Harvest Share Member Agreement
Four Beat Farm’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)–Harvest Share program about commitment and connection.
As your farmers, we commit to providing you with the most variety, abundance, value, and connection to our farm and to your food that we possibly can.
In signing up for our Harvest Share program and paying for your membership share, you are making a commitment to supporting our farm with the following in mind:
Rescheduling and/or Missing a pick up or delivery
By signing up you are agreeing to ensure that your share is collected as you have scheduled, whether that’s picking up at the predetermined time/place, or placing a cooler outside your home for delivery.
We know life gets busy. You will get a reminder email before pickup/delivery day to make your life easier. If you can’t make it, you are always welcome to send a family member, friend, or neighbour to collect your share.
If you need to reschedule a pick up, you can do this easily online by placing a delivery hold before your pre-assigned weekly veggie customization cut-off time (3 days in advance for most of our members), to add a double share of extra veggies for a future week. You can also change pick-up or delivery times prior to your weekly cut-off deadline. Email us if you need help, but it must be done in advance.
Your veggie share also makes a great gift for your house-sitter or dog-walker if you’re going on vacation for a couple of weeks.
If your produce and/or add-on items are not picked up on-time or rescheduled in advance, it is forfeit. It’s considered a donation back to the farm and we will donate or rehome your share (our farm mechanic always appreciates a bonus for their hard work). In order to keep your farmers sane, our harvest schedule on track, and your produce fresh, there are no exceptions.
Vegetable supply, variety, and the weather
As your farmers, we make every effort to ensure there is a balanced crop plan, well-scheduled harvests of quality produce every week, and an awesome farm team to weather the storms that may come our way.
We take this commitment to heart. Every year we look closely at what veggies our members love the most (so we can plant more of them), what crops worked out best (so we can learn from that), and we target ways to improve our growing and delivery practices to create more resilient farm systems. That said, it is important for you to understand that there are factors simply beyond our control (hello, Nature!).
The veggies featured in your share will vary throughout the year, both as the seasons change and as we experience unexpected challenges (for example, an early frost) and great successes (like a bumper crop!). Your share may be lighter in the springtime and heavier in the peak harvests of September. This makes us different from, for example, a grocery store or an online delivery service.
Your Harvest Share sign up, and the financial commitment that goes along with it, is not not a direct purchase of individual carrots, but rather it is a farm membership investment with weekly returns in the form of fresh produce. This shared risk and reward, and your willingness to embrace the ebbs and flows of the harvest season alongside us, is an important part of what makes our farm resilient as we work to put food on your table and to strengthen local food security together.
Cancellation Policy
You can transfer your share anytime prior to the first delivery or mid-season if work/housing/etc changes, just find a friend or neighbour who wants to give it a try. If the program is not meeting your expectations, please let us know. As with most Community Supported Agriculture programs, we don’t generally refund deposits because they buy seeds that are already planted for you! If you sign up for the full season, give it your best shot all summer and the harvest share system really isn’t working for you, we will refund the Fall season no questions asked.