Has anyone bought a farm share?

[Walwen]

I have the opportunity to buy a farm share. For 500 dollars, I'd get "8 or 9 items" of produce per week. For another 120, I'll also get a dozen eggs per week. Finally, the cost to have it shipped directly into town rather than driving to the neighboring city is 100 dollars. This is for 20 weeks of delivery, June through October.

This breaks down to 720 total and 36 dollars per week. I know driving to pick it up would be cheaper, but it's just not feasible without a car.

It would replace my produce buying just about totally. My mother says she might give me 100 to cover the shipping, and in exchange I'll give her the veggies I don't want (don't like tomatoes, mushrooms, squash.)

I know I could go to Walmart and buy the cheapest eggs and cheapest frozen mixed veggies for maybe a 1/3rd the cost. But 1) this is a cool experience in itself, 2) I value high quality produce and think I'd make good use of it, and 3), getting a variety of veggies and local eggs is undoubtedly very healthy.

Would you buy this?

[jacob]

Doing the math, you're paying $500 for 20x8--9 = 160-180 items or $3/item (ouch!). Items could be anything from a bell pepper to a head of cabbage.

The experience quickly wears out. You're basically committing to a certain cooking style in which you have to figure out how to turn the random bunch of vegetables that arrived in this week's mystery box into a meal. Depending on your attitude [towards cooking] this is either a feature or a bug.

I like the idea of CSA deliveries but not the pricing or the randomness. In terms of overspending (relative to Aldi or Walmart), I'd rather support the local mom&pop supermarkets.

[loutfard]

Our current frugal local food luxuries:
- buy honey from a neighbour
- harvest apples, blueberries, mushrooms and walnuts and from public land
- harvest cherries and apples at my parents
- get apple juice, berries, eggs, jam and zucchini from my parents

In the planning stage:
- grow oyster mushrooms (thank you @ffj!), radish, salad and possibly tomatoes
- pick more kinds of mushrooms from public land (thank you @guitarplayer for the saffron milk cap hint)

[Slevin]

Our friends moved last year and gifted us with their farm share for half the year, and I agree with everything @jacob says above (except each “item is often a couple lbs of that veggie, making it a slightly better deal). Consider that most weeks you will get ~3 items you didn’t really want (yay 4 pounds of kohlrabi), or 1-2 of those items are herbs. Now you end up with a bunch of random veggies that you have to meal style around, they aren’t really “cohesive” (I.e easy to make a meal out of), and it’s really just not enough to make a whole weeks meals out of (ymmv, we eat a lot of produce in this house). If you can get a good deal it’s not bad to be supplemental, but I can’t call it a good “total replacement” for veggies.

[jacob]

To add to Slevin's point about it not being a "total replacement". You'll likely have to go out and buy additional "complementary ingredients" to make [a] recipe work. IOW, it'll force some additional shopping. Whether this is good or bad depends on how advanced your cooking skills are on the CCCCCC scale.

I'd say it's net positive if you're at the "meal plan" cook level, that is, you decide what to eat and then shop for the ingredients you need to make that happen. A CSA box will force you to think outside your box by giving you a new box.

If you're on the "walk into any pantry and make a meal out of it" chef level, a CSA box will put you back in the box.

As such I think subscription boxes help you grow/develop as a cook/chef ... but at some point it's more of a hassle than a help.

PS: When you get in trouble with the artichoke rutabaga combo, https://www.supercook.com/ is your friend

[7Wannabe5]

Another plus to doing it, if you don't have much experience with gardening in your region yourself, is that it will get you back in touch with the seasonality of produce that is generally obscured when shopping at a grocery store. So, if a day comes that the national food chain breaks down, you will have more skills towards being able to cook, or more importantly, process/store that which is available locally as it becomes available. It can also be interesting to do a general experiment towards being a locavore or simply mapping out the closest location where various foodstuffs you consume are produced, so that you discover that "Wow, I actually live biking distance from a dairy farm!" or "Damn, there isn't a grain elevator* within 200 miles of me." First thing to research would be your closest access to fresh water supply.

