A new smile behind Featherstone Farm’s CSA goodness.

Yesterday Grace and I made the yearly trek to the off-grid home of our "soil gurus" Bob Dahse and Larissa Walk. Bob & Larissa are long time friends of Jack who have advised and done all sorts of work with Featherstone over the years. Their self sufficient and sustainable lifestyle is pretty inspiring.

The long and the short of this is that January spinach from high tunnels in Minnesota is a completely different deal than spinach grown in the desert southwest. And one place that this difference shows up is in the level of washing and packing that happens to it in advance of you receiving it.

Many of you will remember that, in early fall last year, we completed construction of a first-of-its-kind structure that I know of anywhere in the upper Midwest: adding a second 30’ x 260’ high tunnel bay connected to an existing one, creating a single 60” wide structure. Over time I am very confident that these tunnels will provide an immense yield of diverse greens and salad crops for winter and spring CSA boxes.

With the close of this calendar year we are marking the start of 28 years of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA shares) at Featherstone Farm. In agriculture- as in so many things in life- the only real constant is change.

Last week, Jenni and I had one of those experiences that make the stresses and strains of farming- and owning and operating a small farm business in particular- totally worth it all.

On the informal side, many members of the Featherstone Family are celebrating a huge Thanksgiving of their own this week, returning to their homes in Mexico after 6 months of work here at Featherstone Farm. It is such a poignant deal for all of us here, watching the folks pack for the trip home, sensing their anticipation and delight in homecoming.

It was the early days of Featherstone Farm, we were so ambitious about changing the food system (read: wildly unrealistic!!), that we aspired to plant and manage vineyards and orchards and perennial crops of all kinds, right from the get go (hence the original name Featherstone Fruits and Vegetables). Our good friends at Full Belly Farm in CA did this; why couldn’t we follow the same model?

Way back in March and April of this year—when the seeds of crops in this week’s CSA box were purchased and planted—I wrote a series of newsletters about Big Picture shifts in the world of local, organic agriculture. And about how we at Featherstone Farm are responding by doubling down on our decades-long commitment to a triple bottom line of social, environmental, and small farm financial sustainability.

A year ago, I was very bullish on winter wheat as a significant addition to Featherstone Farm’s crop rotation. It made sense on so many levels, from soil health to disease and weed suppression, minimizing tillage… the list goes on and on. We had harvested two very healthy crops the previous 2 years. And almost exactly 365 days ago, we seeded nearly twice the acreage we had ever planted. We mulched strawberries a few weeks later with wheat straw from our summer crop. Fantastic!

This winter, we came so close to building a grain bin (small silo) at the farm to store the 2023 crop, I had actually sent in a check for down payment. The sky seemed like the limit for wheat.

The other day I had an experience that flashed a lightbulb on my thinking- and recent writing- about the FF Mission Statement in practice. It made quite an impression on me at the time, and I’ve thought about it a lot since. I think it’s worthy of a dedicated post, to conclude my recent series about the Featherstone Farm Mission.

No story of the Featherstone Farm Mission Statement would be complete without an explanation of the original source of my vision for organic agriculture- and the source of the farm’s name. This is a very personal story for me, so I will tell it in the first person

My great grandfather Alexander “AP” Anderson was a farmer, inventor and late 19th century innovator in ecological restoration.

Last week I wrote about the costs of planting cover crops, and the extra effort / late hours often entailed in “doing the right thing” for soil, for the environment. It got me to thinking about all the places where prioritizing soil and “whole farm” health costs Featherstone Farm financially and operationally. I consider spending these investments basic, standard operating procedure here at Featherstone Farm; I seldom if ever question their worth to the farm financially.

I am a numbskull (pre 4th grade level inattention to detail, sometimes!). I have neglected critical accounting information in all my writing about the 3 year Spring CSA share, that is so important to the future of Featherstone Farm’s CSA program (spring, summer and winter shares alike). My apologies!! This post is an effort to correct this error.

Last week I re-introduced the Featherstone Farm Mission Statement, with its modified “triple bottom line” of financial, environmental and personal sustainability. These principles have guided FF since day one, although it took roughly 25 years for me to take the time to key them into the computer and formally adopt them!

I truly believe that FF was well ahead of its time with this kind of mission; from a 21st century perspective- when social equity, good governance and sustainability are buzzwords throughout business culture- it’s easy to forget how unfashionable these ideas would have been ca 1990, when 2/3 of my college class was flocking to jobs in consulting and investment banking (hint: very little thinking about anything other than the almighty dollar). By contrast, the triple bottom line has always been core vision and operating principle at Featherstone Farm.

Featherstone Farm has been working for years to develop its vision of building “gutter connected” High Tunnels for spring, fall and winter crop production. But progress has been relatively slow, amidst all of the other challenges of the pandemic era.

This spring, however, we are about to jump start this “new generation” CSA vision, with construction of the first 30’ x 240’ gutter connected tunnel that we know of, anywhere in the state of Minnesota. Here are the top 5 reasons for you to become a “3 year Spring CSA Member” to help make this happen . . .

From Day 1 (ca April 1, 1996) Featherstone Farm has been a mission driven business. Being certified organic- not just according to the letter of the law, read narrowly, but deeply in the spirit of the movement- was and is a core value for all of us here.

But the Featherstone Farm vision goes far beyond organic practice, as important as that is. Almost 20 years in, I finally got around to drafting a formal Mission Statement for the farm business (in 2015).

Two weeks ago I wrote to you about a series of big picture, “next generation of Featherstone Farm” type decisions that we are contemplating. Among those are (a) renewed investments in and opportunities for long term employees (b) a big push to purchase and protect 100+ key acres of vegetable ground with a perpetual ag easement, and (c) experiments with “value added processing” (just one example: making carrot juice out of the thousands of pounds of misshapen carrots we compost every month in the winter).

There is much good news in all that follows, particularly from the point of view of the CSA program. But there are also tectonic shifts in the big picture of local, organic agriculture, which have caused me to reconsider some of my fundamental, decades’ old assumptions about what we do at Featherstone Farm, and why.