Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
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be especially helpful. Women “seem to be more comfortable dealing with
another woman. And I think having Kathy here to meet with people and
talk over the phone, they will be more comfortable. It is going to take some
time to train her, but I think it is going to pay off for us.” Plus having some
additional field help and management will save time. “That is what we are
hoping. At the morning meetings I can say, 'Ok, we should get this, this, and
this planted and get this cultivated, run some water over this.' That sort of
thing. So that will be his day. And I would have tried to cram it in a few
hours, and some of it just wouldn't get done because I just don't have the
time.” Steve is also proficient at building specific planting and harvesting
equipment to fill specific needs of their diverse cropping systems and the
smaller fields of organic vegetables.
Steve is definitely trying to expand the CSA, but needs more time to
advertise. “We started with a hundred families, and it has been growing
slowly and steadily. Right now it is kind of stuck around two hundred
families. I haven't been actively promoting it. I have mostly been doing
word-of-mouth and these guest bags. It's one thing we started doing a few
years after we started. During the week you can give us a call and say your
neighbor wants to try it for a week. We will gladly put up what we call a
guest bag, and that person can try it for a week on us. They pick up the bag
and see what it is like driving out to the farm. It is not hard, but it's not
going to the grocery store like you are used to. We give them a sample of
what we produce, and they can try it and see what they think. If they like
it, give me a call and I will give you a price, pro-rated, for halfway through
the season. We get you organized into a group and away we go. I probably
add, over the course of the season, 5-10 percent to our program. It is cheap
advertising, and it does work.”
The biggest barrier to more effective advertising is, again, time. “That is
what usually gets us into trouble in the spring. I have always had to try to
organize the CSAwhile doing everything else in the spring. That is one reason
we don't advertise much. I feel the best time to advertise this program, to
get people interested, is the few weeks just before you start. Then put some
general ads in and get people calling about the program. Right now is when
I have time to talk to people, and who is going to look at something that
starts in months? They will look at it and say, 'That looks interesting. I'll call
later.' Then it gets lost in the shuffle.”
While he would love to shift completely to the CSA and give up vegetable
wholesaling, Steve notes, “Realistically I don't think that is possible. We
would love to do four hundred, five hundred families or more. It would
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