Easily our biggest annual cost is labor, making up over half of annual expenses. Without people, none of the veggies you see would grow. Taking a plant from seed to market requires anywhere between 2 and 20 weeks of effort. Time is spent planting or harvesting with maintaining, irrigating, and feeding while they grow. Our high tunnel production has made for more and more time spent trellising crops like tomatoes and cucumbers.
Who is the ideal person? It really takes a passion to either grow or experience growing specialty crops. The amount of effort it takes requires a determination to carry you through the tough times, because they will come. Looking down another 300 foot row buried in weeds on a hot July day gets everyone wondering why they are out there.
We joke about what farm olympics game we’d be good at and how obscure they might be. Who can squat repeatedly for a mile, placing transplants into the soil with a hori-hori? Or who would run the team watermelon race where you cut and huck melons from the field to your teammate in a trailer who catches the 10 pound orb and stack into crates?
My mentor used to say “Love, devotion, surrender”. I think that is a very apt description of how to pursue any challenging passion. Love gets you in the door and keeps you coming back. Love will keep the process growing and your engagement working to improve. Love is the backbone of everything we do at Folks Farm. When conflict and challenge arise, we fall-back to that understanding that everyone and everything is basically good, especially ourselves as we are shown our edges and that we can expand them.
Devotion is the discipline to do the job well all the way through. To cultivate that last row before heading home. I saw last season how when we devoted our time to the plants they responded abundantly. It definitely isn’t always fun and sometimes really sucks, but that sticking power opens up opportunities to increase your personal threshold and amaze yourself. It takes certain kind of meditative skill and peace to make it peacefully down that 300 foot bed weeding with a hula-hoe while not chopping down hundreds lettuces or cutting up the irrigation
Surrender. Let go of any control you think you might have. The season is going to bring what it brings and all we can do is respond, hopefully beautifully. This can be important especially when things go really well. I remember harvesting winter squash for weeks and filing every nook and cranny of our barn to store the crop. We surrendered to that bumper crop and just kept loading the heavy fruits.
It is a hard job. It is a seasonal job. It is a beautiful job that puts you on the frontline of crop production, soil fertility, and the people consuming the products. You facilitate the osmosis it takes for water, sunlight, and a seed to make food to heal people. For a more brass tax job description check the button below. Also please share this with whoever might be interested. We will be interviewing on a rolling basis but taking the month of January off.
Farm News
The Farm Stand will be open Wednesday-Sunday from 10am-5pm. Please come by, supporting our veggies now means more than ever.
What we have in stock:
Greens- Hearts and Souls Salad Mix, Spicy Mix, green and purple napa cabbage, purple and green cabbage, amazing celery, and broccoli
Roots- Red and Gold beets, yellow and red onions, shallots, purple and watermelon daikon radish, garlic, kohlrabi, orange carrots, purple top turnips
Fruits- ORGANIC Apples and Pears from Ela Family Farm, organic winter squash (kabocha, spaghetti, butternut, pie pumpkin)
Local Products- Lehi Ranch Grass-Fed Beef, KREAM Kimchi, Bread Chic Sourdough, Bee Squared Honey (from the farm), Jodar Eggs, Christie Leighton Jewelry, Rey Atelier hyper-local medicinals for home and body