I spoke a little too soon, or maybe late, about less that great tomato flavor last week. I probably should have said something like that weeks earlier. Lately the tomatoes have tasted much better. The drier and warmer weather have helped to force the plants to use all the extra water around and begin to concentrate flavors. Even in hoop houses the overall moisture level outside the hoop houses makes a difference, and with all the saturated ground we had earlier this year, things stayed on the moist side. The past month has mostly been on the dry side, and fruit flavor is responding well. We haven't seen much more late blight, so good news there, too. The outdoor tomatoes are struggling to begin producing, however, and they are beginning to show lots of early blight and leaf spot, the two very common diseases that eventually take outdoor tomatoes down every year. Still hoping we get a nice crop out of them.

We've been packing the boxes around 30% over value lately with all the produce of the summer season. As I've been saying all along, we're growing the whole field, seeing how much we can produce, and getting a sense of our ultimate total productive capacity. With just over 500 customers in our CSA now and the boxes being about 30% fuller than we plan for, we're actually growing for over 700 people. That, coupled with the fact we can still do 25-50% better in the field in terms of overall productivity, means we're well on our way to our goal of 700-800 customers. I don't want to push it to the seemingly doable 1,000-1,200 customers as there are always lean times and difficult situations. I want to plan for the worst case scenario, not the pie in the sky maximum we can do by planting every square inch of the field--but we do plant just about all of them.

On the business side, it's like this. When we reach 600 customers, probably next year, we'll gross about $1 million/year as a farm. That is a milestone I've patiently been anticipating for years. The much greater measuring stick, of course, is our net profit, and there are two things we can do to maximize that (so that ultimately I can make as much as my key employees!).

First, we'll learn to flame-weed all our beds before planting. That basically involves tilling ground a few weeks before planting, irrigating the heck out if to get all the weeds to emerge, and then killing the weeds quickly and efficiently with a propane backpack torch. Planting into such ground nearly eliminates hand weeding, or reduces it by 90%. Weeding is currently our second biggest field expense, behind harvesting. I bet we'll spend something like $40,000 just on weeding this year. That would be greatly reduced if we flamed everything. And as the owner, that's my money.

The other things we'll do directly affects you, our customers, so here's a big sneak peak: Next year, we're going to deliver early on weekend mornings instead of during weekday rush hour. The two big reasons for this are heat and delivery times. We can deliver boxes probably 30-50% faster during the quietest time of day by making this change. And because we'll avoid the heat of the day, it will allow us to keep produce in much better shape by delivering it faster and with less heat exposure.

These two changes will transform us from a typical, struggling farm that barely makes ends meet, to a truly sustainable farm that pays its employees livable wages (including the owner, which is even more rare), and makes enough money to fully pay for the land/mortgage it sits on. Then I'll not have to work solid 80 hour weeks all summer, I'll be able to take care of myself better that time of year, and I'll have time to take trips with my partner--if she can wait that long!

 

                                                                          -- Chris