*Grain elevators are an interesting conjunction of the natural and financial realms. Get a list for the grain elevators closest to you using Google Maps or similar, then find one that has its own website. You will likely see scrolling update of commodities prices which determine the earnings of your local grain (high calorie output) farmers. It's also worthwhile to investigate your local metal scrapyards and their pricing mechanisms and stocks and flows.

[suomalainen]

Did this one year. Thoughts: 1) you get veggies you've never eaten before (and there was a reason you never ate them before). 2) you get a LOT of them, based on what's ripened that week. 3) Did I mention you get a LOT of the same veggie in a week?

That said, for $600, you get a new experience. Maybe you like it, maybe you don't, but your downside is capped at wasting $600 and having to suffer the psychology of throwing away pounds of unused veggies every week.

Pounds. Of. Veggies. Every. Week.

Pounds.

[Western Red Cedar]

My sister participates with a farm near us, and I've picked up her produce box a few times when they are on a trip. I generally agree with @suo and @slevin's perspective. Lots of random veggies!

I found the forced inspiration to create some new meals that @jacob mentioned above fun, but I didn't have to do that all summer.

On a plus, the produce is typically very good quality and better than what you'd find at a grocery store. You also have the opportunity to meet some really interesting people (either on the farm or others picking up produce), but that may not apply with a delivery service. The varieties in plant fiber are likely a positive in terms of supporting a healthy microbiome.

From a more philosophical standpoint, community supported agriculture (CSA) is a good way to support small local farms. Having the known income from CSA boxes provides for more predictability in operations than selling locally at farmers market. The price may be a bit higher, but there are other hidden costs in supporting big ag.

[theanimal]

We did it the first year we moved into our house while we were first setting up our garden. The idea was if our garden didn't work out the first year (it didn't) we would still have fresh veggies. We did it through someone who had just started their farm so they offered a discount for the first year over everyone else in the area. $25/week for 10 weeks if I remember correctly. We didn't think the value was there (sometimes not enough stuff and other times weird stuff) and definitely wouldn't do it at higher prices. There was a lot we had to give away or to our pigs. And we generally eat a lot of veggies.

If you still want to support local farmers, you may be better off finding a farmer's market or store that sells local produce in your area. Then you can get what you want, in the quantity you want and not have to commit to anything long term.

[Ego]

I absolutely love them. A half dozen tenants get them and about half of the stuff they get finds its way to the trash cans. Trash picking fruits and vegetables is not for the squeamish or easily embarrassed.

[jacob]

I absolutely love them. A half dozen tenants get them and about half of the stuff they get finds its way to the trash cans. Trash picking fruits and vegetables is not for the squeamish or easily embarrassed.

Ha! Isn't half just about the measure of calories that are regularly wasted/goes uneaten/thrown out within the North American producer to consumer food system.

[Frita]

The signup for our CSA has three options: single, double, family. As @suo and @Ego noted, there are lots of vegetables, whatever is in season, and what the local farm is able/inclined to grow. One has zero input. Downsizing or sharing could be something to consider. At our local drop off point, there is a spot to put things people don’t want for whatever reason. Just shopping this free box (what I do these days) in another option. They show up with leftovers at the farmers’ market but the CSAs have more variety and better quality.

[Walwen]

I thank everyone for the experiences!

On another note, it turns out one of my coworkers has a mature walnut tree- my first question, "Do you harvest it?" He said he would but he's too elderly to deal with the hassle and drying process. Well guess who's young and happy to deal with it! When the season is right I'm angling to harvest it for him and share some of the processed nuts. I've made woodstain from them before too- regrettably staining my hands for weeks in the process.


My mind is made up about the CSA for a simple reason..... my mother wants to pay for the lion's share, in exchange for us splitting the produce according to our preferences!

If I ever have an inordinate excess of something, I can simply take it into work, too. But I'm pretty good at cooking veggies and enjoy it.

