Community-supported agriculture

The first idea was of, well, of course, exploring by myself all types of activities.

Then we, we started a big CSA, a very important CSA with people where the consumer were.

Of course, we, we moved to a, agroecology and organic farming, and then we established a lot of...

We reclaimed the idea to process food, not only to serve the industries with, with commodities.

So we started to make our own bread, our own sausages, our own meat, and we created more than 15 small industries to process food to transform commodities in food.

And then we created a market, and the consequence of all this was the big CSA concen- concentrated in Lisbon.

And from the CSA, we moved to the, to an experience very interesting of integral cooperative, where the consumers were part of a cooperative.

I rented the farm to a cooperative, to this cooperative, 40 people working in a lot of different activities, and it was, it was a big fail.

It's recognized by the USDA.

And we've also started to fund CSA boxes from the local farms in our communities and bringing the flavorful cocktails to the consumer and connecting stewardship of nature, soil health, to the beautiful sip of whiskey or the cocktail in your glass.

That's such a fantastic way to sort of tell the story of the land and tell the story of the family behind it.

And this ultimate product is something people can feel good about, ultimately.

Last thing I'll say too is that someone may ask, well, why not just give excess produce to the CSA customers? And the simple answer to that is that when you overwhelm CSA customers, they won't often sign back up.

They don't want to waste food, and a busy human can only eat so much.

Now, will some of them take more for sure but in our experience a lot of food is just too much food and they will drop out or not sign back up in the next year if you don't have excess food maybe they get frustrated with you those people that like lots of food anyway this feels like a topic i could drone on about for days but i'll let the comments flesh that out a little bit for us and we can always revisit the csa convo we did a csa for many many years in many different forms The first decade of my farming career was pretty much exclusively CSA farming.

So yeah, always happy to answer those questions.

Right now, though, we're going to take a quick break.

And about a couple years later, I realized I had a skill set and I was lucky to have access to this piece of land and I just started growing.

And soon I had like 50 feet of radishes and was like, what the hell am I gonna do with these? And started a CSA and ended up going to farmers markets and sold at farmers markets for a long time.

While I was farming, I, you know, had come back to this community where I was from and I felt like, you know, as a community, we were very invested in the environment and ecology, but I was really coming from kind of a more political perspective, thinking about things like social justice.

And I really wanted to see more dialogue happening around some of the stuff that Yale was just bringing up around systems of oppression and what's going on in the world.

I don't know him, but I know of-

I put his business card in my pocket last night 'cause I'm hoping that we're gonna be able to do something for our CSA customers.

The kind of grain that doesn't give you the, uh, gluten problems.

The, so the, uh-

You know, 15 years ago

agoUm, that was pro- I was seven, seven to eight years in my farming journey.

We had a CSA movement here in Quebec.

There was 250 farms, 20,000 people signed up to a CSA network.

And we said, well, let's do some, there seems to be people wanting to buy local and we raised them on milk at the time.

And then thought, well, we, what if we got a little beyond family and friends and tried to market it? And so we started with a CSA program that was only pork and they're just meat bundles that people could pick up at the beginning of every month and save on having to buy by the cut.

And so that's kind of how we started.

And we put a wall up in what used to be our calf freezing facility up until the mid-1980s.

We put a wall up, started a little, you know, got one glass freezer and started with pork and have since added beef, poultry, ice cream.

And then on the other side of that wall is where we run our kids' farm camp, and that also started in 2021.

Okay, and for those of us that maybe aren't familiar with the CSA, can you please describe what that is?

Sure.