2024 CSA End Of Season Report
Overview
2024 was the second year of Featherstone Farm’s strategic “pivot to CSA” and, as with many things in agriculture, many things went well and others… not so well. On the whole I think FF succeeded in many of its 2024 CSA objectives. But our aspirations- and some of the commitments I made around this time last year- proved a bit lofty (for a single, super wet season, anyway!). As a high level summary, here are some of my top line assessments:
1. Crop availability and quality for summer CSA boxes was shaky at first, given the wet, wet spring and early summer, but improved markedly over time. I believe that summer and winter boxes provided very strong crops for members in 2024, all things considered.
2. Changes in crop allocation strategy- the so called “bell curve” in CSAware- were largely successful in delivering better value to members, but resulted in some mid-season boxes seeming fuller than ever (too full?!)
3. New CSA initiatives like the Box User Guide (BUG) videos and member onboarding materials started slow but gained momentum over time. FF laid strong foundations here for success in 2025!
4. Interim CSA administrator Karin Wollan brought a ton of enthusiasm and fresh perspective to the role (thanks Karin!!). But the limited 3.5 day/ week schedule that she needed to take the job proved insufficient to handle all the challenges of full season.
5. I made quite a few promises in the spring of 2024 and delivered on only some of these; reusable hard plastic boxes, “salad bowl ready” salad mix, “spinach in every winter box” were among the important shortfalls… for 2024, anyway (more to come in 2025!)
6. Apples from Hoch Orchard came as something of a surprise and were somewhat underwhelming as a result. But we gained a great deal of experience working at the orchard and will be back much stronger than ever in 2025.
7. On farm events were a story of feast or famine in 2024: the cancellation of the June Strawberry Social for the first time ever (fields simply under water). But we hosted a wonderful Fall Harvest celebration on the September equinox… the first in a decade at FF.
Taken as a whole, I would rate 2024 as a flat C growing season at Featherstone Farm. But thanks to great efforts by all FF team members I believe we insulated the CSA program from the worst of the wet spring crop losses, and delivered a B/B+ CSA experience overall. This leaves lots of room for improvement in 2025 and- with lessons learned and a great new program Coordinator starting in March- I am more confident than ever that we will deliver on commitments for 2025… year 3 of our strategic pivot to CSA.
2024 Crop Production and Box Allocation (details on #s 1-2 above)
The spring and early summer of 2024 were among the wettest I can remember in 30 years of growing vegetables in Minnesota. And, since chronic moisture is about the greatest enemy of quality vegetable production I can think of (just two exceptions: hail storms and locusts!), this meant real hardship for FF and its customers.
However, I cannot say enough about the truly heroic efforts that Abby and her team in field production mounted, to adjust to such terrible conditions: to do a full week’s worth of catch up field work in a 36 hour period when it finally dried out one Saturday evening in late April. Then again on a Sunday morning in May. And again in some other odd window as late as the middle of July. Remember the pictures of strawberry fields in June, with many inches of standing water in them? Dang.
This is climate change adaptation at it’s very best, folks; we all owe a debt of gratitude to Abby and Antonio, Jose and Lupe and the entire FP team, that they were able to get so much planted under the circumstances! [There were casualties, however: we brought in a full pallet’s worth of asparagus crowns in May- enough to plant 2 full acres- and then composted them in July: there was simply never a time that it was dry enough to plant asparagus, when we weren’t overwhelmed with annual vegetable catchup. It was wet in the spring of 2024 DANG!].
Given the difficult start to the season, of course there were instances of damaged or unhealthy crops in CSA boxes, well through the end of July. But I’d like to recall some of the huge successes we mounted in the summer of 2025 as well:
1. Green beans(!!) This was perhaps the biggest single commitment that we made to members in 2024, and we delivered on it strongly. There were way more beans available in share boxes than ever before. And Nathan and his harvesters picked them at peak quality (another huge challenge when it’s too wet). Yahoo!
2. Full volumes of tomatoes and sweet corn, melons and bell peppers… warm season crops that we grow for wholesale markets as well as CSA. Here we delivered on something we have committed to over and over again: whenever harvests are short (adverse weather or any other reason), we will always allocate crops to CSA members first, and sell whatever is left over to stores. Nathan did this big time in 2024.
3. New and experimental crops like celery, tomatillos, paste tomatoes and savoy cabbage. Here we are delivering on commitments to expand the range of crops offered for CSA shares. While fresh ginger in the high tunnels did not work out (epidemic disease), we are looking at garlic, sweet potatoes and other new crops for the future.
