Supporting Local Farms

Now that Charles and I have started to settle into real life with the marriage and the house and the jobs. We’ve also really gotten on board with supporting the local economy. As I’ve talked about before, it’s really easy to support your local small businesses. For me, as a small business owner, this is a no-brainer. When you buy your carrots, shipped from China, at a big chain, you’re helping out a CEO that you’ll never meet. When you buy carrots from a local farmer, you’re helping that family send their kids to college, or to buy new equipment for their farm.

One thing that I’m very very happy that we’ve taken on is the CSA. CSA stands for community supported agriculture. It’s essentially agreeing to buy part of a farmer’s harvest for the year. There is a ton of information on why you should do one, but I just want to talk about the things that we love about ours.

Our grocery costs went down.

We are currently paying $65 a week for a ton of veggies (more than we can eat in a week) and 5-8 pounds of meat. Our box this week had two bell peppers, garlic, five tomatoes, two pounds of potatoes, a giant zucchini, ten ears of corn, three full salmon-sized trout sides, and a whole organic chicken. There is no chance I could have bought that at the grocery for that amount of money. It’s been great to then only have to spend $15 a week at the actual grocery store on things like bread and milk. It’s the bulk of our food, and it’s fresh and delicious.

It’s customizeable.

They also offer special order items. If I want extra of something, or to order something special, that’s available.

We’re getting things from multiple farms.

We chose Bayfield Foods CSA out of several in the region that are available because it loops things from several farms together to give us the best variety. It’s been nice to try out some different items from a wide group of farms.

It’s made us better chefs.

Part of the deal with the CSA is that the food that shows up is what you get. When the vegetables arrive, that’s what we’re eating that week. I wouldn’t have bought sides of trout from a grocery, but that’s what’s for dinner two nights this week. It’s also made us learn new methods of cooking vegetables and eating a lot more of them. No more dinner rut!

If you can find some local farmers to support, I strongly recommend it. It’s so empowering to know where your food comes from, and that you can feel good about it.

Happy eating!