A Heartfelt Thank You

Dear Community Food Co-op Member Owners, Shoppers, Staff and Board of Directors,

We would like to express our huge and heartfelt gratitude for the Co-op’s 4% Day Grant awarded to our farm this past May 28, 2010. Thank you everyone, for supporting local agriculture and for supporting Cloud Nine Farm.

As new farmers, we are attempting to bridge the gap between our local communities and create a safer, less fossil-fuel dependent and sustainable way of producing food. We are, like every other local market farmer we know, grappling with the realities of the costs of setting up our business.

We are very thankful for the Co-op’s support during this early period of growth on our farm. We are striving to build a farm large enough to produce enough high quality fresh veggies and fruits to eventually supply 100 local families, wholesale and restaurant accounts, and local institutions like schools and hospitals.

In the process of growing our farm, we are learning a lot about the scale of farming which provides both a living for the farmers, and lots of fresh, nutritious food for the community. However, before we can scale up our fields to grow our business, we have to have certain infrastructure in place. This includes expensive things like a tractor and various implements, a storage and processing barn, fencing and more.

We also feel that in order for a truly sustainable regional food economy to re-develop, we need to share our experiences with others, and this is what we will attempt to do using the grant dollars donated to us by all of you who shopped at the Co-op on May 28.

We are spending the grant money on a design for an affordable processing, packing and storage barn. This plan will employ simple building techniques and affordable environmentally-aware elements like passive solar gain, grey water recycling, and an earth-bermed root cellar. There will be walk-in refrigerated storage and sanitary concerns related to licensing the facility will be met. We will then use the plan to seek grant/loan/investment funding for building out the barn for our own farm system, hopefully in 2011. We hope to be able to provide firsthand cost evaluation and real-life assessment of its workability.

Eventually, we hope to offer this plan as a universal template of sorts for other farmers to access at a low cost to use in business planning, budgeting and eventual actual infrastructure building. When a farm grows, literally tons of fresh produce, proper facilities for packing and storage are all necessity. Hopefully, our efforts will benefit not only our own farming operation, but also the future farms of others like us.

Many thanks,
Allison, Seann and Wyatt Rooney