In the spring of 2024 I charged Karin and Nathan with implementing a new way of calculating CSA box values. The default system in CSAware is for every box all year to have the same value. Yes, most people likely eat more or less the same volume of produce each week all season, I get it. But this system ignores the real life “bell curve of crop availability” over the course of a Midwestern growing season, and led to some crazy crop lists for boxes in the past (examples: 3 or more bunches of greens in a June box, to get to $x overall box value, or tiny bags of tomatoes in an August box, so that value would not exceed $x).
In 2024 we changed this, overriding default CSAware box values in the system, and replacing with values that more adequately reflect reality. So, a late June box might be worth $32 while an early September box might be close to $50. This has the effect of giving members more of the full bounty of the local season (at the risk of overload when everything is on late summer) and, more importantly, decreasing waste in the spring and fall (how many turnips can a person really eat in early July or late October when they are easy to produce and the CSAware algorithm is very happy to allocate them to fill a box (over)valued at $x?!?).
On the whole I believe this new “bell curve pricing” system was a big success in 2024. But we learned important lessons as well, about sending too much produce even when the bounty is rich. Hence our decision not to raise prices in 2025, even with lots more apples coming on line.
2024 CSA Initiatives and Communications (details on #s 3-5 above)
Karin arrived at FF in the spring of 2024 with a ton of energy and enthusiasm, and she and I jumped into a series of new projects and initiatives full force, all at once. Included in these were
1. A set of CSA “new member onboarding” materials, videos and emails, focused on the idea of preparing members to best utilize the vegetables they receive in boxes
2. A new ~monthly newsletter to the entire FF community, to supplement the weekly “build your box” newsletters that members already receive through CSAware
3. Outreach to new potential dropsites and dropsite hosts, to expand the range of FF’s CSA deliveries to parts of Rochester and the TC metro that we had not previously served
4. New collaborations with CSA members and food writers, to provide content (not just recipes, but also big picture perspective on local/ seasonal eating in general) for CSA newsletters
5. New and improved information about crops available in a given week, in the “crop comment” section of the CSAware “build your box” email on Fridays
6. The new ”bell curve” value tracking system described above.
It was a LOT to take on all at once. In retrospect, too much. I do think that Karin did a great job under the circumstances, and that we provided lots of new and useful content to members as a result. But trying so many new things at once also produced a good deal of confusion for some long time members; for this I apologize! We learned so much in this process, however, I do believe will serve us all very well in 2025 and beyond; Nicole will take these initiatives to the next level already this spring!
On the subject of returnable plastic containers (RPCs), “salad bowl ready” salad mix and other commitments I made in the spring of 2024: we saw more shortfalls than successes in 2024, but many of these things are still in the works for 2025.
In April we applied for and were awarded (June) a major USDA grant for buildings, infrastructure and equipment at FF. Included in this list were facilities and equipment to wash, dry and pack salad mix, according to high food safety standards. A state-of-the-art humidity and air quality control system, to allow us to store carrots longer and with higher quality than ever before. And an entire semi trailer load of RPCs for CSA deliveries, along with a machine to sanitize them before re-using. The final approval date was estimated late August / early September… well in time to put into effect for the start of winter CSA.
Then delays at USDA. More bureaucratic delays. And more delays. We finally got a contract in place at the very end of November… way too late to put any of this into effect as promised. DANG!!! Some of this work is now underway for the spring of 2025… but not all of it. Nicole will share more details in spring newsletters, as our plans develop (recover!).
But it was not just bureaucracy that stood in the way of FF delivering on commitments; there were also basic learning curve type things. The immense challenge of downy mildew in high tunnel spinach, for example. I simply underestimated the seriousness of this foliar disease when I crowed about ”spinach in every winter box” last spring. Yes, we put up a third 7200 sq ft high tunnel in 2024… enough to plant more than enough spinach for 600 shares every week all winter. But when we lose ~60% of such a crop to foliar disease, well, another mea culpa from the GM!
We will try not to overpromise on such things in the future, to say the least.
The Hoch Orchard Transition in 2024 (details on #6 above)
The Hoch’s are in a phased retirement plan as of this writing
Did not prune, spray, thin blossoms, manage trees at all spring of 2024: FF inherited a minor mess fall 2024. Made the most of it, picking salvage crop. But mixed results. Situation will be completely different 2025, however.
Other CSA Related Developments in 2024
Fair Food Certification
New delivery trucks (WAY lass down time / delays in CSA deliveries)
Third big (7200sq ft) gutter connected high tunnel constructed (2 nd in as many years) Will be HUGE for spring and winter shares in the future.