We are a three-acre sustainable vegetable farm dedicated to growing & packing the highest-quality, best-tasting vegetables…
Learn about our CSA!
…over the last 10 years the focus of our farm has shifted from farmers markets, to wholesale, to our 200-member CSA. We stopped spring selling and fall planting, directing all of our efforts towards crops like tomatoes, peppers, and squash: by reshaping our CSA entirely around summer-grown vegetables, we separated our planting season from our picking & packing season, evening out the workload and focusing on only the vegetables that are most productive & reliable in our hot, sunny mid-Atlantic region.
These are our Growing Practices…
Our methods follow the principles of ecologically-based farming. We use cover crops to replenish nutrients and improve soil structure, while understanding that this is a long-term process requiring many years and frequent fallow seasons. We also use organic-approved granular fertilizer that is concocted based on soil test results and provides nutrients slowly through soil biology. Likewise, we use a food-grade foliar fertilizer to add small amounts of macro- and micro-nutrients. Pests are excluded by fabric rowcovers or picked off by hand, and we also use limited organic-approved pest controls derived from soil bacteria. We use no herbicides, relying on careful mechanical cultivation or mulch. We use no fungicides except sodium bicarbonate—baking soda.
Why we are not certified organic
Organic certification is a marketing decision, not an ecological one, and we are not interested in pursuing certification. People who eat our vegetables know the farm—many know me personally—and trust what we are doing here without needing third-party verification. We are happy to answer any questions you have.
Moreover, organic certification merely verifies that products were produced solely with inputs & methods on the “Approved” list, and does not certify a farm's principles or actual ecological impact. For example, organic-certified farmers can and do use many pesticides, fungicides, and other sprays; we use very little. Instead of throwing away miles of black plastic mulch we switched to using a biodegradable film that was approved for organic in Europe, but barred by US organic rules.
More thoughts on organic certification here in this blog post.
…and our Selling Practices…
The economic impact of food production is as important as the ecological. We’re players in the long game towards living in a social fabric comprised of individual-scale rather than corporate-scale enterprises. All of the business that host CSA pickup sites are actual local businesses owned by actual local people; these are the same sorts of businesses we sell to wholesale. We encourage you to center your economic life around this type of business. Similarly, we focus on providing food to people we know, whether that's YOU—the individual eater—or the CSAs of other farmers, or small business owners.
...but little of that matters if we can't sustain our own lives:
This farm has followed its own economic path, and Second Spring Farm is unusual among small farms in that vegetable sales from the business provide a stable, long-term livelihood for the farmer, and progressively higher wages to the people who work here. Since the first farm season in 2010, we've been dialing up the efficiency of our production systems to grow as many delicious, beautiful vegetables as we can with the least effort, and then getting them to appreciative people as quickly & easily as possible by making the CSA the focus of our growing season from planning to picking.
As the efficiency of the farm itself has increased, we are able to offer higher wages to people who are skilled at the work of implementing those systems and share an appreciation for productive work: everyone here knows that the vegetables we grow turn directly into the dollars that support our lives, and the more vegetables we can generate per hour, the more wages can rise and workloads fall—thereby offering a high quality of life for everyone here into the future!
