By Erika Jensen

The clock on the computer says 10 p.m., and you are staring at your computer with no idea of what you’ll put in the newsletter this week. You work on the “what’s in the box this week” section—an easy place to start, although the list looks too short and you have a nagging feeling that you’ve forgotten something basic. Oh yeah—lettuce. You go back to the “farm letter” section and decide to write about the joys and frustrations of growing heirloom tomatoes. Finally, at 11 p.m. you turn the computer off. You work hard on this newsletter every week but wonder how many members actually read it. Is it really worth it?
Ideally, the CSA farm newsletter is a great vehicle for communication with members. Many farms distribute a newsletter every week with their CSA boxes. Both educative and informative, the newsletter is a way to connect members with the farm when they are not able to visit. In a way, it’s not that hard to produce–a one or two page document with news and recipes. On the other hand, not all CSA farmers feel comfortable with desktop publishing, writing, or selection of recipes. Plus, newsletter creation often occurs during the busiest time of the year and sometimes it feels like just another thing to do. During my research for this article I was a bit surprised to find that there are few resources or guides available for writing newsletters—just a few short mentions of the process in books like Sharing the Harvest. If newsletter writing seems difficult at times, there are some good reasons for feeling that way.
First, let’s get down to basics: how is the newsletter organized? Although format varies from farm to farm, many newsletters include these components:

List of vegetables
Many newsletters include a list of that week’s vegetables. Farm members often find this helpful if they see something in their share box that they don’t recognize—surprisingly enough, not an uncommon phenomenon. Notes about vegetable varieties and use are also helpful. They can be briefly covered here, or the information can be covered in other sections.

Farm news
This section is used to tell people about how things are going on the farm, upcoming events, anecdotes of interest, and so on. This section is the most obvious one for educating farm members. It may also include a reflective essay about farm life or farming issues. Chris Blanchard of Rock Spring Farm writes just such an essay each week. Although Chris is an excellent writer, he finds the essay to be “the most difficult part of the newsletter to write, but the part that the farm members come to rely on to establish a connection with us.” Blanchard looks for topics that are inspirational or amusing. His members love the stories, and are sometimes able to recall them years later.

Recipes
Newsletters often include 1-3 recipes that members can use in their own kitchens. Especially the first year, many farm members are challenged by cooking vegetables like kale, kohlrabi, Asian greens, and leeks. The recipes section is an important resource for members who are trying out new vegetables, or simply trying to use up everything in their box. Chris Blanchard co-writes this section of the newsletter with his wife Kim. For the most part, the recipes are Kim’s original creations—dishes that are made during the week from farm vegetables and do double duty as newsletter additions. For recipes to be accessible to farm members, it’s important that they are fairly simple, contain common ingredients available in most kitchens, and are quick and easy to prepare.

The winter newsletter
Some farms publish not only a weekly newsletter during the season, but also a newsletter in midwinter or early spring. Some examples of what the newsletter might contain: summaries/analysis of the past farm season; the farm’s financial information; sign up info for the next year; calls for volunteer assistance; educational articles on organic farming. For those with a long winter season, it’s a way to remind shareholders that your farm continues to exist even though they are not receiving deliveries.

Goals for the newsletter
•Say who you are: Not surprisingly, many CSA farmers’ newsletters directly express their goals for the farm. Often CSA farms have the goal of community involvement, education, and fostering a connection with agriculture. On the more commercial side of things, farmers are often concerned that they maintain a high customer retention rate, and appear to be a well-run, thriving business. As with any business publication, it’s important that the newsletter expresses the personality of your farm, and caters to your customers. If you market to wealthy urbanites and you graduated from Harvard business school before taking up CSA farming, your newsletter had better look like it. On the other hand, if you are an aging hippie and your members are liberal folks deeply concerned with social justice issues, your newsletter should reflect that. Steve Gilman, of Ruckytucks Farm in Saratoga, New York, comments that you don’t necessarily need a slick publication. A CSA farmer for 25 years, Steve maintains that “down home funky is OK.”

