The Face of Food Archives - That Homestead

What is a CSA?

A CSA, by definition, is a Community Supported Agriculture. In a CSA, people buy “shares” in a local farm in advance of a growing season, and receive their return in produce. It’s like that CD you have had at the bank for 10 years, except you get a return out of a CSA. To answer the question “What is a CSA”, we will go over a few pro’s and con’s.

PRO:

They’re flexible. One of my favorite things about using a CSA is that they are flexible. All of the farmers operate differently, and many times personally. They can grow produce according to past purchases of shareholders, deliver produce if you’re sick, and put your kids to work when they’re driving you nuts. The point is, It’s really a relationship between you and your grower that dictates how and where you can get your produce.

CON:

There is no guarantee. If the tomatoes get blight, or your farmer produces 1,000 linear feet of beans and no lettuce or kale, you get what you get. Paying in to the CSA does not guarantee the type of return you get. Just like any investment, you’re in it for better or for worse.

PRO/CON:

Most likely, your share will consist of produce you may not normally use. Your farm has to grow a decent variety of produce to stay relevant. They may even have some things you’ve never heard of before. Until I met my wife, I thought kale was a form of seaweed, so I understand the plight. If you can manage a bit of positive thinking, this is a great way to broaden your cooking repertoire. Along with that, you’ll be adding a healthy variety of new vegetables into your diet that you would not have normally ventured into. It’s an adventure!

PRO:

You can learn how to farm. If you have been reading my blog at all, you know that I am starting at zero. Why do you think I’m interviewing CSA farmers and following homesteaders on Instagram? I’m a flippin cheater. One thing that Graham from Valhalla Farms told me was that you can always glean from other people and other styles of farming. Even just by going to the farm to get your produce or asking the farmer questions. If you are lucky enough to be within range of Graham and Bianca, you may learn more about farming than you even want to. These people are a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips.

PRO:

It’s fresh. Check out this article. It is not the only article ever published on the nutrients lost in food in time. The more freshly picked your food, the better. For instance, Bianca and Graham pick their produce the night before or the morning of pickup depending on the variety. Do you have any idea how long it takes from farm to store to table for produce at a place like Walmart or Meijer? Neither do they! I guarantee it wasn’t picked that morning!

These are just a few of the things that make up a CSA. In the simplest terms, at the beginning of a given year, you pay for a growing season and are given fresh, usually organic, healthy produce in return. Sounds like a good deal to me.

As always, start small, think big, and stay healthy!

Why use a CSA?

A question with more answers than anyone would care to read about. The question should really be “why not?”

In the last post, I mentioned some pros and cons and could only think of 1.5. That is not a whole lot when you compare it to the health benefits alone.

In a CSA, members get access to fresh, often organically grown food. Fresh like…if you don’t wash it when you get home you may find dirt or bugs in your veggies.

You get to know your farmer. This may not seem all that interesting for any of you introverts like me. I’d rather be in my own yard cursing wood chucks than ever have to go to the farmers market and converse with a strange human, but there is something to be said about knowing the person who’s food you’re ingesting. You may not want to talk to him about the Lions, because who cares about the Lions, but at least he/ she can be accessed. Because sometimes, even though you don’t want to, you want to know that you can if you decide later that you want to. Bagging up what I’m rakin in?

Another reason is local community support. You may not like your neighbor, but you may REALLY not like the next guy who moves in. So support him just in case. It’s always good to keep local support whenever possible. Small sustainable communities are a great thing and are fewer and farther between every day.

I will conclude with this. It was an honor to meet with Graham and Bianca from Valhalla Farms. I got so much information from them about farming, CSA’s and healthy food that I hope that I can repay them with your patronage. They are wonderful people and I recommend checking them out if you’re ever at the Davison Farmers Market in Davison, MI on the weekend.

If you’re a dad and you’re reading this, happy Fathers Day! And, as always, start small, think big, and be healthy!

