Please help me understand how this works

[mira]

First, thanks to Vernie and the Farm for setting this forum up. My guess is that it will turn out to be very helpful.

I don't want to add to Vernie's likely deluge of inquiries, so if my questions can be answered here, it's possible some of those inquiries will also be answered.

I have a custom farm membership, mostly milk, eggs, yoghurt, cream, and beef. There are just a few produce items and I figured that they would arrive in their own sweet natural time (and am fine with that), not ours or the Farmers' necessarily. For those who need more produce, the U-pick (with Farmers' guidance) makes sense for the time being, as well as picking up on the Farmer's market schedule.

But how does it work with the above animal product items in the custom plan? I doubt that I am skilled enough to go forth and "harvest" my own beef, or milk, for that matter. Nor is it likely that the Farmers or their government regulators want me to do that.

So do we pick up those items on the scheduled Farmer's market days?
Or do we pick them up at the farm at some other pre-determined time?
Has the individual allocation of those custom plan animal products changed?

I live in the Carver/Redland area and was picking up at Sunnyside and changed to Oregon City. So I may be able to pick up for someone who has difficulty getting to the farm on the current schedule.

Mira

[mira]

Even though I read and re-read Vernie's email to farm members, dated July 19 and titled "Farm Market Days...Please Read...and probably re-read" about the changes, the following details did not fully register. Probably because there are numerous other changes and challenges coming at me on a daily basis. I took this morning when I could give my full attention to all the details.

Anyway, for anyone like me who didn't process all the details fully, with advance apologies to Vernie for possibly quoting a bit out of context and clumsy editing, copied below is what I understand now from the email. It is excerpted and copied from the email, and bolded on action, time, and instruction details. What I left out is just as important, if not more so, but not as action directed(for farm members).

"For the next two weeks (starting July 19th) we are going to let the garden catch up.
If your family needs food for these two weeks the garden will be available as a U-Pick this Friday from 1-6pm and again on Monday from 9am-12, Lora will be there to direct you in the garden.

William or Vernie will be available to help you with dairy and meat.
It isn’t necessary to contact us first, we will be here and we’ll be expecting people to arrive.

On the next week you are welcome to come anytime Monday thru Friday (NOT SATURDAY OR SUNDAY. No one will be available to help you).

Starting on Tuesday July 31st we will host the first of two weekly Farm Market Days here at the C’est Naturelle Farms location.

Every Tuesday from 5:30-7pm (just prior to our 7-8pm farm education class) and

Every Saturday from 11-1pm

These Farm Market Days will be your own personal Farmer’s Market. We will harvest everything that is ripe in the garden, make it available for you to choose for yourself the varieties, cuts, and products that you want for the week, and in this way ensure that each member is getting the food that they want and need to feed their family.

It is extremely important that you be on time for these Farm Market Days. We will allot this time to provide your food for you, but the rest of our days are full with the work of farming; chores have to be done, and crops and animals have to be tended. It makes it difficult to do the work of farming if we are accommodating multiple pick-up times. The farm stand will open and close at the times we have set. This will allow us to serve you better and ensure a better experience for you.

The Market itself will be held in the large barn where we held our Farm Tour events.

We are having a new floor put in during the next several weeks, new tables will be built to make picking up your products easier, and we’re hoping to talk some of our very talented farm team members into singing to us while you shop. We want these to be family friendly events, feel free to bring your children and your friends.

Here is how Farm Market Day will work:
1. You’ll be responsible to bring your own bags, baskets, or boxes to carry your items home. Also please remember to bring your egg cartons and all milk bottles back with you as well.

2. When you arrive you will park on the South side of the new, big, green-roofed barn.

3. When you enter the building you will check your name off of the farm member list so that we can keep track of who has picked up their produce.

4. You will be filling your own baskets from the available products.
We will work hard to make sure there is a variety, please realize it will vary from week to week
based on weather and crop.

5. On some weeks, depending on the natural fluctuations of farming we may require that you limit some of what you take. These will be clearly marked each
week.

6. If you are unable to make it to your market day you can send someone in your place to pick up your products.

7. You can choose for yourself which day you will be coming (Tuesday OR Saturday), but we do need you to pick one day and stick with it so that we can be sure
to always have enough milk bottled up for you, butter made, veggies picked, etc.
We do need to split the market days up to ensure there is enough fresh products for everyone.

We know that this is considerably different than what we had planned to do. We understand that for some of you this may prove to be a challenge to work with your schedule and commitments. We’re sorry for it and we wish we could make the home delivery system work, but it has become painfully clear that we will either keep delivering and not farm the way we need to, or focus on raising the best crop we can and be able to keep farming for years to come. That is the bottom line and that’s the difficult decision that we’ve had to come to unanimously as a farm team.

Our goal remains the same: To provide our farm members the highest quality, fresh farm products at a price that they can afford."

To Vernie: please forgive me and correct, amend, or delete in any fashion you see fit. Mostly I did this so that I would "get it."

[shamanofsmile]

It looks like you just reply to the email to let them know if you'll be coming on either Tues or Saturdays and then go pick up your items. They will be there to talk to on those days, too.