Notes from Your Farmer

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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