Survey results & thoughts for 2011

(CSA Newsletter: Week 35)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

• Salad mix — A big bag of fresh salad mix!
• Broccoli — More fall broccoli to eat roasted, steamed, raw, in soup, etc.
• Tomatoes — This warm weather has kept the tomatoes ripening!
• Sweet peppers — The warm weather has also kept our peppers ripening!
• Summer squash OR chard
• Carrots
  
• Potatoes — Yes, really, potatoes this week! Sorry to keep changing plans between the printing of the newsletter and CSA pick-up …
• Sweet onions — The last of this year’s sweet onions! (But next year’s are already in the ground and growing!)

Well, we’ve been tallying the survey results over the last few weeks. So far, we have received 53 complete surveys — a new record and representing almost half our membership! Woo!

It’s been great to hear from everyone, especially since the vast majority of your comments have been positive. The few criticisms we received were fairly consistent with our own frustrations or disappointments in the season. Many comments could be directly connected to the extreme cold weather we had last December: less variety in the winter and lower quality. Those are things we were also very aware of and have taken steps to remedy this upcoming winter season!

But, I imagine that you all are most interested in hearing the results concerning the possible change in the CSA and the “vegetable preference survey”! I’ll start with the results of the preference survey. These are how the vegetables ranked (from most beloved/could eat every week to least liked overall):

Onions 147
Tomatoes 145
Lettuce 145
Snap peas 143
Broccoli 143
Garlic 139
Green beans 139
Sweet peppers 138
Carrots 138
Sweet corn 137
Potatoes 136
Spinach 136
Green onions 135
Cucumbers 135
Leeks 134
Sweet potatoes 133
Winter squash 132
Zucchini/sqsh 125
Cauliflower 124
Chard 121
Basil/parsley 121
Beets 116
Kale/collards 115
Arugula 114
Asian greens 114
Cabbage 111
Radishes 107
Brssls sprouts 100
Parsnips 100
Eggplant 99
Kohlrabi 99
Pie pumpkins 97
Turnips 92
Radicchio 85
Rutabaga 80
Celery root 79
Fennel 75
Fava beans 74

Just because a vegetable made the bottom of the list (poor fava beans!) doesn’t mean that no one likes it. Fava beans received many “3” votes from their fans! But, they also received many “1” or “0” votes from folks who find them to be a little too much work. So, take all these numbers in context — no vegetable was universally hated or disliked; there were just some that were more universally popular.

For Casey and me, there aren’t any huge surprises in this list. Even though we only give out an official survey once a year, we hear from you in person every week. Plus, we see what items have been ‘skipped’ and then donated to the food bank.

But, it was interesting to see that winter vegetables mostly ranked at the bottom half of the list while the summer vegetables mostly ranked at the top half.

I imagine that some of this is because summer vegetables are just so awesome. Also, those summer vegetables are more traditional in American diets, making them easier to eat frequently without extra work. Plus, I also imagine that the winter vegetables’ rank was possibly hurt by the overall ‘less perfect’ nature of vegetables harvested in the winter months.

So, since we are a year-round CSA, we probably can’t completely toss the veggies at the bottom of the list and replace them with the top — unfortunately there aren’t tomatoes in February (at least none that we would want to eat!). But we can do as much as possible to provide only the highest quality winter vegetables. We’ve built better storage facilities this year with that in mind, but we may also have to just bite the bullet and toss more into the compost pile rather than give it out. Up until now, we’ve worked under the assumption that folks would rather receive an imperfect vegetable than to not receive it at all — but perhaps that’s not entirely true.

Our primary goal is still to produce as many high quality vegetables with as little ‘waste’ as possible, but we also want you to feel pleasure and happiness every single week that you pick up your share — whether it’s a summer share full of tomatoes or a winter share full of cabbage and leeks (and on the cabbage note: we are trying to grow smaller cabbages this year!).

So, what are we going to do with this information? We will use it when we make next season’s planting plan. We plan to continue growing all of the vegetables on this list. But, we will increase the quantity of the most beloved ones and decrease the size of our plantings of the lower ranked ones — as is seasonally appropriate, that is. Once again, there are certain times of the year when the lower ranked vegetables are all we have!

We will also probably try to offer the love/hate vegetables as options so that those of you who love arugula or beets can have them while others might choose something else. And, we will try to think of a way to get more onions to those of you who want them.

Which leads us to the second big question in the survey — whether people like the idea of having more choice in each week’s share and having the option of a smaller (medium) sized share.

