Swamp Creek Produce

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The individual groups, however, didn't agree with this: policy. In effect, they were telling the larger organization; "Look, we formed to bring people good, cheap food so make the prices competitive with those of commercial markets, or we'll buy elsewhere." That left us in a strange position: We could either accept less money (a substantial reduction, with a ton of vegetables changing hands every week), or we could find and develop another market hardly possible at that stage.

The second hassle involved containers. Our gripe was that our baskets weren't being returned and at 75 cents each, we couldn't stand the loss very long. The federation didn't like the baskets anyhow because they didn't stack well, so its members proposed a deal: They'd supply us with containers for everything but tomatoes, if we'd use special tomato boxes (which held only two layers to reduce damage, and which stacked properly in the trucks). Again, we had little choice, and spent $130 on boxes at ,41a apiece.

All containers were supposed to be recycled, but sometime weren't. We sent the member coops a mimeographed newsletter explaining why the packing materials had to be returned, and were disappointed with the negative feedback we received.

The worst, however, was yet to come. We'd already lost on of our out of state buyers, as you'll remember and ,we soon found that the other was having interpersonal troubles. Due to these difficulties and a very unreliable truck, their pickups became sporadic. Meanwhile the co op union nearest us ha:

reshuffled its management, and the new leaders completely disregarded the federation's commitment to buy only from us. Drought was reducing the quantity (though not the quality) of our vegetables week by week, yet we still had more than we could sell because our only customer was dealing with other growers. We were, in fact, stuck with a huge amount of perishable produce.

After much thought, a few phone calls, and a bit of building, we implemented the only solutions we could think of: we set up a vegetable stand at the gas station where Sue worked in the mornings (it did quite well!), auctioned tomatoes and peppers at the farmers' market nearby, and bartered and sold locally as much as we could. We canned, froze, and dried twice the amount of produce we needed. In a desperate effort to offset some of our losses, we even located an additional 25 acres (rent free from the bus company) and planted them to buckwheat. Finally, I'm sorry to say, we built one of the biggest compost piles you've ever seen.

The crash came the third week in August. We decided to go canoeing (for our first weekend away from the farm), began the routine harvest a day earlier than usual and were halfway through when the phone rang. It was Martin, and the message was, "Stop picking!" What? "Yeah, that's right, stop!"

Martin, it seemed, had just talked to the federation and learned that its organizers intended to go on vacation for a month the first we'd heard of such a plan. Since the managers wouldn't be back until school opened at the end of September, and since their coolers were already full, they wouldn't need much for the next four weeks (which just happened to be our garden's period of heaviest production!).

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