Why CSA?

CSA provides an upfront commitment to a local farm for produce sales week after week during the season. This is huge from a small business perspective. We can make purchases of seed and equipment without the expense and risk of a bank loan. And more importantly, we know our produce is sold! We are not at the mercy of a rainy farmers market or an unhelpful wholesale buyer. Our produce and eggs go to our members, rain or shine.

In addition, we know our budget, so we can hire employees and commit to giving them work all season long. Last year, in addition to myself and my wife; we had our son and his wife working year-round, one half-year worker, 2 drivers and 4 students working during the summer. Some years ago, the 2011 season started poorly with cold and continued rain for 6 weeks. Our CSA customers allowed us to keep our employment commitments, keeping our workers busy with other projects, knowing that eventually the rain and cold would end and we could get to work growing food. Without CSA, and no income coming in, I would have had to cut their hours significantly, or worse, laid them off until July.

Our employees live in the Buffalo area, so your money stays in the community. And these are quality summer jobs for students - full time, 40 hours per week, Monday thru Friday, daytime, with evenings and weekends off. None of the part-time and split shift and weekend work that is common these days in retail and fast food. And, contrary to popular press, we have no problem finding local employees for the quality farm work jobs that our members make possible.

Why should I buy your share?

We think you will like our program for several reasons.

• We are YEAR-ROUND, you can SIGN UP ANYTIME, making steady monthly payments.
• A 6 MONTH or more produce season (In 2012, our produce season lasted from mid-March to mid-January - 36 WEEKS!)
• We offer EXTRAS other farms don't have like asparagus and strawberries, plus honey and our free range eggs.
• You get PRIORITY for produce, like asparagus, eggs and other items that run short at a farmers market.
• You can CUSTOMIZE your box, picking items you can use each week.
• We include HOME DELIVERY - right to your door.
• ZERO LANDFILL - we take back all of the packaging we give you, either re-using it, recycling it, or composting it. Nothing goes to the landfill.

Where do I pickup my share each week?

You Don't! We include Home Delivery. Your box will be delivered to your doorstep. We use an insulated box with icepak to keep your items cool. During the winter, we use water bottles to keep things from freezing. As long as you are home by midnight, all will be fine.

What is your home delivery area?

In general, from Buffalo, we go North to the Mississippi River, East to I-494, South to I-394/US-12 and West to Cokato and Annandale.

Towns included are Buffalo, Monticello, Albertville, Otsego, St Michael, Rogers, Dayton, Champlin, Maple Grove, Plymouth, Wayzata, Medina, Hanover, Rockford, Maple Plain, Delano, Montrose, Cokato, Annandale and Maple Lake.

Can I select what I want?

You get a "share of the harvest", so what we harvest is available to our members. We do not do farmers markets, so its all for you. We use a CSA software package called CSAware to distribute the harvest based on your preferences. After you sign up, you set and maintain your preferences - they range from "Love it", "Like it", "Sometimes", "I'll eat it", and "Not for me".

Can I customize my box?

Yes. After CSAware creates your box based on your preferences, you will get a "Ready to Customize" email which will let you look at your box contents. If the box looks good, you do nothing. You can also make changes if desired. You can take items out of your box, putting them into the "Swap Area", which are made available to other members. You can also add items to your box from the "Swap Area". You can even add items beyond your default box size.

What if I only get a partial box?

You only pay for what you get. If you have unused space in your box, you get credit back in your Cash Account.

What happens if I want to skip one or more weeks?

Once in a while, you will not want your share. Maybe you are on vacation, or just not able to cook that week. It's not a big deal. You can "hold" your share and skip the delivery. No charge will be made to your cash account. You can schedule holds in advance.

Can I skip multiple months?

Yes, you can "make your own season". If you go away for a 3 months in winter, you can go to your calendar and put those deliveries on hold. If you don't like late season produce, you can skip those deliveries. You can also change your mind, get a one time delivery by simply taking a box off hold before the delivery week.

Are you organic?

We are not certified organic. However, we keep things simple and use only normal things garden items. We rotate fields and incorporate cover crops. We do use fertilizer when planting, and a few crops like onions and sweet corn like some extra nitrogen. Typically, a balanced fertilizer like 17-17-17 for planting, and a high nitrogen fertilizer like 26-0-5 (without phosphorus) for corn or onions. Chicken manure is composted along with straw, wood chips and packaging that you return to us, and then added to the fields as well.

As we harvest produce for you to eat, we are removing, from our fields, the organic material and nutrients that went into our produce. That must be replaced for the next crops to grow as nicely. So we do cover crops to add organic matter to the soil and provide food for a flourishing underground world of earthworms and microbes. When the cover crops are growing actively with lots of root development, we will do a light fertilization with a balanced 17-17-17 fertilier. The cover crops soak this up like a sponge with no runoff or leaching. Those nutrients, plus other micronutrients, are pulled from the soil and will be slowly released as the earthworms and microbes decompose the disked in cover crops, making these nutrients available to our vegetable crops.

