Author: Amy

Thank you so much to everybody who joined us for our first ever Winter CSA! We think it was a huge success and I hope you agree with us! Our greens did great in our greenhouses and caterpillar tunnels and we were able to continue harvesting some of the heartier vegetables like carrots and radishes.

We decided to do a Winter CSA this year mainly because of the pandemic. We usually finish our CSA season at the end of October but continue to sell vegetables to restaurants until the end of the year. However, most restaurants are struggling so much right now that we knew we couldn’t count on that income for the farm. I also decided that I was not comfortable having our (crowded!) pumpkin patch this year so the farm lost that income as well. A Winter CSA was the obvious choice for us to distribute all the late-season produce in our fields and also replace some of the lost income for the farm. We are so happy we made this choice and look forward to having a Winter CSA in future years!

One of the big challenges of having a vegetable farm in Colorado is that we do not have year-round work for our farm crew. That means we start with a (mostly) new crew every season. Imaging training a whole new work force every year! The Winter CSA extended our work season by about 6 weeks which means that Kai (CSA manager) and Jenny (harvest manager) had a little more work and won’t have as much time off before full-time work starts again in mid-March. That means we have a better chance of keeping these awesome people for a few years!

The pandemic has been so hard on all of us. But one positive is that has forced a lot of us to try things outside our comfort zones. And thus the birth of our Winter CSA!

Wyatt and I hope you all have a safe winter and that we’ll see you again with some fresh veggies in May!

Amy

You will get a little something extra when you pick up your CSA share this week – aphids! We are growing some gorgeous lettuce in our greenhouses right now. The heads are tucked under a toasty blanket of row cover. Unfortunately aphids like to be kept warm and toasty, too. Of course we don’t spray any pesticides on the lettuce, which means the aphids get to go home with you.

The good news is that it’s relatively easy to get rid of the aphids at home. You just have to soak the lettuce to wash the aphids away. Start by soaking the lettuce in a salad spinner–or a large bowl. (Wyatt says it’s mandatory to have a salad spinner as a CSA member!) Fill the bowl all the way to the top with cold water and swish the lettuce around a bit. This will make the aphids float to the top of the bowl where you can just skim them off with your hand. If there are a lot of aphids you may have to change the water a few times. I like to spin the lettuce each time I change the water to help fling the aphids off the leaves. If the aphids are really bad, it might take me four rinses to get rid of all the aphids but I’m usually successful in removing all of them.

It’s a little extra work to deal with the aphids. But I think it’s worth it to get such beautiful local greens in December!

It has been 11 years since Red Wagon Farm and Tuv Ha’Aretz formed a partnership thanks to Rabbi Marc, Lisa Bates, and Sandy Cohn. Thank you so much to all of you who have been members in that time! In the first few years of our partnership, Tuv Ha’Aretz members did things like volunteer at our CSA pickups and there was a Tuv Ha’Aretz newsletter that was sent out frequently. There was also a large Tuv Ha’Aretz Core Committee that met monthly. We’re down to 5 members on the Core Committee (me, Beth Ornstein, Becca Gan Levy, Jerry Pinsker, and Monica LaBush) and we only meet 3-4 times each year. There aren’t many official organized activities for Tuv Ha’Aretz members anymore and it might be difficult for people to see tangible benefits of being a Tuv Ha’Aretz member. But the partnership still has tremendous value to me, Wyatt, and Red Wagon Farm!

For starters, 2 of our 4 CSA pickups are at Nevei Kodesh and the Boulder JCC and we are very grateful for the ability to use these spaces. The JCC in particular has been incredibly supportive of our farm and CSA. Jonathan Lev and Cynthia Weinger knew our CSA pickups would be a challenge this year and they offered to host a second pickup day at the JCC if it would help us. Last fall Becca Gan Levy let us have our last pickup of the year in the barn at the JCC to help us get out of the snow!

We have been invited to many events over the years at the JCC, Bonai Shalom, Nevei Kodesh, and Har Hashem to get to know Tuv Ha’Aretz members and build a connection. Among other things, we’ve been to multiple Seders to celebrate Passover and Sukkot and we’ve been invited to participate in the Jewish Food Fest at the JCC. We’ve also hosted Sukkot events for Mazel Tot at our farm.

