Firstly, thank you to all of our CSA members for your support this year, most of you many years. Without you guys we would have never even been able to get started farming day 1, let alone every year with the security of your investment early. We are grateful and blessed to be your farmers.

We are certainly blessed to be in such a beautiful part of the world with plenty of great farmers with small farms actively producing healthy food and improving the land. With all of this bounty, and all of the farms that aren’t being farmed, one can easily discern the productivity of the land if used even slightly more thoughtfully let alone with full intentions of providing for the community. However, with the seasonality of our area, and the appetite for certain flavors year round, we are in great need of processing and preserving operations. Due to stringent regulations, farmers cannot just preserve what they have grown and sell it to the public. One needs to be certified at food handling, have access to a certified kitchen, and send off samples with ingredient lists to have labeling that turns the food into something you can legally sell.

So if we were to increase food production locally and globally a lot more people are going to have to start up businesses around preserving the harvest. Farmers don’t even have time to preserve for themselves let alone grow extra and put it up for sale. It is pertinent that we get more people into the local food system to help communities become self resilient. Not only would it be highly profitable to have a food centered culture, but it would increase the demand for local jobs growing, processing, preserving, and fine dining booming the economy and creating a sustainable food web where you can trace all of your ingredients back to individuals not multi national corporations.

Naturally, the big business of food is terrible for our health and the environment. The shipping of international products, the huge plants used to produce synthetic food additives, the preservatives for shelf life and transport, the packaging, the exploitation of people and places, the lobbying that influences politicians to allow unhealthy products to remain in processed foods. Is there any good reason to actually eat any of this junk produced by these food monopolies? Oh, right, it’s cheap.

Thankfully in our area, we are lucky to have found some good canners who came from the restaurant world of Philly to come help us farmers utilize our abundance and preserve the bounty for our community. As you may know we had some sauce and marinara canned up for us (ketchup is coming!). We are working with Coddiwomple Cannery and are planning on how to utilize their skills and to grow more of certain things so we can have our very own hot sauces, salsa verde, pickles, sauces, and more. But getting stuff we’ve grown and had processed isn’t the only way to stop supporting unhealthy food from big industry. At the farmers markets you’ll find plenty of great businesses that are often using local whole ingredients to make their products. When you are buying local, most likely they have no need for preservatives as they are selling it directly to you rather than sitting it on a shelf after shipping it hundreds of miles away. The best part about supporting your local processors is you can ask them about their product! You can actually know who your food is coming from, where it was grown, how and when it was made. Big business has only one why for making food, and that is money. You can ask your local processor why they took the risk to open their own small business, and you will find the passion and care that will make you want to support them. So get out there and support local. Better yet, start being a local business!

Kind of weird seeing them wheeled away. But we knew they were in good hands.

I mean come on, you can’t not appreciate the intimacy of small businesses

Haven’t gone to Coddiwomple yet without being given something delicious. Fresh strawberry ice cream. You know I love my dairy products.

Great clean facility. Thanks Green Meadow Farm for creating the space for them.

They were cooking up when we dropped off our tomatoes

BONUS! October 2nd is our second wedding anniversary. I am truly blessed to be married to my best friend and work side by side to feed our wonderful community. Happy anniversary, Sammy!

Full Circle CSA

Local Resilience