Our geese know today's different! We're travelling 1000 miles!
The geese know today's different. Our truck is fueled with biofuel and ready to roll! They walk up to us and make their gossling begging call, asking us to pick them up and hold them. The chickens are sometimes worse. Patrick, our Rhode Island Red Rooster, flies up into our arms. All the birds cry, "Don't go!"
Though our customers elsewhere already know we're experimenting with a new delivery method designed to reduce our time on the road (more about that later!), in the Valley Area we're still driving our truck door to door with fresh, delicious affordable food in the back. Straight to your door. Ready for cooking! Meals. Now!
Hopefully our birds will miss us less if our new tricks work out - we miss them too. But we're glad to take the drive. We actually love to drive. It sounds funny - we're farmers, shouldn't we yearn to stay put like our plants and animals? But we farm not only for them, not only for us, but for our customers. We love to see them all!
Our fuel is clean, our conscience clear, our hearts long for the journey of a thousand miles that takes us past your door back home to our tents. Sometimes, we joke, Robert Frost should have been a Re Rustica delivery driver:
"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth." - The Road Not Taken
Ha ha! We hate to laugh at the venerable poet, but when on deliveries, we take them both!
In farming, we take Frost's lesson and have no regrets, what we do we do for love - for love of our customers, our farm, ourselves. And, as Chretien de Troyes reminds us,
"those who love love truly, truly need no fear, for all will be forgiven of them, for love's sake."
Yet we try to "take the road less traveled" so we get there and back quicker, because - as with rush hour, as with our clean fuel, as with our affordable food and kindness to our animals and attention to the needs of nature, our low water use, as with all of our lives - it is how we take the journey, not the destination that in the end matters most.