so we are kind of just finishing our crunch season as we call it so may and june are our busiest months of the whole year in addition to prepping fields getting plants in the ground having lambs and piglets born and calves we have all the other things that go on your round so we have to still take care of our two thousand laying hens collect eggs on the daily basis washing we have a delivery room once a week for wholesale we do a farmer's market every saturday and  a which runs year round move every other week schedule to a weekly schedule in the height of the production season so for vegetables so in the middle of june we went to an every week pick up for c s a members we have about one hundred two hundred fifty shares for every given season throughout the year for our c s a and so so at this time of year we're harvesting two days a week we're doing a delivery once a week we're doing pick ups two days a week for the c s a as well as all the livestock care on a daily basis we're bringing pigs to market every other week and then you know with the warm weather and the rains coming and all that we'd start to grow to use not only harvesting and planting but we're waiting in you know prepping things for fall crops and that's one thing with being in year round production is even though you think of the summer when people think oh you plant in may and you harvest in september and you're done well we do year round production so we're planting as early as march and we're harvesting all the way through the year it was a little dry for the last couple weeks but we just got this rain storm which has been nice and you know a lot of people always come back to see if they pick up and they're all bummed out that it's raining and i'm celebrating you know the opposite but no the overall the weather's been good we had a couple early hail storms  no you know horrible image of them right now it's exciting it's like a whole diversity we're moving out of like the heavy greens period of you know spring and early summer and starting to get some of our warm season crops like you cumbers in zucchini and squash  tomatoes are just starting with some of the cherry tomatoes are just starting to ripen oh other fun stuff you know the cabbage is the broccoli all that stuff coming along so we're getting a little more diversity beans and don't have to eat salad every day so we grow about fifty different crops and within those there's many varieties of each so if you count every variety that we grow it's well over one hundred and we try to give the c s a members you know a diversity of anywhere from eight to twelve different crops each week in their share  and so yeah on any given day out in the field will be harvesting anywhere from ten to twenty different things jericho settlers farm is comprised of about four different parcels of farmland that we lease from different landowners within the towns of jericho and richmond this site here is the farm owned by the peat family in richmond and it's almost thirty acres and about half of that is in vegetable production and half of it is in pasture that we utilize for our sheep in our pigs primarily  and most of our vegetable production is here this year and then we also the other major piece that we utilize is on the barber farm road in jericho the original barber farm and that has about seventy acres of vegetable crops and about fifty five acres of grazing land and what we did this year in the past we've grown our vegetables in two places this year we primarily are growing them here we'll do that for about two seasons and then will rotate back up to that farm for about two seasons that allows us to do some crop rotations it help with disease and pest control helps with soil fertility and weed management recover crop in those fields right now to help with some nutrient management and control so it's a way to kind of you know diversify well wood terms of soil types and everything to when we can grow on different fields and that as of this this is floodplain and it's heavily loan which is one of the best soil types in this that you can find in the state of vermont or in the northeast region it's a very silty loamy soil it holds moisture waterlogged it's just it's just such and there's not a rock in it i mean there's not a stone out here so it's very nice and you know as long as we're really good about our weed management and fertility management and for the crops the soil does the rest of it it has a good min can get what they need in terms of calcium and things like that and yeah it just grows incredible crops and grows good weeds to the ok so there's about fifteen acres of pasture still this all used to be grazing land as well and we turn this over last year and then this piece over here was about three to four acres along the side of the fence that's what we had in vegetables for the last two years we put that into a cover crop over the winter we put into winter rye and all these straw bales that you see here are what we harvested off of that we made straw and then we use that straw to  mulch in between rows for crops that are in the ground for a long time here like these onions right here you see they're planted on plastic and we've done some weeding we have one more round of weeding to do a number of mulching these pathways so we want to eat again ideally we would have mulch them earlier in the spring but we didn't have the straw yet so we're still making it so we started jericho settler's farm in two thousand and two just basically as an experiment to see if it was something we really wanted to do my husband and i both worked off farm jobs for about five years when we had the farm starting and it was something we've always done a little bit of growing our own food but never on a commercial basis and so we we started on the side working after our you know doing hours after work on the weekends a couple  small farmers markets and then we started our c s a program in two thousand and five and for us you know it it was really a choice of you know not only growing our own food but it being able to provide something for the community that was an alternative to what i see as some of the unsustainability of industrial agriculture and so we wanted people have the opportunity to not only eat good food but support a food production system that was sustainable and good for the local economy and landscape so that's why we got into it and it just took off in the ten years after that you know the whole local food movement really been growing and so the timing was just great in terms of building the business so we built really rapidly and we went from what started as vegetables animal growing a few chickens to for ourselves and a few for our neighbors to  acres of vegetables twelve to fifteen to two thousand hens for egg production a thousand broiler chickens a