Preliminary Survey Results and Our Thoughts

Preliminary Survey Results and Our Thoughts

I have put the most common response in red.  If there wasn’t a common thread, then I have put all of the chosen options.  Our comments are below.

1. How many people eat your CSA share? I’ll skip this one, although average is 3-4.

2. Please choose the phrase that best describes how you feel about your CSA share or write your own: a. I would like larger quantity of certain items (potatoes, carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, green beans...) and less overall variety; b. I would like larger quantity of certain items (potatoes, carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, green beans...) but also still want similar variety; c. I like it how it is; d. I recognize farming is weather dependent and would like whatever you are able to give us; e. I need another season to really say; f. something else B. Larger quantity of certain items but also similar variety.  Many people then listed what they would like more of.  There was much less consistency about this.  Some wanted more of the things I had listed, others said they really appreciated the less common things that we grow and would prefer we had greater quantities of those items.  Others listed their favorites and the items they really don’t like, which again some member’s favorites were other member’s least favorites.

3. Is it important to you that we plant heirloom varieties? a. Very important; b. Important, but also want a full bin; c. Think hybrids are perfectly fine as long as organic and not GMO; d. farmers' decision; e. no opinion; f. don't really understand the difference/benefits/negatives, etc. A mix.  Many people chose 2 options.  A. and C. most common: Heirlooms very important and Think hybrids are perfectly fine as long as organic and not GMO.

4. What alternatives to arugula would you like us to offer (in addition to or instead of arugula)?  Options below all have similar growing requirements.  Choose as many as you like: baby beet greens, leaf lettuce, mesclun mix (mix of baby greens and lettuce), orach/mountain spinach. Sorry, I should have clarified that we weren’t planning on entirely eliminating arugula.  Most common response by far was mesclun mix. 

5. What tomatoes would you like?  Choose your favorite 2. a. Heirloom beefsteak/slicing tomatoes b. hybrid/red beefsteak/slicing tomatoes c. paste/Roma tomatoes d. cherry tomatoes Most common responses were slicers, both hybrid and heirloom.  Most people said they did not want paste tomatoes, except for canning purposes.

6. Would you like more than 1 lb. of potatoes/week even if it meant you received potatoes for less weeks?  Yes, no, no opinion This was vary divided.  Almost 50/50 yes and no.

7. Do you want to eliminate kohlrabi? Yes, no, no opinion Also very divided, with lots of strong opinions both ways!

I had emailed back and forth with another farmer recently, and in his last email, he said that farmers are about the most honest folks around.  I don’t know that that is true.  I think we are probably just as human as the rest, but I do hope that we can be more open with you - after many years, realize that you won’t doubt our competency if we tell you it is really difficult to grow something.  I have numbered our comments as they relate to each question, although there may be some overlap, and of course, since I am writing, a little “long-windedness” as well.  Again, I am skipping question 1.

2. This is the question which plagues us at the end of every season, as we begin to plan for the next.  How to move the pieces of the puzzle around so that what goes in your bin each week satisfies your wants and needs.  If you want the short answer, see bold right before question 3.  We can’t, of course, make all of you 100% satisfied, and even if we tried, Mother Nature would prevent us from doing so.  There are going to be seasons that some fruits and vegetables do not do well, and the following season, it will be different ones.  That said, we did want to know if most of you wanted larger quantities of the same things or if most of you wanted a larger variety.  It seems that most of you do want a variety of fruits and vegetables, which is good because variety is a necessary part of our farming method.  The more variety we have planted on our farm the better, for several reasons.  More variety helps to prevent pest and disease problems.  Monocrop farms or “poco-crop” farms (my term, farms that just grow a few things) typically have a lot of pest and disease problems and use a lot of pesticides and fungicides to control them.  We use variety.  Our farm is planted like a huge 14-acre garden: kale next to beets next to carrots next to peas, etc.  Since most pests and disease pathogens are plant-family specific, this mixed planting scheme keeps pests and diseases from spreading quickly.  More variety also makes us feel fairly certain that we can fill your bins each week.  Most plants within a plant family have the same or similar growing requirements and ideal growing conditions.  However, across plant families, there is quite a bit of variation.  Planting many different types of fruits and vegetables at one given time is our “insurance plan”.  The growing requirements and conditions in a given season may not be right for everything that is planted, but they will be right (most seasons) for most of what is planted.  For example, in a warm season, we may have low yields of lettuce, carrots, potatoes, and green beans in the summer, but high yields of melons, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, okra, and field peas.  In a cooler summer, it might be reversed.  