Exactly half of the survey responders said that they love the idea of choice! But the other half of the survey responders either said that they weren’t sure whether they liked the idea of change or that they preferred to keep things the way they are. Several people commented that they consistently show up in the last half-hour of pick-up and would hate to be left with the ‘dregs’ after everyone else has chosen. This is of course a problem that we would plan to avoid (most likely by picking extra of things we know are favorites), but we too have reservations about radically changing the CSA.

On one hand, we see that a revised system could fix some of the persistent ‘problems’ in the CSA (not enough choice and no varying sizes), which is why we first hatched this scheme. However, we also know that this new system could potentially be a lot more work for us — we’d have to keep track of more variables both in the office and in the fields. We’ve spent the last several years trying to simplify, simplify, simplify … so, we wonder: are we crazy to now complicate our farm again? We don’t know the answers to these questions yet …

Part of our delay in deciding is that how we approach the CSA next year is wrapped up in much bigger questions of how our farm will look in the future. Specifically, we are once again (as almost always) questioning the scale of our farm. Our current scale feels slightly awkward — we’re big enough that we can’t run the farm on our own anymore, but only big enough to need one employee, which doesn’t feel efficient. Having one employee doesn’t quite put Casey into a manager role or free him from being responsible for many tasks on the farm, but it also adds all the complications that come with having any number of employees (more paperwork, more organization, more cost).

So, we’ve been going back and forth between two very different visions for the future of our farm: Should we get slightly smaller again next year and return to being a farm that doesn’t have employees? Or, should we expand our operation significantly over the next few years to reach a new level of efficiency in our scale?

Honestly, both are desirable. The smaller farm sounds wonderful in that it keeps our life as simple as possible and affords us the most privacy and independence. But, ultimately, we wonder if we’ll eventually get bored.

Also, getting slightly smaller limits what we can do as a farm and in the community. We receive a request to be put on our CSA waiting list almost every single week — and that’s just the interest we receive without any continued marketing! Clearly, there is enough demand to warrant growing our farm, and growing to meet that demand is an appealing concept.

So, we continually think seriously about getting bigger. Growing our farm’s scale is the seemingly riskier and more challenging of the two options — we’d have to add complexity in the form of more employees, more land, and probably more outlets and venues for selling our produce (perhaps a second or third CSA drop? a farmers market? U-pick? farmstand?).

When we think about getting bigger, we worry about losing the easy flexibility that comes with small numbers of people (and fewer general ‘moving parts’). We also worry about how to keep our quality high as we grow — both the quality of the produce and the quality of the relationships we have with our customer base. For us, the community our farm fosters is at least as important as the vegetables we grow.

But, of course, the huge advantage of getting bigger would be the pure joy of contacting all the people on our waiting list and letting you all know that you can invite your friends to join the CSA! We hate turning people away from an experience that we think is so positive (it’s easy to sell a product you love!).

And, how exactly does this question of scale play into our CSA model for next year? I suppose it’s just another piece of the puzzle. Before we know how much more complexity we add from one side, we need to decide how much challenge we’re going to have on another. Maybe adding complexity to the CSA will ultimately make growth easier (more options appeals to more people!).

On the personal side, what we decide will have a big impact on Casey and my individual daily experiences. If we stay small, Casey will spend more time working alone and be responsible for almost all of the physical work of the farm. If we get bigger, Casey will have to give up doing some work that he loves and learn to become a better manager of people, but he will also have more time to think about new projects and the big picture of our farm.

If we stay small, I will probably focus more of my time on being a mom with some hours spent helping in the fields each week. If we get bigger, the growth of our farm will require me to become more deeply involved again in management, marketing, and general business tasks. Each of us has two possible future selves and lives to consider, let alone how the decision will affect the farm as an entity as well. Much to think about …

All of this analysis is taking you way deep into the minds of your farmers. I think that ultimately neither direction is right or wrong for our farm — it will be a matter of how we execute any changes that will matter in the long run. We know that we can be a great smaller farm, and we think that we can also be a great bigger farm (although we have yet to see that in practice). In the end, I think we’d be more relaxed as a small farm, but probably have more fun as a bigger farm.

And, I have to acknowledge now that we feel so grateful that we are faced with such wonderful choices at this point in our life. It is wonderful to feel that our business is in a place of such positive flexibility — especially amidst an economically rough period.

As we keep processing all of these questions and your survey input, I will let you know where we are headed. Feel free to keep giving us feedback (we’re still accepting surveys!). Soon we will have a better idea of the plans for next year, but rest assured that the CSA will continue to be awesome!!!!! We love our work!

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla