“Eating is an agricultural act.” -Wendell Berry
What is a CSA? CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. When signing up for a Small Spade CSA share, you are becoming a member of the farm. Our CSA program is small (so is our farm) and we have been running it since 2016. Most of our customers have been with us since the beginning, and we value these relationships so much! By supporting a small-scale, sustainable farm, you are ensuring that farmers are paid a modest living wage and can afford to invest in ecologically sound field practices. Your collective investment in our farm allows us to better predict and plant for our community for the coming season, and helps to subsidize the incredible amount of labour and packing costs that come with the CSA model. You, in turn, take part in the risks and rewards involved in regenerative farming.
What does this look like? If there is a shortage of eggs or vegetables, we will typically replace the value of those items with an appropriate substitute. When there is a bounty of produce, you get extra. Supporting a CSA is very different than purchasing a food delivery service or going to the grocery store - you have a direct relationship with a farm and a farmer, and with the animals and soil that produce your food. With this relationship comes familiarity with growing food sustainably and in season - and the risks and rewards that come with this relationship. When the growing season is poor, due to weather or pests or some other factor, the members receive a leaner return. It’s this aspect — the risk-sharing — that truly defines the CSA. This means that one bad year will not bankrupt a local farmer, forcing them either to mortgage their farm and their future to a large industrial conglomerate or to sell outright and find another line of work. In essence, the community is protecting its small farms by guaranteeing farmers “living wage insurance.”
Why is this important? Buying local is crucial to our ability to feed ourselves in a world that’s fast becoming environmentally, economically and geo-politically unstable. Covid has shown us how flawed our food system is, and how fragile the supply chain is - one of the best ways to ensure our communities can feed themselves is by building a resilient local food supply and by knowing exactly who grows your food, and how it gets to your table. The true cost of cheap industrial food is simply passed off elsewhere in society – in a degraded environment and poverty level wages for farm workers. In actuality, our prices are in line with grocery store prices (for food that has usually been imported and isn’t organic) and our veg comes with far less packaging. We ask members to return all bags and boxes, and we reuse these items over and over and recycle them at the end of their lives. Cheap food costs the earth - supporting local farms keeps money in the local economy, and creates a strong and stable local food supply chain. Also, you get to eat food that was harvested mere hours before it gets to your plate, and the taste of nutrient dense vegetables is really amazing! More info on this topic here.
How does our CSA work? We run our CSA in short 4 (winter) and 8 (summer) week sessions, to allow folks to join and rejoin when necessary. A number of our members go away for extended periods of time for work or vacation, and we find that this more flexible CSA model works better for them. In the winter months we shorten the sessions to 4 or 6 weeks, to allow the hens to slow down their egg production (we do not force them to lay artificially in the winter). Get in touch with us at smallspadegardening@gmail.com if you are curious about when the next session starts!
How we grow your food: We grow thirty + vegetables, year-round, using bio-intensive & no-till methods. Essentially, we grow as much as we are able in the smallest area possible without tilling the soil. We disturb the soil as little as possible, we keep the soil covered as much as possible and we keep the soil planted as often as possible. Our farm is a closed-loop system, which means that we use no off-farm inputs - our compost is made from our herd of dwarf nigerian dairy goats manure, and bedding from our flock of 100 laying hens. We believe in avoiding extractive agricultural practices as much as possible. Our only off farm inputs are organic mineral supplements that we cannot produce ourselves, and we use these to re-mineralize our soil in conjunction with soil testing, in order to grow the most nutrient-dense food possible.
Social Justice: Running this farm in right relationship with the land, animals and soil is a balancing act every day - we are aware of our privilege as white settlers of this place and we acknowledge the debt we owe to the indigenous people who were stewards of this land for centuries before our presence here.
We are also very invested in running our farm in an equitable and socially just fashion. We do not accept unpaid interns as a workforce, preferring instead to take on one employee, pay them a living wage and train them to be organic farmers, so they are equipped to start their own farms and feed their communities.
As someone from a very low-income and unstable background, I am aware that asking people to work for free as an unpaid intern makes it impossible for someone to enter into the agricultural education system, and acquire farming experience and skills. I am also of the opinion that we need to value farmers and pay them a living wage - if we ask people to work for free as beginning farmers, what message are we sending about the value of agriculture as a viable living? We prefer to value folks labour and teach them the skills they need to succeed.
A note about animal welfare: Our flock of heritage breed laying hens live in a large, airy mobile coop and are pastured year-round. They live out their lives on our farm even after they have finished laying, (we love them and they all have names - some of our girls and roos are over 12 years old) and happily eat bugs and grass and treats from the market garden. We ferment their feed for them by inoculating their grain ration with apple cider vinegar, kombucha or whey from our goat milk, to maximize nutrient availability and digestibility - and we guaranteed these are the best eggs you have ever had.
Our dairy goats are all dam-raised, and we share the milk with the babies, we do not separate the kids from their mothers. We manage our herd very closely and spend a lot of time with our goats - they also all have names and very distinct personalities, and we love them all. They are fed excellent quality hay and get visited twice a day for pets and attention. They bring us great joy (and stress during kidding season, but that’s another story).
Animal welfare is an absolutely primary concern for us, and we consider our livestock to be collaborators, not property. They are an integral part of our fertility management program, and all the inputs for our vegetables come from our animals. As such, we treat them with love and respect - they are very important for a small-scale sustainable farm and we value their contributions (i.e poops and snuggles!).