“‘This is driving me nuts’ is the big motivator for upgrading systems.”

For Mike Racette and Patty Wright, 2009 will be the eighteenth year they’ve grown vegetables for their Community Supported Agriculture farm. With no experience in commercial vegetable production, and a farm distinctly lacking in flat ground, Mike and Patty have developed a farm that provides a comfortable living with a minimum of hired help.

With five acres in vegetable production, in addition to cover crops, Spring Hill produces 150 shares each week, which go to the Twin Cities in two separate deliveries. CSA members help with the harvest, washing, and packing operations, and manage all of the deliveries in their own vehicles. Each delivery day, four or five cars, with a total of up to ten CSA members, come to the farm to participate in the farmwork. A single coordinator manages the scheduling through web-based calendar, and Mike and Patty have enough familiarity with their members that they know what sort of work to plan for a given day; for example, if several families are coming with children, Mike and Patty would structure the harvest schedule so that potatoes would be harvested that day for the next several deliveries.

Patty notes that this membership involvement means that Spring Hill needs to provide meaningful work, because people are “smart enough to know when they are just engaged in busy work.” Spring Hill also needs to provide work that is appropriate to the available skill level: members don’t pick tomatoes because that crop requires too much judgment; they don’t pick beans or peas because unskilled workers are just too slow. Typical member tasks would include bunching herbs and greens, digging potatoes, and cleaning dried alliums, all undertakings that involve several people at a time, with a high rate of success.

A crew of five or six people working half time helps Mike and Patty with most of the harvest; work crews don’t come in on member days. Greens are harvested ahead of member days so that they have time to pre-chill in Spring Hill’s modest walk-in cooler. The efficiency loss that results from having members perform much of the work is offset by members taking deliveries to sites in the Twin Cities, saving not only labor expense but also the need to invest in a delivery vehicle.

On the other hand, Mike notes that new farmers should, “be careful what [they] start with, because it’s hard to change.” For Spring Hill Community Farm, scaling up would require new land and a change in their delivery and membership systems.

The packing facility at Spring Hill Community Farm is the definition of simple, an east-facing ten-foot by forty-foot gravel area covered by a shed roof extending off of a machine shed. A supplemental building provides community space for members, as well as a kitchen and a bathroom. The packing area has antibacterial soap to supplement the handwashing facilities in the community building. The farm has a limited need for storage of boxes and totes because they pack shares twice each week, reducing the amount of product they have on hand at any given time. Shares are packed into canvas bags for delivery.

Packing of product happens concurrently with the harvest. A four-wheeler with a trailer moves the harvest to the packing shed, and crops are cleaned before going into to the eight-foot by six-foot walk-in cooler inside the machine shed. Because the pole-style space is open to the air, it’s easy to access with the trailer. Cleaned product is hand-carried to the walk-in cooler.

Because they rely on less-skilled labor, and because the twice-weekly harvest schedule means they manage less product at a time, Mike and Patty have kept their handling equipment to a minimum.

Four 50-gallon Rubbermaid stock tanks are supported on wooden sawhorses to bring them to an appropriate working height. The small tanks refill quickly, requiring less management than a single tank that took longer to fill; members and workers can easily continue washing in one tank while another fills. These tanks are used for bunched greens and peppers. Bunched greens are drained on a screen table before packing.

Spring Hill uses an electric pressure washer to clean their carrots, which are an important signature crop for the farm. The pressure washer has a variable pressure adjustment so at crops don’t get shredded. Carrots are topped in the field and put into totes for transport to the packing shed, where they are dumped into an empty stock tank and batch-washed with the pressure washer. Rutabagas, parsnips, and bulk turnips are handled in the same way.

Potatoes and topped beets are harvested directly into 25-pound mesh bags, then agitated in a tub of water and sorted on a grading table.