We NEVER apply fertilizer (or compost for that matter) to dormant (winter) fields. This is how nitrogen and phosphorus leach out and end up in our lakes, rivers and water supply. We apply compost and fertilizer when plants are planted, or actively growing with fully developed roots that will soak up the nutrients the moment they become available.

We ALWAYS fertilize in small doses so plants can fully utilize the nutrients without any waste.

Do you use herbicides or pesticides?

Yes, there are times we need to use them. If a herbicide or pesticide is needed, we limit them to safe biodegradable ones that require no special safety equipment or licensing and will not contaminate land or water.

We will use Roundup herbicide on tough spreading weeds like thistle and quack grass. Despite its bad press, it's actually a very environmentally friendly herbicide because it binds tightly to the soil so it can't get into the water table, and it decomposes in a few days. We can't keep it in a tank for long as it will "spoil" just like milk - the bacteria and mold eat it up. Obviously it is not used on our crops as it would kill them. The only exception is sweet corn. Like most sweet corn growers in our area, we grow sweet corn that is resistant to glyphosate (roundup) and has the BT gene (kills earworms). This eliminates the need to use enviornmentally harmful herbicides like atrazine (gets into groundwater) or pesticides (kills bees).

We do not normally use pesticides. We prefer to tolerate insect pests - figuring that they are kept in balance by beneficial insects. Once in a while, the damaging insects get out of control (like potato bugs or cabbage worms) and we will use a pesticide like BT or Spinosad to help control them. Spinosad, while organic, is still an broad-spectrum insecticide and thus lethal to bees, so we never use it when a plant is flowering.

What about GMO?

GMO stands for Genetically Modified Organisms. Farmers have known for millennia that crossbreeding of animals and plants could favor certain desirable traits. Gregor Mendel's pea plant experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 established many of the rules of heredity. These rules let breeders more easily create and track hybrids, transfering traits from one plant variety to another. But typically, this breeding only works within one species (like tomatoes) or family of species (like the potato family that includes potatoes, tomatoes, peppers and eggplants).

Today, breeders have more tools to manipulate genetic material and can actually move helpful genes from one plant species to another. They also have ways to introduce metabolic components from bacteria into plants allowing them to produce the organic BT protein that kills corn ear worms or to give the plant an ability to breakdown glyphosate (Roundup) so it does not disrupt a plant's growth. Today, when people talk about GMO, it refers to this ability to move traits from one species to another.

There are very few GMO fruits and vegetables available. So when someone says their vegetables are non-GMO, they are not saying much. Everyone grows non-GMO. The only exception in our area is Sweet Corn. The Sweet Corn sold in supermarkets and farm stands, and sold by half the growers at area farmers markets, is GMO. The primary reason is to eliminate corn earworms (avoiding spraying pesticides). Twenty years ago our corn had ear worms. You just needed to cut off the end of the corn and discard the worm, but it would gross people out! To prevent ear worms, farmers would spray inscecticides on the corn silks, which is costly, time consuming and environmentally unfriendly. We did not spray and just had to deal with the worms.

The GMO variety also has easier weed control which is a big challenge with corn. A simple herbicide can control the weeds without harming the corn. We grow the GMO variety. Growers cannot grow GMO corn if they are "Certified Organic", so if you want non-GMO corn at a farmers market, you need to buy it from a certified organic grower.

The best balanced discussion of GMO that I've seen is in Wikipedia. See GMO.

Are you bee friendly?

Yes indeed. Not only bee friendly, but insect friendly! We limit our use of insecticides, preferring to keep things balanced.

Bees, of course, love farms like ours. Many flowers, varied plants, and plants flowering all summer until frost. Its fun to watch the squash blossoms to see all the different types of bees. We see honeybees, of course, but also many types of wild bees like bumblebees and the many small bees that most people don't know exist. Even bees that only like squash blossoms. We also have unplanted areas (steeper hills, wind breaks and meadows) that have wild flowers like yarrow, golden rod and sumac, plus two sections of prairie with coneflowers and lupine. Two years ago, we built a dam to help slow down water flow in a gully. In the wall, we added rocks, plus wool mulch and landscape fabric. Why? For field mice and voles to build nests, which then become the preferred nesting spots for bumblebees in subsequent years.

Butterflies, also like this same varied habitat, and we encourage milkweed patches for Monarch butterflies.

