Quality Control in the Coop

Growing high quality, organic produce has become easier as people have gained a greater understanding of how to manage pests and disease, and farmers have adopted good harvest and post-harvest handling practices. Without the quick fix of most herbicides and insecticides, organic farmers must rely on a whole range of pest management practices. These include mechanical control of weeds, crop rotation, biological controls (introducing one organism to control another organism), covering plants at risk of insect predation, keeping plants healthy with appropriate fertilization and irrigation, and much more. Farmers now know the best times of day to harvest each crop, and the optimal temperatures and humidity levels at which to store harvested produce. Even with all this valuable information, organic farmers are constantly challenged by both new and familiar insects, and plant disease. Often, farmers will have to till in or compost crops that have too much insect damage to salvage for market. This can be one of the most difficult aspects of farming. Fortunately, most small, organic farmers are highly diversified- growing up to 50 different crops, so some crop loss is expected and can be tolerated by the whole operation.

In the midst of these challenges, farmers have to consider what their quality standards are. How many holes can a leaf of chard have? How uniform do your bunches of radishes need to be? Retail and wholesale buyers and chefs have very high standards for quality. Customers who buy at growers markets also tend to pick out the best-looking produce in a booth.

Quality control has been the single greatest challenge of running a cooperative CSA. We all want the boxes to look good and our members to be satisfied, but there have been different ideas of what quality looks like. A year and a half ago, the coop farmers set out to create quality standards. We sat down with a list of the fruits and vegetables we offer and came up with specifications for what was acceptable to put in the CSA boxes. Some farmers wanted the standards to be more lenient- suggesting that people who join a CSA are accepting part of the risk in the farms, and should understand a certain amount of crop degradation. In the end, we agreed to adopt very high quality standards, based on the rationale that CSA members are paying for high quality produce and are entrusting us to put the best produce in their boxes.

We continue to try to deliver high quality produce to our members every week, but our system is not perfect.
Please let us know if any item you receive seems at all questionable. We rely on your feedback to make our CSA topnotch. We will also gladly replace any item in your box the following week.

Now, back to those carrots...