Auto Renew & Important CSA Changes for Next Season

We’re making some significant changes to our CSA Share offering for 2024 and we wanted to let you know before the auto-renew period happens. We have a rather long list of changes and we thought we’d share our rationale with you as well. To help you navigate through this email we’ve bolded the changes we’ve made with further explanation in regular text. Then, at the bottom of this email we have our underlying rationale for these changes.

For those who are new members this year and as a refresher for others our CSA auto-renews with your preferences, addons, delivery location and settings to our next season in 2024. Auto renew offers a hassle free way for you to secure your spot in our 2024 season without having to worry about signing up before we’re sold out. You can opt out of auto-renew by changing your settings on your Harvie account. We’ll send more information on auto-renew soon.

2024 CSA Changes

We’re dropping Tuesday as a delivery day option. We’re also no longer planning on attending the Tuesday market in Mankato. For the past couple years we’ve had some difficulties securing reliable labor and inevitably it means that our Sunday-Monday “weekend” turns into at least one of us having to work on Monday to keep the farm going. That was a lot easier to do before Addie joined our lives and now it feels like when we have to work on Monday that we are losing precious time with our daughter. By dropping the Tuesday market and CSA Delivery day it allows us to reliably take Sunday-Monday off as our “weekend” without feeling the pressure of having to potentially be available to work on Monday if our staff don’t work out.

Adding an every other week delivery option. This idea spurred from our winter CSA shares and we’ve realized that sometimes people feel overwhelmed by the half share and want a smaller option. While we won't have smaller shares the bi-weekly option will have the same effect and Harvie makes it easy for both you and us to have a bi-weekly option.

Slightly increasing the number of items per week and the weekly price. This one takes a little bit of explaining to get through but the gist of it is that for our CSA each individual item in your CSA share is priced individually (lettuce mix $5/bag, green onions $4/bunch, etc) and Harvie fills your shares with items based on your preferences and our produce availability up to your share size value. Since 2020 our half share has been $20/week and our full share is $40/week.

We’re increasing the share size value to $25/week for half shares and $50/week for full shares. This essentially means that the average half share will see 1-2 additional items per week and the average full share will see 2-3 additional items per week. We think that coupled with the option to do every other week delivery that this will work out well for folks.

Our CSA share has been priced at $20/week for a half share and $40/week for a full share since 2020 and with inflation and increased costs of production (seeds, fuel, fertilizer, insurance, have all increased) we need to make this adjustment to ensure the continued success of our CSA program.

The Big Picture: Why We’re Making These Changes
Ultimately, we’re making these changes to have a better farm-family-life balance. Lara and I both feel strongly that it’s extremely important for us to have boundaries when it comes to the farm. The todo list for the farm is endless and without boundaries we will lose precious time with our daughter that we’ll never get back. Furthermore, we’ve seen countless examples during our farming career of other farms discontinuing their CSA or quitting farming altogether because they burn out. Setting boundaries helps us to avoid burnout so that we can continue to grow healthy, sustainable produce for you and your family.

We’ve found that delivering CSAs and doing markets on both Tuesday and Thursday is unsustainable long term. It essentially means that someone has to be harvesting and preparing for markets/CSA on Monday, Wednesday and Friday leaving only Sunday as a guaranteed day off. Without reliable staff to work Monday (so that we could secure our 2 day weekend) we end up losing our weekends during the summer and we don’t feel like that is sustainable for our farm long term.

Farm life can be very rewarding but also very stressful. The weeds never quit growing and the weather is increasingly unpredictable. We stress over the threat of wind, excessive rain, too little rain, hail & more. We’re making these changes because these are things we can control and they’re things we can do to ensure our farm is sustainable long term.

To Conclude:
These feel like really big changes for us. We’ve been doing 3 markets per week for a number of years now and our CSA through Harvie has been basically unchanged since 2020. We’re excited about these changes and think it will drastically improve our farm-family-life balance.

We’d love to hear from you regarding these changes. We realize that not everyone will be happy with these changes but we feel like they’re necessary for the farm to continue to be successful well into the future.

Thank you,

Dan, Lara & Addie Zimmerli