Don't Care How
"I want it now!"... Veruca Salt wanted more and more of Wonka's sweet delicacies, and who could blame the gal? I think we all have a bit of Veruca in us. If you get a taste of something you like, the last thing you want is a dearth of the goodness. Though my frizzy summer hair is akin to Willy's wild locks, our products are in much different food groups. But we do have a few offerings which garner enough interest to have people channeling their inner Veruca.
When it happens that we sell out of our kaleidoscope salad mix on a Saturday at market, I find myself wanting to hide under the table so as not to face the good, peeved customers yet to visit our booth. Then, on the drive home, I toil over how to meet the salad demand and grow our operation. And grow we will. Growing we are...with more acreage planted this year than ever. The inevitable question for us and for any business owner is how much to grow? And furthermore, when have we grown enough?
Rich and I are big fans of taking the business a year at a time. After monkey-seeing farmers who we learned from tackle these questions, we developed a good idea of what we wanted. And our current outlook is not much different from the one we held in 2018 at the beginning of Foxhole. Let's start as small as we need to in order to manage the business well. And we will grow as we see fit. While others may see the sky as their limit, we identified that our ambitions would lie somewhere in the troposphere...the lower-most layer of the atmosphere. We don't endeavor to grow gangbusters. In fact we would rather get out than get big. As we see it, there is a grey area that makes up the sweet spot. In the years that the kids don't need us so much, we will likely be pushing the upper limits of the grey. This year, we are ascending slowly as more sophisticated, low impact equipment and maturity allow us to manage more space to grow more food.
There's no doubt that the very American, and perhaps simply human impulse to capitalize on demand is tempting. We have the land, we have the market, but there is something very imperative missing: the desire to expand and step into different roles managing people rather than managing our own field work. The essence of our roles here is what drives us. We are hungry for the catharsis of working with the soil and each other while having the freedom to be spontaneous, and that hunger is what inspires us to look forward to a lifetime of farming. We grow enough food to support our family and to contribute to feeding the community here.
But perspective must be taken into account. These are the ramblings of a young mother with the potential of a long road of life ahead. There are years-worth of mysteries which lie in wait to be uncovered. From my vantage point, this is the life. We have a quiet, private existence at home on the farm to figure out how to raise a seven and a four-year old and to make a living for ourselves. We are still beginning farmers by USDA standards and so we are green in our experience tending this business. A time will come when our May and Jack are adults, when we will have evolved into new iterations of ourselves. What will we yearn for then? What will we decide is best for ourselves and for this chocolate factory of a farm? How will the world be getting on? Will we invite Oompa Loompas to the party? We did so once before having kids, her name was Emily, and it was lovely to have her.
But for now, whenever someone asks us why we don't hire people and grow the rest of our acreage in annual vegetables, and show up to more markets, and never run out of salad greens and sourdough, I'll simply tell them, we're not ready to call in the Oompa Loompas yet :).
Thank you for reading :).
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