“Well, the First Days are the Hardest, Don’t You Worry Anymore.”
At Fibonacci Farm, we are about to head into our third growing season and feel more prepared than ever. With a new land addition to the farm, exciting farmers market updates and our recent investments in equipment and infrastructure, we are going into the season with a bang!
It has definitely been anything but easy starting a small farm business. Honestly though, despite all of the challenges we have faced so far, we are making. it. happen. We’ve been focusing on making “the right decisions”, and we’ve been doing this by realizing what our motivations are and what is valuable to us. Our Motivation = Provide local + organic food to the community. Our Values = Being a member of the community, always having food available to us, and reversing the negative effects of climate change. We find that when we take “Money” aspect out of the equation, then it allows us to open your eyes to what’s really important. We are manifesting what we want and we are making those dreams come true.
I mean… we must have stared at the house we now live in for the entire year when we were working at our farm in Bend. We literally must have manifested it “for rent” at the exact time we needed a new place to live.
We’ve invested a lot in infrastructure this season: Firstly, the new farm we rent in Bend now is double the price we were paying in Redmond. But we know this is THE best investment we’ve made this season thus far: for us, our customers and our business as a whole and totally worth it. We also unexpectedly just purchased a 100 foot Caterpillar tunnel… Our application we submitted to NRCS for a grant award to purchase two greenhouse tunnels has been declined. We needed the additional tunnels for flowers, since we are down three tunnels from our Flower Farm in Redmond and another one for an early round of crops to sell in May. So we just closed our eyes, pressed the magic “ purchase now” button and bought ourselves a $3,000 greenhouse.
The new house has brought us so much opportunity for a successful start to the growing season. We have an amazing garage that we can utilize as a CSA Pickup Stand during the season. There is an additional bedroom we can utilize as our indoor grow room - so there is no possible way we can lose our young plants to frost like we had last year. We also just built our 55 foot propagation house on our driveway! It sits parallel to our house which is great for efficiency and also protects it from the wind. And best of all, it is steps away from our already amazing farm we lease from our friends and now neighbors.
Although we didn’t receive the NRCS Tunnel Grant we were awarded the High Desert Food and Farm Alliance Efficiency Grant which is paying for 60% of our heated greenhouse project. Woot! This entailed installing a propane tank, digging a trench for the line to reach the greenhouse and installing the heater and the rack. The project just finalized last week and once this storm blows over of single digit temps this weekend, we are going to get some plants in the ground. This is great news for our tomato, cucumber and spring pea lovers as those crops are expected to be ready in June.
Another unexpected turn of events is that this year we are participating in the Bend Farmer’s Market on Wednesdays! Our original business plan for 2023 was to increase our CSA and participate in just one farmer’s market. However, that all changed when the Bend Market switched their hours from 2pm- 6pm to 11am - 3pm, which coincidentally works perfectly with our CSA, Market and Harvest schedule. Just last week we received the acceptance email and we’re stoked! To make this happen, we are now going down to revert back to a Weekly total of 25 Vegetable Shares and 20 Flower Bouquet Shares. So this season you can find our booth there as well as the NWX Farmers Market in Bend on Saturday’s from 10am - 2pm.
Our chickens are settled into their new chicken coop and chicken run. A big upgrade to where they lived before. We did however, encounter some growing pains with predators…The first week they moved into their new coop we lost 13 beautiful hens. One morning, we walked over there and it looked like the chickens exploded. There were only feathers, but they were EVERYWHERE and the chickens were missing entirely. We noticed there was a small hole dug into the side of the chicken coop and our electric fence also had a dead battery. We are pretty certain it was a fox. But now, it looks like we have an American Bald Eagle problem as we found one eating a chicken in our front yard just the other day. It wasn’t ours. But damn… it was a sight to see.
We can say that our new baby chicks, a total of 61, born on 12/27/22 (Capricorns) are doing great! They look so healthy and happy and they eat a ton of food. They’ve quadrupled in size since we got them and will start laying in May. Being able to have locally sourced eggs for our community is important, especially after the recent egg shortage. Although our friends have asked us if we’re “rolling in the dough” since we are hustling eggs, it is actually a big investment. Our chickens only eat Organic Feed which is $33 for a 50lb bag. There are also constant predators like coyote, fox, raccoon and the infamous Avian Flu that all farmers throughout the WORLD are worried about. Current conversations include whether or not we need to build overhead infrastructure for bird flu prevention (and now from American Bald Eagles) and how we can do it without breaking the bank…
With March just around the corner, our days get busier by the new daily chores, but thankfully, the days are getting longer which helps us get more done. We learn to work together better as we go into this season being able to finally work side by side rather than working at separate farms. Everything we did last year and the decisions we made brought us to this point which we know is a great place for us to be. We are giving 1000% to the 2023 Season and can’t wait to share it all with our community.
We thank all of you that continually support us and small farms as a whole. Your support helps make a smart, locally sourced food system work. We together are building our community to be stronger, healthier and wiser, and that’s pretty great. :)
