We don’t get asked this very often, but it does come up from time to time and I’d like to explain to those who haven’t asked, why.
I’m posting some of the text that I recently included to a member who asked this question.
I do not believe we will return to weekly deliveries. When we do weekly deliveries, the orders are significantly less but the costs remain the same. Also, many fewer people order because they are still working on the product from their last delivery. From a costs perspective, it increases the per delivery costs by a significant amount. Additionally, it takes us ~9 days to execute one delivery. We already begun harvesting for the upcoming delivery–mostly things that have a long shelf life: onions, winter squash, etc… We also do farming outside of fresh food. For example animal farming, grain and hay for our animals, etc. The farm itself requires upkeep, too. So these are some of the activities we fit in on non-delivery weeks. Yesterday we processed 166 chickens. If it were a delivery week, we would not have been able to do that. Each of us already work over 60 hours a week–April and I more.
Over the past 14 years, we’ve explored all kind of machinations of the CSA model–we had 11 employees in 2016. It unfortunately didn’t make us profitable. So we’ve settled here.
Something worth thinking about…. If you find stuff going bad w/in two weeks, we may be able to help you with storage techniques. Us and the guys consistently eat things from the cooler that went out in a delivery two weeks ago. Also, I recently had to replace one of our household refrigerators. I was surprised by how small most models were. I was thinking…..Wow, if members had similar sized refrigerators, I can see why it would be a struggle to store stuff for two weeks. We have two massive refrigerators in our house as well as the largest chest freezer money can buy.
