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.