2nd Week of Winter CSA: Feb 3–5
This Week’s Availability
This week we will have yellow onions, red onions, garlic, celeriac, yellow beets, red beets, carrots, red potatoes, yellow potatoes, watermelon radish, green cabbage, red cabbage, sweet potatoes, spinach, and green curly kale.
This week’s greens limit:
Mini shares: 1 greens item
Small shares: 2 greens items
Medium shares: 2 greens items
Large shares: 3 greens items
Super shares: 3 greens items
You do not need to use the order form if you are coming to the farm to pick out your veggies from the display cooler.
All delivery days and times are provided as a reminder at the bottom of the newsletter.
Farm News
(Feel free to stop reading anything below here.)
We transplanted baby bok choi, salad turnips, radishes, and tokyo bekana last week to start replacing some of the harvested out greens in the tunnels. This specific planting won’t be ready for awhile (probably for the spring share), but they help bridge some gaps as we continue to harvest out winter greens before outdoor greens are ready. Year round farming requires constant seed starting and transplanting.
We are finalizing this year’s plans for starting transplants for sale for folks’ home gardens. We are really excited about some of the adjustments we are making to those plans, and it will allow us to offer an even wider array of garden starts for folks. When that is ready for pre-orders, we will let you know.
(Rodents are this farm’s biggest nemesis… this is a completely destroyed bed of spinach, which is the equivalent of many, many hundreds of pounds of lost greens….ugh. Photo by Adam Ford)
And it’s February! To dive into Black History Month this year, we are focusing our learning on reading more about contributions to the agricultural landscape by Black farmers and organizers. At nearly 950,000, the number of Black farmers in the US was at its highest in 1920, but the most recent census has the number of Black farmers down to 45,505, or 1.3% of US farmers. And as young, white, first generation farmers, we feel like we can farm better and serve our community better if we learn more about this history.
This week’s highlight is on John Boyd Jr. and the organization he founded in 1995, the National Black Farmers’ Association. He is a 4th generation farmer and activist in Virginia, who still farms hundreds of acres while advocating for the livelihoods and land of Black farmers. The National Black Farmers’ Association was created in response to the fact that the USDA was systematically denying loans and subsidies to Black farmers, which led to a disproportionate number of Black farmers to lose their land, and livelihood. They filed a class action lawsuit in 1997 that is often referenced as “the most organized, largest civil rights case in the history of the country.” The case was settled in 1999 with an estimated value of over $2 billion. It confirmed the discrimination against 22,363 farmers, but unfortunately was later determined to exclude over 70,000 other Black farmers. For years, many eligible farmers still hadn’t been paid, and it took many actions and years before legislation in 2010 was passed to try to begin addressing the outstanding issues with the settlement.
Starting a farm as 1st generation farmers without access to family land, we have benefited from an incredible amount of business planning support, grants and loans, technical assistance, educational opportunities, and other resources available to us from various sources, including the USDA, more specifically, the local branches of the Farm Service Agency and the Natural Resource Conservation Service. For most of the 20th century, Black farmers faced discrimination from these same branches of the Department of Agriculture that actively drove the precipitous decline of Black farmers in the United States.
We stand on the shoulders of farmers and organizers who came before us, working to create a more equitable and resilient agricultural landscape to feed our communities as best as possible. Farming is an incredibly collaborative industry. We benefit tremendously from working with and learning from other farmers’ experiments, techniques, methods, etc. So in addition to the heartbreaking and unjust affects of discrimination in farming on the Black community, it is also a loss to agriculture as a whole to limit the number of voices in the field. The loss of nearly 950,000 Black farmers in the past 100 years represent not only so many Black families who lost their land, livelihoods, and ability to generate generational stability and wealth, but also so many missed ideas and innovations to help us push all of agriculture forward to meet the demands of the future.
(This information is based on content from NPR, PBS News Hour, The New York Times, the National Black Farmers’ Association webpage, The Guardian, and Wikipedia.)
If this is an interesting topic for you and you haven’t already listened to it, I recommend the podcast 1619, which is available in most podcasts platforms. Episode 5 is a rich case study of a young Black farmer’s experience of discrimination and the effect on his family’s farm business. Another great listen is this episode from John Biewen’s podcast “Scene on Radio,” from their series titled “Seeing White”. Both of these paint a colorful portrait of the broad nature of discrimination against Black farmers, and the impacts that these policies had on particular farming families. There are so many rich topics to learn about in both of these series, it’s worth a listen if it interests you.
