Notes from Your Farm Fresh Team

Why we need YOU!

There are a lot of good reasons not to start a business, especially a farm. Small business failure rate statistics alone are enough to end the discussion before it starts. How about the fact that the average farmer with 1 million dollars of liabilities averages $19,000 per year as a paycheck. Or the fact that California has the highest small business failure rate, a whopping 69% higher than the national average.  Eek!

Yep, the odds are just not in your favor to get involved in a small community farming venture here in the golden state.

All the depressing statistics aside, we here at Tara Firma Farms have thoroughly surprised ourselves. We all believe in Tara's vision of wanting to feed the community grass-based healthy food, heal the degraded land, strengthen the community and grow young farmers. However, belief in a vision and knowing it is going to operate at a financially sustainable level are two entirely different things. But the thing is: we may have underestimated how badly our community wants this food. In just under 3 years we went from serving 0 families, to providing 750 families with pastured raised beef, pork, chicken and eggs. You people are hung-ry!

The other amazing thing is that we are almost turning a profit. One of the reasons this is amazing is that just about every person we talk to about making money in farming in California says you shouldn't buy land if you want to make money in farming. The land values are so high here that the actual value you derive off the land cannot cover the cost of operations and the inflated land value at the same time. Leasing is where it is at. While we agree, the problem is we wanted to find a piece of land we could help regenerate and to offer the farm as a place to connect with our membership, and a lease just wouldn't work.

Another thing you hear a lot about in farming is that the profit margin, as in most enterprises, is in selling direct to the consumer. For us, selling direct to the consumer was part of the original vision.

What they often don't say is that in order to achieve that margin an organization has to work in a particular scale. The overhead costs we have generated as a result of directly serving our community are high and what we have learned over the past few months is that we have to scale them in order to cover them appropriately. Now that doesn't mean a scale as large as we can go, because at a certain point when serving more families, the overheads increase. If we go beyond our 1000 families we would then have to buy another delivery van, and then we would need 1250 families to cover our new overhead. So for us we are excited to get to a sustainable level of 1000 member families and then cap our membership. After it is capped then you can tell your friends they can join, but there is a waiting list: You become instantly cooler.

So here we are in May 2012, three years in, serving you, living our dreams and excited about it. We're so excited about reaching a financially sustainable level of operations so we can start focusing on other elements of our business and letting our creativity fly. We envision creating a full picnic area by the barn with a bunch of tables, grills, an outdoor kitchen and hang out space. We want to put in a bio-diesel station so that folks can fill up their cars with veggie derived fuel and then pick up fuel for their bodies! We see a retrofit of the store with beautiful wooden cabinets, glass faced freezers and murals. We envision monthly barn dances, movie nights and jam sessions (jam: music AND fruit). We envision you bringing your ideas, passion and creativity to change our landscape and joining us in co-creation of this wonderful place. And once we get to a financially stable level of operations, we can begin to turn our attention to really making this place second to none.  Making YOUR farm even more fantastic.

Our Expanded Referral Program for May!

We don't just have Members of the farm - we have community, and while we don't all know each other yet, we look forward to continuing to evolve, celebrate and hang out together.  We like you - and we think we'd like your friends and neighbors too - which is why we are giving you, our Members, groovy incentives for referring a new Member of our community to sign up for our CSA.  

As many of you know - we have our $10 Farmbucks - Referral Program:  for every new Member that tells us that they heard of the farm through you, we throw $10 into your WebStore account, which can really add up to a lot of free food!  AND as a special bonus for May - we are putting you all in a lighthearted competition with each other:  the Member with the most referrals in the month of May will receive one free pasture raised Thanksgiving turkey each year for the rest of your life!!! (apologies for the morbidity)

Now - there are a couple folks who have excitedly jumped the gun - they have already emailed all of their friends and asked for brochures to drop off to their neighbors.  BUT!  Today is May 1st - and there hasn't been one sign up yet this morning - so don't sweat it - we are all at zero.  

We'll be keeping the tallies coming... like this one:

GOAL:  1000 Members

CURRENT # Members: 749! (That's YOU! THANK YOU!!!)

We can't help but be excited about the potential!  

