Annual Update 2023: Business and Administration
Our first Annual Update for 2023 centers on the larger business and administrative changes we're working on. The topics included in this update are our new building, dropping our USDA Organic certification, and a review of our labor systems, including our participation in the H2A program.
This update is the first of four. Other topics of focus include Veggie Production, Livestock Production, and Conservation.
Our laying flock nice and warm in the new barn space! A total game-changer for winter animal chores. Thank you to crew member George for this photo!
Our New Building!
As some of you may know, the farm is losing a long-time partner business, Twenty Paces, next season. After 8 years of dairying sheep on the west side of the Bellair property, the Ewes Guys are moving on to other life pursuits. Seeing their business grow and now close has been a privilege and a learning opportunity. They have always been excellent stewards of their pastures and great neighbors, farm partners, and friends. It will be sad to see them go.
As with many things, new beginnings come along with endings and now that Twenty Paces has moved out of the Dairy Barn, Bellair Produce LLC will be moving in! The building consists of 4 general areas: a livestock-ready large pole barn, a workshop space, an office, and a VDACS-inspectable kitchen area that served as the cheesemaking area.
For 2023, we are setting realistic expectations for ourselves. With so many other projects on our plate at the moment, we will hold off on investing in or utilizing the kitchen area much this year, even though we have big dreams for the future. More on that in a future Annual Update, perhaps!
For the time being, we are planning on using the barn for its livestock handling capabilities and its storage capacity. We've already got our chickens up there in their new winter home. It's hard to tell because they are chickens, but it seems like they are so much happier this winter because of it! I mean, I would be too. Dry straw is so much better than cold mud! It's nice to improve the chickens' quality of life and keep them off the pastures when it is so sloppy anyway.
We're also already utilizing the barn to load out hogs. If you've never loaded hogs, you should know that it's one of those things that can be done the easy way or the hard way. Having a barn facility with easy trailer access, a roof, and sturdy panels is definitely laying the foundations for more easy loads, especially in "mud season" as we call it here.
On the storage front, we've been busting at the seams down here in the main barn for quite some time now. The addition of our new walk-in freezer was revolutionary and a GREAT investment for us, but that doesn't help us out when it comes to refrigerated or dry goods. In the summer season when the produce is rolling in, we are often limited by the amount of space we have in our walk-in cooler and cool bot room in the CSA barn. We're also holding everything at one temperature since it all is sharing the space together. The Dairy Barn has additional walk-in cooling units and we plan to expand into those. Once we tweak the temps and humidity levels, we should be able to create specific storage areas for summer crops like summer squash and okra and winter storage crops like potatoes and sweet potatoes as differentiated from the leafy greens cooler. In the end, this will mean better storage quality for our veg and an easier time keeping things organized and accessible.
Cheers to a new space and new opportunities that come with it!
Onions planted in real (petroleum based) plastic beds for weed control.
We're dropping our Organic Certification
Another big news item to share is that as of 2023, we will be surrendering our USDA Organic certificate. We've been thinking about this for a long time and there are a lot of factors that have gone into this decision. We'll include the main reasons below, but the first things to make clear are:
1) This decision will NOT have an impact on the ways in which we are farming and our growing practices will remain almost 100% the same (see below for plastic mulch change)
2) We value transparency and have built our business on it! That's why we're letting you know about this up front!
3) This may not be the end of the story! We are looking into Certified Naturally Grown and other options that would allow us to indicate our growing practices within parameters we can accommodate.
4) We're happy to answer any follow-up questions about this or any other topic! Email works best for us.
As for why we're dropping our certification, read on below.
Preference to use biodegradable materials over traditional petroleum based plastics
One of the stipulations of the Organic label is that you must only use soil inputs on the USDA Organic Approved Materials list. In general, this isn't an onerous task because for the most part, the list is only excluding synthetic chemicals and fertilizers we have no interest in anyway. However, when it comes to one specific product, we have our (deep) disagreement with this list. We use plastic "mulch," a thin film we lay down with a tractor, to keep weed pressure down for our longer-season crops. There are two general types of plastic mulch available on the market: regular petroleum based plastic and biodegradable "plastic" film made from a corn starch base. For regular plastic, we obviously have to send in a crew at the end of the season to pick up and remove that trash from the field, which is a LOT of work and expense. In theory, we can reduce our labor dollars AND trash generation a LOT if we can use more of the biodegradable options.
