Behind the Scenes of a CSA: Meet “The White Board”

How we keep the harvest organized and 415 boxes from getting lost in the shuffle.

This is the white board we use to help us figure out what to harvest each week.

So how does produce get from our field into your box, you might ask?

With 415 boxes to fill each week, there is (of course) an organized system we have developed to get it all packed in just under 5 hours. And it all revolves around 2 giant white boards.

There are two primary packing nights — Monday and Wednesday — when we pack all the boxes except Toledo’s.

Each week before the crew arrives, Corinna checks the master checklist on a clipboard in the packing shed. This checklist summarizes exactly how many half and full shares, fruit shares, cheese shares, and egg shares go to each site. This checklist changes slightly from week to week based on emails from customers who request a change in pick-up.

It also tells us interesting things like how we need to pick “183 portions” for Monday nights and “196 portions” for Wednesday in order to give each full share 2 of something and each half share just one. It will say how many eggs fall on “A” week or “B.”

Our staff (of about 7 people per night) arrives at 4 pm and goes to look at our giant to-do list that we affectionately call “the harvest board.” This is a huge dry-erase board with all the harvest orders on it, which have been written up by Kurt the night before in a particular order.

Each veggie is listed, along with how many portions (boxes, bunches, pounds) to harvest, where to find it in the field, what harvest utensil to use, which packing container to use, where to store it when it’s finished, how many to pack for CSA, chefs, or store orders, what setting to use for the pressure washer, and how to bundle them.

We also have a second white board, which lists the order in which we pack the items into the box, along with any special bagging or packing instructions (e.g. arugula, 183 lettuce bags, 0.4 lbs)

We also have a “packing crew.” They are in charge of processing and bagging the produce as it comes in from the field. If we need 215 lettuce bags for arugula, they are responsible for counting those out so they are ready when the arugula comes in. Then they weigh the portion sizes on a scale and pack the bags. Often our harvesters will help with this job too once the harvesting has been done.  Our packing crew also takes care of packing the fruit shares, coolers with eggs and cheese, labeling extras bins, and filling all of our store orders — labeling them in the right bins so they go to the right spot.

Sometimes certain high-intensity crops need to be harvested first, so we can have enough time to wash, bundle, and dry the item before packing them in the bins. So we pay attention to the types of crops that we process first. Onions, cherry tomatoes, potatoes, and carrots usually get first dibs.

Some crops like lettuces and chard or cilantro are very sensitive to temperature or water. Farmer Kurt must usually harvest those in the early evening the night before so they won’t wilt in the heat.

As items are harvested, weighed, inventoried and stored in the cooler, we move a green magnet along that crop’s row on the harvest white board. That way we can see where it is in the process. Once the magnet makes it all the way past the washing and packing stage, it sits on the very right edge of the board — a signal that it’s ready for the assembly line.

This is the master list showing how many share types to box for each site.

By 7 pm, we are usually ready to “set up the line.” We pull all the items out and put them in a certain order on tables — assembly-line style. The crew lines up and takes a place on the line. Each veggie is placed in a certain place in the box based on the second white board, then fitted with a lid, and packed about 8 boxes high in the cooler. 

We have learned to pre-count the bins before we pack, so that when we run out of bins, we know we are done. Sometimes, we accidentally run out of one veggie product, and the line stops while we go out and quickly pick a few more portions. At about 6 pm, the assigned bin washers start washing  the legions of harvest totes that come in, so that in theory, we all end at the same time at 8:30 pm.

The white board also function as our documentation system. Anything we need to document for food safety audits and organic

certification can be found on these boards: cleaning checklists, water sanitation levels, who was present that night, weights and yields by crop and bed row, etc. This way, we simply snap a picture of the white board at the end of the night and file it away on our Google Drive.

Creating a system like this has been necessary in order to make our packing night as efficient and fast as possible. Who knew packing your box was such an operation?