(Letter to Our Members: June 23, 2024)
It is with a heavy heart that I write to let you know that we must cancel the CSA for the rest of this year. As you are all undoubtedly aware, we have been experiencing storm after storm these past couple of months, causing the soil to be completely saturated and the rivers to rise. We had hoped that we might be able to escape flooding ourselves, but we woke up Saturday morning to find our production field under water and watched as more water came in throughout the rest of the day and evening. It crested at around five or six feet, completely submerging every crop we grow. Everything is still under water, and we don’t know when the flood waters will recede.
We have spent the past 24 hours researching what to do when a flood like this happens. There is still a chance that the plants themselves will survive, but the odds are diminished the longer the water stays, especially this time of year when the plants are actively growing and respiring. They can only hang on for so long without oxygen. Even if they do survive, the risk of contamination by bacteria, heavy metals, and chemicals from upstream are too great to let anyone safely eat anything out of the field this year. These things tend to adhere to plant leaves and it is very difficult, if not impossible, to adequately wash them off, and we don’t want to get anyone sick. It is too late in the season to replant, and even if we could, it might not be the best idea as pathogens tend to stick around in the soil for a while. Instead, we must wait for winter to come and go as the freezing temperatures will take care of most of those issues for us.
This is a big blow for us as we said that if we ever experienced another flood of this sort, we would have to rethink farming. Thus, there is a good chance that this will be our last year running the CSA. While we are not making any important decisions just yet – it will take some time to process our grief and it is incredibly difficult for me to even consider giving up farming altogether – we would be foolish not to see the writing on the wall. Out of the past five years, two growing seasons have been in serious drought and two have seen catastrophic flooding of the kind we just had. Prior to this, we’ve had at least four other minor floods and a couple of near misses. While this land had been farmed successfully for decades prior to our coming here, things have changed. Too much time, energy, and love go into farming to risk it all on the off chance that we’ll end up with a good year. It is too emotionally painful to watch all our hard work destroyed in a matter of hours, and we simply cannot put ourselves through this time and time again.
We feel a profound sense of loss for several reasons, the first of which is that this decision means a possible loss of identity for me as well as a loss of a way of life for our family. Second, we have so enjoyed getting to know you and your families and growing food for you. It has given us both a sense of purpose and much joy in doing so. We have been cheered on by you, supported by you, and it’s hard to imagine not getting your emails and texts letting us know that you ate the best (insert vegetable here) you’d ever had or that your children were learning about new ways of eating and taking great pleasure in their meals. We loved the community that we were building, and it’s a hard pill to swallow knowing that we only had two years of that before we had to end it prematurely. We are so grateful for the folks who took a chance on us the first two years and we are so saddened that our new members won’t have the opportunity to experience a full season of CSA and become more deeply part of that community now.
We encourage you to try and find another CSA or visit the farmers’ market for your veggies going forward and to continue to make use of our website for information on how to store and cook with them. Small farmers need support now more than ever as we are all struggling in the face of climate change – let’s face it, that’s what much of this is coming down to – and too many are having to close up shop. We ourselves have done our very best to be sustainable and help heal our little piece of land, but it’s not been enough to counter the forces that are much larger and more powerful than we can ever be. Government policies and corporate interests have done little to stave off climate change, instead propping up a less environmentally conscious way of farming that has itself been an important contributor to global warming while failing to provide an adequate safety net for small farms who are trying really hard to minimize their own contribution to the problem.
This next week we will be figuring out how to prorate the cost of the shares and refund the money that we owe you for not being able to fulfill our end of the deal. We will calculate the value of the produce you’ve received so far, add any delivery charges, and subtract that from the cost of the share you purchased. We will return your money via Venmo or check, depending on how you paid.
We wish we could tell you what the next chapter of Middle Fork Farm will look like. Maybe eventually we will figure out a way to do the CSA again, just in a different way or in a different place, or maybe we will have to do something else entirely. We’ll keep you posted.
Right now, we are just going to let this all sink in and grieve for as long as we need to. I am told by other farmers that have made this decision that it will get easier with time.
We will also do something we haven’t done in many years and that is take our kids on a proper summer vacation. We will look forward to that.
Please reach out if you have any questions.
In gratitude,
Angela, Erik, Simon, and Luka
Middle Fork Farm 