What is the CSA, anyway? and, a concrete example...
/What “IS” the CSA, anyway? You can read a lot of words on the website about what the CSA is, and my impression is that's a fairly accurate description. Still, everyone has to sign up in advance, based on that description and before they really know what they're signing up for. Rarely—and honestly less often than I would expect—someone interested in joining the CSA asks about a sample share or a trial week. I always consider it, and I always refuse. Not because it wouldn't be possible, but because I don't think one week can ever say all that much about what the CSA is. If anything, basing one's impression of the CSA on one isolated week would give a less accurate view of what to expect! Each week is different from the last, shifting slowly but surely through the season. I'm even disinclined to let people join the CSA partway through, even when there's space at the site, because, in some way, I feel like someone joining only for the second half of the season (tomatoes, peppers, winter squash) misses the context of what came before (zucchini, cucumbers, onions) and the change and growth over the course of the entire season. They might very well miss understanding the defining feature of the season, whatever it might be. The CSA is more than the sum of its parts, more than just one blue bag, which could be sampled in a trial week and then repeated 16 weeks in a row.
But in the bigger picture, is one whole CSA season even enough, to know what the CSA is? At this point, going on ten years running the CSA, the planting schedule and crop list is fairly nailed down with only minor adjustments each year. (For example, more tomatoes this year and hopefully a longer, less-intense melon season.) ...And yet, somehow, each season always develops its own character, unpredictably different from the year before. Some years it feels like a potato year, or a squash year, or a tomato year. Years ago there was even a beet year, which I was sure not to repeat once learning people's feelings on the matter. The funny thing is, these feelings about what the season was like (“too many beets!” “not enough tomatoes!” etc) are real, but they are just our impression, and often when I go back and look at actual numbers the seasons are, to my surprise, much more similar than they are different. The “reality” of what happened doesn't determine our impression of what the season was like.
Some years into developing my farm I heard from my neighbors, for whom I'd worked and learned to farm in the first place, that even they had winners and losers every year—and they'd been doing this for decades! That's just the way of it. Their farm always had enough overall, and approximately the same total quantity of vegetables each year, just not in the same proportions. I find that to be true for me too. I used to be concerned when a crop didn't seem to be working out, as if any given thing “should” work each year simply because it's worked in the past. And I didn't notice as much when certain things happened to be exceptional, because, well, maybe they “should” be like that every year. It took me a long time to get a sense of what a “typical” year is, and now I know that ALL of this is normal. We can't plan for what WILL happen in a given season, only for what is most LIKELY to happen, and, given enough seasons, will happen, on average, in time.
And so if someone were to join the CSA for just one season, does that tell them what the CSA is? They would certainly see a variety of different shares throughout the season, as you are this year, but it would be an error to assume each year is a repetition of the last. Sometimes I myself even worry about that, that as the farm plans become more similar year-to-year, the CSA might get boring for returning folks—and then I remember that my plans don't actually have the effect on the farm that I think they do, and so even if the plans are the same year to year, the farm never is!
To really get a sense of what the CSA is, I'd say one needs to experience not just one week, or one month, or even one whole season. As with farming, doing it for only a few years teaches a whole lot while still leaving one unprepared for year four, and it takes many more years than that to have experienced a breadth of situations to where everything that happens feels possible, normal, and with a ready answer for what to do about it. Similarly, for the CSA I'd say maybe 5 seasons is about right to REALLY know what the CSA is like, to understand the context for what might happen in any given year, and to feel that all the variation and surprises are well within the range of normal expectation given the experience of the prior years.
Last week you heard about how every year of the CSA is, in some way, different from the last; some of you might have noticed by now that last year was a Potato Year, and this year most definitely is not! I have been parceling out potatoes a little bit at a time and only when necessary, not wanting to exhaust the supply before they become a critical item for fall shares. You see, although I did everything I was supposed to for the crop—as far as I knew—we had plague levels of potato beetles this year. Unheard-of numbers. And I thought, in fact, that we had been on top of it, looking for eggs to squash by hand and collecting the adults long before any larvae had yet appeared! Sure, some eggs did hatch, as always, and I figured the potatoes would outgrow them like usual... and then there were more potato beetles eating the plants, and I continued to trust my experience from prior years, which had not included such a comically unbelievable potato beetle situation, and, by the time I recognized that this year was NOT to be like any other, it was too late. Plants were eaten down to the nub. First in selected areas (surely the plants in the other rows will take off any minute now), and then across the entire patch. This is why your potatoes have been pretty small this year—that's all the potato the plants had time to make!
You can be sure I've been thinking all summer about what adjustments to make to avoid this situation in future years. On the other hand, the adjustments I'd made on account of LAST year's productive but very weedy potatoes didn't prove to be important. The bigger picture, here, is that potatoes are something planted only once a year. Lettuce, on the other hand, goes in the ground weekly; tomatoes and squash, 5 times, every year. I've grown plantings of those crops many, many more times than I've grown potatoes! And the systems for those crops, in response to all that experience, are pretty dialed-in. I've already made and then adjusted for the most common mistakes. But with potatoes (and onions, for that matter), it'll take decades to have as much experience with them as I have with tomatoes or cucumbers. In so many cases, one minor oversight or unusual situation results in, “Well, better luck next year.” And then, inevitably, some new combination of growing conditions will result in some new and unforeseen circumstance.
A farmer friend of mine, who goes to all the vegetable-grower conferences, once told me about a conference where a noted potato-grower spoke about how he did it. And he was sure to point out something to the effect of, “I've spent my entire career growing potatoes, and you're all looking to me to learn about how to grow them. But you have to understand.. I've only done this 30 times in my entire life!” How good can one get, in only 30 repetitions, each one in different climactic conditions? Over the same span, tomatoes would get planted 150 times, or lettuce, 500 times—now that's enough to get seriously proficient!
And this may be why farmers are a notably conservative bunch, in the sense of being resistant to change—whether new methods to combat climate change or new equipment to do the work better or faster, most farmers probably want to wait and pay close attention to how it works out for a neighbor before trying it themselves. Because even it it seems like an innovation “should” work out, a farmer who knows they've only done something 30 times knows that their lifetime of experience is insufficient to make the proper decision about an untested innovation, and therefore one must rely on principles and methods developed over a much longer timespan—and so knows that it's risky to deviate from the established custom: the best practices not of the last few years, but the last few generations.
Here on my farm, I've accepted that I'll always be better at tomatoes and cucumbers than at growing potatoes and onions. My experience with those can never hope to catch up. I accept the long term project, too, of incremental improvement year by year and the curiosity of seeing what happens in a new situation, and then waiting an entire year to make the one adjustment that might have fixed it (and which might, itself, cause other unforeseen issues—or might simply be irrelevant in the new year). The other factor at play here is that while I don't come from a farming family, I did learn from older farmer neighbors, bringing their far longer experience to bear. And those older farmers excel at the standard market crops I mentioned: tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, etc. Not one of them was any good at growing potatoes.
