Flood Update & Recovery

The water has mostly gone down by now, instead of 8 acres flooded there's about 1 acre still under water. Now that I've gotten a better look at the damage, I can say for sure that it's pretty bad. Thousands of pounds each of onions, leeks, potatoes, carrots, beets, tomatoes, thousands of heads/bunches of cabbages and leafy greens, and even more that I can't even bear to list are all gone. I would estimate the value of all the lost produce to be well over $100,000.

But there are silver linings! We do still have about 2 acres of nice crops left, and we're re-planting and re-seeding fall crops as quickly as possible. And thank you all so much for the wonderful messages of care and support - so many CSA members and other people in the community have reached out with incredible expressions of solidarity and it really means a lot.

A lot of people have offered help in the form of volunteering, which is so generous and the sentiment is very much appreciated but to be honest at this point we have more of the opposite problem - most of the crops that we would be weeding and harvesting are dead so our farm crew suddenly has some extra time on their hands. In our case, it's not the kind of flood that has debris to clean up, the dead crops just need to be plowed under to make way for either new fall plantings or cover crop seeds so the land can rest until next year.

But we're determined to keep our farm crew employed full time and keep the farm shares going, so here's my plan for the next couple weeks at least:

The farm share pickups will continue on the normal schedule for now. Most of our farmer neighbors have actually not been affected by this flooding, it just has to do with quirks of topography and where the land is in relation to the Connecticut River (as well as a few tributaries in western MA that also flooded). So while there are definitely other farms in our area that have been negatively affected, most of them are still having a great season. And many of them have generously offered to let the Stone Soup Crew harvest their crops! So for now our crew will be visiting neighboring organic farms and harvesting veggies that they have in abundance to piece together our CSA.

We will likely also have to buy in a significant amount of organic crops from our neighbors over the next few months, and even with both of these things combined with what we have left on our land, the shares will likely be smaller than usual, but we'll do the best we can to make it work!

To help us keep everyone employed, re-plant for the fall, and buy in some organic veg from our neighbors, we set up a flood recovery gofundme. (Gofundme and credit card companies each take a percentage, so if anyone wants to give directly checks are great too). Thanks for considering.

That's all for now. I just want to say again that I'm so overwhelmed by all the love, care, and support that everyone has been showing us. I really appreciate it and can't thank you all enough.

Dave, Stone Soup Farm