University Place

Community Supported Agriculture

[Chris Russin, Senior Lecturer, Program in Biological Sciences, Northwestern University]

I’m Chris Russin, I’m your program chair for the Racine/Kenosha Master Gardener’s Association, and tonight we want to welcome Sandy Raduenz.

She is the co-owner of Pinehold Gardens C.S.A. with her husband David Kozlowski. Earlier in her career she worked desk jobs, but she hated being indoors and she hated sitting down. So, 22 years ago, she attended an Urban Rural Days conference in East Troy, and she found out about the concept of Community Supported Agriculture or C.S.A.

She came home and she felt like she finally belonged somewhere. So, with encouragement and a check for $200 from her husband’s sister-in-law, she and her husband plowed up the backyard of the house they were renting in Oak Creek, and she began – they began their one-member C.S.A. It is now 21 years later. They have 185 members in their C.S.A., and they sell to 15 Milwaukee-area restaurants.

So, Sandy Raduenz.

[applause]

[Sandy Raduenz, Owner, Pinehold Gardens]

My husband, David Kozlowski, has a degree in journalism, and he usually does all public speaking for the farm. So, I will do my best. He’s out, busy planting our 10,000 heads of garlic, preparing for next year’s season. We have begun the 2017 farming season this weekend.

David and I own 21 acres in Oak Creek in the very, very far southeast corner of Milwaukee County. We refer to it as the block that time forgot. There is no cable. There’s no sewer. There’s no water. There’s no D.S.L. There’s no fiber optic. I get one bar on my phone signal. And there’s a subdivision two blocks from our house.

And so, it is – it has a very high water table. We’re very close to the river floodplain. And so, it is not the best farmland. It is not the best land for development. But it’s our home, and it’s where we have a very worthwhile and life-fulfilling business operating.

It’s a great place to be because we are very close to the city. We’re only 17 miles from downtown Milwaukee. So, our restaurant delivery route is only, the full circle is only 42 miles. Our C.S.A. route is only 60 miles full circle. Most farms have to travel 60 to 90 miles to even reach the city.

I’m here to mainly talk about community-supported agriculture but, besides community supported agriculture, we sell to 15 restaurants in the Milwaukee area, and we have an on-farm stand on Saturday mornings. We have discontinued going to farmers’ markets and are instead choosing to build community around our property with personal relationships at people that attend our farm stand, the chefs that I meet with every winter and personally deliver to over the year, and our 185 C.S.A. members.

So, a C.S.A. stands for Community Supported Agriculture. In a monetary way of looking at things, it is like paying for a subscription to a theater, maybe a sports team. I used to say magazines, but people really don’t hardly subscribe to magazines anymore. You pay up front for a product. In this case, in a traditional C.S.A., which we are still a traditional C.S.A., you get a weekly box of vegetables, and it – for -our season is 18 weeks long. And – and it’s whatever is in season and is whatever is growing on the farm. You dont – with our – now, to kind of clarify, I’m going to talk about the way our C.S.A. operates first because there has been very many different permutations now of the C.S.A. model.

So, I grew up gardening. I grew up in the city of Milwaukee, just north of the airport. My husband grew up in Greenfield. And in a new sub – that was one of the new suburbs when his dad built the house. My parents bought their house in 1955. And everybody in those small suburbs, in the small city gardens or city yards, had gardens. So, we – now, in Oak Creek, I want to give a plaque to a household if they even plant a tomato plant.

[laughter]

Its – so, we both grew up gardening. We did not grow up farming. We both went to college. We both have college degrees. David’s is in journalism. Mine is in education for computers and math.

And we both had desk jobs, and both had careers. And I, for some reason, went to a conference at the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute. It was called Urban Rural Days. This is way before foodies was a word, before local food was a word. It was trying to connect urban people with rural farmers. And there was a presentation on C.S.A.s. And I met the nicest people. And I just never fit in. I was kind of like a nerdy math geeky kind of weird person. And I just came home, and I said I belong somewhere. And I was talking and talking and talking and talking about this. So, David’s sister-in-law gave us a check and said: You’re going to do this.

So yes, we literally plowed up the backyard. We were living in the property we currently own. We were renting. It was – it did happen to be my relative’s property. But my boss bought it as an investment to develop, and we were renting.

And we started with one member, and then we went to five members, and then we went to 15 members. And we started looking for farms because we never thought we’d be able to buy the land that we live on now. But our landlords believed in what we were doing and that we wanted to be in an urban environment and that we wanted to educate the public and that we wanted to work with school groups and that we wanted people to know where their food was coming from, so we were able to purchase the property 12 years ago.

So, getting back to the concept of C.S.A., C.S.A. is like where you pay up front for a weekly delivery of vegetables. It really helps small farmers exist because you get your operating capital up front so you can buy your seeds. You can buy, you can pay your property taxes. You can pay for equipment repairs, and you can have a budget to work with. Most C.S.A. farmers have a goal of how many members they want to sign up, and then you know what your budget is for the year.

