“Without Love in the Dream, It Will Never Come True”

With a week of snow and freezing temperatures in our current future, the 2022 Growing Season is coming to an end. Currently, all of our vegetable crops in the field are covered and tucked in with frost cloth. The Irrigation canal has now been empty for a couple of weeks so all outdoor crops can utilize mother nature’s precipitation now to keep them watered. The last of our tomatoes and peppers have been picked, the raspberries are finally starting to slow down and we actually still have flowers in our greenhouses. But after this week, I am sure they will come to rest, too.

We have one final market you can find us at: Central Oregon Fill Your Pantry bulk-buying pop-up market on November 12 at the Deschutes County Fairground. But otherwise we do not have plans for winter farming and we hope to rest easy this winter and focus on planning for the 2023 Season, along with a couple handfuls of winter/ early spring projects.

We do have some exciting news to share - there has come an opportunity to lease the home/property at 62910 Eagle Rd, directly across the shared driveway from 62900 Eagle Rd, aka, Bend Farm, aka 2.0. The house sits on 4.8 acres of farmland with water rights and is just steps away from 2.0. It is the white house on your left when driving toward the farm after turning from Eagle Rd (see diagram below, new property highlighted in yellow). We are thrille to move in next month and feel fortunate to have this opportunity come our way. Having the ability to live so close to the farm in NE Bend will ease a lot of our current efficiency issues and can help our farm continue to be sustainable. We get our time back and will have less expenses. We are excited for the endless opportunities this new lease could bring to us as we grow our business.

There are a LOT of farmers, even in this area that lease their farm land due to increasing land prices. At the moment it isn’t possible for us to buy property in Central Oregon due to rising costs and the financial situation of our newly formed business. So how can we remain sustainable? We have to be creative and resourceful. The reason we are leaving 1.0, our farm in Redmond, was a bit out of our hands. Our landlord has amended our farm lease from two years to one, so we quickly started looking for options for our next move. We know that a move to Bend could mean sustaining some pretty serious losses; losing some of our Redmond customers, the hard work, time and money and the substantial part of our souls which we put into that farm, it does give us good reason to consolidate our efforts and strictly farm in NE Bend.

So, yes we will be moving again this winter (project #1). The move will mean we have to do several build-outs. Firstly, we will work on a Chicken Coop/ Run Rebuild at 3.0 (new property is now aka 3.0). With the new location, we are planning on increasing our chicken capacity so we can have more organic eggs for CSA, market as well as local wholesale customers. Another thing we need to rebuild is our Propagation Tunnel and build new energy efficient heated tables for our tomato and pepper starts. Having the Prop House there will be a huge contribution to improving efficiency and preventing loss early on in the season. We have also applied to receive an NRCS grant for two 100 ft. Caterpillar Tunnels that will be dedicated to early spring crops. Once we finish harvesting those early vegetable crops we will flip them into flower tunnels and dedicate some space to our winter squash crop.

3.0 also includes a beautiful field in front of the house that is (literally) dying to be watered. After we work out some irrigation kinks, we may cover crop one side of it, to get some nutrients and bio mass into the soil. The other side we will put to use for cold-hardy annual and perennial flowers. Which I am sure will look super cute. That entails bed making, and according to the current crop plan, we will need 26, 50ft beds. We predict this should be a good amount of work.

There are probably several other projects that we forgot to list or haven't yet come into fruition. Alas, we will have plenty to do off-season. We have a lot to look back on this year with regards to how we did as small business owners and as organic farmers and our success next year will hinge on how well we can adapt and make changes to improve our efficiencies.

Is our business sustainable, financially? During our first year we had high start up costs but low expenses. We technically broke even with the initial investments we made into the company. This year we sold out of our CSA Membership for vegetables and did pretty well with our Flower CSA. We were also pleasantly surprised about the AMAZING increase over Last Years Sales at both the Redmond Farmers Market and Northwest Crossing Farmers Market in Bend. However, our costs were pretty high for the additional expenses that come with running two separate farm locations: labor for farm coverage and the costs that come with housing interns, compost and soil, irrigation lines, and the the soaring prices of gas did not help much either. TIME was also a very expensive resource we wasted a lot of, by going back and forth between the two locations.

Are we producing as much food as possible in a small space, organically, to the local community? We could definitely be growing more and selling more. A true Market Farm works similar to the flow of a restaurant: Setting the table, sitting your guests down, taking their order, feeding your guests, cleaning up and setting the table after they leave, then sitting down your next guests… “burn and turn” they sometimes call it. Get as many customers through the door to get more product out. This is the mentality we need in order to constantly have production coming out of the farm. We need to have a tight crop plan, we need to do more succession planting, incorporate inter-planting and constantly flip beds. This new lease opportunity will specifically solve this problem as well as grant us the time we need to keep our small business sustainable.

Do we still LOVE what we do? YES! There is so much love put into our farm. Although we face many obstacles, we still have so much freedom doing this job. There is so much satisfaction. Every day there is a new reason to continue doing what we do. We are promoting positive health and wellness to our community. We are rich in life. This is a dream we had come true and we couldn’t ask for anything more.

Small Farming is a great way of life and our country needs more of them. We appreciate having you as supporters and we hope the Small Farm Movement continues to prove its importance especially during these times of inflation, potential recession, climate change, and supply chain issues. We are firm believers and proponents that this is the direction we need to go in order to improve our broken food system and the health of ourselves and the planet.