Dear Farm Friends,
Mountain Bounty is unique in our region in that we offer CSA boxes for 50 weeks of the year. But why go year-round and how does it work?
The genesis of this idea goes back to an “aha” moment I had in the second or third year of the farm. We’d had a blight hit our potatoes and were looking at a dismal harvest. I felt that our CSA members deserved some potatoes, despite the original CSA aspiration that everyone should share in the farm’s triumphs and defeats. So I reached out to some farmers I knew at Full Belly Farm near Davis and ended up buying a truckload of potatoes from them. At that time there was a movement towards “full diet” CSAs, where a single farm would grow vegetables, fruit, grain, meat, dairy, and make many other items like pastas, jams and preserves as well.
I experienced both external and internal criticism when I brought those potatoes from another farm. But I realized that I couldn’t, and didn’t want, to try to do it all. It was a relief to rely on friends. And also a recognition that in a myriad of ways we are always relying on others. True self-sufficiency is an appealing fantasy. If we have any success, we like to think that we’ve bootstrapped ourselves, against all odds. But have we really?
Soon after the potato incident, I noticed a pattern of CSA member laments. As winterapproached, people would say “we’ll miss your food so much, we don’t know what to do.” That got me thinking some more, and I approached Riverdog Farm, also near Davis, about providing winter CSA boxes for us, which they did for several years. Now, many years and a few iterations later, we work with a small group of organic farms to produce your weekly boxes. We are fortunate that not too far downhill from us the growing conditions are remarkably different. With our current system, we are able to include some of our own produce in the winter, as we are able, and then also select the best things we can find from our friends’ farms.
This system benefits all the farms and eaters involved. And it’s especially important that we are able to provide year round work for our crew, which has resulted in a much more stable and long term team than most farms enjoy. A bit of farm resilience through cooperation. It’s so much more fun than rugged individualism.
-John
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