So what are the fruits and vegetables people want more of?  Are there some “basics” that most people agree on?  It turns out not as much as we thought there would be.  Several members listed the fruits and vegetables that they would like more of.  There was quite a bit of variety and disagreement.  Those requested in quantity include: green peas, sugar snap peas, carrots, lettuce, greens of any kind, spinach, cauliflower, potatoes, tomatoes, red peppers, hot peppers, okra, green beans, lima beans, summer squash, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, celery, arugula, kale, herbs (some people specified and some didn’t, basil most requested), corn of all kinds, and watermelon (so far...surveys are still coming in).  I won’t go through each item individually, although I can if you would like at anytime and give our farmer opinion; however, I thought I would divide them into categories: easy to increase, difficult to increase, and somewhere in between.  Easy: lettuce, greens, spinach, okra*most seasons, summer squash, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, arugula, kale, herbs, corn; difficult: green peas (we have eliminated entirely...we do not have the spring weather for them; would rather dedicate their spot to more sugar snaps), cauliflower (we don’t really have the spring or fall/winter for it...one of my favorite veggies), and celery (another California-weather crop); in-between: sugar snaps, carrots*would put in easy category, except we were incredibly disappointed in last year’s seed, changing seed source, we’ll see, potatoes, tomatoes, green beans*depends on summer, don’t do well in hot weather, and lima beans.  

We can’t increase the amount that we plant of all of these fruits and veggies.  We would run out of space.  Some of them, we think we can increase the productivity, either by changing how we grow them or changing varieties.  These would include sugar snaps, carrots, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and green beans.  We will try to increase these.  Some of them, we are willing to dedicate more space to.  These include: sweet potatoes, garlic, kale, herbs, and fall/winter lettuce.  Some I think are not shared by the majority: arugula, okra, lima beans, summer squash.  Watermelons:  these have become our nemesis.  There are now no organic hybrid watermelons, except for seedless varieties, which we think shouldn’t be organic and so won’t use.  That leaves only heirlooms.  Last season was the first season for us to trial several heirlooms in search for melons that we liked.  It wasn’t the season for watermelons!  So, we will try again this season with several Southern heirlooms in hopes of finding a reliable variety that is fairly easy to pick and taste good!  Otherwise, we will go back to Crimson Sweet, which was okay.

Conclusion: we will always be increasing variety - for the farm’s sake, for your sake, and for our own.  We will increase or try to increase the amount of some fruits and veggies.  This season’s goals: sugar snaps, carrots, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, green beans, watermelons, sweet potatoes, garlic, fall kale, herbs, and fall/winter lettuce.   

3. We plant a fairly balanced mix of heirlooms and non-GMO, organic hybrids.  When deciding which variety to choose, we typically consider three things: production (which includes pest- and disease-resistance as well as size, uniformity, and percentage of usable vegetables/fruits), taste, and historical significance.  Hybrids typically are larger and more uniform.  Heirlooms typically taste better and have more historical significance.  Depending on fruit or vegetable, sometimes heirloom varieties are more pest- and disease resistant and thus produce more usable fruit and sometimes hybrids are more resistant.  Currently, we plant slightly more heirlooms than hybrids.  We typically plant both an heirloom and a hybrid of a given fruit or vegetable at a given time.  This is another way to reduce our risk - given most possible circumstances, we will likely harvest one or the other or both.  This does mean, however, that you could receive a hybrid veggie (cabbage, for example) when someone on the same day receives an heirloom one.  We are also always trialing different varieties (both hybrid and heirloom) in search of better varieties for our farm and our members.  There are several fruits and vegetables for which the number of varieties is essentially endless, and it seems impossible to quell the desire to try them all (tomatoes being the prime example); for other fruits and vegetables, particularly cold-weather crops and biennials, there are many less options, and we may have, in fact, tried them all.  (It is harder to save seed for these crops, and thus, there has been much less diversification of genetic pool.)

4. We don’t get a ton of complaints about arugula, but we do get some.  We thought it would be a good idea to either offer a choice alternative each week when we have arugula or offer slightly less weeks of arugula and offer something in its place.  We will likely do the latter in the spring (when it is easier to grow cool weather crops) and the former in the early fall (it is hard to get many cool weather crops to germinate well in August when these would need to be seeded; arugula will very reliably).  If I was choosing, I would choose beet greens, mostly for nutrition.  If Lalo was choosing, he would choose leaf lettuce.  The pros and cons of all options: beet greens and leaf lettuce have the least pest and disease pressure.  Mesclun mix has to be covered with row cover (or on other farms sprayed) to prevent significant damage from brassica flea beetles.  Mesclun mix almost always contains at least one brassica (arugula, mustards, kale, mizuna, tatsoi, etc.).  Orach is the most heat and drought resistance, followed by beet greens, then leaf lettuce/mesclun mix (probably a tie).  So what does that mean?  Well, for the spring, we have added in beet greens and mesclun mix early and orach later along with arugula plantings.  In the fall, we will plant mesclun mix and leaf lettuce.  We will only offer leaf lettuce as a choice since many members said they didn’t want more lettuce (some said they wanted a lot more!).  The only time we will hand it out in your bin would be if we had leaf lettuce but not head lettuce.

