Thank you to all of our wonderful CSA members and market customers who supported us through another year of farming in Minnesota! Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday and seems to be a favorite among many farmers we know. Finally, finally our outdoor work has slowed and we have put the outside work of growing food to a close for a few months. Our own stash of winter storage veggies have just been moved into our basement and root cellar today, and Adam is fixing up the snowblower attachment for our tractor in case the impending snowstorm blows our way. The knots in our back are slowly working themselves out, and we have time to cook some of the fall storage produce and enjoy it with our family and friends. Thanksgiving is also the first weekday holiday that we farmers have gotten off since March! 
It’s a great feeling of satisfaction to finish up another year of business and then eat the fruits of your labor.
In addition to thankfulness for our customers, we also have a lot of gratitude for the folks at Harvest for the Hungry, a program of the Emergency Foodshelf Network. In early November, Adam and I gleaned the rest of our fields and ended up delivering over 1,000 pounds of the fresh stuff to Emergency Foodshelf Network’s Harvest for the Hungry program. Thanks to donations from our CSA members and friends, Emergency Foodshelf Network was able to match those donations and purchase our extra produce from us at $1 per pound wholesale prices. It’s a pretty good deal for them to buy lots of great organic produce for a dollar per pound and it also really helps all us small, local farmers that sometimes find it hard to make ends meet. It goes without saying that we would love love love to be able to do big donations of produce for free, but honestly, the profit margins of small-scale farming are very, very slim and it is an extremely labor-intensive business. So, with this in mind, it is a really wonderful service that Harvest for the Hungry is able to purchase produce from us at modest prices and we can feel good about our produce going to hungry folks that may not have much access to fresh stuff otherwise. Harvest for Hungry has already distributed over 60,000 pounds of produce from local, organic farms in 2010 and they’re hoping to break that record in 2011! The work they do at Emergency Foodshelf Network is just phenomenal.We plan to be a part of that. Hope you can help us get there too. Thank you, thank you!
Have a wonderful, safe Thanksgiving! 2011 veggies are not too far away…the greenhouse will be turned on in a mere 3 months.
