- I'm Chris Russin, I'm your program chair for the Racine/Kenosha Master Gardener's Association, and tonight we want to welcome Sandy Raduenz. She is the co-owner of Pinehold Gardens CSA with her husband David Kozlowski. Earlier in her career she worked desk jobs, but she hated being indoors and she hated sitting down. So 22 years ago, she attended an Urban Rural Days conference in East Troy, and she found out about the concept of community supported agriculture or CSA. She came home and she felt like she finally belonged somewhere, so with encouragement and a check for $200 from her husband's sister-in-law, she and her husband plowed up the backyard of the house they were renting in Oak Creek, and they began their one-member CSA. It is now 21 years later. They have 185 members in their CSA, and they sell to 15 Milwaukee-area restaurants. So, Sandy Raduenz.  (audience applauding) - My husband, David Kozlowski, has a degree in journalism, and he usually does all public speaking for the farm. So I will do my best. He's out, busy planting our 10,000 heads of garlic, preparing for next year's season. We have begun the 2017 farming season this weekend.  David and I own 21 acres in Oak Creek  in the very, very far southeast corner of Milwaukee County.  We refer to it as the block that time forgot. There is no cable. There's no sewer. There's no water. There's no DSL. There's no fiber optic. I get one bar on my phone signal.  And there's a subdivision two blocks from our house.  And so it has a very high water table.  We're very close to the river floodplain.  And so it is not the best farmland.  It is not the best land for development. But it's our home, and it's where we have  a very worthwhile and life-fulfilling business operating.  It's a great place to be because we are very close to the city. We're only 17 miles from downtown Milwaukee. So our restaurant delivery route, the full circle is only 42 miles.  Our CSA route is only 60 miles full circle. 

 Most farms have to travel 60 to 90 miles  to even reach the city.  I'm here to mainly talk about community-supported agriculture but, besides community supported agriculture, we sell to 15 restaurants in the Milwaukee area,  and we have an on-farm stand on Saturday mornings. We have discontinued going to farmers' markets and are instead choosing to build community around our property with personal relationships and people that attend our farm stand, the chefs that I meet with every winter and personally deliver to over the year, and our 185 CSA members.  So a CSA stands for community supported agriculture.  In a monetary way of looking at things,  it is like paying for a subscription to a theater, maybe a sports team.  I used to say magazines, but people really don't hardly subscribe to magazines anymore. You pay up front for a product. In this case, in a traditional CSA,  which we are still a traditional CSA, you get a weekly box  of vegetables,  and our season is 18 weeks long.  And it's whatever is in season and is whatever is growing on the farm.  Now, to kind of clarify, I'm going to talk about the way our CSA operates first because there has been very many different permutations now of the CSA model.  So I grew up gardening. I grew up in the city of Milwaukee, just north of the airport. My husband grew up in Greenfield.  That was one of the new suburbs when his dad built the house. My parents bought their house in 1955. And everybody in those small suburbs, in the small city gardens or city yards, had gardens.  So now, in Oak Creek, I want to give a plaque to a household if they even plant a tomato plant. 

 So we both grew up gardening. We did not grow up farming. We both went to college. We both have college degrees. David's is in journalism. Mine is in education for computers and math.  And we both had desk jobs and both had careers. And I, for some reason, went to a conference at the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute. It was called Urban Rural Days. This is way before foodie was a word,  before local food was a word. It was trying to connect urban people with rural farmers.  And there was a presentation on CSAs. And I met the nicest people.  And I just never fit in.  I was kind of like a nerdy math geeky kind of weird person.  And I just came home and I said I belong somewhere. And I was talking and talking and talking and talking about this. So David's sister-in-law gave us a check and said you're going to do this. So yes, we literally plowed up the backyard. We were living in the property we currently own.  We were renting. It did happen to be my relative's property. But my boss bought it as an investment to develop, and we were renting.  And we started with one member, and then we went to five members, and then we went to 15 members. And we started looking for farms because we never thought we'd be able to buy the land that we live on now. But our landlords believed in what we were doing and that we wanted to be in an urban environment and that we wanted to educate the public and that we wanted to work with school groups and that we wanted people to know where their food was coming from, so we were able to purchase the property 12 years ago.  So getting back to the concept of CSA. CSA is where you pay up front  for a weekly delivery of vegetables.  It really helps small farmers exist because you get your operating capital up front so you can buy your seeds. 

