Understanding How Featherstone Prices Crops

If you’ve read our CSA Success Series articles, you know that the Featherstone Farm Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program aims to offer significant value for your investment by bringing you super-fresh, nutrient-dense vegetables, fruits, herbs, and greens. We also aim to bring you extra value through your relationship with the farm, which encompasses everything from our newsletters to on-farm events.

As part of this direct producer-consumer relationship, we strive to be as transparent as possible about how your food gets from our soil in southeastern Minnesota’s bluff country to your plate. And that transparency includes how we price each item in your box.

In a typical CSA, you pay a flat fee and get a “share” of the harvest that might be larger or significantly smaller from year to year, depending on the overall success of the season.

But the Featherstone Farm CSA has always attached a price to the items that go into your box. Even though you’ve already paid for the items through your membership, this practice enables us to ensure that members are really getting a good value.

How We Set Individual Crop Prices

You can find the individual crop prices on the See what’s in my box page in CSAware, the third-party software we use to manage your account.

Currently, these prices are set to be comparable to what you might pay at a food co-op or Whole Foods Market.

When a crop is priced higher than you might expect to pay at a co-op, you’ll find a brief note explaining why. For example, organic green beans are seldom available in stores, period. When they do show up, they are most often machine-picked and bagged at a processing plant (read: cheap!). At Featherstone Farm, we pick all beans by hand, and bag them up just before packing in your box. Fresher green beans means better taste and nutrition…but there is no way to do this at the same price point as California green beans. Therefore, they will be more expensive, and we’ll explain why.

Sometimes, you’ll find that we have discounted a crop below what you might expect to pay at the store. This almost always happens at the peak of the item’s season, when we have an abundant harvest. For example, when red bell peppers peak in early September, we may discount them by 10-30%, depending on the crop size. We’ll notify you of these discounted items in your box customization email.

Our long-term goal is to make all our vegetable prices reflect the actual costs of production at Featherstone Farm, rather than market prices at high-end retailers. We’re a four-season farm located in the “wet” Midwest; the costs of producing organic vegetables locally aren’t the same as industrial-scale horticultural operations located in the desert southwest.

As we discussed earlier in our CSA Success Series, even though you may pay more for local crops than for crops shipped in from California, you’re still getting a good value when you consider the improved taste, freshness, nutrition, and environmental impact of locally grown foods.