That's only 251 Member Slots left!  Pass us your friends who are CSA-curious.  Pass us your favorite folks.  Pass us your parents or your grandchildren - anyone who's health you care about.  Anyone who you'd like to hang out by the pond and have a BBQ with.  Ask them via email to sign up (see forward-able examples in emailed newsletter) or ask them to join you for an event this month.  Go ahead and sign them up as a gift for Mother's Day or as a gift for some other reason you make up on the spot.

Lest we forget - this isn't all just about dollars and cents, money is actually just the means to continue doing and living and expanding the notion - that every living thing deserves the right to live a happy and healthy life.  Including us : )

So - let's go sequester some carbon - one burger at a time! 

The Farm Fresh Team at Tara Firma Farms

Notes from Your Farmer

If you want to continue getting food, please read the following J

As many of you know...

Our Story

When most people, including the people writing this, read a book that makes them upset or angry, they complain about it over wine with their friends. It’s one of the finer pleasures in life.  It takes a lot less energy to vent then to say, buy 300 acres, start a whole new career, and figure out how to raise food for and distribute food to about 700 families. However, Tara and Craig are not “most people” and so, here we are, 3 years later.  

In case you are wondering, the book was the “Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan.  

Tara’s new goal in life: to feed our community healthy food that also regenerates the landscape from which it came, to have Tara Firma Farms sustain itself economically, and to have fun doing it.  We’re all on board.

The Financial Reality of the Farm

As we all know land prices in California are very very high which makes it hard to run a profitable farm when you have to cover the cost of land values here. Second, running a model (CSA) where we provide food direct to the consumer isn’t cheap. Forecasting the demand for our 700 families not to mention taking care of the customer service needs of everyone is cost intensive. Third, raising animals humanely and using them as tools for regenerating the land takes careful attention and more time than old world ranching. However, healing the land and providing food to our community are two of the main goals we have at the farm here so these are costs we are committed to covering.  

The good news is that every year we are approaching closer and closer to profitability and we are so close we can almost taste it. The bad news is that there is no more money to subsidize the business. Tara Firma Farms needs to stand on its own two feet as quickly as possible if we are going to be providing food to our community this same time next year. After thorough economic analysis of the business what we found is -

we are close.

Membership Appreciation Month

Right now we have around 700 Members and what we need is about 1000 Members total in order to cover the overhead of the business.  The exciting part is that if just under half our current membership had ONE of their friends sign up we would be there!

The truth is we love you. We really do, if it weren’t for you we wouldn’t be here - you co-produce every bite of food we grow. So to show you how much we love you May will be Member Appreciation Month.

What will that entail, you ask? Having fun, we say.

We are putting together a seductive calendar of events starting with an epic Member Open House/Swap “Meat,”, followed weekly with a dash of Bar-B-Ques, movie nights, Q&A’s about grass and nutrition and celebrations sprinkled throughout the month. It is going to be quite a ride!

And we know you’re busy, and you have a lot to do. We also know you talk a lot about wanting more community and you love the farm as much as we do.

So here it is, May - our Membership Appreciation Month - for our Gratitude to all of you - our current Members - and our chance to grow our Membership to a sustainable level, so we can keep our doors open and the earthworms earthing.  It can’t get easier or more fun than this. So what we are asking from you is:

1) Come to the Member Open House and bring a non-Member friend,
2) Come to at least one event in the middle of the month and bring some non-member homies that are CSA curious.
3) Come to our Barn Dance at the end of the month where we celebrate your awesomeness.

Get ready for May as we party the farm to profitability and say thank you to you, our Members.

The Farm Fresh Team

Notes from Your Farmer

Folks, This Ain’t Normal…Joel Salatin

Dis-sensus…it is the environment where creativity, solutions and ingenuity thrive.  It is what we have going on in our country around food.  In our lives we tend to get together to “build consensus”.  Come to a common place in order to move forward.  We negotiate and compromise.  However, solutions come from another place.  They come from the individual mind, bouncing off others, forming fledgling ideas that eventually turn into the solutions that move forward change.

Joel waxed poetic as only Joel can do with his, humorous, adjectives, noun and verb descriptions of the world in which we participate.  It was, as usual, an inspiring and alarming call to action.  To spend our dollars on local foods, understand the value of healthy real food that is clean, unadulterated, sustainable food. 

It was a call for a cultural change.   To understand the current path our government and food systems are on, feel confident that there are solutions we can participate in and through education we can teach the world to feed itself along with the responsibility that comes with stewardship of the land.  And apathy is its enemy.   