Who is the CSA

This is part one of a multi-part series about CSA farms (Community Supported Agriculture’s), how they work, and who works them.

Your CSA farmer may not be Graham and Bianca (sucks to be you) but I’m sure they’re great. The “who” behind a CSA farm is really, in part, you. Yes, your farmer works his tail off every season to deliver you fresh produce in the healthiest way he can, but without his community supporting him, he will fail. To create a sense of community again in times like these seems priceless, but it apparently is not. Its costs vary according to your CSA, and it’s returns are more than food. They are community, family, health, friendship, and much more. More than can be seen or measured. More than can be weighed on any scale. It’s even more than consumer and producer. It’s a pledge in your local farmer with a return. It is, in essence, edible stock in your local community.

I recently had the great pleasure to sit down and chat with Graham and Bianca from Valhalla Farms. If I meet my own expectation of this article, I will by no means do the two of them any justice. The vast amount of knowledge, dedication, and joy for farming will in no way shape or form be able to be expressed in this blog. Only by meeting them face to face could you ever understand the joy that it was meeting with them and learning more, not only about how a CSA farm works, but about THEM.

To me, one of the things that stuck in my head the most about purchasing produce from a CSA is that you know where your food is. If at any point in the middle of the night you wake up distressed, thinking about the poor living conditions of your turnip plants, you can get in your car and drive by the farm. Breathe a sigh of relief, because Graham and Bianca have taken great measures to ensure the quality of your turnip plants. Hyperbole? Yes. Fact? Also yes. What is better than know exactly where your food is before it hits your table? You can even go feel the dirt that it’s growing in if you ask nicely.

Do you know where your turnip plants from Walmart come from? Me neither, and I’m sure that nobody stocking them knows either. You might get an answer like “Uhh, I just grabbed the box from the back” along with a very confused/ possibly angsty look. Push your cart very politely back to the cart corral, get in your car, and go to Valhalla Farms. If you ask Graham where his turnips come from, he will give you that information plus the history of hybrid turnip plants and the most suitable soil types and zones to grow them. Have you ever seen rain man? It’s like that.

In this article, I hope to teach you (and learn myself) a bit more about how a CSA works and how it works for YOU. It’s being inserted in your body, so you have the right to know where it comes from and what it is. I hope that you enjoy reading this article as much as I have had fun writing it and learning more about CSA farms, especially Valhalla Farms. If you have more questions than answers, stay tuned for the next couple of sessions and I will fill you in on the how’s and why’s.

Start small, think big, and stay healthy!

Valhalla Farms

Graham and Bianca from Valhalla farms will be the preface for a short three part series on CSA farms. I met them recently to do an interview for an article about their farm and found more than I bargained for. I ended up with a series about CSA’s on top of it. The best part is that I’m going back to work on the farm with them just for giggles, so I hope that puts in perspective the depth of knowledge that these two have for their trade.

In the Beginning

I always liked that sentence in the Bible, and I thought it fitting to start off the birth of Valhalla Farms. I found it fitting because, well, “it was good.” If you were to step back and take a look at the world, it would seem that man was created to destroy and to hate. His fellow man means nothing, war abounds.

If I were to believe the Bible, and I do, I can see that “God created mankind in his own image.” Oddly enough, in that sentence, he said that he created us, and thus, we are creators. This is the story of what brought about the creation of Valhalla Farms. Graham has been part of war. He has seen death and destruction and hatred to its core. After all of that, he found that his peace was in creating. He had farmed in Arizona in the past and knew that he enjoyed it, but not enough perhaps to calm a storm inside of him.

As with any good man, he is held up by a wonderful woman. In Grahams search for calm, His fiancé Bianca told him to do what he enjoyed. She wanted him to love what he did…and I truly believe that he does.