The folks who make the biodgradable mulch (examples include Biotelo and FilmOrganic) generally have very tight patents on their products as they have spent a lot of money researching and developing their formulations. There is information available about the general makeup of these products, however, for a couple of reasons, the USDA Organic certifiers do not include these products on their Approved Materials list. Those reasons include that there's not a full disclosure of the component ingredients and/or no way to ensure that GMO corn is not an ingredient (though most companies say they do not use GMO corn). Because these products aren't on the Approved Materials list doesn't mean we can't use them, but does mean that we are supposed to "remove them at the end of the season." I put that in quotes because it is a joke. These products are meant to break down and biodegrade, making them impossible to clean up. Further, that defeats the purpose of using these products in the first place!
Ironically, the USDA organic label has no problem with pretroleum-based, non-renewable, non-recyclable plastic film (as long as it is removed at the end of the season). It has felt like more and more of a charade to interact with our certifiers as more of these biodegradable options come on the marketplace. It seems like many of them know what a facade it is and personally, I'm just not one to play that game. Dropping our certification for me removes the ethical block: we can use these products and not have to pretend to remove them. We can also save hundreds of pounds of plastic from the landfill each year and thousands of labor dollars.
Administrative cost and preference
Annually, we pay out about $2000 in certification and inspection fees to participate in the program. This figure does not include the administrative labor it takes to record and compile all the records needed nor the time spent with the inspector escorting them around the farm. Those costs are estimated at an additional $1500 for a total of $3500 annually. It's a cost that's not abhorrent, but not unnoticeable, either! Most of the labor around the annual recordkeeping and filing falls to me, Michelle, as does the meeting with the inspector. I'll be honest: I have grown to hate it. It feels more and more like an arbitrary label and an unnecessary part of my job that I slog through.
Acknowledgement of our trust-based community
The final reason that solidified this decision is the acknowledgement of the fact that you, our customers, trust us! We communicate with you directly and frequently and we just don't think, if we explain our reasoning, that we will face any severe negative consequences by dropping this certification. If we were a wholesale-only farm, it would be a different question and a different evaluation, but for us, we thought that our customers would be fine with the decision as long as they knew nothing would change about the way we're farming. If you shop with us and still have questions about organic certification or any other topic, we encourage you to email us!
Part of our 2022 Crew! Everyone in this photo is returning for 2023 in some capacity and we’re so happy about that!
Labor: a review and a look forward
Last year, we made a big shift in our labor strategy on the farm. After hiring exclusively local workers for over a decade, we enrolled in the H2A Program, the US Department of Labor's program for migrant workers. We got four new staff from Veracruz, Mexico, who arrived in late March after some nail-biting Covid-vaccination delays.
We knew the first year would be hard, and it was. Working with four completely new staff, a language barrier, and cultural differences was a challenge. But the guys were awesome: grateful and ready to help. My spanish went from "nonexistent" to "pretty bad" and I'm still learning every day.
Getting involved with H2A was in response to long-standing issues we were having with hiring and retaining an all-local crew on our scale of farm. You can read more about that in last year's annual update. Honestly, I don't know where we would have ended up last year if we hadn't taken that leap given the labor market realities of that time. Applications to work on our farm were at an all-time low and I think we offered employment to every single person who contacted us, and we still came up short. If we hadn't had those four guys I don't know what would have happened.
Luckily, this year seems like a changed scenario, at least for us. We're working on hiring now and have a much bigger applicant pool. Plus, our four Veracruzanos are all looking forward to returning! After putting in the hard work last year, we feel that this will be the year we can leverage that work toward our ultimate goal, which is to create a team of professionals who we can compensate well and retain for seasons to come.
Our labor spending is higher than ever, and we think that's a good thing! But we need to make sure that financially we can afford this investment in people, the most powerful component of our business.
Ultimately, we still have a long way to go, but also we have come so far already. Our Administrator, Amanda, and our Market Manager, Tina, are both returning. We're building a robust Livestock team. We're looking for a new Greenhouse Manager and our 2022 GH Manager will be around to help train the successor! All in all, we're retaining a large part of our 2022 staff. As far as wages, we were at an hourly average of $11.27 per hour in 2019 before Nat and I took over. Now, we are at an average of $14.16 (plus housing, transportation, sick time, vacation, eggs and veg) for our H2A staff, and $15.47 (plus sick time, vacation, eggs, and veg) for local hourly staff excluding market part-timers and salaried managers.