Make a weekly schedule to write about the farm and good things will happen.Farm writing is almost always of value to customers. Your everyday experience of growing food is so outside of the experience of your readers that you will always be interesting if you write with passion, honesty, and photos. Blogging is an exercise of distilling your work and life into 500-1000 words that interests and motivates your customers to keep coming back to you each week and each year. Write about a particular challenge of the week (squash bugs, irrigation, drought?), the story of someone working on the farm, a particular variety. In the future I will post a list of starter blog ideas to get you writing when you don't have any ideas. If you devote a few hours each week to this throughout the year, I guarantee you will find more loyal and receptive customers; it is no longer an eggplant or a steak, the food is infused with your face and your voice.

Andy from Mariquita Farm [1] in Watsonville, CA takes blogging to the next level by writing an "open letter from Mariquita Farm to everyone with a curiosity about the people, practices, and politics of farming." This is some of the best farm writing I have ever read in print or on screen. One commenter calls Andy "a most unique philosopher-farmer".

This week's article is entitled Water Under The Bridge [2] and deals with Andy's start in agriculture delivering produce from Star Route Farm to the Veritable Vegetable Coop. I'll provide some excerpts to the article and go read it! I wouldn't expect each farmer to write a high-quality blog like Andy -- it is literature really -- but it is a wonderful example of how great writing can connect with people and customers and another role model to use as you write your own.

Vegetable information interspersed with personal experience:

"Truly fresh broccoli is a revelation. When I worked at Star Route Farm I didn’t earn much money, and I saved my wages for important things, like beer and toilet paper. ate everything I could from the fields. The first time I cut a head of broccoli and steamed it four minutes later, I was amazed . The broccoli had a sweetness I’d never tasted before. Any dressing or sauce would have only clouded the fresh purity of the flavor. But to deliver some facsimile of that green sweetness to a distant customer is tricky. As broccoli ages it begins to express the odor and flavor of the mustard oil that is a characteristic component of every member of the Brassica family, from arugula to broccoli to cabbage to kale."

Humor on visiting a late-night liquor store to get ice for the vegetables:

"One night when I got to the liquor store both lanes of Bayshore Boulevard were blocked by a couple of pimps with flashy cars. I don’t know for sure they were pimps. They could have been librarians dressed to kill, out for a night on the town in dark glasses and comporting themselves like fighting cocks, so that ignorant country boys like myself would presume they were successful pimps. The casual manner they took the whole street for their own was threatening. I parked behind them and stepped into the liquor store."

Go visit his blog [3], read, and start writing.