Be the change

Graham and Bianca both realized that something had to change. They wanted to be part of something productive on an emotional, physical, and communal level. In our interview, one of the things that Graham said was “what do you want your legacy to be?” This word legacy gets thrown around a lot, rarely for reasons of any merit. Legacy can generally mean money, houses, cars, property… but is that really what you want to leave? Wouldn’t the world be better served by knowing how to grow food and eat a balanced healthy diet than by your kids having a 5200 square foot house? Unless they turn it into a homeless shelter or have 40 kids, it doesn’t really serve much real purpose other than taking up space. I guess the real question is, will you be remembered as a producer or a consumer? Did you add any value to the world or were you a parasite to it?

They decided that they wanted to leave something real behind. They wanted to turn Grahams passion for creating into something that people could benefit from. Graham and Bianca are striving toward interpersonal relationships between farmers and the communities they serve to promote not only health, but community, and friendship.

Too much like work

When I asked Graham what advice he had for people who wanted to start a CSA from scratch, he and Bianca looked at each other and said “Don’t.” with a chuckle.

This wasn’t from a competitive standpoint, but a matter of hard work. For a CSA starting out, they have no money to hire help and no money for things like crop insurance. They can’t even take advantage of farming tax breaks until they hit a certain sales number. They had to make a rule that they only work six days a week at the farm because “There is ALWAYS something to do.”

Graham and Bianca are always looking for ways to save time (all while staying organic), and increase efficiency. Every move they make and every plan they plan has to be very well thought out, because if they miss something, they don’t have the means to start over. From the placement of the greenhouse, to how to position their crop rows, to the hand equipment they use to work their land. It all takes time, and as we all know, that is a very limited resource.

Paradigm Shift

When I asked Graham and Bianca why they thought there has been such a shift in the way people think about their food, they had some good insight.

They believe that what once started as a fad turned into a real lifestyle change for a lot of people. People are becoming more health conscious because they are starting to find out the truth about where their food is coming from, what’s in it, and what the effects are on their bodies.

It seems to them that large communities like vegans and the like are a good point of reference for this kind of research. Although we don’t share all of their ideals, they lead a generally “clean” lifestyle in the food they choose and they have blogs and resources everywhere.

It is also the opinion of the writer and of Valhalla Farms that people are getting sick of big government lying to them. It takes very little common sense to know that there is no way something can naturally last as long as it has to to make it to our kitchen table the way it comes from the stores…that and we HATE buying bananas. If I want to eat a banana, I have to go to the store and buy them just to wait a week before they’re ripe. It makes me crazy. I digress. You are finally wising up the the fact that an FDA or USDA stamp really only means that it won’t kill you…that day. As more and more research is done on pesticides, hormones, preservatives, and the like, the news about our “fresh” produce from Meijer gets more and more dire.

Last but not least is your wallet. You’re sick of paying high prices for low quality, low favor, low nutritional food! You work too *$&%^#* hard to throw your money away on things that are of no value to your life. You spend 40 hours or more away from your family to provide for them, but the choices you have at the big stores isn’t cutting it anymore. Enough is enough!

I hope that I have given you a little insight on Valhalla Farms. They, like I assume most CSA farmers, are very passionate and knowledgable about what they do. It’s time to say enough is enough with big farming and big government food and to start saying yes to taking care of your body and your families body. You’re the only one who will.

As always, start small, think big, and stay healthy!

For more information from Valhalla Farms or to sign up for fresh produce, email them at valhallafarm2018@gmail.com

The Face of Food

In this section of That Homestead, we will be featuring you! Are you a local CSA or homesteader? Do you sell eggs, chicken, produce, beef, or anything organic? I want to hear from you!

I want to feature only the most passionate of homesteaders here. This is a place for the elite. The ones who said “enough is enough” with leaving their families in the dust while they worked 70 hours a week. The ones who said “enough is enough” to ingredients in their food that they can’t even pronounce. The ones who’s friends told them they were nuts.

If this is you, contact me to set up an interview and we will show the world what it’s like to be sustainable.