me&thegals
A Major Squash & Pumpkin Lover
Here's the thing. Even at high prices, I still get very little for my time. I could never, ever afford health insurance without getting much bigger. Can't afford nice vacations. Can't even afford new clothes. So why the heck would I lower my prices?
I don't have organic meat, but we do have pastured, and it sells for $3/lb. Just regular feed costs enough to drive our prices up. We buy 1 ton at a time, not the 1000s or more that a factory farm would be buying.
I started the organic certification process last year for our veggies, and it overwhelmed me. I have a college education, and yet I was absolutely floored by the process. I will try again in the coming year. Most people will just trust their farmer to be honest about how the food is produced, but certified organic is the only way to be sure about a lot of it. Thankfully, people take me at my word thus far. But, to belong to the CSA coalition I belong to, at the size I have gotten to be (20+ families), I am actually required by the coalition to get certified. And this coalition is so hugely supportive in marketing and ongoing education that I will try again next year just to maintain my membership.
Moolie, thank you for the last paragraph! And "true costs" are rarely factored in, either way. The cost of labor is not always/usually reflected in the price of local food. And the price of contamination, pollution, and below-cost-of-living wages for employees are not shown in factory farm food. Kind of like Wal-Mart--you (the generic you) get their goods cheaply, but have you factored in your tax dollars going to provide their employees with state-subsidized health insurance since WM doesn't provide it and they earn so little that they qualify?
Here's another example. In our chaotic mid-summer, we got meat chickens. Due to always being somewhere else, it took us a while to realize a chicken hawk was devastating our pastured bird population. It's lovely for our customers that their birds are pastured, but it ended up being an enormous cost to us. We lost 50 out of 120 birds. Our income was just slashed despite much of the cost already invested in those birds.
I don't have organic meat, but we do have pastured, and it sells for $3/lb. Just regular feed costs enough to drive our prices up. We buy 1 ton at a time, not the 1000s or more that a factory farm would be buying.
I started the organic certification process last year for our veggies, and it overwhelmed me. I have a college education, and yet I was absolutely floored by the process. I will try again in the coming year. Most people will just trust their farmer to be honest about how the food is produced, but certified organic is the only way to be sure about a lot of it. Thankfully, people take me at my word thus far. But, to belong to the CSA coalition I belong to, at the size I have gotten to be (20+ families), I am actually required by the coalition to get certified. And this coalition is so hugely supportive in marketing and ongoing education that I will try again next year just to maintain my membership.
Moolie, thank you for the last paragraph! And "true costs" are rarely factored in, either way. The cost of labor is not always/usually reflected in the price of local food. And the price of contamination, pollution, and below-cost-of-living wages for employees are not shown in factory farm food. Kind of like Wal-Mart--you (the generic you) get their goods cheaply, but have you factored in your tax dollars going to provide their employees with state-subsidized health insurance since WM doesn't provide it and they earn so little that they qualify?
Here's another example. In our chaotic mid-summer, we got meat chickens. Due to always being somewhere else, it took us a while to realize a chicken hawk was devastating our pastured bird population. It's lovely for our customers that their birds are pastured, but it ended up being an enormous cost to us. We lost 50 out of 120 birds. Our income was just slashed despite much of the cost already invested in those birds.