 You can buy, you can pay your property taxes. You can pay for equipment repairs,  and you can have a budget to work with. Most CSA farmers have a goal of how many members they want to sign up, and then you know what your budget is for the year.  In the old days, you would have a private banker that you would go to for an operating,  basically an operating loan. So the CSA members, in a financial way, you can be thought of as your operating loan. But CSA members are more than just the money basis.  It is a way for people to personally invest and know where their food is coming from.  Also they are rewarded  with bountiful harvests or they,  if things don't work out then  they have to take the good with the bad. That's not to say that a farmer can just say oh, well, this didn't work out. I mean, you have to be a responsible farmer and irrigate,  like this year, in a drought. You can't just say oh, it didn't rain. I'm sorry we didn't have a crop because it didn't rain. And making the transition from a gardener  to a CSA farmer is very, very, very difficult  because you have to have, in our case now, we have to 185 of lots of things every week.  So you have to have 185 heads of lettuce that mature at once. You have to have 185 heads of cabbage that mature at once. You can't have the deer eat half your crop. You can't have a variety that's not going to mature all at the same time. You can't grow as many heirlooms that are beautiful but just don't yield. They only yield that one eggplant, maybe, during the growing season. So transitioning from a gardener where you can do a lot of experimentation and grow a lot of different heirlooms was hard, and transitioning to try to find the right varieties that work in your soil and your climate is hard,  and just the timing of the succession planting.  So we grew up as Memorial Day gardeners. You plant your garden on Memorial Day, and then you harvest as things come along. With CSA farming, you're constantly planting. So we would have six succession plantings of beans. We plant lettuce every two weeks. We have a huge planting in the middle of July. That's for all of our fall crops. All of our broccoli and kale and cabbage and cauliflower and leafy greens. Huge. And carrots and beets. So we almost plant more in the middle of summer for a fall harvest than we do in spring.  And we still, let's see, it is now the end of October, and we still have two more deliveries in our CSA. So even though we have had a frost, there's a lot of crops still in the field and there's things in our root cellar and things in our hoop house for storage  that we're still going to be sending out to our customers.  Also involved in a CSA is you have. There's a lot of education because people are receiving food,  and a lot of people join CSAs because they want to eat healthier or they want to join CSAs because they want to cook more. And both of those things kind of conspire against becoming a CSA member because people find out that they really don't like vegetables or that they really don't cook.  They thought they cooked, but making a salad is not cooking.  So we have to provide, or we do provide,  we enjoy providing a newsletter. It has things like a day in the life, what's going on in our lives every week. 

 What's going on in the fields. What's in the box. Storage tips.  There's been a big, big, big gap in the passing down  in information of how long will a potato last in a paper bag. How long will an onion last.  You have to put a head of lettuce in a plastic bag in the refrigerator, otherwise it's going to dehydrate. So just even storage tips, besides cooking tips,  is a huge educational component of being a CSA farmer.  How the CSA works for us is that  we mainly rely.  We only have two part-time employees. It's my husband and I. Another advantage of being near an urban setting is that we have a very good supply,  including many master gardeners, of what we call worker shares. They work four hours a week to help us on the same day,  the same time, to help us harvest whatever goes into those CSA boxes.  And so tomorrow, a crew of 12 people will appear, and they will harvest 185 bunches of kale and 185 pounds of beets  and 185 bunches of parsley and wash 185 butternut squashes,  and it all gets done in four hours.  And then following day, we put everything in the cooler, and the following day I have a different crew of worker shares that come and help me put those items in the boxes, and then, in that afternoon,  my husband and I both head out on two different routes and we deliver the boxes to people's homes  and a couple of businesses where the people come and pick up their boxes of vegetables. There's also a large portion of people that pick up at the farm because we are located so close to an urban area.  And then  they hopefully will use the contents of the box.  And so it has, like I said before, it has enabled a lot of small beginning farmers to be farmers,  to work on smaller acreage, but it's also a very dangerous  or risky thing for a beginning farmer. So we always recommend when we have a young farmer that's interested in CSAs to just do farmers' markets  for a couple of years because of the complexities of the succession planting and meeting the timing of the maturity dates.  And plus the CSA community of farmers really doesn't. You don't want the name of CSA to get a bad name by someone having a bad experience. So we try to encourage young people to sell,  maybe sell to a couple restaurants or sell at a market to get growing, the growing pains in the past. 