Joel pointed out how our government has “segregated” our food system.  Farmers are allowed to grow food but not allowed to sell it to the consumer.  Think about it.  The current regulations came about 60 years ago, when we little to know understanding of the bacteria, germ theory, and the havoc that can be brought by unclean conditions and overcrowding in city food processing systems.  The solutions solved a short term problem but not long term.  Today we are saddled with these antiquated regulations, segregating our food from us.  From the push to hurry food using fertilizers to antibiotics, it is unhealthy for us, the animals, the land and the planet overall.

And apathy is the enemy.  Read his new book.  It is the best for overall education I have found to date.

And finally, thank you so much for supporting us and your food system.  We are flirting with profitability each month.  We would like to be solid for the rest of the year.  If each family brings 3 new families to the farm to tour, at least one will become a new member.  It’s the big push for May!   And apathy is its enemy…

Your “Take Action” Farmer, Tara Smith

Notes from Your Farmer

I Want to Hear From You!

The topic is organic food.  The question is:

”Why do you think only 1% of the population buys organic food (albeit growing)”.

Here are some thoughts to get you thinking down the right track and engaging people you know to find out their/your thoughts (assuming that you have this figured out for yourself)…

“It costs too much”.  1lb of steak purchased in the grocery store will cost you $815.  A small portion is paid at the checkout stand and the rest is in taxes to the farm bill, health care and environmental cleanup.  http://www.sierraclub.org/truecostoffood/

There is a 15 minute animation and all of the statistic references below the video.

Our steak will cost you $20 all in.  No taxes, all healthy, sustainable and regenerative.  Many people have said they save money as they don’t eat out as much during the month.  Health Care costs, if we eat more greens, less meat (even less of the good stuff and no one needs to eat a 12oz steak for dinner), the assumption is lower health care costs, right? 

“It is too inconvenient”:  Seems like that when we face change.  Nobody likes change if it is not solving a painful (financial, physical or emotional) experience.  It has to be one of those 3 for us to change something and unfortunately the “painful” part comes in a stressful way.  Whether it is needing to diet, cut back spending, end a relationship or mend one.  In the case of our food choices, for most of us, we are not in a painful place.  More of an annoyed place but not enough to do anything about it. (and don’t forget plain old “apathy”)

I love going to the grocery store to walk through the aisles, stand in the lines, pack it up to my car, put it in, take is out, unpack it at home, put more bags into the mess I store them in…ugh…OR  I could pick up my bag of meat, box of veggies once a week and go home.

My decision as to what to have for dinner is in my fridge or freezer.

Did I mention saving money, eating healthy with friends and good wine at home?

Those are my two discussion starters…what are yours?

Your “Pushy” Farmer, Tara Smith

Notes from Your Farmer

“Real Food needs time to grow and it needs the money to work with that in mind.  – Arno Hess, Slow Money

In other words, if we care about access to Real Food, Real Local, and Regeneration of our Environment we need to accept the fact that pushing food to grow “faster” will involve chemical inputs, inhumane practices, and environmental destruction.

The chemical inputs are showing up in our bodies through the applications of herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers.  Growth hormones, antibiotics and a host of other chemicals in the food sources of chickens, pigs, cows etc…are transferred to our bodies as we eat this “food”.

The inhumane treatment of industrial poultry plants, cattle feedlots and confined pig operations is horrifying.  Not to mention the quality, or lack thereof, of the meat from that system.  Stress is considered to be one of the most significant health risks to humans….don’t think that doesn’t apply to animals.  Hence the need for constant antibiotics/medications throughout the life of those animals to keep them alive (as a close friend commented one day “why go to the doctor when I can get all the antibiotics I need from the meat I buy at the grocery store”).  Hmmm, that’s an idea.

Environmental destruction is everywhere but most of us are not aware of how bad it has gotten.  Take a look at the CAFO production for pork in North Carolina (wikipedia – Intensive Pig Farming) will give you a shock, with pictures and links to articles etc.  70% of U.S. pork is raised there.  In 1995 a manure lagoon broke and released 25 million gallons of noxious sludge into North Carolina’s New River and killed approximately eight to ten million fish and created a dead zone where it dumps into the Atlantic Ocean.  Oops.

