TL;DR

Today we harvested broccoli raab, purple top turnips, tatsoi, and loose leaf kale. I also thought a lot about next year and how the addition of the new general store will affect the operations I experienced this season to support the CSA, and when the role of a produce manager becomes necessary for a farm.

At Some Point and Scale

Every farm is different in its people, its resources, and its goals. Every farm has at least one person whose responsibilities include making sure that the right produce gets to the right people at the right time at a level of quality and consistency needed to ensure continued business. If this doesn’t happen, the farm doesn’t make money.

Sometimes these responsibilities are shared among multiple people and as such the level of detail and precision required can vary greatly. But more often on small farms, they are lumped together into the duties of a single person already doing other jobs, usually the primary operator. I call this the ‘all the things’ role since it’s a role that requires a specific person to do everything, or at least be able to delegate extremely effectively.

Combining responsibilities is a necessity when there are limited resources, and until there’s simply not enough time to justify another hire or adjustment to work scope, that person has these extra plates to spin. Sometimes having one person do most of the things is just easier from a communication perspective; since it’s the same person, nothing needs to be communicated…until it does, someone gets sick or injured, and there’s no backup for ‘all the things’ that person juggled.

Different Needs and Expectations

Now that the general store is open, the needs and expectations of the farm have changed. Next year, there will be three main outbound channels to cover: the CSA, the general store, and deliveries (technically part of the CSA, but requiring different processes and time spend). Potentially add to that pop-up markets, pre-orders for delivery to the general store (non-variable stock) and even some restaurant demand…each with different expectations and desires for different kinds of produce…and it becomes clear that the responsibility of making sure these distributions are satisfied increases significantly.

The general store often gets the most visually stunning produce (particularly now that the CSA is over) because in retail settings, there’s an increased focus on presentation and aesthetics. Particularly in a produce store in Essex Massachusetts, the casual consumer might not understand why there are a few wild turkey peck scars on the outside of a pumpkin, passing it up for a perfectly smooth one or not buying it at all. So we hand wash the outsides of all the best and biggest gourds we send over there…and similar with other produce.

For the CSA members, slightly smaller or bigger heads of lettuce, or gourds with a little dust from the field on them, or bagged loose leaf kale instead of plastic packaged kale, is perfectly fine because they know what they’re signing up for. Heck I often prefer my CSA produce a little out of the supermarket ordinary as a sign that it’s real and not mass-produced. People who know trust their farmers and are happy to get produce that’s a little different from what the average grocery shopper gets.

Restaurants care about flavor, but often about size and consistency of shape as well. Why chop 5 small onions when you could chop 1 large onion in a third of the time? Wilted and insect-damaged lettuce is not what their customers have been trained to expect in a ‘fresh garden salad’, so they often discard it. Restaurants distribution channels often also equally benefit and suffer from relationship risk between the chef and the farm. If the chef leaves, the restaurant may lose access to the farm’s produce and the farm may loose the restaurant account.

Each distribution channel has its own set of expectations and desires for different kinds of produce. This must factor in to produce management decisions otherwise people don’t get what they want and there’s not enough of the right stuff to go around.

More On This Tomorrow

Tomorrow I’ll continue this post as a part two, since I’ve run out of writing time today. I intend to cover:

• Prioritizing in Real-time
• The Cost of a Role, Not Another Employee
• When to Add a Produce Manager (and When Not To)

AI Summary from Field Notes

I haven’t seen too many ‘confusion’ events in the LLM reasoning process recently. This is likely due to Qwen3 model updates that get brought down automatically every so often. I haven’t changed the prompts or the way my audio notes are structured, but I’ll check this weekend into the update history to determine what might be contributing to the improved output.

Summary