Building a "Cooler" Future

You’d think with the amount of carpentry going on around the farmstead this week that Jack and I are full-time contractors. We have been spending the past several days, nearly from sun-up to dinner time, working on building new infrastructure for the farm. We are not foreign to builds, in fact, we have built several shelters and mobile chicken coops over the years, but this week has been particularly busy as we try our hand at building our most impressive project to date, our walk-in cooler.

A walk-in cooler is basically a very large refrigerator. Walk-ins are commonly found in restaurants for storing fresh fruits and veggies, but they are also more commonly found on vegetable farms to keep produce cold and fresh after it is harvested and before it is distributed to customers. This is a very, VERY, exciting time for us because it means that we are setting up infrastructure so that we can really start growing and selling food to the community. Honestly, a walk-in is an absolute necessity for a farm to keep its harvested, high-quality produce in its freshest state possible. I have already been struggling this season with not having enough space in our 3 (yes I said THREE) refrigerators to store everything we have harvested, so this new addition will certainly help as we move forward in expanding the farm garden and our business. Our hope is that we can start a very small Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program next year and begin to share our harvest with those in our community.

If you are unfamiliar with what a CSA is, it is basically a direct partnership between a community member and the farm and one of the best ways to support local food. When a person signs up for a CSA, he/she pays for a “share” of produce (and sometimes, meat and eggs, too) from the farm and picks it up from the farm on a weekly basis throughout the season. CSA’s are a wonderful way to be connected with local food and ensures the farm has customers that it can rely on and distribute goods to without having to worry about sales and market fluctuations at a farmers’ market or other venue. I have always appreciated the CSA model due to its direct link to customers and the beautiful farm-customer partnership it creates, and with everything going on in our world due to COVID-19, the local food systems have become more important than ever. Having a walk-in cooler will allow us to keep our harvested vegetables fresh before we pack weekly CSA boxes for our members, and keep the produce in top-condition before it gets picked up by our members.

Needless to say, although I am exhausted and the build for the walk-in has been time consuming, I could not be more excited about the opportunity it offers, not only for our family and our own harvested food, but the potential it has for keeping hundreds of pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables in peak condition for our customers. This is an exciting step forward at Mystic Hills Farmstead, and I can’t wait to show you our completed project! Below is a sneak peak of what we have been working on this week, and hopefully, by next week I can show you an even more completed version of our walk-in cooler.

The walk-in cooler all framed out!

Thanks for reading!

Farmer Kinzie