And wasps, despite their bad press, are also welcome. Think of them as flying carnivores (just like dragonflies), but going after caterpillars like cabbage worms. They love the juicy caterpillars for feeding their babies. So we do not disturb yellow jacket and other paper wasp nests whereever possible.

Are your chickens free range? What do they eat?

Yes. During the daytime, our chickens are free to roam a fenced in area (about 3 acres of grass and woods) where they can eat grass and scratch for bugs and seeds. At night, they sleep in our barn with the door closed to protect them from predators (raccoons, foxes or wandering dogs - It's a jungle out there). The chickens eat a commercial vegetarian layer feed plus produce scraps. They really like lettuce, strawberries and summer squash!

Foxes, stray dogs and hawks can be a daytime problem. A 4' fence with an electric wire surrounding the 3 acres poultry area keeps foxes and stray dogs at bay. And a "chicken disco", old CD disks strung between trees, twisting in the breeze and reflecting the sun over the ground, makes hawks leery of swooping in among the confusing flashes and movement.

Can I get eggs?

Eggs are another product we "harvest" on the farm, so yes, you can add eggs to your farm share. You can let the system know you want some eggs in your share, and when they are available, you will get them. Figure out, on average, how many eggs you want per week. If you average one or less than one dozen eggs per week, you can add them when needed, and not have much effect on how much produce you receive. If you determine you average more than one dozen eggs per week (like 2 or 3 dozen per week), upgrade your farm share to the next level to insure you have enough room in your box for the produce you want.

What if I just want eggs?

Not a problem. Eggs are one our farm products you can get in your box. If you do not want produce, edit your preferences to "love" eggs and "dislike" everything else. That let's the system know that you do not want any fruit and vegetables added to your box. You can add the number of eggs you need. And you can get delivery every other week if desired. At the same time, you can add specific produce to your box as desired.

What about honey?

We like to have honeybees on our farm to pollinate crops plus provide honey for our members. We normally have 2 or 3 hives on the farm. Sometimes we are able to overwinter them, other times we have to start with new hives. Some years, John Swanson, who sells honey at the Buffalo Farmers Market, will park some of his hives at our farm for the summer after they have done their spring pollination work in the local apple orchards. The more the merrier!

What's special about your farm or produce?

The produce we deliver is planted, grown and harvested on our farm to insure the best quality. This is YOUR FARM - you can visit it, wander around and see how we grow your food. We are not a consolidator, gathering produce from different growers and delivering to you as a middleman. If you have a question, we know the answer since we planted it, we grew it and we harvested it.

Occasionally, we may add some special items grown by a neighbor, one of our employees, or even a member. One year we had some older varieties of sweet corn from one of our fellow market people. And we had some lettuce and squash from one of our employees!

We start receiving seed catalogues in December and scrutinize new varieties carefully. Sometimes we try something new and sometimes we go back to the "tried and true". We look for what tastes the best and is the most disease resistant. We invite your feedback, good or bad.

Can I visit your farm?

YES! After all, its YOUR FARM! Someone is always around Monday thru Friday, 9AM-3PM, or you can arrange a different time. Give Ian a call at 763-732-3052 before you come so you know we are home. There are several nice spots in our pastures or along the marsh for a picnic.

What can I expect each week?

Typically, for products that are plentiful, everyone gets some. New arriving products like strawberries may be split into smaller portions just to make sure everyone gets the "first taste of the season". We also have our Box Customizer. Each week, the system will create your box by looking at available produce and dividing it up based on member preferences. You can then go online, and and further refine your box if desired to add or subtract items.

One goal is to provide each item we grow to everyone at least one week during the season, so you can try something you might not normally buy like turnips or edamame soybeans. Another goal is to make available basic items like herbs, onions, potatoes and beans for as long possible, letting you choose them when you need them.

How much is a typical Full Share or Half Share?

During the peak season, a full share will be about a bushel of produce. (A large apple box is a bushel). Obviously, in the beginning, the amounts are smaller as things are just starting. However, our asparagus starts mid-May, and we typically start early crops like lettuce, spinach, green onions and radishes in a hoop house so we get those products in May as well.

In general, figure a full share is good for a family of 4 (or 2 vegetarians), and a half share is good for 2 people. We try to keep the shares reasonably sized so you are not getting too much of any one thing.

Another way to look at it - for the summer season, a full share comes to about $44 per week. Now go to the grocery store and buy $44 worth of mixed produce (leaf lettuce, summer squash, snap peas or green beans, tomatoes, peppers, asparagus) and see what it looks like. Our share will be similar - but of course - fresher and tastier!

As you know, with CSA you share some of the risk of farming. If we have good planting and growing conditions, your share of the harvest will be more plentiful and varied. However, when weather conditions are not so farvorable, the yield and variety will be reduced.

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Eat food -- Not too much -- Mostly plants