Welcome
FRESH Food Connection is a group of farms in southern Wisconsin sustainably producing vegetables, fruit, meat, eggs, cheeses, canned goods, wool, and other farm commodities.
Our farms operate based on the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, inviting customers to purchase a yearly or seasonal share of our production. Vegetable and egg/dairy shares are typically provided weekly or bi-weekly, and other types on a more occasional basis.
As farmers seeking to produce in harmony with nature and with the least environmental impact, we sign onto a sustainability pledge that enumerates the principles we follow. Farms that also have organic certification are noted in the member farm list.
As a group, we are organized democratically, following a collective decision-making process and chartered as a cooperative in the state of Wisconsin, with membership tiers allowing both farmers and the wider public to join. We also act as a growers guild, encouraging communication and information-sharing between farmers in order to hone our professional skills.
Latest FRESH Blog Post Time to Account By - Rob Hilltop Farm
2012-02-10 00:10:44 It's the idle season for farmers and therefore time to look back and assess the productivity of the previous growing-year, if for no other reason than that the IRS wants to know.
At Hilltop, we look at our productivity in some detail at the end of each growing season in order to account to our subscribers what exactly it is they've gotten for the ungodly sum we've charged them.
In looking at the numbers this past year, I was modestly encouraged not by the fact that Erin and I are still making the same $3 an hour as back in 1993 when I started but that we had produced more food for our shares in 2011 than we did the previous year. This wasn't much to do with any particular perspicacity or hard work on our part, but more with mother nature giving us better heat and fewer torrential downpours than in 2010. Accordingly, we were able to provide a total of ≈28,580 calories to each of our households over the course of 20 weeks, up more than 11% on the previous year. (This was fortunate, since we had put up prices 9%.) Our members received ≈67 calories per dollar overall. Income per square foot for the vegetable patch which we account separately from our tree fruits, since the latter provide a much higher return per unit area eased up over the dollar mark for the first time, to $1.07 / sf. This may have been partly a result of our price increase, but we also managed to squeeze better than 55 calories per square foot out of our garden soil, vs ≈44 cal/sf in 2010. Because we use little in the way of mechanized equipment, we were able to produce just over 10 calories of consumable output for each calorie of non-renewable input for the vegetables, which rises to 13.7 cals when the tree fruits are added in.
I thought I would compare these numbers to those generated by conventional agriculture. Over the years, I'd heard from a few different sources that the generally received figure for farming efficiency in the U.S. is, on aggre ... Read More
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