Farm Math and the Unpriceable Deliciousness of Snap Peas

Back on the math train we started last week, we did yet more number crunching this winter for the first time. I promise I will move off math for next week!

Because we are a CSA farm, we’ve never done an item by item cost of production analysis because we know that some of the crops we grow are simply not going to be profitable. I know that it probably costs us $11 a quart or something crazy to grow and harvest peas and get them into the shares, but they’re so important and delicious that we will never cut them out.

But since we kept extra time and labor records this year and inflation made for uncomfortably crazy prices in farm supplies, it seemed worth the effort to take a week and crunch these numbers for the first time. It also is the increasing “in” thing to do, as a lot of farmers in the northeast are getting to our certain age and establishment level and looking ahead to the big questions—can we stay in business as a farm? For those with kids, what does it mean for their chances to get out into the world—do they have money to send them to college? Can we ever earn enough through farming alone to save for retirement? We don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but we do know that it’s likely worth digging in to our farm’s specific numbers more these next few seasons.

And don’t worry members, we aren’t planning to cut beloved crops from the CSA, but it’s more that we just want to know when we are growing something that’s costing more than we think it does.

There’s storm’s a’coming, Pa!

In the past as a CSA, we just calculated the average of what it costs to run the farm and stay in business, and then divided that out over the number of beds we have on the farm. So if a crop brings in less than $600 per 200 linear feet of bed space, we have to pay to produce it. (It’s not that it’s not profitable, but that it’s negatively profitable!) If a crop brings in more than $800 per bed, then it contributes to our income from farming. Crops that fall between these two numbers can go either way, depending on how much labor they entail.

This is why we don’t grow a few crops at all. For instance, sweet corn on our farm (with 2013 pricing) yields about $162 per bed of saleable product, which means it costs us $450 out of pocket for every bed we grow. We don’t mind growing some crops that are below average value, but growing an acre of corn for our size CSA would literally mean that both Matt or I would have to work an second off-farm job overnight during the growing season just to subsidize that corn (and we farmers need our beauty sleep)!

If we don’t get enough sleep, we go out into the world camouflaged as vegetables

Cost of production is a funny thing though, because a farm in a different place or with different tools might find sweet corn an easy crop for them. We aren’t set up for sweet corn and there are so many corn pests around here is why our economics on corn are so terrible.

Big farms (or ones that aren’t mostly growing for a CSA) usually specialize in a small number of crops and run very tight cost of production analysis because if you’re going to sell 1 million units of carrots you need to make sure that it doesn’t cost you fifty cents more per unit than you’re selling them for.

I find this sort of thing incredibly interesting because it’s like a giant math problem with infinite intangible variables.

Like peas, how much do we really value peas?

The first peas of the season (which I promptly ate and did not share)

Sure, you can get them in the store for a couple bucks shipped in from Mexico or China or someplace much cheaper than here but are those ones worth eating at all, even at only two or three dollars? Whereas in June, we’re all starving for fresh vegetables, everything that’s ripe is a root or leafy green, and then all the sudden there’s this insanely sweet podded treat. Of course it’s worth double or triple the price of those bland off-season snap peas!

Now maybe none of us are crazy enough that we would want to pay $8 for a pint of peas, but that’s why you are in a CSA 😉 For every box of peas that costs twice to grow over what it’s “worth,” in a CSA we can afford to produce it by growing a crop whose production costs are half of what it's “worth.” In short, you should thank that bunch of kale for doing the work of subsidizing those snap peas!

Any guesses who’s doing double duty in this share box?
The kale, onions, and eggplant are doing a little overtime to make up for the (slightly underperforming) mini peppers and beans :)

Doing this whole cost of production analysis for the embarrassingly first time in 20 years of running a farm (in my defense, I’ve been a CSA the whole time) turned into a surprising ego boost since my estimations (of dividing the farm into beds and rating crops as what percent they under or over-perform) were 100% on the money.

Our time analysis (in last week’s blog) surprised me, but our crop cost analysis, not so much. (If you want to find our biggest loser, we posted it over on our Instagram feed.)

But I won’t keep you in suspense, it’s broccoli, the bane of my farming existence and surprisingly beloved by more people than you expect.

But combining this analysis with being the child of an economist thoroughly unchaperoned in the library stacks (what parents would let their third grader read “It” (I’m paralyzed by clown fear to this day) or sixth grader read Adam Smith?) really just makes me want to go off and create my own darn economic system, possible based around vegetables, because sometimes it feels like our financial measurements are that darn made up.

We can reduce all our products down to commodities and the tight numbers of money and labor in and out, but do numbers like that hold when a good pea picked at the perfect time is such perfection? Or does/should food exist in an intangibly special space beyond the dullness of economic value? And how do we move food system and vegetables beyond the dismal science of economics so that everyone can enjoy the amazingness of a perfect pod?