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.