•Communication: One of the most important goals for the newsletter is communication. You need to let your farm members know about their vegetables, member events, and general farm information. It follows, therefore, that you should work on clear, concise writing. Although some farms have longer newsletters, a one- or two-page format is the generally acceptable length. Remember that your farm members are inundated on a regular basis by information from a host of other organizations, and it’s hard to read it all. A winter newsletter has the space (and you’ll have more time in the winter) for longer pieces and in-depth essays. Your sentences should be direct and to the point; formatting should highlight those items that you want to emphasize. Use different size fonts, boldface and italics to highlight the most important information.
Repetition is another key element for good communication. If you have something important to say, say it in three or four consecutive newsletters. Although some members will read your newsletter every week, many won’t. Make sure you include all the key information. For some farm events, when I wanted “extra advertising” I made an invitation on brightly colored paper and tucked it into each box. If you use a dry erase board at your delivery sites to communicate information, you can tell people to pay special attention to their newsletters if you have a major event/happening to tell people about.

•Marketing tool: For better or worse, farm members gain a perception of the farm through the newsletter. The newsletter can become a vehicle for selling the farm and reinforcing positive feelings about it. To this end, many farmers agree that the overall tone of the newsletter is very important. The newsletter should be positive and upbeat—a source of information rather than complaints. If you’re having a hard time, your members need to know—but don’t apologize, and don’t become overly emotional. Chris Blanchard cautions that “there are days and weeks that farming sucks, but you don’t want your customers to know that.” When telling members about a problem is a necessity, Chris and Kim will always balance the negative with a positive statement. For example, they might say “The new tractor developed a hydraulic leak and was taken in for service; it came back Wednesday night in good condition.” This helps the members to think of the incident with a positive resolution—and it helps to keep the farmers positive as well. Kate Stout, of North Creek Community Farm, tries to make her newsletters upbeat, entertaining and educational. “I share a lot of personal stuff”, she says. “For example, I’ll tell people what vegetables I had for dinner and how I fixed them.” Kate views her newsletters as another tool for selling the farm to shareholders. She shares jokes and anecdotes—and her members comment that they love her newsletters.

•Education: Unless a member visits the farm weekly, it is hard to keep up with what’s happening at the farm. Let them know what’s going on, and their understanding of what they get and don’t get in their boxes every week will be much more complete. Another kind of education involves farm and political issues. If your farm’s goal centers on this kind of education, by all means let it spill over into your newsletter.

Newsletter production
The best time to write newsletters is in the off-season, and preparatory work can be done at this time. Winter is the time to work on newsletter design, think about a standard look and format, and to do research for any educational pieces you write during the summer. Most of the recipe-related work can also be done now.
Farm member volunteers can provide valuable assistance with newsletter production if you are willing to put in the time to coordinate them. During most of the years I ran my farm, members put together the bulk of the recipes for the newsletters. As with other activities, I had a few “worker bees” who were very consistent and prolific. This could be an ideal volunteer job for those who can’t make it out to the farm to volunteer, but sincerely want to help. Older adults with health or mobility issues, and women with small children are common volunteers. The way to get good results is to make your needs and goals clear, and to give the volunteers deadlines. Always proofread their writing as soon as possible after it comes in, and phone them with questions if needed. To see a newsletter produced by volunteers, visit www.prairielandcsa.org, the website of Prairie Land CSA.

Format and computer programs
In order for your newsletter to look professional, you may want to create a standard look. This includes a farm logo, banner across the top with your farm’s information, and standard sections with associated formatting. More than just a pretty look, this standard formatting will let the reader know where to go for information. For example, if they want recipes, they will always go to page two of the newsletter; important information will always be in the box with double lines around it on page one.
In terms of computer programs, Microsoft Word is the easiest to use if you don’t need too many bells and whistles. Microsoft Publisher and Pagemaker are available for those who would like to produce more professional looking documents. These come with a variety of templates for newsletter production that make layout easier.

Graphics
Graphics can make your newsletters more visually appealing and fun. It’s quite possible to find free clip art if you are on a tight budget. Some libraries have books of copyright free art that anyone can use. Free clip art is possible to find on the web, although a number of sites simply route you to other sites where you have to pay for the clip art. The website www.clipart.com provides a large number of images for affordable prices. Wheeler Arts has inexpensive download packages or CDs of agriculture-related cip art. (See advertisement on the outside cover of this issue.)

