CSA Share Delivery – From the Beginning

Jesse, Joe, Josh one of the first worker shares and David on the packing line our second season.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how we deliver your produce. This week I want to talk about how the delivery has changed over the past 20 years, as the farm has grown. Presently we deliver about 1200 vegetable shares and 225 fruit shares every week; our first year we delivered 50 vegetable shares.

In the early years of the farm our delivery day was on Monday, because Barb and David were still working jobs in Madison for most of the work week. In that first year nearly all of our harvest, washing and bagging happened on Monday. Our only cooler was an old refrigerator, found on the curb of the near east side. The first season we packed share boxes around two metal tables which we still use in the packing shed and at our events. Each box was labeled with the member’s name. Since we knew almost all of our members that first year (most of them were friends from the near east site who bravely supported this crazy idea of ours) we could give someone more or less of a vegetable if we knew their preferences. We delivered all of the shares in a 1989 Dodge Caravan, to two sites; the current Jenifer Street site and the Mason Street site which was a site until two years ago.

Our second year we added improvements that are still an important part of the farm. We added our first walk in cooler which we still use, allowing us to harvest earlier in the week. We also greatly improved our box packing area. We filled in the old dairy barn manure gutters and added our box packing line, which has only been slightly modified over the past 19 years. Our box packing line was built from parts of the old bowling alley at the Eagles Club, that Joe Schmitt salvaged when it was torn down to build Willy Street Coop. We also added a trailer that we towed behind the minivan for our deliveries. It had a canvas cover draped over metal bows, kind of looked like a gypsy caravan.

Over the years we have continued to make changes to our delivery system. After two years we switched the delivery day to Thursday and began to only pack and deliver the shares on Thursday; harvest happened prior to Thursday. We began renting trucks from Ryder for our deliveries to replace the minivan and then eventually bought our own box truck which we also used for harvest. We have added (and gotten rid of) trucks until we got to our present fleet of two box trucks and two box trailers which we use to deliver to 34 sites. We added a loading dock, so we no longer had to get a running start to load the boxes onto the truck. We also switched from wax boxes that we had to assemble as we packed them, to the plastic boxes that we use today.

The delivery process has evolved and has become much more efficient over the years. Even though the farm is now over twenty times bigger than when we began, we are still able to pack and deliver all of the shares in one day.

Jesse

Box packing line 1995

Set up for the pack our first year.

All of the boxes assembled and labeled.

Ready for the pack our second year.

Barb leaving for the delivery.