Hence the need for local farmers and Farm Membership i.e. the CSA model.

What does Farm Membership mean?

Technically it means you buy your weekly/monthly food from the farm on account.  It allows us to forecast what we will need to grow/raise today to feed you tomorrow and in the future.

Here is what it really means…

·         Feeding yourself/family healthy food that lends to less health issues and lower health costs.

·         Supporting a local business that puts your money back into the local economy by buying local.

·         Supporting the environment.  Reduction of greenhouse gases due to growth of perennial grasses year round that process CO2 out of the atmosphere. 

·         Humane treatment of animals, which you can see for yourself.

·         Regeneration of 300 acres of soil badly damaged by overgrazing for 200 years, increasing topsoil.

·         Education of thousands of kids and adults alike through our weekend free tours, school programs and Tara Firma Farms Institute for Agricultural Education.

But it isn’t easy, is it?  It is in-con-ven-ient (said with harsh tones and drama on each syllable).  I know. 

Nothing worth building, supporting or driving toward is easy or convenient until we get used to it.  You have to make adjustments…

·         Changing the way you plan meals.  You have learned to plan your meals vs running last minute to the grocery store (at least most of the time).

·         Changing what you eat.  Learning to eat seasonal foods, cooking with greens, slow cooking amazing meats, utilizing cuts you never heard of before.

·         Saving money. I hate that part (said, sarcastically of course). Lots of saved dollars eating at home with friends.  Local wine, local food at less than half the price of eating out not to mention the health of the fare you are sharing.

·         Eating out healthy - if you drink wine you know what a corkage fee is.  If you know your chef you can pay a moo fee, oink fee or baa baa baa fee.  Meet your chef and set up a fee that works for both of you.

·         Putting up with your friends that don’t care what they eat and being asked to eat at their home…relax on that one a bit. Help educate them or better yet, bring them out and let us do it.  If you eat mostly healthy then once in a while won’t kill you (at least we don’t think so).

·         Picking up your bag/box/egg carton or storing your bag/box/egg carton – Tedious for most but not the Petaluma members.  We began delivery door to door in Petaluma in January.  It is Convenient. It saves us hours of phone time with missed pick-ups and nothing goes to waste…yeah!  You will see door to door in your neighborhood soon!

CSA Member vs Shopping – “I will just come by to pick up my food instead of being a member”.

While we love our farm shoppers, it simply ISN’T the same.

·         Membership allows us to forecast what we need to raise/grow – veggies, chickens, pigs, cows and turkeys need time to grow!

·         You make a difference.  We need a minimum # of people on a delivery to make the finances work.  If you were the last person to make the minimum number and decide to “just shop” at the farm, the drop becomes costly and we scramble to increase membership or cancel that drop. The other members who picked up there are now trying to make another situation work for them.

·         We want you to know what is going on here – farm events, specials, piglets being born – if you aren’t getting our weekly/monthly food then you’re missing out on all the great stuff to participate in.

·         In-con-ven-ience (that word again). Chances are you will end up shopping somewhere else.  You want to support the farm, but now that the food isn’t given to you on a regular basis, you find it harder and harder to support the farm FIRST, the other stores second. You pick up that package of rib eyes at Whole Foods or that bag of lettuce (probably from Mexico) at Trader Joe’s.  Pretty soon you come out once a month and get a few things – not enough to last you more than a week and you forget that buying somewhere else is supporting the big ag production you didn’t intend to support.

·         Learning to eat seasonally.  Because grocery stores stock things like tomatoes year round, you can literally have whatever you want, whenever you want it.  But that mentality is part of what got us in this food mess to begin with, isn’t it?

·         Knowing your Farmer - do you know that those “free range” eggs are raised in the way you think/hope they are?  When you got eggs from us, you could literally see for yourself that the hens were out in the sunshine, eating grass and bugs.  But I’m sure that farmer in (where is that label again) Idaho is raising his hens outside too……right?

At the end of the day we choose our future and sometimes it is, let’s say it together, with nasty tones, and drama, “IN-CON-VEN-IENT”.  But only for a while. 

Remember Rosa Parks (my favorite story).  She sat on the bus in front.  She went to jail.  MLK paid her $14 fine to get her out and began a yearlong boycott of the bus system.  The day the State Government stopped paying subsidies to the bus system, the bus system said “sit wherever you want”. 

