Who grows it
Cropfare is a working market garden on the Petaluma side of the Sonoma line. We are not a collective, a co-packer or a subscription brand — we are the people who cut what you eat, and you can meet all three of us on a Thursday.
A share is not a shop.
You buy the season before it happens, we plant against that number, and whatever the field does — the good August, the wet June — we do together. That is the whole arrangement, and it is the reason there is no warehouse behind us.
How we farm
Certified organic since the second season. Weeds come out by hand and by hoe, which is why the crew is three people and not one.
Four acres are under cover crop at any time. It costs us a quarter of the plantable ground and buys back the soil we would otherwise be mining.
A forked carrot is a carrot. We grade for taste and not for the shelf, and the surplus goes to the Petaluma food bank on Fridays.
The crew
Founder and field lead. Twenty-two years on other people's farms before this half-acre; still writes the pack sheet by hand on Tuesday night.
Runs the pack barn and every market stall we take. If your box was short a bunch of chard, she is the one who will have already emailed you.
Propagation and the tunnels. Starts forty thousand seedlings a year in a greenhouse he built from a dairy barn that was falling down.
Six seasons
Eleven families, half an acre
Dale leases the bottom field off Stony Point Road and sells the first eleven shares to people he already knew. Pack sheet taped to the barn door.
Certified organic
Three acres under certification and the first full season of cover cropping. Priya joins to run the pack barn and the Saturday market stall.
The tunnels go up
Sam rebuilds the collapsed dairy barn into a propagation house. The season stretches five weeks either side and the share list passes eighty.
Town pickup points
Two drop points open in Petaluma and Cotati so members no longer have to drive out to the barn. Home delivery starts on the larger two shares.
Twelve acres, 140 shares
Four acres resting, thirty-eight crops in the rotation, and a waiting list for the first time. The arrangement has not changed since the eleven.
We open the barn to members and would-be members on the first Saturday of every month, April through October. Bring boots.