Week 17 Newsletter

As we are living in a period of great turbulence, we at Roxbury Farm need to think about how we should adapt to these changing times. What are Roxbury’s strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, and what are the threats?

Roxbury Farm’s greatest strength is to be found in our direct relationship with you, the members. The members come first as they provide the farm with financial security. We also see strength in the choice of a long-term land tenure model that frees the farm up from heavy financial obligations. This tool also provides safekeeping to the members by guaranteeing the farm’s continuation beyond me and Jody. This land tenure model includes a resale restriction on the farm house, which is tied to the 99-year lease. This will allow the farm to remain affordable to any future farmer. A future transition (which we hope will not happen for at least another thirty years) can only be to another working farmer, as opposed to a developer or hobby farmer. Last, our strength-within-a-strength is the long list of prospective members who will replace any non-renewals.

Roxbury Farm’s weaknesses are the seasonality of operating a farm in the Northeast, which makes it difficult to attract a permanent staff and allows us to use equipment only for a short period of the year (with payments and depreciation for the full twelve months). But having to work with a different crew each season can also be a strength, as new people make for new friends and they sometimes offer us fresh and exciting insights. Another weakness is our reliance on oil. Here we can observe another paradox, as the members who live far away are also our greatest strength; you allow us to operate at a critical scale. Another “weakness” of the farm is that we cannot expand it to reduce costs. The farm as a living organism is not only limited by its acreage, but also by the number of people that make for a cohesive crew.

Our opportunities include a membership that is asking us for more than just vegetables. While we have maxed out our ability to produce “in season” vegetables, we have a real opportunity to expand our lamb, beef, and turkey operations. We have reached the optimum number of butcher hogs that we can keep, because an increase would do damage to the woods instead of improving them. If we were able to build better cold storage (which also means a greater reliance on energy), we could expand the delivery season with root crops, cabbage, and winter squash. This would also allow us to provide longer-term employment for the crew.

One threat is the short-term security we have left on our packing house and barns at the South Farm. We have seven years left on our lease before we need to rebuild. The price of energy, which impacts everything from gas to wages and supplies, is also a threat to the sustainability of the farm; to what extent can we pass on all these increases to our members without pricing the share out of reach for most of you? We get the impression that many people must have stopped shopping at Whole Foods, as that company has posted substantial losses in the past few months. Are CSAs affected by a tightening economy as well? The weakening of the economy in New York state in particular adds to this issue. The pain of the collapse of Wall Street will be felt most in our state.

Another threat is the tightening regulation on food safety. If the FDA decides to treat small farmers as food processors because we sell salad greens, we will have to spend an exorbitant amount of money to comply with their standards. FDA please get it: We do not process food, nor do we have feedlots contaminating our fields, and neither do we re-use and filter our rinsing water. Food safety is, in their minds, still an equipment issue; we know it is mostly a human issue, or rather the lack of real human interaction with the product. Every time something is produced on a very large scale, mistakes are only discovered when it is already too late.
Yet another threat to the farm is the changing of weather patterns. We have already had to bear the brunt of that this year. Based on more than just this year’s experience, we don’t think that drought will be a major threat to the Northeast – rather, it is excessive rainfall.

When I add all these considerations, I realize that we have already taken some action to avert some of these threats. We bought (yes, we took out an additional mortgage) another ten acres of flat, well-drained land that is highly suitable for a new washing and packing barn. This spring we built a farm road that connects this new piece of land to our other land. Unfortunately, it borders on some of the wettest pieces, so drainage tile will need to be installed to continue this new road to our existing farm road. Drainage tile looks more and more like a necessity as this year’s wet conditions caused too many losses in the field, from lettuce to tomatoes. A new packing barn is the answer to a lot of the possible threats, but also puts Roxbury Farm in a vulnerable position, as the price tag for this project would be near $500,000. As we are making attempts to lessen our threats, we add to our weaknesses. In this economy we will be hard pressed to take on such an obligation. We need financial advice and we have started to work with Hudson Columbia Partnership in identifying possible funding and sources for low-interest financing.

If New York state is in trouble, maybe the time has come for it to reach out to its many small businesses, especially the businesses that help prepare us to deal with a world beyond cheap oil. We are proud that we have never asked for government support, but the time has come to change our mind on this one. This mess has shaken all of us up, but if we all become shell-shocked, we will never get out of it. As stretched as it might sound, now is the time for action and strong government support for the greening of New York state. We will be able to strike two birds with one stone: weaning off of our oil dependence and basing the strength of our economy on small businesses that actually produce something, as derivatives have proven to be anything but productive. ~ Jean-Paul