Winter is a wonderful time on a vegetable farm. In addition to having a break from the hectic pace of the growing season, it’s a time for reflecting and planning ahead. It’s a time to let the lessons of last year sink in and to strategize for the coming season. It’s a time of optimism because next season everything will grow perfectly! We’ll stay on top of the weeding, the pests won’t get out of control, harvests will happen efficiently, cover crops will be planted in time… and we’ll maintain some work-life balance, not run ourselves into the ground.
But the truth is -and we are well aware of it- this never happens. There are always new challenges (heat domes, fires and smoke, flooding, new pests… pandemics… or even just weeds, lots and lots of weeds), and we always seem to run ourselves well into the ground. But there are also successes, just not in everything. And we’re ok with that part. As long as we keeping learning and tweaking our plans and approach.
However, for the past few years we have been feeling like tweaks might not be enough. We’ve been so overworked that my mantra has become the sorry saying, “This is not sustainable, just get through this season and we’ll make some changes”. Unfortunately this has been my unwelcomed, but also insuppressible, mantra for more than one season now. It’s ironic because as organic farmers we practice sustainable agriculture. When something is sustainable that means it is in balance ecologically, economically, and socially in way that will allow it to continue in perpetuity. But when it comes to sustainable agriculture we think about the practices and so rarely do we ask if it’s sustainable for the farmer. But if the farmer burns out, it doesn’t matter how amazing their produce is or how excellent their practices are, if they burn out eventually they’re gonna choose or be forced to quit.
We don’t want to quit.
And so this winter we’ve decided to do more than just tweak things. We’re making some big changes, thought through and carefully planned, all in the hope that we don’t burn out. We’re making these changes with the hope they will allow us to continue farming for the rest of our career and even have a viable farm to pass on to the next generation.
The big changes we’ve decided to make are not about our growing practices, or even how many vegetables we produce, but rather about how we sell them. We’ve decided to really shake up our traditional CSA by stopping with the pre-paid season long commitment that was our Harvest Box program. This year we will instead be working with the Cowichan Milk Company to allow you to customize your order each week and then have our produce (along with additional items if you like) delivered to your door! To read more about this, please see our CSA page.
And as for the Duncan Farmers Market, well, we’ve decided to take a break from doing markets this season as well. Rather than finding us at the market each Saturday, customers will now be able to find more of our produce at the Community Farm Store (in the past we have just supplied them with kale, but this year we have committed to broadening the array of produce we supply to them), through the Cowichan Milk Company (see above), and direct from our farm through an online store for bulk items (e.g. pickling cukes!). If you’d like to receive updates about when and where our produce is available, including when we have veg in our online store, please sign up for our email newsletter here.
We cannot deny that these were big decisions, to dramatically change our CSA and take a break from attending our local farmers market- we agonized over both for months! But in the end it came down to us trying to find a new way forward. We are about to start our tenth growing season here on Tatlo Road Farm. Over the past decade we have built a farm nearly from scratch, growing thousands of pounds of delicious vegetables, in addition to building a lot of infrastructure (and growing our family!), but it has been a ton of work and if we keep going at this pace we're afraid we'll burn out. But we want to keep farming! So here we are trying to find a new way forward, one that allows us to make a living farming, but also farming in way that allows us to live a more balanced life...
Looking ahead we're still planning to grow as much food (if not more!) as in past years. We're just planning to sell it differently, in a way that gives us more time in the growing season to plant, maintain, and harvest crops- some of which we will then have available through the winter. So one big benefit to our community is that you will be able to find more of our produce year round! And one big benefit to ourselves is that hopefully we will find some balance and be able to continue farming for many years to come.