5. I have to say we were a little surprised by this outcome, and so have reworked our tomato plans.  We expected cherry tomatoes to come in higher (they came in dead last).  We still plan to plant some for the early fall tomato slot because they do better in cooler temperatures than slicing tomatoes and are less prone to disease (partly because they are quicker-producing).  Since only a few members made request for large quantities of Roma tomatoes for canning, we will likely just plant these once, hopefully ready for harvest the first or second week of July (schedule your canning now!).  We will increase the number of heirlooms we are planting and add another succession of tomatoes because it was often requested as one of the fruits/vegetables you wanted more of.  To be very honest about tomatoes: growing tomatoes organically in East Tennessee in large quantity in a cost-effective way is challenging, heirlooms even more so.  We produce quite a lot of tomatoes, about 2,000 pounds a year, but with the number of plants that we plant, we would like to harvest a lot more.  We are making a few changes to try to increase our productivity without increasing drastically the acreage that we plant in tomatoes: we plan to mulch our tomatoes this season; we are planting recent-release, disease-resistant organic hybrids (expensive but hopefully much more productive, especially late in the season); and we are spacing out our tomatoes more to provide more air circulation.  Beyond that, we have to hope for perfect weather, which for tomatoes is fairly consistent rain when the plant is growing and fruiting and drier conditions when ripening (and not too hot...many tomatoes will not set fruit above 90 degrees) - ideal world...obviously not possible for all of our successions and in every season.  Another thing, we got a couple of comments about tomatoes being refrigerated or dinged up by the time that they got to you.  I was glad to get these comments because they mean that we need to change our distribution of tomatoes.  The only season that we refrigerated tomatoes was 2010.  All members who commented about this are the last stop of their pick up day, which makes us think that tomatoes are getting too cold in route just from other veggies in the bin.  (The only exception to this is members who forget to pick up.  I put your whole bin in the fridge, tomatoes and all, when I get back to the farm.)  I think it may be similar with dinged-up tomatoes (also was only last-stop of the day members who made these comments).  I imagine they are getting dinged up in transit.  So, we are going to look into separate containers for transporting tomatoes.  We had some in NY, but I don’t know where they came from or if they are still available.  If can’t be purchased, we will come up with something.  

6. Potatoes, oh potatoes.  So, we didn’t expect this to be so divided.  We had already planned to add two beds of potatoes this season because I felt there was a general consensus that people wanted more potatoes, and we wanted to have more for winter shares.  Honest truth about potatoes: they are not meant to be grown commercially in our climate.  They are grown commercially in places like Colorado, Idaho, Maine, and Denmark.  You can see we are a little off the mark, but we are determined to offer them to the CSA and to have them for ourselves.  What does that mean to us?  Well, a lot of things: 1. the seed potatoes that we purchase (organic, disease-free, heat-resistant, drought-resistant varieties) are expensive; 2. our production is not what we would like it to be and hasn’t improved much despite our efforts to do so - we have to keep potatoes covered with row cover for most of their growing season March through July and we have to irrigate them often!!!; we need to mulch them to cool down the soil temps...that would help increase yields but beyond that we’re not sure; 3. until we can increase our productivity (I’m going to still put it that way, assuming we can increase our yields), we have to add acreage to increase our yields; 4. we may move to less well-known varieties in order to increase production...Yukon Gold and its spin-offs are not productive potatoes; we probably haven’t experimented enough with potato varieties.  What does that mean in terms of this survey?  We are as undecided as you all are collectively.  We will still plant two extra beds and try to increase our productivity within the acreage we plant, but we aren’t sure if we will a. have more potatoes to hand out this year, b. if we will hand more out at a time or if we will leave it as is (1 lb./week).

7. We had sensed this divide (similar to the divide over fennel).  The decision was actually made for us.  Our spring kohlrabi variety is not available this season, and we didn’t like the purple variety.  So...we will have kohlrabi in the fall and not the spring.  That gives us another season to come up with a better solution.