Each week we have CSA members who miss their pickups and we donate the veggies from these missed shares. For many years, Bob and Ru Wing helped to get these veggies to community members in need. This year we have partnered with Jewish Family Service to fill this role. They send volunteers to our farm each Friday to pickup and distribute these missed shares to community members. There has been an extra need for fresh vegetables during the pandemic and I know the recipients of these vegetables have been especially grateful.

This spring we needed help recruiting new CSA members and Rabbi Marc Soloway wrote a lovely piece that was included in the Boulder Jewish News. The JCC also helped us promote our CSA.

The most important part of the partnership between Red Wagon and Tuv Ha’Aretz has been the connection. We value each and every one of our CSA members, but for the most part we have individual connections with CSA members. Our connection with Tuv Ha’Aretz members is different. It is really valuable for Red Wagon to have the support of a whole community who shares values–even if it is just moral support sometimes! I also know I can reach out to the Tuv Ha’Aretz community if our farm needs anything. There’s also been a personal connection between me and Wyatt and so many of our Tuv Ha’Aretz members and we’ve come to know many of you as friends. I am reminded of this on the weeks that I work at all of our CSA pickups like this last week of our CSA season. I know a lot of people at each of our pickup locations and talk to many people, but I can help Kai out as part of the CSA team. However, Kai knows I’m pretty worthless on Thursdays as a part of our team and that she shouldn’t count on me for much help because I know so many of our Tuv Ha’Aretz members. I don’t get to see you very often so I value having a few minutes to catch up with each of you. Remember that when you see me standing around talking this Thursday!

With warmth and friendship,
Amy

We made it to the end of our CSA season! I almost can’t believe it. In early May I was having panic attacks (just ask Wyatt!) about coming up with a way to have a safe season for our farm crew and our CSA members. And here we are finally at the end of October. Every year it feels like a big accomplishment to make it to the end of our CSA season knowing that we’ve been able to feed our CSA members all season. But this year it feels like an especially big accomplishment!

Thank you so much to all of our CSA members for your support! We really could not do it without you. You are the whole reason we are able to have a farm and grow food for our community. This is especially true this year. The world was so turned upside down in March and Wyatt and I didn’t even know if we’d be able to have a farm season with the whole country getting shut down. By the end of March we knew we’d be allowed to operate our farm, but we didn’t know if we could make it financially. (We knew we would lose a large amount of the farm’s income that we usually get from restaurant sales.) I asked all of you to help spread the word about our CSA to your friends and family. Did you ever come through!! We increased our CSA membership by almost 70% this year! We never would have been able to do that without your help. And I don’t think we would have been able to make it through the season financially without growing our CSA membership.

You’ve also contributed over $8,500 to additional funds we have set up at Red Wagon:

Farm Worker Support $5,423 (contribute money to go into our farm crew’s paychecks)
Sharing the Harvest $1,932 (help provide reduced-rate CSA shares to community members in need)
Red Wagon Supporter $1,173 (extra money for farm equipment)

We had a lot of small losses with our CSA this year. We weren’t able to invite you out to our farm for any tours. And we weren’t able to have our end-of-season CSA party at the farm. Most of all we missed being able to talk to you at our pickups!

The cold weather coming this weekend is a good reminder of why our CSA season ends in October. I know we will see some of you for a few more weeks for our Winter CSA. For the rest of you, I hope we will see you in May! Hopefully life will be a little easier by then.

With gratitude,
Amy

We are excited to announce our first ever Winter CSA! Click here to join.

Details:

• Pickups will be at Red Wagon Farm at 7694 N 63rd St, Niwot on Thursdays from 3-6 pm.
• There will be a total of 7 weeks of pickups from 10/29 to 12/10. (The pick up will be on Tues 11/24 the week of Thanksgiving.)
• Our Winter CSA share will include veggies & fruit for a total of $48.50 per week.
• We are offering weekly and biweekly shares. (see biweekly schedule below)

Here are the possible crops we will have (depending on weather):

• Greens: kale, chard, collards, arugula, spinach, bok choi, lettuce
• Roots: carrots, beets, rutabagas, turnips, potatoes, winter radishes
• Cabbage
• Winter squash
• Onions, garlic
• Herbs: parsley, sorrel
• Fruit: apples, pears

Pickup dates:
Biweekly    Date
A                 10/29/20
B                 11/5/20
A                 11/12/20
B                 11/19/20
A                 11/24/20 (Tuesday pickup)
B                 12/3/20
A                 12/10/20

Click here to join now!
Email csa@redwagonfarmboulder.com with questions.

