Total Harvests for 2011


The graph shows the cumulative harvests, such that the end of the graph is shows what the total harvest for the year were, in pounds. The blue line is vegetables that have been paid for, mainly our CSA shares. The red line is vegetables used by workers, including our working CSA shares and people that live or were living on the farm. The yellow line is vegetables used by people that generally didn't pay us or work on our farm.

There's still a few things that haven't been weighed, such as probably 20 or so pounds of dry beans and various brassicas that might have survived the frost on Thursday, but they won't really impact the final totals that much.

This graph obscures a lot of things, which are probably worth talking about further than I will here. Quickly, though, there's first the fact that a pound of potatoes isn't the same as a pound of kale or a pound of raspberries. We could approximate the value of each of these using their price, though this presents its own problems, a good example being the fact that stinging nettle is quite healthy, but most people wouldn't pay any money for it. We don't do much work to grow stinging nettle, but then the question becomes should we value nettle more because it's easy to produce, or less because it requires less labor. Beyond this, our mission isn't to produce the maximum amount of goods and then dump them somewhere, as this food aid strategy doesn't really work great at "creating a community in which everyone can participate in growing and eating delicious, healthy, locally produced food." So the actual pounds isn't the final measure, its whether we're helping to create that community. I think we're doing a pretty good job of distributing our food in a way that does that, though we'll be sure to talk about it at the roundtable discussion in December, seen below.