In the old days, you would have a private banker that you would go to for an operating, basically an operating loan. So, the C.S.A. members, in a financial way, you can be thought of as your operating loan. But C.S.A. members are more than just the money basis. It is a way for people to personally invest in and know where their food is coming from. And to – also, they – they are rewarded with bountiful harvests or they, if – if things don’t work out then it – then they have to take the good with the bad.

That’s not to say that a farmer can just say: Oh, well, this didn’t work out. I mean, you have to be a responsible farmer and irrigate, like this year, in a drought. You can’t just say: Oh, it didn’t rain. I’m sorry we didn’t have a crop because it didn’t rain.

And from making the transition from a gardener to a C.S.A. farmer is very, very, very difficult because you have to have, in our case now, we have to 185 of lots of things every week. So, you have to have 185 heads of lettuce that mature at once. You have to have 185 heads of cabbage that mature at once. You can’t have the deer eat half your crop. You can’t have a variety that’s not going to mature all at the same time. You can’t grow as many heirlooms that are beautiful but just don’t yield. That they only yield that one eggplant, maybe, during the growing season. So, transitioning from a gardener where you can do a lot of experimentation and grow a lot of different heirlooms was hard, and transitioning to try to find the right varieties that work in your soil and your climate is hard, and just the timing of the succession planting.

So, we grew up as Memorial Day gardeners. You plant your garden on Memorial Day, and then you harvest as things come along. With C.S.A. farming, you’re constantly planting. So, we would have six succession plantings of beans. We plant lettuce every two weeks. We have a huge planting in the beginning – in the middle of July. That’s for all of our fall crops. All of our broccoli and kale and cabbage and cauliflower and leafy greens. Huge. And carrots and beets. So, we almost plant more in the middle of summer for a fall harvest than we do in spring.

And – and so its – we still, let’s see, it is now the end of October, and we still have two more deliveries in our C.S.A. So, even though we have had a frost, there’s a lot of crops still in the field and there’s things in our root cellar and things in our – in our hoop house for storage that we’re still going to be sending out to our customers.

Also involved in a C.S.A. is you have – there’s a lot of education because people are receiving food, and a lot of people join C.S.A.s because they want to eat healthier or they want to join C.S.A.s because they want to cook more. And both of those things kind of conspire against becoming a C.S.A. member because people find out that they really don’t like vegetables

[laughter]

or that they really don’t cook. They thought they cooked, but making a salad is not cooking. So, we have to provide, or we – we do provide, we enjoy providing a newsletter. It has things like a day in the life, what’s going on the – in our lives every week. What’s going on in the fields. What’s in the box. Storage tips. There’s been a big, big, big gap in the passing down in information of: How long will a potato last in a paper bag? How long will an onion last? You have to put a head of lettuce in a plastic bag in the refrigerator, otherwise it’s going to dehydrate. So just even storage tips, besides cooking tips, is a huge educational component of being – being a C.S.A. farmer.

How the C.S.A. works for us is that we mainly rely – we only have two part-time employees. It’s my husband and I. Another advantage of being near an urban setting is that we have a very good supply, including many Master Gardeners, of what we call worker shares. They work four hours a week to help us on the same day, the same time, to help us harvest whatever goes into those C.S.A. boxes.

And so tomorrow, a crew of 12 people will appear, and they will harvest 185 bunches of kale and 185 pounds of beets and 185 bunches of parsley and wash 185 butternut squashes, and it all gets done in four hours.

And then following day, we put everything in the cooler, and the following day I have a different crew of worker shares that come and help me put those items in the boxes, and then, in that – that afternoon, my husband and I both head out on two different routes and we deliver the boxes to people’s homes and some – and a couple of businesses where the people come and pick up their boxes of vegetables. There’s also a large portion of people that pick up at the farm because we are located close – so close to an urban area.

And then they hopefully will use the contents of the box.

And so, it has, like I said before, it has enabled a lot of small beginning farmers to be farmers, to work on smaller acreage, but it’s also a very dangerous or risky thing for a beginning farmer. So, we always recommend when we have a young farmer that’s interested in C.S.A.s to – to work at – to just do farmers’ markets for a couple of years because of the complexities of the succession planting and meeting the timing of the maturity dates. And its – and plus, the C.S.A. community of farmers really doesn’t – you don’t want the name of C.S.A. to get a bad name by someone having a bad experience. So, we try to encourage young people to sell, maybe sell to a couple restaurants or sell at a market to get growing, the growing pains in the past.

