Howdy Folks,

I'm sorry that this newsletter is tardy for your final week of our Traditional CSA Summer Season. It’s been a wild ride this year for Who Cooks. We can’t really say we had a great year, but we also can’t really say we had a bad year. Luckily we’ve learned to over plant and over plant we did thankfully, to keep us in the green. Food has been here and at times a little tighter than comfortable, but we made it! All shares have been filled!

Why such a shoty year? Well August! This august was unseasonably cool and then also wet! This is the time of year when our summer crops are in full swing and we are transplanting our fall crops out to the field. This is a critical stage of development for any being. Youth sets a foundation, it creates our constitution in which we can reference for stability. At this time of the summer we are feeding our summer crops, planting more successions of summer crops and also planting our longer season fall crops. It was hard on all the plants to endure the days of wet feet with multiple inches of rain that couldn’t drain from the saturated ground. Luckily we over plant to help us cope with low yields, and this is how this season worked.

We are installing a new fence around a small field that has yet to be fenced in. The fence is around 1700' long. The funds for this fence are coming from a grant from PASA. The grant when we applied was called The Climate Smart Grant. This is a grant that was applied for in early 2024 and got held up in court as the funds got taken away by the current administration, but then it got renegotiated, (with very hard work from PASA staff and board) with less Climate criteria and “marketing” added to the title, then refunded. We received the funds for what we had been approved for before the grant got nixed. A miracle! Our grant award includes funds going to help us build a new composting facility, mulching, cover cropping and fencing! All very important things that we do on the farm that help us be good stewards of the land and enable us to feed people in this day and age. To read more about the grant restoration check out this article.

We feel very blessed to have this come through. This was a Biden administration effort that got nixed. We were certainly heart broken to maybe have these funds not come through. It feels great for small farmers like us to get government help for improvements. Many of the funds would have been usual expenses for us and the composting system was something on Chris’ wish list for many years. Usually government funds for farmers are subsidies for big Ag. It feels good when us little guys get a leg up.

We have many more years in the game of farming and funds like this give us a huge leap. To have help fencing in our last parcel of ground to keep out the deer means more food for the people. Composting infrastructure is extremely important and expensive, with this grant we were able to purchase a compost extractor, so we will be making some excellent new brews for the soil with our compost, getting more beneficial microbes from the compost into the soil more often.

The summer traditional CSA is ending, but the fall CSA is starting and we are still going to farmers markets until mid December. The burnt orange hills and leafless trees are signaling a new season, as they sing with their brittle leaves a new tune. I recently have heard about death as not an end but a new beginning. Like all living things that die, their body as we know them alive changes its elemental form. Everything returns to mother earth, and something new comes the same materials that once were something very different.

As farmers we find our way to make changes in planting, cultivating and harvesting, but we certainly still vote in our elections as well. In thinking of change makers in farm politics, A great woman named Dolores Huerta died on Wednesday, Oct 28th. I’m sorry I didn’t know of her until this past spring, sadly it was due to a New York times expose of how she was raped by Cesar Chavez. Crazy how some great women don’t stir into our knowledge until they are dead or almost dead. Well I would like to tell you a little about her as she is a very important person for workers in the field. Dolores was a grassroots organizer. Gathering people in homes talking about what was happening in their lives and encouraging change for a better life. She gathered farm workers, she encouraged them to picket and stand up for their rights. When people were telling her we can’t do this, she was saying yes, we can. From 1965-1970, she led workers alongside her all too infamous comrade Cesar Chavez. Together they unionized farm workers and helped them fight for standards of sanitation and humility in the fields. Her work created an essential foundation for which farm workers today still benefit from here in the United States. She was a powerhouse! She has a quote “Si se puede”, “Yes you can” In a documentary on her life titled “Dolores” Obama, thanks her for this line. It was his slogan, this slogan came from the United Farm Workers of America, it was their slogan!. Small world right. How didn’t I know this quote earlier in my life, How didn’t I know who coined the slogan? Wild how some history is a small paragraph in a giant book. How do the schools decide what should and shouldn’t be taught? Well let’s just end on these questions and may I please encourage you to always vote! Hopefully you all did vote yesterday to make some good trouble! Si se puede!

Your Farmers,

Chris, Aeros and The Who Crew

Summer 2026 Week 24 Newsletter

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