Here’s another small loss due to COVID. We will not have a pumpkin patch at Red Wagon Farm in 2020.

Everything at a farm requires a lot of planning. We have to plant pumpkin seeds around June 1st. Remember what everything looked like on June 1st?? The whole world felt upside down. We did not know how long social distancing would be in place and it seemed like a good chance that we would be looking at another Stay-at-Home order in the fall. Wyatt and I decided it was too risky to put the investment (both time investment and financial investment) into growing pumpkins for a pumpkin patch that we might not get to open 4 months in the future.

I still think that was a good decision for us. There are currently a rising number of COVID cases in Boulder County. It has been a tremendous amount of pressure for me to try to keep our farm and CSA pickups as safe as possible this year and it’s taken a toll on me. It feels like a lot more pressure to try to keep our farm safe for hundreds of families visiting our pumpkin patch. I realize that a pumpkin patch is an outdoor activity and relatively low-risk, but I’m just not up to the challenge.

October 2021 is a very long way away. Hopefully we will be in a much better place in terms of dealing with the pandemic then and will be able to welcome you back to our farm and pumpkin patch then. Thank you for your understanding!

Amy

Wow it’s been a roller coaster ride! A week ago there was a winter storm warning and we thought it was going to get down to 25 degrees with 5-8 inches of snow. There was a good chance that this would kill everything on the farm except for root crops. Crops like and kale can generally handle freezing temperatures, but they have to have some cool weather to adjust from going to summer to fall. We were looking at going from 99 degrees on Sunday to 25 degrees on Tuesday which is way too much for plants to handle.

Fortunately it only got down to 30 degrees on the farm on Tuesday night. We did get a few inches of snow, but I think the ground temperature was warm enough that it protected the plants and melted the snow within a few hours. Our cucumber plants died (they weren’t producing anymore anyway), but everything else seems to have made it. The kale plants and beet greens got a little smooshed, but they will recover.

I always say that if Wyatt and I farm enough that we will have a year with catastrophic loss. I’m glad this wasn’t the year! The weather forecast is calling for beautiful weather the next few weeks so we can expect to have an abundant harvest of fall crops as usual.

In a word–yes! Have you seen the news about the salmonella outbreak in onions from California? This is the problem with our food system. You have contaminated onions from one farm go to a huge processing facility. The contamination spreads to everything in that facility and then the contaminated onions get shipped all across the country and we have a national outbreak. (As if we needed another huge outbreak!)

You completely avoid this when you buy your food directly from your local farm. Our onions go straight from our fields to you. Nobody handles the onions other than the Red Wagon farm crew.

That’s not to say it’s impossible to have food from a local farm that’s contaminated. But the fewer hands that touch your veggies, the better. It’s also best to avoid having your food go through a huge processing facility. When you buy directly from your local farm you know you are safe from any national food outbreaks that you read about in the news!

Recently, a longtime CSA member asked me about the price of our CSA shares. The short story is that our prices are directly tied to farm worker pay. Labor is by far the biggest expense at Red Wagon. Vegetable farming is incredibly labor-intensive, and it is hard to charge enough for vegetables to provide decent pay for farm workers. (This is why there is so much farm worker exploitation in our country.)

The biggest threat to the existence of Red Wagon Farm is the ability for us to find a good farm crew. Every year we struggle to find enough capable people to work on the farm. We are especially shorthanded right now because of coronavirus—not because of illness, but because of the peculiar life circumstances we all find ourselves in these days (maybe more on this in a future blog post??)

The most obvious difficulty in finding a farm crew is that being a farm worker is hard. You work long, hard hours that start early in the morning. We’ve worked in temperatures from 10 degrees to 102 degrees in hot sun, freezing rain, snow, windstorms—you name it! Less obvious is that it takes a ton of training to become a good farm worker at Red Wagon. You have to learn how to grow and harvest over 100 crops on our farm. And there are a lot of unpleasant tasks like thinning beets on your hands and knees for hours. Or washing a huge pile of coolers with a pressure washer. Or fighting off mosquitoes while you’re trying to harvest peppers. You have to be really passionate about farming to make it through these challenges.

Being a farm worker is hard financially, but not just because of low hourly pay. Our main farm crew works from mid-April through mid-November. That’s only 7 months, which means that you have to find a way to earn money the other 5 months of the year if you want to return the following season. That often means working at a job that you don’t particularly like. People suggest we hire students, but they have to leave in August to go back to school. That is our busiest time of year and we can’t hire and train new people then. The lack of year-round work is a huge problem for keeping workers on a vegetable farm.