Vote with your dollars…take a stand for Real Food.  Become a member and bring your friends and neighbors.

We love and appreciate all of you.  

Conveniently, Your Farmer Tara Smith

Notes from Your Farmer

From the Farmer Note Classics, last year about this time:

A little bit of lice is good for you!

Knowing me as the positive person I am, many of you might now think I have lice and am trying to come up with a silver lining on my way to have my head shaved…Which I would do (the shaving part), maybe….However, what I have learned about lice makes sense…why I learned it is a different story……

This time of year the pigs will get lice.  A little lice is fine for the older pigs but the piglets get depressed.  They really do.  It is a bit overwhelming for them.

The internet cure for piglets is all about pesticides… lovely.   The treatment most recommended for you and your children is also a pesticide and highly toxic.   It is the ingredient Permethrin.  It is a synthetic chemical pesticide that works as a neurotoxin.  It kills the insect and in quantity can kill brain cells.  It is bad stuff to put on your head.  It doesn’t work much anymore because it doesn’t kill the eggs of the adult lice.  The stronger of those that hatch build a resistance and hence the Permethrin only kills the weaker of the pesky things.  Leaving a stronger strain to deal with while you poison yourself…isn’t that special.  But there is something that actually kills not only the adult lice but the eggs too.  Natural and non toxic to humans - Tea Tree, Neem and Karanja Oil.  The eggs are killed and the lice are gone.  The best mix out there we found is by Access Nutraceuticals Inc.  (you can Google licekiller.com). 

Not willing to wait for an order to be delivered I took the Tea Tree oil off my shelf and mixed it with an organic shampoo.  Armed with a bucket and brush I walked out to the piglets.  Now piglets are not excited about cold water in winter and they do not wish to be bathed in a tub.  But sometimes mom’s gotta to do what mom’s gotta do.  Just like holding the dog in the tub, we put the piglets in one by one and gave them a Tea Tree oil bath.  The sound that comes from a piglets mouth when it does not want a bath is something one should not put on a bucket list of experiences to have in ones lifetime.  OMG.  It is the worst screeching, high pitched nasty sound on the planet.  If you didn’t know better you would think they were having a leg cut off and they don’t stop screeching until you put them back on the ground, at which time they just stop. Instant silence and they walk away.   Just like a human baby, one of them had to poop and at the same time try to jump out, splashing poop water all over me and particularly in my face (I love my job, I love my job).  After getting 9 or so cleaned up I took a break, staring at the little herd digging around the greens in their pasture.  Half of them were so clean compared to the other half that were not bathed yet.  The difference was striking.  I remembered Wilbur and how he glistened when the farmer’s wife gave him a buttermilk bath.  I also remember that he stood there enjoying it.  Duped again.  Covered in mud, pig poop and feeling good about the morning, I walked back toward the house that would offer a shower.  What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, even a little bit of lice (kicks in your immune system).  I stopped to talk to one of our members walking with her young daughter.  The sweet, cute little darling scrunched up her nose at me and whispered to her mom “she smells bad”.  That I did.

Your Farmer, Tara Smith.          

Notes from Your Farmer

What does Uganda have to do with Tara Firma Farms?

Nothing and yet, everything.

Peter Frances Lustwata heads up a group in Uganda feeding 200,000 families.  This is food they get to choose, this is the only food they get, period.

Fascinating in that it is all organic.  They cannot afford chemicals. 

The Uganda Rural Community Support Foundation: ugandarural.org.

There is a U.S. site also:  goworks.org

There are so many opportunities to participate with this group.  Sending our young adults there to participate in many good works.  It is safe and the programs and well set up.  They can use all the help they can get but there is a huge value in participating.

Seeing the difference and participating in it tends to grow not only minds but hearts.

Peter was here yesterday and walked around looking at what we have going on here.  Perhaps the shock for him is the wealth of land, food, and how our country lacks an understanding of what real food is.  I was about to explain it, my understanding of it but it seemed to be not understandable from his perspective (or at least that is what I thought would happen so I didn’t try). 

What I know is we are leaders in the world and you are part of a much broader movement to take back our lives, the accountability for them.  We are in such a position to do so.

Take a peek at the website.  You may find it inspiring.  

Your humbled Farmer, Tara Smith