I recently overheard a conversation between two shoppers at a local supermarket, remarking on how expensive the organic items were compared to others. They then conjectured that the reasons for the higher prices was all hype, implying that there was no real reason for organic items to cost more. It was all I could do to hold my peace and not explain to them that while that might be true for large scale organics it certainly was not/is not true for small scale farms like this one.
Local and organic is the best of all worlds, when it comes to food. Buying locally saves fossil fuels, reduces carbon emissions, encourages and strengthens the local economy. Buying local food gives jobs and stability to an enterprise that would likely not survive without your support. Paying a little bit more for what we do here is a small price to pay for what you get in return.
My crew is here at 5am, working in the field, sweating in the heat, bending over all day long to weed, water, plant or harvest. We don't have big pieces of equipment that we can just run up and down the rows to pick things. Each and every thing that is picked from our field is touched by one of those guys, which is why the quality is high. They visually inspect what they pick so things are picked with a kind of precision that a mechanical picker would miss. Blemishes are inevitable, that is how things grow in the field. Nothing is perfect but we can choose the best of what there is, at its peak, which is something you won't find on large production farms, organic or not.
Because our field is just a couple hundred yards from the store, we simply walk across the parking lot to fill our bins with fresh food. The fact that sometimes what you get in our store has been picked for less that a few hours means that the nutritional value is still very high (nutritional values can wane as produce ages). Our farm store is stocked with items from other farms, yes, but only for items that we cannot or do not produce ourselves and only to meet customer demand. Because we are so conscious of the value of local food, we try to support other farms/producers in our region so that the impact of long distance movement of food products is minimal.
We donate our excess to local food pantries and organizations that feed the food insecure. We are your neighbors and your friends. You can come to this farm and ask us anything and we will answer you to the best of our ability. You can't do that to the person who is producing food in California, Mexico, Canada, etc. Sometimes food store chains will advertise that they have local food but that is meaningless without a definition. Because people are more aware these days of the idea of local food, many of these chains spin their advertising to make it their products more appealing to that idea. Some food store chains consider anything within a 750-1000 mile radius as "local". Not my definition by a long shot.
So our produce prices may be a little higher than what is in the supermarket. We worked hard for it. We earned it.