My area has a farmer's market but I've been disappointed with it in recent years. First off, there's more fancy pastry sellers, solar panel scam artists, and overpriced CBD peddalers than anything resembling a farmer. Second, the produce is not cheap (quality being factored in) and often not good- I'm talking potatoes being sold green and live plants being sold with thrips bad. There's some local grocerers I go to for higher quality produce but it's quite a ways away for me. At the farmer's market one day I decided to buy a loaf of bread for everyday use. The CHEAPEST loaf of bread was 18 dollars. I didn't buy any. Just a normal average round loaf. That was the turning point in going to the farmers market for me. I can go to the local bread store and get very high quality bread for less than half that- and they give generous free samples with every visit, too.

[take2]

$18 for a loaf of bread?!? That’s incredible.

Makes me happy DW got into making sourdough during the pandemic. I think we pay c. £50 for flour that lasts us about 6 months of 1-2x a week for making bread.

Let us know how you find the farm share once you start receiving. I’ve never done it but my mother has an extensive garden and when we spend time with them over the summer we end up eating pounds of zucchini for about 6 weeks straight. It does get a bit old after a while, and would be nicer to stretch out those pounds across 52 weeks instead of 6. I imagine it’ll be the same with a farm share, albeit with some more variety.

[IlliniDave]

Some acquaintances of mine used to do that back when I lived in Alabama and they liked it pretty well. But knew them from the Crossfit gym and they were really after raw milk as it became a craze with some of them. Getting a box of in-season vegetables was just part of the price they had to pay to get the milk. Farmer actually delivered to the Crossfit box weekly.

To me it would depend on the farm. If they used regenerative organic agriculture, 100% pastured chickens, etc., it might be worth it because the quality of the food (nutritionally speaking) would be far superior to anything you'd get at a typical grocery. It also depends on what is meant by items. If it means literally 8-9 vegetables total irrespective of type (i.e., this week you get 8 radishes), then it seems pretty pricey so quality would become extra important. If they use conventional farming practices--chemical fertilizer, insecticides, commercial feed, etc., sounds like a scam.

[C40]

I did it for a year and liked it. Stopped because I moved to another state.

Mine didn't cost nearly as much as yours and I still got a LOT of produce. For one way to eat it, I started making pizza that I totally loaded up with vegetables. Plenty of other ways though. Yeah there were some weird things, which were good to try at least once to know what they are, but if I was getting them for years I'd be annoyed

[Ego]

Someone dumped a box today with a dozen mandarins, a cabbage and a wilted celery. I kept the mandarins.

[Ego]

This thread made me pay attention to the food box deliveries we get here. Sometimes the delivery people take them to the apartment doors and I do not see them. Some leave them in the lobby. That's where I see them. Yesterday we had one delivered and today we had two.

One of the deliveries had a return address in Salt Lake City and the label on the box indicating it was flown to LAX then (I assume) trucked here. Not local at all. It was from a company called Daily Harvest. I looked them up. They specialize in the tropical fruits for smoothies and bowls of salad.

Hard to understand considering we live within walking distance to Whole Foods.

[Scott 2]

That's one of the business models - premium online grocer masquerading as farm share. The one in my region, you commit to $XX per week of shopping, then pick out your order from each week's seasonal list. They bring together produce from a several hundred mile radius. Some of the prices:

fancy mushrooms $16/lb
spinach $4/lb
beauty heart radish $3.33/lb
black spanish radish $3/lb
carrots $3.75/lb
gold potatoes $2/lb
red potatoes $2.50/lb
beauregard sweet potatoes $4/lb
black beans $5/lb

Then you add 33% to the total, for shipping. Someone delivers to your house weekly. Financially, it makes no sense. The middle men add way too much overhead.

[fiby41]

I'm a limited partner in an LLP that cultivates farmlands. My profit share is proportionate to the 'fixed capital' component whereas rest of it as an 'interest free loan.' It consists of 11.52% of my total assets under management and I will retire from the LLP in 36 months. My profit share is caped at 16% per anum paid quarterly. I've received the first payment so far calculated on a pro rata basis. Coincidentally the quarters roughly coincide with crop cycles. Here are the financials of the company:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing