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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] CSA start-up

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  • From: Brigette Leach <avalonfarmshomegrown AT earthlink.net>
  • To: frshstrt AT baldwin-telecom.net, Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] CSA start-up
  • Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2007 21:40:18 -0500

Hi, Lu.

You're getting some good advice from others. In our experience, living near a good sized community is important. We live in a small community, just outside of the Village, population 800. No subscribers from town. We had 150 subscribers for the '07 season, all of them in the nearby communities with populations of 10,000, 50,000 and 80,000.
For us, we are too far from those communities to expect subscribers to come to the farm to pick up their shares, so we deliver to them. Some drops are for 15-20 shares at a time, so we do not make 150 stops, but deliveries do have a cost and take time. We encourage people to act as coordinators for a reduction in their season price. If you go this route, do this with caution though because not everyone will be reliable, we've had a few problems when the coordinator couldn't keep payments straight. We do allow our subscribers to be invoiced weekly, monthly, quarterly.

Another reason we didn't want people at the farm, and especially didn't want subscribers working for part of their share is the liability situation in our state. We couldn't risk having someone get hurt...our worker's compensation laws consider them to be employed, even if they are not being paid. In addition, as much as we enjoy children, we didn't feel it would be safe to have subscribers bringing their children to our farm because the CSA isn't the only enterprise on the farm and we often have large equipment in and out.

My other advice is not to bite off more than you can chew. I get really ambitious in January looking at the seed catalogs. Even the first year of our CSA, when we only had 25 subscribers, we almost worked ourselves to death. We're more sensible now about what we can reasonably expect to grow and have enlisted a few neighbors to grow some items for us. For example, one raises all of our winter squash. He can do that part time with his kids...the kids learn and earn.

We started the first year at 26 weeks (too long on the November end), then 24, (still too long), and now this year 20. We charge $20 per share per week. A share is enough for one or two people, with 6-10 items. Now that we have the high tunnel we are considering doing a winter CSA, but because our bodies and minds need at least some down time, it will probably only be 8 weeks or so.

Our market garden is quite small, just over an acre, but we have two greenhouses and a high tunnel. The two greenhouses are just under 10,000 square feet total and we raise hydroponic tomatoes (1660 plants) in one and salad greens in the other.

In addition to the CSA, we have commercial accounts with restaurants, caterers, and some of the local companies who provide in house food service for their employees. We also hit 3 farmers markets each week. All this takes a lot of time; we have 4 of us full time year around, and during the summer months about 4 part-time employees.

I do hope you'll keep asking questions...

Brigette Leach
Avalon Farms Homegrown
Share of the Farm
www.avalonfarmshomegrown.com


frshstrt AT baldwin-telecom.net wrote:

Hi Everyone, I'm toying with the thought of starting a small CSA. For those of you who do this- I need to know how many weeks, how much cost per share and about how much per week in that share. Any hints are helpful. Thanks, Lu in Wisconsin
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