Have a great week,
-ESF Team: Kara, Ryan, Katie, Grace, Taylor, Cindy, and Sam
Meet Baxter! This sweet little kitty has joined the farm team to be one of the many layers of defense to reduce the rodent population in the fields, photo by Adam Ford
Molly and Ryan unloading one of our propagation house doors that is coming back from Molly’s art studio after she did THIS to it! Molly is the wizard behind packing all the CSA bags and setting up CSA in the barn, but she is also a wildly talented professional artist. This farm is lucky to have her farmer skills and artist skills gracing this space, photo by Adam Ford.
This is the other side of Molly’s door, re-hung back at the propagation house. Both sides of these doors are inspired by Molly’s appreciation of when our kids wear matching leopard-print leggings and shirts, photo by Adam Ford
Stacking little wood ends provides entertainment to our kids while cutting and splitting wood, photo by Adam Ford
Recipe Ideas
Instead of a recipe this week, I just want to share some of my excitements for sweet potatoes. we are fully diving into these right now since it’s not something we normally have, and since we are lower on greens than I normally want in my kitchen. So if any of this is exciting to you, try some of these out! (Parsley will be ready in the next couple weeks). So far, we have enjoyed them in these ways.
Roasted in veggie sushi rolls, with thinly sliced pickled onions, finely chopped parsley, and toasted sesame seeds (It was my mom’s birthday, so I had to do a fancy dinner, but sushi rolls are a lot easier to make than you might assume, in case that’s a new adventure to you.)
Roasted in chunks for breakfast burritos and omelets
Air fried into tiny, skinny, sweet potato fries
Shredded with onions and baked with a little oil, rosemary, and salt
Raw like carrot sticks with hummus (a kid favorite)
Roasted chunks along with roasted beet chunks and whole garlic cloves, then tossed with linguine, olive oil, and parmesan
As au gratin instead of using normal potatoes
Roasted in strips and then layered in a sandwich with kimchi, chopped parsley, and swiss cheese
How to get veggies during the Winter CSA Share
All online orders are due by noon on Tuesdays. Harvesting winter greens requires many factors to be just right, so we need the flexibility to know exactly what we are harvesting as early in the week as possible.
Oh no, I missed the order deadline! No worries. (I would probably miss it pretty often myself.) You are welcome to come to the barn on Wednesdays between 9 am and 7 pm to pick out your veggies. Or send us an email, and we will pack whatever we are able to deliver. It just might not include any greens if the many harvesting conditions don’t allow after the order deadline.
Pickup at the farm: The display cooler will be set up to pick out your veggies from 9 am to 7 pm on Wednesdays. Shunpike Road can be narrow during the winter months, and slippery on actively snowy days. If you are not comfortable coming to the farm any week, consider getting a pre-packed bag at either Stewart’s or Pierce’s in Shrewsbury, or in Ludlow or Rutland. We will try to make a note of Wednesday’s projected weather each week in the newsletter. (So far it looks like it won’t be snowy this Wednesday for pickup.)
Pickup at Pierce’s Store in Shrewsbury: Fill out the weekly order form by noon on Tuesday and pick up your bag from Peirce’s Store on Wednesday between noon and 6 pm.
Pickup at Stewarts Maple Marketplace in Cuttingsville: Fill out the weekly order form by noon on Tuesday and pick up your bag from the Stewart Maple Marketplace on Route 103 on Friday between noon and 5 pm.
Pickup at the Rutland Area Food Co-op in Rutland: Fill out the weekly order form by noon on Tuesday and pick up your bag from the co-op on Wednesday or Friday between noon and 7 pm.
Pickup at Knight Tubs, Pools, and Spas in Ludlow: Fill out the weekly order form by noon on Tuesday and pick up your bag from Knight Tubs between 2 and 5 pm on Wednesday. They are curbside only, so call or knock when you arrive, and they will bring your bag out.
All of these pickup spots love supporting their community, like offering us this favor to use their spaces. If you have any trouble getting your bag, let us know.