Farmer John’s New Year Post

Written by

Shani Crider

in

2018 will be a year we’re grateful to put behind us. We’re incredibly lucky to still be here after some of the most difficult challenges presented this season. It started with the wettest May on record, when we saw the most abundant portion of our spring season washed away by over two feet of rain that fell in the last 14 days of the month (May is historically one of the driest months and correlates to our largest harvest interval). We then had to adapt to the challenge of our harvest crew from Puebla, Mexico being delayed nearly a month due to our paperwork being held up by extremely slow processing times (60 days) in departments of the Federal Government (luckily we had some angels/volunteers help us plant our strawberry 2019 crop in October 2018). This 26 day delay caused us to miss most our vegetable plantings and the sweet spot of the fall season. We then had the wettest El Niño fall on record, which dumped multiple feet of rain at our farm since the October planting season began. This rain washed out thousands of dollars of seeds and wasted even more time necessary to plant and cultivate the crops that will never have the chance to be harvested.

To survive in a country that places small and medium-scale farmers last after economic priorities and ignores the concrete data of climate change, we’re adapting our business to unite other growers with our values of creating clean food free of contaminants. In 2019 we’re going to do what the grocery stores and the USDA can’t: bring you local, organic food right to your door. Free of adulteration, counterfeit, and contamination, we will ensure that the products we supply you are fit for our kitchen and children to eat. This year we will continue to grow amazing produce at Frog Song and will accompany our products with a larger selection from our friends’ farms so you can feed your families and customers food made with clean, local, organic produce. Our reasoning is that by spreading out production and sourcing over a slightly larger geographic area, we can mitigate the effects of severe weather on any one producer and continue to improve our local food system.

Thank you all for supporting us since 2011 and we hope for a healthy and prosperous 2019 for you, your friends, families, and all organic farmers.

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