Well, it's finally the last week of our main season shares! We know some of you will be joining us for the fall share, but we thought we'd recap the season while everyone's here.
If you are unsure if you signed up for the fall share, you can log into your account and click the Deliveries tab to see the dates of your future deliveries.
It's been a crazy year around here all around. From the endless building to the tough weather and a whole new CSA program to learn, it's been challenging, but pretty rewarding. It's pretty cool to think that this time last year, the picture above would have been nothing more than a few drought-stricken squash and potatoes growing - we didn't even have our well drilled or electric installed yet.
By the end of our season we'll have packed around 28,000 items into a little shy of 3,000 farm share boxes to around 200 members. We'll have installed a couple miles of irrigation, three greenhouses, 3/4 mile of deer fencing, along with managed construction of a house, washing facility and pole barn while increasing our production acreage by a third. In the process, we've had our share of laughs and frustration, and luckily only one ER visit (fingers and 150# fence posts don't always agree on what direction they're going, we'll let you guess which one won that battle).
Within the next couple weeks we'll finally be wrapping up our farm expansion that we started two years ago when we purchased the new property. This year, we've invested around $300,000 into the future of the farm, a combination of our own funds and loans from the FSA. It's a daunting amount of money when you consider how many bunches of carrots or radishes that is, but it's amazing how much it has improved many of the processes around here already, just by being able to streamline much of our work. There's simply no way we could have managed the farm share program (especially with the customized shares) this year with our previous setup, so I guess we were definitely due for an upgrade. Over the next couple years, we'll be migrating the remainder of the hoophouses to the new property so it can all be in one place; for now we're focused on automating them as best we can to ensure they operate at their optimum while we can't always be there.
We're impressed by how well the 24/7 cooler pickup has worked in Cheboygan and are interested to use it as a model going forward to help improve accessibility to our farm share program - we know pickups aren't always the most convenient! We ran into a handful of mixups over the season, but not bad considering we had over 1,500 boxes go through that location this year. Thanks to everyone who uses this location in helping us make it work as well as it has!
Looking forward to next year, with our heaviest investments and projects behind us, we can focus on improving our crop management and investing more into our employees. We'll be keeping our production acreage steady with some moderate growth (versus our historic 50%+ growth we needed). We're excited to take the foot off the pedal for a bit and work towards improving our processes around the farm now that we've got the appropriate infrastructure. Less growth means less building and less kinks to work out, so we're hopeful it may also mean a little less stress around here as well. It's been a long push to get the farm to the scale it needs to be to be sufficiently profitable and we're happy to say that we've finally gotten there.
Our big goal next year is to improve the success of each of our crops; hopefully with a little less craziness we can devote the time to each crop that we need to. At this point, we have a pretty solid understanding of what each crop needs to succeed, but some just don't quite get the attention they need. This usually means that a handful of crops each year we end up putting in 75%+ of the effort but end up with subpar results - our goal next year is to hit that 100% target.
Next year, we'll also be selling our first commercial volume of grapes to area wineries. We're also in the initial planning stages to open our winery by 2022/23. It's been a long time coming and well past our initial schedule, but, as we said, we didn't expect the farm to get this big - the vineyard took a bit of a back seat while we got the farm to where it needed to go. It's a daunting task to work with the township, local police, county, health department, DEQ, MDARD, TTB, etc. to get approval (just ask any area winery!), but we're excited to move forward with it.
It's been awesome to see what the farm has turned into. Over the past couple years we've had a few people tell us that they never thought the farm could have succeeded when they first heard about it; not necessarily because of us, but because of where we were doing it. You all sure proved them wrong! In our book, it's a pretty big compliment to have people come back and tell us they were wrong. To be honest, we never really thought it could ever have gotten to where it is either. Turns out, our area isn't always given the benefit of the doubt, when perhaps, it deserves a bit.
So, of course, a big thanks to all of you for joining us for the crazy year that it's been and our employees for making it an entertaining and productive season. Registration will be open again on January 1st for the 2020 season (you'll have the option to turn on auto-renew in the future so you don't miss out - stay tuned!) and we look forward to you joining us, but we'll be in touch before then!
Have a good week!
-Brendan & Greta
