News from Terra Firma Farm

Boxes are charged on Monday for the week's deliveries at:

$14 Small
$24 Medium
$32 Large

For a payment of $300, get a 3% bonus. Your account balance will be $309.

For a payment of$850, get a 5% bonus. Your account will be posted as $892.00

For a payment of $1,400, get a 7% bonus. Your payment will be posted as $1,498.

Vacations are charged weekly when notice is given as a fee, no charges occur during the vacation week.

$4 Small
$8 Medium
$11 Large

Bulk Items

From time to time we have bulk bagged carrots available, 10 lbs. for $12. If you are interested, let us know and we will put you on the list.

Pledge of Authenticity

Terra Firma is a real farm. We grow 99% of the produce that goes into our boxes on our 220 acres of certified organic land in Winters. If we do buy produce from other farms, it's almost always from a neighboring farm and we give them full credit in the box list.
The owners of Terra Firma are involved in every aspect of making your boxes a reality: walking the fields, planting the crops, selecting and checking what goes in the boxes and finally delivering them to you. We eat the crops from our fields every day, just like you do. Thanks for supporting our efforts and enjoying the food we grow.
Paul, Pablito, & Hector

Payments, Billing, and Changes

Schedule vacations, change box sizes, make payments or sign up for autopay by logging in to your subscriber account at terrafirmafarm.com

News From Terra Firma Farm

Community Supported Agriculture

Greetings!

With the election a week behind us, the hope that politicians from the two parties would actually work together to solve our nation's problems is already starting to seem naive -- with one exception. For the last four years, the Republican Party has followed an immigration policy driven by the loud and angry faction in its ranks that wants to deport all undocumented immigrants immediately. This was never a comfortable position for Republicans who see immigrants as hard-working and valuable members of their communities. Thankfully, the election results last week was interpreted by both parties as a mandate for bi-partisan immigration reform.

Farmers from Maine to Florida on the East Coast and Washington to Southern California on the West Coast rely almost entirely on immigrant employees. Our nation's current immigration policy as it applies to agriculture is essentially insane. Every year, farmers plant crops knowing full well that the majority of their workers have false documents, and that if federal officials were to show up on their farm, they would be shut down. Their crops lost, their businesses destroyed. And every year, a handful of farms are randomly chosen as sacrificial lambs, like getting hit by a government-controlled tornado.

Meanwhile, the otherwise law abiding and hardworking people who are putting food on our tables gamble every time they drive to work or to the store that they won't be stopped by the police, sent to jail, and deported without seeing their families. Fear of the law enforcement and government in general makes them less likely to seek help if they become the victims of crime or other injustice.

Anti-immigrant people like to say that native Americans would work on farms if farmers paid them more. This is faulty logic for so many reasons I can barely list them all. But the most important ones: Americans would never pay enough for their food to allow this to happen. There aren't enough unemployed citizens living in agricultural areas to fill all the jobs that would become available if all the immigrants were deported. And farmers would not survive a single season with an entirely new, untrained, and unskilled labor force. Mechanization has eliminated millions of jobs in agriculture, but millions of jobs still must be done by hand. Futurists dream about armies of robots, but that is still decades -- if not a century -- away.

Agriculture is seasonal work in most of the country, and there are people in other countries who want to come here and work and then return home. For years, foreign workers spent part of each year working on a farm in the U.S. and used the money saved to invest in their own business or education back home. It is almost impossible for people to do that anymore. Tighter border enforcement has actually exacerbated many of the problems that the anti-immigrant lobby rails about, by forcing workers who used to migrate seasonally to bring their entire families here.

I hope in the end that our nation can find a way to safely and fairly allow immigrants to work and reside here legally. Finding a way to provide a reliable labor force for agriculture should be one of our top national security priorites -- at least until the robots can take over.

Thanks,

Pablito

Thanksgiving Information
Turkey Day is next week, and here is the DELIVERY SCHEDULE:

Wednesday deliveries will happen as usual.

Thursday boxes (San Francisco) will be delivered on Tuesday, November 20th at the usual time and place.

Friday boxes (Sacramento) will be delivered on Tuesday, November 20th at the usual time and place.

BOX LIST: We don't have a complete list ready for next week yet, but the boxes will contain the following items:

Walnuts, Sweet Potatoes, Satsuma Mandarins, and Asian Pears (all boxes)
Leeks, Cabbage, and Carrots (M, L)

Most of the items in the boxes next week will be relatively less perishable than normal but will also fit nicely into a Thanksgiving dinner.

In your boxes
After weeks of much-above normal temperature, we had two nights of frost this weekend -- two weeks or so ahead of our normal first frost date.

The cold weather will help sweeten up our cooking greens, broccoli and cabbage -- all of which have been a little stronger tasting than we prefer them to be. It will also help color up our Satsuma Mandarins, which are sweet already but still fairly green on the outside. That's right, cold weather is what turns oranges, uh, orange. We plan on harvesting the first Mandarins this weekend and sending the first batch along to you next week. We're not sure yet how many will be ready, and thus, how many you will get.

All of the Peppers in your boxes this week were harvested late last week just ahead of the frost, which killed the plants. We were very happy with our pepper field this year, which produced a lot of nice fruit over a long season. We hope you enjoyed them as well.

We are loading up this week's boxes a bit with both Potatoes and Butternut Squash, but either or both these items will easily keep until next week for Thanksgiving or even longer. Keep the spuds in the fridge and the squash on the counter.

There's a bag of Spinach in your boxes today. It's not exactly "baby" sized, but it's still tender enough to make a salad with. Alternately, you can quick saute it or do anything other thing you might do with cooked spinach. Remember that Terra Firma rinses our spinach to remove excess soil, but we do not apply bleach or any other biocide to the water to kill bacteria. We follow all current FDA recommendations in growing and packing our spinach, but like all the crops we produce, it is grown outside where there are birds, bats, bugs and other critters that the government considers to be "vectors" for "contamination" of produce. If you are concerned about microbes, rinse your greens in bleach water or cook them.

Recipe: Butternut Squash Tart with Fried Sage
Thanks to site host John Wallace for sending me this recipe, which comes from Bon Appetit.

Preheat the oven to 375. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper, then roll out a piece of thawed frozen puff pastry to fit it.

Beat 1 egg with 1 T. water and brush it on the dough.
Cut the neck off a butternut squash and peel it. Cut the squash into 1/8 inch thick rounds and arrange over the dough. Place another piece of parchment paper over the squash, and then weigh it down with another baking sheet.

Bake for 10 minutes, then remove the top baking sheet and the parchment paper and brush the squash with 1 T. olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Return to the oven and cook another 25-30 minutes, until the pastry is golden brown.
Meanwhile, boil 1/4 C. honey and 2 T. water in a saucepan with 1 thinly sliced fresh hot pepper for about 6 minutes.
In a skillet, fry 12 fresh sage leaves in 2 T. olive oil until crisp.
When the pastry is done, drizzle with the chile honey and sprinkle with sage leaves and 1/4 C. shaved Parmesan cheese. Season with black pepper.