 Now, the movement of CSAs is undergoing  a transition right now. When I said we are a traditional CSA,  that is we deliver the same size box every week  for consecutive weeks.  Most CSAs offer different sized boxes or they offer an every other week option where people only get vegetables every other week. We feel it's important that people receive fresh vegetables every week. And keeping track of.  So we settled on kind of a medium-sized share, which is good for single. Here's our marketing. It's good for single people, couples, and busy families who don't cook every night.  So there's 12 CSAs that serve the Milwaukee area,  and everybody's just a little bit different. Their length of the season is different. Ours is really kind of middle of the ground at 18 weeks. We don't start until July because we're close to the lake with the heavy soil, with the high water table. There's CSAs that serve the Milwaukee area that are southwest of Madison that are like in a different world as far as climate and temperature.  And so we always encourage people to find the CSA  that suits their needs the best, whether people want a smaller box or, really, they want to only cook one week and maybe they'll go out the next week or maybe they really are traveling a lot during the summer and they won't be able to use a weekly box of vegetables. The other way CSAs are changing is that people that call themselves CSAs, and this is not a Milwaukee phenomena, this is a nationwide phenomena, aren't CSAs in the true sense of it's where you're investing in a farmer and you're taking the risk with the farmer, where they're becoming more market basket type things where produce from a number of farms is being accumulated or produce from one farm with things purchased, like honey and apples and cheese and bread, is also being included. Kind of more of a Peapod type of delivery service.  So that is confusing the whole concept of CSA  in the consumers' minds. Also, there's so many more options than when we started 21 years ago for people to access local foods. At least in the Milwaukee area there's farmers markets almost in every single suburb or neighborhood that have started. Many of the larger grocery stores are starting to carry local food.  I would say there is not a single grocery store in the Milwaukee area that doesn't carry a pretty good selection of organic produce. Speaking of organic, we grow according to organic principles. We are not certified organic. We sell our produce directly through the CSA, restaurants, and our on-farm stand. If we were going to wholesale our product, we would become certified organic.  If we were going to wholesale through a grocery store, but we don't have plans for that.  And so the interest in CSAs, unfortunately, although there are many people that are still not familiar with the concept, the interest is waning.  And it's a very big concern. I said it's the only time I enjoy being my age, 61, because I don't know what's going to be happening to the market in five years, if CSAs will even be in existence,  and I really enjoy being a CSA farmer. 

 The Urban Ecology Center based out of Milwaukee is going to be having a meeting this year, and we've had. In the fall of 2016, there will be a large meeting discussing the future of CSAs. One of the promising things is we see a lot more people interested in health and workplaces interested in health, so there's going to be a push towards having, rather than a person having their box delivered to a neighborhood or a person's house  we would deliver to a workplace. We already deliver to two workplaces. We deliver to the Milwaukee Public Museum and to the TOPS organization, Take Off Pounds Sensibly. And so we deliver to the person's workplace. And so the Urban Ecology Center out of Milwaukee  is making a big push to give talks to anybody. So if anybody has a workplace that would like that type of talk, you could contact the Urban Ecology Center out of Milwaukee and they will be willing to come and give a talk at your workplace.  And so the CSA  is about 75% to 80% of our income.  We farm full-time.  We don't have off-farm jobs.  And so that's pretty unusual for farming. The other thing about CSA farming  is that many people that have children,  their children want to continue farming. I live next door to the last dairy farmers in Milwaukee County and  the children are wonderful children, and one is actually going to be going into agricultural marketing, but he really didn't want his children to be farmers.  And many, many children of.  There's a succession plan for many children of CSA farmers  and small organic farmers to take over the farms, which is very wonderful. Another great thing about organic farming and the CSA movement is that there's a conference in La Crosse. It's MOSES. Midwest Organic Sustainable Educational Services.  They've been around 25 years.  It's the largest organic conference in the country. And it is just full of young people,  which is so heartening to see. And finding creative ways to find land,  and just such enthusiasm.  And also universities are starting to get involved with research and to help with farmers. When we started out, it was all farmer to farmer helping. Helping find equipment, helping with seed varieties,  helping with pests, helping with anything. You could and still call anybody  that I've met and ask them a question. 

 There's no competition. There's a great sharing of knowledge. Part of it was out of necessity because there wasn't research or help through the university for organic farming.  And I always say if you go to the conference, you move into a different city where everybody thinks alike, and then you come home and you walk into a grocery store and you feel like you've landed on a different planet because you've just been in a different environment. And it's a great, big community  that is just very supportive and very caring. And I don't have.  I hopefully have covered all the concept of CSAs, the general concepts.  Thank you.  (audience applauding)   - I'm Chris Russin, I'm your program chair