How does this tie into CSA prices? Our regular veggie shares have gone up 29% from 2016 to 2020. The biggest reason for this is the increase in the Colorado minimum wage during this time due to Amendment 70. In 2016, minimum wage was $8.31/hour and now in 2020, it is $12.00/hour. That’s an increase of 44%. Amendment 70 also mandates future minimum wage increases that are tied to increases in the cost of living in Colorado. While it’s great that minimum wage has increased, the result is higher prices. So, you can expect to see future increases in the price of your CSA shares.

Red Wagon has always paid more than minimum wage, but an increase in the minimum means an increase in the entire pay scale so our pay rates have increased, too. Right now, new farm crew members are starting here at $13.50 per hour. If you were working full-time and year-round, that comes out to $27,540 per year. Think about trying to live on that in Boulder County for a minute. Then add in the fact that you only have 7 months of work per year on the farm. Most people can only make this work financially for a year or two at the most.

The starting pay of $13.50 per hour at Red Wagon is better than I know of at other farms. There are a lot of issues related to pay and farm worker exploitation on large-scale farms. That’s a story for a different time and place. But many small, organic farms also exploit their farm workers. The farm calls the workers “interns” and provides often primitive housing and a small monthly stipend, which actually isn’t legal under labor laws. The result is people working for less than minimum wage on small farms. I don’t know how you could do this in good conscience, especially given how hard the job is.

We have struggled with ways to pay our farm crew enough that people can have a decent life and work at Red Wagon for a number of years, but we are far from having an answer. In 2015 we started our Farm Worker Support Fund. Last year we collected $3,600 from CSA members and were able to distribute a few hundred dollars each to the farm crew at the end of the season, which is very helpful and appreciated when the work stops at the end of the season!

We try hard to pay Red Wagon farm workers as much as possible. I constantly struggle with ways to improve pay and I hope we can continue to increase wages in years to come. This means having the financial support of CSA members like you!

What a crazy start to the season it’s been! In early March when the pandemic started to heat up Wyatt and I didn’t even know if we’d have a farm this year. Would we be required to close down? It was time to do our first big spring planting, so we decided to put a lot of seeds in the ground and hope for the best!

On March 23rd, our governor declared that farms were essential businesses so we knew we had the choice to stay open. But what about the health risks? I did a lot of online research and decided that our workplace risk was relatively low since we are working outside and can reasonably maintain safe distances from each other. But restaurants had already been ordered to close and we sell a lot of produce to restaurants. Would we have enough income to operate with the loss of restaurant sales?

In a normal year we have about 400 CSA members. As of March 30th, we only had 320 members and we didn’t think this would be enough to keep us operating. So I put out the call to existing CSA members to help us spread the word. You sure came through! By April 23rd we had 600 members and Wyatt said he didn’t have enough crops planted to feed any more people, so we closed the CSA to new memberships and went to a waiting list. (We have 175 people on the waiting list! This says so many things about people and food these days!)

In the middle of all this, the temperature got down to 14 degrees on April 14th. Remember the night the buds on all of your trees died? So did a bunch of our sugar snap pea plants. All the things we plant in March (spinach, arugula, radishes, turnips, peas) can handle cold and snow. (Otherwise we wouldn’t plant them in March.) But 14 degrees is a bit much and a lot of our crops suffered some damage. And then it was cold and muddy for a handful of days so we couldn’t get out to plant anything else until it dried out a bit.

Your CSA shares are lighter this week than we usually try for. But I feel like we have accomplished a lot by having any food at all given the past two months. Wyatt, Javier, and the rest of the crew have been working so hard to plant and grow and harvest…and plant and grow and harvest…and…  There are so many seedlings in the ground here right now. We can’t wait to start harvesting them for you in a few weeks.

Thank you all so much for joining us for whatever unknowns this season brings. We’re grateful that we are able to look forward to feeding you in these uncertain times!

Amy

After I published this blog post I decided to go back and add this bit. I hate attention and prefer to remain incognito. But with so many new members I realized that I really do need to introduce myself (sigh). My husband, Wyatt, and I are the owners of Red Wagon Farm and we’ve been growing organic vegetables for our Boulder County community since 2004. Thanks for joining us!