Here is a piece I wrote for the newsletter of our last 2010 CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) distribution.
The trees are aflame with color, and though we are in the throes of a delicious Indian Summer right now, the fields are slowly going to sleep. Fall is well underway and this year is coming to a close. On behalf of all the staff here at the George Jones Farm I want to thank each of you for embarking on the agriculture adventure that this year has been, and for linking you and your family to our farm family. I know that the first half of this year was difficult, but I hope that you have been enjoying the fruits, herbs, and vegetables of the second half.
The CSA model offers the chance for a radical refiguring of our relationship to food. All of us were raised in a supermarket world that masks the trials and tribulations of weather, pests, and a million other factors that are the reality of farming with the flourescent glow and piped-in muzack of continual and unquestioned abundance. Even the seasons do not come and go in the supermarket aisles. Want a cucumber or a tomato or a pear in January in northern Ohio? No problem, whispers the supermarket genie. No matter the thousands of miles of transport under refrigeration and all the fossil fuel that entails. No matter the price of the actual taste of the food, picked green and shipped and then "ripened" with ethylene gas. No matter the wages and lives of those who slaved to grow and harvest that banana or pineapple. No matter the chemicals sprayed on plants and people in the field alike necessary to produce that archtypical "perfect" vegetable.
What the CSA offers is an encounter with the reality of your food and a partnership with the people who grow it for you. When the Summer swelters with a continual run of unusually hot days and a long run of drought, you feel it. When the Fall has been relatively mild and rains come in time, you feel that too. In spring, peas. In summer, tomatoes. In autumn, turnips.
No matter what each week has brought forth from the fields, we have been committed to making sure you have received value for your trust and investment in the farm. The CSA subscription broken down weekly comes to about $27.25. In this last week, I am happy to write that we will be offering you $40.50 worth of produce, and that over the course of the whole season we will have provided you with $716.50 worth of produce. That is a 19.4% bonus above and beyond your investment!
Over the course of the year we have been committed to bringing you not only those items of the supermarket world, but also the items of this world, the world of the fields and the woods and the wetlands of this farm. This has included a wide variety of wild edible greens in our salad mix like stellaria, red amaranth, spring cress, and wild spinach. We offered healthful cooking greens like lamb's quarters and buckwheat greens. We brought you a chance to taste flavors from other parts of the world like gobo (burdock), Chinese cabbage, and Catalan onions. And we brought you the "exotic" flavor of cattails from our own backyard and Native American foodways. I hope you have enjoyed, if not the taste, then at least the adventure of exploring how to cook with these unusual items. I do feel that part of the revolution in society that sustainable and regenerative agriculture is participating in includes expanding our culinary minds beyond those supermarket aisles.
Again, I want to thank you so much for traveling this agricultural road with us this year, and I hope you will join us again in the future. In the meantime, please find us next Saturday at the Oberlin Farmers' Market in the public library parking lot and the following Saturday on Tappan Square at the Local Foods Fest. And stay tuned for more opportunities in November and December to purchase fresh, sustainably grown produce from the George Jones Farm.
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