My Farm Was Devastated by a Superstorm Last Evening
Well, not quite “my farm,” but the farm I support through my CSA membership.
A part of our CSA Share from fall, 2009
I recieved an email from the farmers this morning, letting our group know that a strong hail storm ripped through western Maryland and southern Pennsylvania last evening, dropping hail the size of baseballs on the tender young crops growing at our CSA. I saw the storm warnings on the nightly news, but didn’t think much of it since they said it would miss DC. It ended up impacting many of us in DC regardless.
I’ve been a member of the CSA since 2009, and this is our 11th season (the seasons are broken up into 6-8 week periods). Some have been better than others, but this is the first time I truly understand the CSA model – it protects against events such as this that are no fault of the farmers. With a global food system, the 30-or so of us that are signed up for the CSA would have barely noticed the effects of drought or storm on the availability of produce. But this model connected us to local and regional growing conditions, for better or worse! As the email stated:
This is what is meant by the CSA being a partnership with the farmer. We are all affected by Mother Nature. She can be loving and harsh! The farm workers are quite shaken by the magnitude of the storm and its damage. Their hard work destroyed in an instant.
This morning I’m thinking of my experience with the CSA much like my experience with the stock market. My strategy has been to invest regularly, and in quality investments. Some years are up, some years are down. It’s easy to forget the down times when you have 11 successful quarters of positive returns (or 11 successful seasons of harvest), but I’m OK with my support of the CSA hedging against catastrophes such as this.
“We are all affected by Mother Nature.” Well said.
Great Post! I’m ashamed to admit- when I started reading the email, my first thought was “Oh… gosh…. wait… are they gonna refund us money?”… and then I got to the line that you quoted about the CSA being a partnership with the farmers -and I realized I needed to shift my mindset immediately.
In today’s “me” society, one that is pretty disconnected from the source of its food – it was so simple to think “what’s in this for me?”. I’m really glad that Esther from the CSA reminded us of this partnership and I’m really grateful for the lesson this will teach me. I now feel challenged to try to keep it in mind in other aspects of my consumer affairs, and I’m grateful for that!
#agchat #urbanag My Farm Was Devastated by a Superstorm Last Evening http://bit.ly/mOIxMQ /by @GrownInTheCity
Poor farmers…. the first thing I thought of…..
[...] approach, encouraging hyper-local, backyard farming for self-sufficiency. Others advocate for the Community Supported Agriculture model, which begins to use economies of scale to spread the risk and reward involved in local production [...]