Now, the movement of C.S.A.s is undergoing a transition right now. When I said we are one of the – we are a traditional C.S.A., that is we deliver the same size box every week for consecutive weeks. Most C.S.A.s offer different sized boxes, or they offer an every other week option where people only get vegetables every other week. We feel it’s important that people receive fresh vegetables every week. And keeping track of – so, we – we settled on kind of a medium-sized share, which is good for single. Our – here’s our marketing. It’s good for single people, couples, and busy families who don’t cook every night.

So, there’s 12 C.S.A.s that serve the Milwaukee area, and everybody’s just a little bit different. Their length of the season is different. Ours is really kind of middle of the ground at 18 weeks. We don’t start until July because we’re close to the lake with the heavy soil, with the high water table. There’s C.S.A.s that serve the Milwaukee area that are southwest of Madison that are like in a different world as far as climate and – and temperature. And so, we always encourage people to find the C.S.A. that suits their needs the best, whether people want a smaller box or, really, they want to only cook one week and maybe they’ll go out the next week or maybe they really are traveling a lot and they – during the summer and they won’t be able to use a weekly box of vegetables.

The other way C.S.A.s are changing is that people that call themselves C.S.A.s, and this is not a Milwaukee phenomenon, this is a nationwide phenomenon, aren’t C.S.A.s in the true sense of it’s where you’re investing in a farmer and you’re taking the risk with the farmer, where they’re becoming more market basket type things where produce from a number of farms is being accumulated or produce from one farm with things purchased, like honey and apples and cheese and bread, is also being included. Kind of a, more of a Peapod type of delivery service. So, that is confusing the whole concept of C.S.A. in the consumers’ minds.

Also, there’s so many more options than when we started 21 years ago for people to access local foods. At least in the Milwaukee area, there’s farmers markets almost in every single suburb or neighborhood that have started. Many of the larger grocery stores are starting to carry local food. Almost, I would say there is not a single grocery store in the Milwaukee area that doesn’t carry a pretty good selection of organic produce.

Speaking of organic, we grow according to organic principles. We are not certified organic. We sell our produce directly through the C.S.A., restaurants, and our on-farm stand. If we were going to wholesale our product, we would – we would become certified organic. If – if we were going to wholesale through a grocery store, but we don’t have plans for that.

So, were – the C.S.A. movement – and so the interest in C.S.A.s, unfortunately, although there are many people that are still not familiar with the concept, the interest is waning. And it’s a very big concern. I said it’s the only time I enjoy being my age, 61, because I don’t know what’s going to be happening to the market in five years, if C.S.A.s will – will even be in existence, and I really enjoy being a C.S.A. farmer.

The Urban Ecology Center based out of Milwaukee is going to be having a meeting this year, and we’ve had. In the fall of 2016, there will be a large meeting discussing the future of C.S.A.s. One of the promising things is we see a lot more people interested in health so, and workplaces interested in health, so there’s going to be a push towards having, rather than a person having their box delivered to a neighborhood or a person’s house where we would deliver to a workplace. We already deliver to two workplaces. We deliver to the Milwaukee Public Museum and to the T.O.P.S. organization, Take Off Pounds Sensibly. And so, we deliver to the person’s workplace. And – and so, the Urban Ecology Center out of Milwaukee is making a big push to give talks to anybody. So, if anybody has a workplace that would like that type of talk, you could contact the Urban Ecology Center out of Milwaukee, and they will be willing to come and give a talk at your workplace.

And so, the C.S.A. is about 75% to 80% of our income. We farm full-time. We don’t have off-farm jobs. And so, that’s pretty unusual for farming. The other thing about C.S.A. farming is that many people that have children, their children want to continue farming. I live next door to the last dairy farm in Milwaukee County and he – the children are wonderful children, but – and one is actually going to be going into agricultural marketing, but he really didn’t want his children to be farmers. And many, many children of – there’s a succession plan for many children of C.S.A. farmers and small organic farmers to take over the farms, which is very wonderful.

Another great thing about organic farming and the C.S.A. movement is that there’s a conference in La Crosse. Its the organic – it’s M.O.S.E.S.: Midwest Organic Sustainable Educational Services. They’ve been around 25 years. It’s the largest organic conference in the country. And it is just full of young people, which is so heartening to see. And finding creative ways to find land, and just such enthusiasm.

And also, universities are starting to get involved with research and to help with farmers. When we started out, it was all farmer to farmer helping. Helping find equipment, helping with – with seed varieties, helping with pests, helping with anything. You could call – you could and still call anybody in – that – in – that I’ve met and ask them a question. There’s no competition. There’s a great sharing of knowledge. Part of it was out of necessity because there wasn’t research or help through the university for organic farming.

And I always say if you go to the conference, you move into a different city where everybody thinks alike, and then you come home and you walk into a grocery store, you walk in and you feel like you’ve landed on a different planet because you’ve just been in a different environment. And it’s a great, big community that is just very supportive and very caring.

And I don’t have.

I hopefully have covered all the concept of C.S.A.s, the general concepts.

Thank you.

[applause]