year for meat production we raise about forty lambs a year seventy pigs for me and about thirty head of cattle  so yeah in ten years we expanded a long ways and then we also branched out into year round growing and so we don't just do the main season we have who poses which are unheated greenhouses where we plant in the earth and we grow crops in there from september through april and it was our choice i mean we could heat them and grow a lot of other stuff in there but it was our choice not to do a lot of energy demanding crop production in terms of having to use other sources of energy other than the sun so we chose to do a lot of cold hardy greens production things like that which can actually survive through our winters here in vermont and so that's how we expand our fresh vegetable offerings in the winter we can also store a lot of vegetables which are incredibly good in the wintertime like carrots and beets and and potatoes onions all those kinds of things that you think about put in the root cellar we can grow a lot of those too and so yeah so we went from a small kind of side hobby farm to a full scale farm probably guess maybe medium for vermont i mean there's certainly some bigger farms out there than us but we're really diverse and that's kind of unique to have so much diversity at the scale that we do it at and we support ourselves full time and we have two other employees or full time year round and then a crew about eight that are a long season of work with us as well you know we get a lot of interest from folks who want to run their own farm in the future and they like the diversity that our farm offers they want to learn how to integrate livestock in vegetable production they want to learn how to market you know multiple enterprises and how to balance that workload which is the most challenging aspect of it you know certainly with some people specializing like one area and become very efficient at it but like how do you become efficient at doing six different major different lines of production and so that's one thing that you know we can offer them as to how to learn systems and ways of management to to get there and so yeah it's usually folks in their twenty's and thirt they may have done some agricultural training in school they may not of a lot of them is usually worked at least two or three seasons on another farm or several farms folks from all over the country and we don't do an internship program per se  terms of vegetables and that's one of our major focuses right now and so we're trying to find that balance of like how much mean season production to keep going while we expand in the off season markets and we're kind of getting to the scale that we want to be we've shifted things around in the last few years in terms of numbers of livestock and things like that to kind of find a balance that meets our land base better to you know that's the hardest part about farming shit in counties land is really expensive we don't own any of the land that we farm we lease it all and we have really good  landowners and great agreements and arrangements with them and we're fortunate for that but it's not like we can you know find a two hundred acre parcel somewhere and build a farm it just doesn't exist and that in county at least not at agricultural value where you c purchase so that's the way we've made it work to stay in this community and we think that's an important part of the farm is you know helping other people keep their land and production and make it useful and  and so i think you know we're kind of i mean say what we want to the next ten years we're kind of at the growth level we need to be we just want to become more efficient get our systems a little more place which every year to do one or two more things that get us a little closer to that and whether it's an equipment purchase or a way we learned to you know organize a certain work stream better or something like that we have are getting better that every year and that's that's kind of where in the fine tuning process of our business you know when we started ten years ago well we started our c s a in two thousand and five so i guess that's seven years ago and terms of that aspect of our business they were definitely popular  way near as many as there are now in the a and at the same time the public was just becoming aware of them and i think there's a lot more awareness of them now  started out pretty small but we'd like within three years time we doubled our membership three times over and that was really easy to do and now at the level we're at with the amount of competition that's in the area maintaining the membership numbers that we have is a good marketing goal every year  it's that's you know sort of i think i mean i think it's great i don't think we've like totally tapped out the capacity of the market because i think more people are becoming aware of the opportunities for  year but i definitely think you know there's a lot more options for them now and the c s a models are as diverse as you can imagine it means everything from some farms do just see essays and they do just the summer c s a and they might have two hundred members and they do just some are c s a production and they don't sell in any other capacity and their members get everything that comes out of the field or if it's really bad year they get hardly anything that comes out of the field whatever the case may be the members take on that risk  other farms maybe like in sort of the whole opposite end of the spectrum is like a multiform c s a were several farms put products in together they grow different things for the c s a there's not a lot of risk for the members because there are so many members farms involved that there's always going to be something coming out of some farmers not like one farm going to get wiped out the whole programs then and some see this is even to like custom ordering where members can like order what they want each week which isn't really what i see as a ever and they started out so now that's sort of like a you know it's like a custom ordering and delivery service even like this yeah yeah but it comes direct from the farm or from a group of farms but usually there's a distributor middleman person or middle woman person who's organizing the program you know and so a lot of times those farmers do the beauty of a c s a is as a farmer you're working direct with the customer and people are paying close to retail value but we always give them a discount because they're paying up front for the season and and when we do have overabundance of production they get the opportunity of that so like our members have always we always guarantee at least ten percent more than they pay for in the last few years it's been like twenty five percent more than they pay for what we've been able to give them