Harvest Week 4, July 25th – 30th, 2022

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Every Day

Every day an extraordinary amount of work gets done here, a blur of lean, sweaty and noble work. Last Wednesday we lifted the garlic, planning to have it field cure until late Friday morning, when, dry from sun and wind, we would gather it into cribs and cure it further with fans for several more weeks. On that Friday, we also planned to seed fall carrots, harvest the cucumbers, weed (mechanically cultivate) the squash, harvest basil. We had that full day of work planned for Friday, and, as usual, a full day of work planned for the Thursday before. On Thursday morning, rain was abruptly predicted for Thursday night. None of our plans for Friday would come to fruition after a rain. We can’t harvest basil wet, can’t harvest cucumbers or weed squash in the mud, can’t harvest the garlic wet. But, we had a full work day already planned for Thursday. How would we combine Friday’s work with Thursday’s work? We are already short staffed.

Victor Stands for Victory

I lamented this impossible situation to Victor. Victor characteristically said, “I gotcha covered.” 

Victor means it, when he says “I gotcha covered.”

Victor had me covered—had you covered, my shareholder friends. 

I knew that what Victor was signing up for that Thursday was not possible; I also knew that Victor and his crew would get it done, no matter what, by the regular 4 o’clock quitting time. It would never cross Victor’s mind that it’s not fair; it’s exploitive; I won’t get paid extra for it; it’s not my fault that it’s going to rain—why am I being burdened with this? Perhaps the Department of Labor would object to it. Victor would just take it on as an exciting challenge.

Two days of work were done in one day last Thursday, because it needed to happen.

Why did it need to happen?

Ever Eat an Excuse?

We endeavor not to put excuses in your box: “Well, it rained that day we were going to seed your fall carrots, so you won’t receive them. . Remember our fall carrots, the ones that we actually put in your box in past seasons. Imagine how delicious they would be if they were in your box this season, sweet and earthy. Our winter squash, too—if it just hadn’t gone to weeds because the rain got to it before we could weed it. Those carrots and that squash sure would have tasted good this fall. Oh, yeah, and our legendary garlic, too bad it rotted in the field because we didn’t get it in before the rain. Maybe we should offer recipes for imaginary carrots, squash and garlic from a breatharian cookbook.

We do Have Entitlement Issues, Though

We’ll work hard and fast here without the least bit of resentment or entitlement issues We do, however, feel entitled to shareholders taking home the box with their name on it and to shareholders adhering to the requests of our lovely site hosts. Read on.

Site Problems

For instance, a shareholder went to their site and didn’t find their box, so the shareholder decided to take someone else’s box home. The reason the shareholder did not find their box is that they were signed up for an every other week share, and this was an off week. So, this shareholder got someone else’s customized box, and the person who the box was customized for did not receive their box.

My wife Haidy offered her share to her doctor, because she is planning to visit Finland for the next two weeks (after twelve years of being away from her home country.) Her box was not in the cooler where it was supposed to be, and her doctor consequently did not receive her box.

A shareholder was two days late getting their share from the site, and the box had already been given away (as per the site host’s policy). The shareholder requested a replacement box from the farm, which is beyond challenging: this would require going into the CSAWare archives, printing a new label from the former week, pulling everything out of the coolers to select the items from, some of which might not even be available from the previous week. (In this case, a reasonable solution was devised, but in other cases, shareholders who forget to pick up their box insist on holding the farm responsible.)

These problems above get in the way of our getting the work done here (and sometimes make us wonder who we are doing this hard work for, day after day.) Our job is to grow the crop and to deliver it, not watchdog that people are taking boxes with their names on them, or to make sure that people get to their sites during the official pickup window.

Delivery Downers

I’ll add, though, that a bigger, more comprehensive problem than those listed above, has been our over-arching delivery system. Deliveries have been extra challenging this year, because we sought to consolidate them into fewer trips to Chicago. It is really expensive and demanding to deliver our shares, and this year we earnestly sought ways to streamline home deliveries. Mostly, we have gotten it wrong. We use a delivery routing app, but it only projects approximate times for delivery routes. We have consequently designed routes that (we thought) would take 10 or 12 hours per day which in reality have taken 14 to 15 hours, way too long for our driver to manage. This then requires reconfiguring the routes into manageable timeframes, which means re-assigning some of the scheduled home deliveries to other days—not a problem for some of our shareholders and a definite problem for others. 

Further, the van that we use for deliveries is not super reliable, and has required almost daily repairs/upgrades.  Plus the aging refrigerated box truck that we use to deliver to community sites is also not reliable. I just got news this morning that the transmission seems to have given out on the refrigerated truck on the way home from Chicago. Replacing that truck with a new reliable model will likely run over $100,000. Maybe we’ll rent a truck to get through the season, though rented trucks are often problematic, too.

Turns out no refrigerated box truck is available to rent anywhere. So, we have rented two vans to take the place of our broken refrigerated box truck, plus we will still be using an unreliable farm van for home deliveries. This means having a home delivery driver plus two drivers to do deliveries to community sites some days, whereas normally just Zdenek does deliveries to community sites. This has leaned very heavily on Nathan, who we need on the farm full time as greenhouse manager and pack coordinator and inventory manager; he’s been our emergency driver several days per week.

Why Not Have New Reliable Trucks?

With deliveries, we can never miss a day. Always, always, we have to keep the deliveries on schedule. Accomplishing that level of performance with unreliable trucks this year has rattled us. 

If we priced our shares so that we could afford new reliable trucks, we wouldn’t have enough business to keep the farm going. Pricing shares at substantial discounts is a way to keep the business going, but eventually, all the equipment that supports the business has to be replaced—with money from where? 

Easier

It’s easier to grow the crops here than to deliver them—not that it’s easy to grow the crops; it’s just easier than delivering them to you, unless you pick up at the farm. Maybe drones will one day be the answer. Or widespread breatharianism.

Are We Entitled?

Are we entitled to trucks that work? Unhh, probably not. 

Crop Substitution

Somehow, the flea beetles got under the row covers that were supposed to protect the bok choi and the flea beetles degraded (ravaged) the leaves. We offered it for this week, but won’t be including it. Instead, we will probably substitute carrots–lovely, young carrots.

Overheard

Neighbor (dairy farmer for over 60 years): “I don’t nap. If I did nap, I’d wake up wondering what the cattle needed.”

Warmly,
Farmer John