Volume 22, Week 13

Full share &🐛 green🐛half shares

218 Gates Avenue between Classon and Franklin
(IMPACCT Brooklyn at the Gibbs Mansion)
5:00 to 7:30 pm

Order local extras from Pleasant Valley Farm!

Hello! We are Pleasant Valley Farm located just a bit north of Windflower Farm. We have run a small vegetable farm for over 30 years and transitioned to an online custom order store in 2020. Now, we are expanding and offering a full add-on service for CSAs with over 400 local top quality products. We offer a full range of local and organic meats including chicken, beef, pork and turkey, cheese, yogurt, teas, spices, pasta, grains, beans, peanut butter, jams, bread and much more! All of these products are made locally by awesome farmers and artisans. Currently, we pack orders every other week for your CSA site. The deadline to order is 8am on Wednesday for Thursday CSA distributions. The next delivery date is September 7th. If you have any questions, you are welcome to reach out to us directly at farm.pvf@gmail.com. Our store link is https://pleasantvalleyfarm.localline.ca/csa.

This week’s share

  • Tomatoes

  • Sweet peppers

  • Eggplants

  • Squash

  • Yellow onions

  • Butterhead lettuce

  • Bok choy

  • Flat Italian Parsley bunches

  • Genovese basil bunches

  • Fruit: Pennsylvania plums, complements of Yonder Farms

  • Extras: bread, eggs, granola, and Pleasant Valley Farm deliveries!

    Somehow, we find ourselves in the second half of the delivery season. Busy-ness has a way of stealing time. Labor Day is just two weeks off. Soon, summer vegetables will be replaced with fall crops. But not yet. Next week, we’ll send arugula, kale, lettuce, radishes, and red onions, along with tomatoes and sweet peppers.

News from Windflower Farm

For a very small business, we are subject to a dizzying array of regulations. Here’s a sampling.

 

Food safety. Next week, Melissa, who is from the NYS Department of Agriculture and Markets, will come to enforce the new Food Safety and Modernization Act rules. The federal government wants to see sanitizers used in our wash water, they want to see a paper trail that tracks our produce from a specific field to a specific market (your CSA site), and they want to see that our staff has been fully trained in topics having to do with personal hygiene. These are the steps intended to keep your food safe to eat.

Organic certification. Sometime in early September, we’ll see Richard, the new inspector from Pennsylvania Certified Organic, our National Organic Program (NOP) certifier. He’ll be here for an entire day, walking fields, looking at records and conducting two kinds of audits – all of which are designed to test our assertion that we indeed farm using nothing but NOP-sanctioned practices. This is what separates us from those who ask you to take their word for it. Although, for the $3000 this costs us annually, I’d prefer you took my word for it!

Worker safety. We regularly see Ambar, the NYS Department of Labor inspector. She arrived prior to our start in the spring and has visited regularly since. She reviews our written work agreements, wage rates, overtime hours, work conditions and payroll taxes. Ambar also makes sure that we have Workmen’s Compensation Insurance, and she does that by subjecting us to an annual third-party audit. And, this year, she delivered a set of videos on sexual harassment in the workplace for our team. Not necessary here, but no doubt useful elsewhere. Our NYS Department of Health inspector’s name is Joseph. He visits twice annually for inspections of our housing and water. Do smoke alarms work, is the water safe to drink, is there hot shower water, etc. He’ll also poke around the place – this year he was in the utility room to make sure that the washing machine was working properly and that the toilet was properly vented. These steps are designed to keep workers safe and safe from exploitation.

Truck safety. Kevin, our USDOT contact makes sure that we have a safe truck and that we are paying all the appropriate highway use taxes. We maintain fire extinguishers, emergency flares and triangles, and a driver’s log of hours driving and hours resting. The Isuzu people maintain my truck safety checklist and the State police regularly direct us into truck stops for impromptu checks of their own. We are in contact with the NYS Thruway Authority, who has given us tags with which to pay our bills, the NYC Traffic Enforcement people, who occasionally give us tickets during unloading, and, of course, the NYC Department of Finance when my plea fails to get me out of a fine.

When I get past the time and effort all of this requires, it boils down to this: safe workers, safe organic food, and a safe truck with which to deliver it. I think these are worth a few headaches.  

Have a great week, Ted

 
Veronica