Newsletters on the web
Some farms have chosen to publish sample copies or back issues on their web site. This is a good way of reaching members who wouldn’t ordinarily read the newsletter. You can also impress potential members who are learning about different farms on the web. It’s also a great way for farmers to check out each other’s newsletters. My quick search under the key words “Community Supported Agriculture newsletter” yielded many, many different farm websites with sample newsletters. Two good ones I found were Rock Spring Farm’s website—www.rsfarm.com and Sixth Street CSA’s website—www.sixthstreetcenter.org. Several farms have also come up with the idea of having a recipe collection on the web for their members to access.
Should you post your newsletters on the web every week? The answer to that question seems to depend on how much time you have. Many farmers are too busy to both produce a printed newsletter, and then reformat the information and post it on their website. One of the problems is that adapting the information from a word processing file to HTML can cause glitches and problems that take time to correct. Microsoft Word seems to be the best word processing program for this kind of work, though it is not free of problems, either. Web designers typically use an HTML editor program like Dream Weaver. Perhaps the best way to get the job done is to use Adobe Acrobat to create a PDF file. In this way, you can create a document for the website that has the identical formatting as in your version for print.

Recipes
Those of you who retype recipes from cookbooks or download them from the internet will want to read this section particularly. I delved into some online research to determine if this process violates copyright laws. The bottom line is, most cookbooks and materials on the web are protected by copyright laws, and if you get caught you can be taken to court and fined. However, there are a few loopholes to complicate the matter. I gleaned the following information by looking at the copyright websites listed later in the article.

•Mere bare-bones lists of ingredients, as well as techniques, can’t be copyrighted. However, if there is any explanatory language or directions that is an original work of the author, this information can be copyrighted and probably is.

•Public Domain. Some recipes and cookbooks might be in the public domain, in which case it may be possible to use them without copyright infringement. The most common scenarios are instances of lapsed copyright or fair use.

•Lapsed Copyright: If books are written before 1964 and the author has not renewed the copyright, they pass into the public domain. You are free to copy any of these works.

•Fair Use: This allows materials to be used for nonprofit and educational purposes. To qualify for this use, your organization cannot derive profit from the publication, you can use only a small portion of the copyrighted work, and your use cannot affect the potential market for the work.

My interpretation of this information is that if your CSA is legally registered as a non-profit, it’s possible that you could use copyrighted recipes for your newsletter under the Fair Use provision. However, if you are a for-profit business (regardless of how much money you actually make!) you are probably not legally able to make use of the provision. If you are a nonprofit organization, you might want to take additional precautions. Based on the above information, it would make sense to not use too many recipes from any one source, give credit to the author and publisher, and recommend to your readers that they purchase the cookbook themselves if they enjoy the recipes. In addition, you might make it clear in your farm’s promotional information that the cost of membership reflects the purchase of vegetables (or meat, etc.), and that the educational newsletter is available at no extra cost. I’d like to say at this time that I don’t have a law degree, and I’m certainly not qualified to give official legal advice. If you have further concerns or questions, I’d advise you to consult a lawyer.
For more information, there are a couple of web sites I’d like to recommend—www.benedict.com and www.copyright.gov. The former written in easy to understand language and has information on internet copyright law. The latter is a government website that contains all the fine print you’ll need. For those of you who find government websites frightening, this one is quite good—it actually seems to be written with the public in mind.
When all is said and done, and you produce the perfect newsletter for your members to read, are they actually going to read it? They will, but you’ll have to scale back your expectations somewhat. Don’t expect them to hang on your every word—Kate Stout, for example, believes about 50% to 75% of her members read the newsletter on an average week, a percentage she feels comfortable with. Producing an attractive publication with a standard format, clear and concise language, fun and interesting stories, and easy to use recipes will boost your readership numbers. Ideally, the newsletter becomes a great tool for communicating with your members and marketing your farm, and transforms itself from a chore into a wonderful opportunity.

Erika Jensen is a flower and vegetable farmer living in Waupun, Wisconsin. She formerly ran Plowshare Community Farm, a 70-share CSA in Prairie Farm, Wisconsin.