June 2nd, 2020
What’s in your share?
Boy Choy
Salad Mix
Japanese Salad Turnips
Spinach
Kale
Pickled Radishes (Keep refrigerated)
Thank you. Thinking about each and everyone of you - your participation, generosity, risk, and trust - commands hope, a love, and a spirited, yet calming, awakening deep within. Our gratitude cannot be said or expressed enough. Through acts such as these we enter into something greater than any one of us alone, something even greater than each of us combined, something rare and truly wondrous.
We find ourselves in a historic moment, and from these circumstances we are presented equally historic opportunities for change, for growth. Almost weekly it appears we enter an even more imminent culmination of crises - ongoing environmental destruction and climate destabilization, a global pandemic, domestic militarization and never ending war abroad, and mass poverty amidst opulence.
At the crossroads of this moment and its ensuing crises lay our food and agriculture system. The current globally networked and corporate dominated food system is - at best - broken, though arguably functioning exactly according to plan (*see below). We need to re-localize and retake control over our most basic necessities. While regulation and reform is important, it is not enough; we need Justice for the environment, the landless, the workers, everyday people, and future generations.
It is our belief that Justice is arrived at by providing and demonstrating a viable alternative. That is why we join millions of small-scale farmers and peasants around the world whose practices, rooted in centuries of experience, have long provided nutritional food, environmental stewardship, and dignified work for their families and communities.
Though seriously valued, our protest is not always one taken place in the streets; and it is truly excruciating having to reckon between tending the farm and “showing up.” Surely the comparison is too self-assuring, but in harmony with India’s Salt March and Mahatma Gandhi spinning cloth, so too do we set our sights on the mundane, though absolutely crucial, daily rituals. In providing our most basic necessities we approach self-sufficiency, or for Gandhi, Swadeshi, subsequently enabling our protest and non-cooperation, Satiagraha.
We are in it for the long haul and are forever grateful for your solidarity.
*Non-comprehensive evidence of a broken Food and Agriculture System:
Environmentally - soil erosion, water loss and pollution, deforestation, biodiversity loss, Agriculture is responsible for a third of climate change causing greenhouse gases. Socially - reliance on underpaid and migrant labor, persistent child and slave labor, health and obesity crisis, hunger amidst plenty, farmer/peasant/indigenous refugee crisis. Rural decay, rural under-development, rapid migration to urban slums. Economically - Huge subsidies paid out to non-farmer land owners, financialization of commodity/real estate markets making a few people very wealthy at the expense of millions of livelihoods, non-competitive monopoly controlled markets, incalculable waste costs, automation, job loss. Morally Narrow profit focus, the commoditization of genetics, people, animals, and land with little - if any - regard given to their non-market values, cultural genocide.