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

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!

The three-acre tomato field we are harvesting right now is alongside a private gravel road. Every morning our employees park along that road, grab empty boxes from the piles arrayed there, and start harvesting tomatoes by hand. It's a fairly tranquil scene.

Terra Firma's Tomato Field

Most of the tomatoes we grow are tall vines that must be trellised with metal stakes and twine. People walk down the rows and harvest the fruit, walking the boxes back out to the road. We don't put much fruit in a box -- 10 to 20 lbs. -- so as to avoid crushing the tomatoes. On a normal day, we get about 3000 lbs. of tomatoes out of a field this size. It takes about 30 people five or six hours to do this. If the weather is hot, we pick the field every day; if it's cooler we pick every other day.

Each of our fields has multiple varieties of tomatoes -- as many as 20. In the best case, each of those varieties generally produces ripe fruit for three weeks. We have four plantings in all, each three weeks apart. In this way we produce a steady flow of tomatoes from early June until mid-September.

On the other side of the gravel road from our tomato field is 100 acres of non-organic processing tomatoes grown by another farm. These are varieties bred to produce huge amounts of fruit that are harvested all at once, mechanically. Yesterday morning, at the same time we were hand-harvesting our field, this field was being harvested.

The neighbor's (canning) tomato field

The tomato harvester lifts the entire plant off the ground, strips the fruit off, and sends it over conveyor belts where dirt and other foreign matter is removed. The final conveyor shoots the tomatoes into the air where they fall into a very large trailer pulled behind a tractor. Each trailer holds about 10 tons of tomatoes, and with both tractor and harvester moving 20 miles an hour, it takes less than ten minutes to fill one. When the trailers are full, the tractors pull them to the edge of the field where they are taken by semi-truck to the cannery.

In a single day, the farmer across the road from us harvested more tomatoes than we will produce in 3 months. It will take them just 4 days to harvest the entire 100 acres. Of course this is just one of dozens of fields they will harvest this year.

Processing Tomato harvest

Of course, these are not the same type of tomatoes we are growing. They are not even the "supermarket tomatoes" so commonly derided for their lack of flavor. As you can see, they are fully ripe when harvested -- any green ones are identified by an optical sorter and spat back out onto the ground. They are also rock-hard. You would not want to eat one raw, but they taste pretty good when cooked or used in sauce. (And btw, organic canned tomatoes are harvested the same way).

There are few scenes that illustrate the diversity and complexity of agriculture better than this one. Scale, technology and innovation have allowed farmers to become amazingly efficient at growing canning tomatoes. Meanwhile, the system used to grow fresh market tomatoes has changed little in the last 50 years, and the amount of human labor involved remains tremendous. An economist might ask, why does anyone still produce fresh market tomatoes when canned ones can be produced so much more efficiently?

The answer lies not in the demand, not the supply. Sales of fresh market tomatoes -- and acreage planted worldwide -- increase every year. Demand for canning tomatoes is in decline and has been for over a decade. People want to eat fresh tomatoes, even when they are out of season locally and cost ten times what canned ones do. In this declining market for their crop, processing tomato farmers must become ever more efficient just to survive. In a decade or less, harvest will be fully automated using GPS and self-driving tractors and harvesters. Only a handful of giant growers will remain.

One day in the future technology will be advanced enough to build armies of soft-fingered robots to replace human harvesters in fresh market tomato fields. The question is whether or not they will ever be cost effective. Until then, and as long as people still crave the flavor of fresh ripe tomatoes, humans will be picking the fruit by hand in fields that look much like ours.

Thanks,

Pablito

In Your Boxes

Speaking of Tomatoes...we try to give every subscriber a mix of tomato varieties every week, but there's no way for us to guarantee that you will for sure get a particular variety -- even once -- over the course of the season.

Heirloom tomatoes are unreliably to an extreme. Even though we have been growing them for over ten years, and have simply stopped growing certain ones that are particularly unproductive, we still don't know how much we are going to get of a particular variety until just a few weeks before harvest. Hot weather, cool weather, wind, and rain each can impact particular varieties -- in different ways. This is the main reason that heirloom tomatoes are generally more expensive in stores than other tomatoes.

If Terra Firma was only growing tomatoes for our CSA, we would grow very few heirlooms -- they are simply not predictable enough. We sell heirloom tomatoes to restaurants and stores for roughly double the price of red tomatoes like Early Girls, and this price premium makes up for their other problems.

On the other hand, we do not put a higher value on heirlooms in your boxes. When they are producing heavily, we send more of them to you. When they are not, you will get mostly -- or entirely -- red tomatoes. This is why you may see Terra Firma heirlooms selling in a store but not get any in your CSA box that same week.

While we have been picking tomatoes for over two months now, we are just now entering peak season for heirlooms -- which generally don't produce well early in the season.

The Peach varieties we are harvesting now -- O'Henry and Trazee -- are probably the best tasting of the whole season. They are also ripening almost two weeks earlier than normal. With only one variety left in our orchard after this, the end of the season is coming quick. If you've been waiting for the right time to order a box of peaches to freeze or can for the winter, now's the time. The latest ripening variety has a light crop and we may not have any extra; its flavor is also not nearly as rich.

Recipe: Summer Vegetable Soup, 3 ways
I know that it hasn't been a warm summer in the Bay Area, and that this week has been particularly chilly -- the fog has been so deep we've seen it spilling over the Coast Range every morning. Maybe a nice mid-summer soup recipe will help warm you up. This basic recipe can be customized in (at least) three different ways.

Heat 4 C. vegetable broth in a soup pot.

Cut the kernels off 3-4 ears of corn, and then use the knife to press any liquid out of the cob. Reserve the corn and liquid, then cut the cobs in half and add to the broth. Bring to a boil and simmer for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, peel and dice onion to make 2 C. Saute in 2 T. olive oil in a skillet until the onion is tender, then add 1-2 minced cloves of garlic and 2 C. diced tomatoes and their juices. Simmer for 5 minutes, then add 2 diced zucchini and cook for another 2 minutes.

Remove the corn cobs from the broth. Transfer the contents of the pan into the soup pot, and then use a cup or so of broth to deglaze the pan. Simmer for another 10 minutes, then add 1 C. basil leaves, torn roughly.

French Version: Serve topped with toasted bread and grated parmesan.

Mexican Version: Top with fried corn tortilla strips and serve with sliced jalapenos and lime wedges.

Thai Version: Add 1/2 C. coconut milk to the broth, then season with fish sauce, chile paste, and lime juice.