It's that time of year again! CSA boxes are being filled, deliveries are being made and happy customers are enjoying locally grown foods! For our Member Assembler subscribers and other farmers running CSAs this season, we hope your pickups are starting smoothly and that you have a great 2010 season!

Starting the season at Ploughshare Farm in Parkers Prairie, MN
Packing boxes at Village Acres Farm in central Pennsylvania.
Picking strawberries at Oakridge Berries in Oshkosh, Wisconsin

As a farm kid, turned computer programmer, turned farmer, and then combining those passions with Small Farm Central, I think I am in a unique position to appreciate Jeff Atwood's post called "Tending Your Software Garden".

Jeff writes about software development, so you probably don't read him on a week-to-week basis. However he has some thoughts on how programming relates to farming:

All the best software projects I've worked were, for lack of a better word, alive. I don't mean that literally, of course. But the software was constantly and quite visibly growing. There were regular, frequent release schedules defining its evolution. There was a long term project commitment to a year out, five years out, ten years out.

To me, the parallels between farming and software development are strong and evocative. Steve disagrees:
"The weakness in the software-farming metaphor is its suggestion that you don't have any direct control over how the software develops. You plant the code seeds in the spring, Farmer's Almanac and the Great Pumpkin willing, you'll have a bumper crop of code in the fall."

To be clear, all these metaphors are abstract and therefore heavily subject to interpretation (and/or useless, take your pick), so I don't want to get too wrapped up in defending one.

That said, I disagree with Steve's dismissal. The strength of the farming metaphor is the implied commitment to the craft. Farming is hard, unforgiving work, but there's a yearly and seasonal ritual to it, a deep underlying appreciation of sustainible and controlled growth, that I believe software developers would do well to emulate. I also think Steve was a bit unfair in characterizing farming as "no direct control". There's plenty of control, but lots of acknowledged variables, as well -- which I think more accurately represents the shifting sands of software development. Farmers do their best to control those variables, of course, but most of all they must adapt to whatever conditions they're dealt. Next season, next year, they know they'll be back with a renewed sense of purpose to try it all again and do better. Not so coincidentally, these are also traits shared by the best software developers I've known.

I'm not completely convinced of the relationship between farming and programming that Jeff proposes here, but it is an interesting thought.

I can say that Small Farm Central feels like a living, breathing organism as we add features, start a new website for a farmer, or improve the help documentation.

Sometimes it is hard work -- the frustrating days in code are much like problematic irrigation equipment. It is maddening, doesn't quite make sense, and a simple problem can consume your whole day, but once the problem is resolved the water flowing freely is a beautiful thing!

Often, this little software garden that we have dug, planted, and maintained over the past four years does most of the work by itself to help our farmers succeed. On those days, I can calmly watch this garden grow and know that work that it took to get here was worth the result.

Another beautiful premium template is available for your farm website:
We call it "Fruited" -- let us know if you would like to try it out!

We really like the illustrative, earthy quality of this new template design. Also, take a lot at the slideshow images on the front page that feature your farm's best photography!

Want to see it in action? Visit the sample site: http://premium6.smallfarmcentral.com

What makes it premium?

• Professionally designed by the best designers we can find! We invest in these flexible, beautiful templates so we can offer your farm great design at a fraction of the price of hiring a designer yourself.
• Limited in quantity -- we only allow 50 farmers to use each design, so you know your neighbor can't come along with the same template.
• The advanced design of these templates require us to help you with the customization by taking the header images into Photoshop to make the design "yours".

Entertaining yourself is a key to surviving long days at the farmers market!

1. Your customers spend their days tied to email and their computer, so they can order at a time that makes sense for them.
2. It is a differentiating factor between your farm and other local farms: if you can find a way to offer online sales you have a leg up on the competition.
3. For products that are very seasonal or limited in quantity, customers can see if certain products are available and order them before they drive to your farm market or farmers market stand (for example, if they just must have their baby radish sprouts).
4. There's no data entry -- just keep farming as orders come in. When it comes time to pick and pack orders, just print out a report of the orders that came in and you are ready to go!

If you are generating content over time for your farm website and blog, you will notice that your hard-earned content starts to get buried and it is not as easy to find. This is especially true for those farmers who are using the blog format.

Much of the time, the content you generated a year ago is just as valid as what you can write today. Instead of re-writing articles, you need to guide your visitors to older posts and content. One great way to do this was recommended by ProBlogger a while back - he calls them "sneeze pages".

He writes, "A Sneeze Page is one that simply directs readers in multiple directions at once – back into your archives"

So a "sneeze page" is simply a group of links with a common theme. Your sneeze page can be about anything as long as it directs people back into your archives. For example, if you developed 4-5 posts throughout the year of your chicks as they grew and developed, you could then create a sneeze page at the end of the year that linked your customers back to all of your information about chicks.

To get an idea of what this can look like, check out one I did for the Small Farm Central blog. I called it Best of the blog, mid-2009 to get our visitors to take a look at all the great content that had come out on the blog over the past 6 months.

Importantly, put your sneeze pages in a prominent location such as the sidebar of your website (if you have a Small Farm Central site, this is called the "widget column"). You want your customers to easily find these pages and then navigate through the history of your website.

Darren at ProBlogger has some great ideas on what topics to create your sneeze pages on, so go check out the full article.