I think of myself as a seasoned optimist. When the Fit hits the Shan, I am usually good at finding the lemonade in the pile of lemons. Both of my parents have low blood pressures, so I think that I get that from them.

With that said, I am not feeling all that great with the Covid situation that our communities are in currently. Now, I am not a doomsayer, but after March 2020, we need to be ready for anything. We cannot fall back on the excuse, “I never thought this could happen.” Anything can happen; we know that, so here are a few notes to let you know where we are as a company.

Loyalty Membership Level. You know that I like to have a seat for everyone at our table. It is a fantastic policy to have, but I honestly almost got myself over our capacity during the height of the pandemic. Our infrastructure and crew were pushed to the limits. Under the current labor shortages, we cannot go there again.

So I am cleaning up our website’s database to help ensure that we have the food and people in place to take care of our customers no matter what comes at us.

Therefore, I am taking every customer who has ordered with us in 2021 and placing them into Loyalty Membership Level. What this means for you is that we will reserve your seat at our table no matter what happens with any potential spikes in Covid demand. We are committed to taking care of our most loyal customers first. Furthermore, our pricing and delivery fees Will Not increase for this membership level. Best of all, this membership level is free. We just want to thank you and reward your loyalty, and give you peace of mind.

Now how about some fruit? After a cool spring on the western slopes of Colorado, summer harvest season is finally picking up for Paul the Excelsior orchard crew. Seeing as how we have a lot of new faces at the table, I’d like to share our partnership with you.

In 2004, Excelsior Orchards was increasing their production under the stewardship of Paul and Elane. At that same time we were just a baby company (still in our Organic reusable diapers). Paul was looking to sell some incredible fruit. We were looking to buy some incredible fruit. Our partnership was born.

Excelsior is 85 acres in Paonia, CO. Honestly some of the best tree fruit growing regions in the country. Michigan and California cannot compare to the soils and climate that Paul has on his orchard. He starts with the best possible foundation, and his attention to details makes him the best fruit grower with the tastiest fruits. And I’ve tasted a lot.

As our demand for his fruit grew, Paul and I came up with a fantastic goal; he concentrates on growing the fruit, and we will find homes for it. So over a green chile cheeseburger and a cup of coffee (we drink a lot of coffee), our partnership was sealed with a handshake.

Now, you have access to the most unique and incredible fruit that you have ever put a tooth into. This week (starting on Tuesday deliveries) we will have Shiro Plums. These are some of the most interesting plums. They have a yellow skin. Because of that, they will show blemishes easier than dark skin plums. You will not see them in any grocery store. But the flavor of the Shiro is out of this world. Look for them.

Stay healthy, Farmer Monte

We have a very simple business mantra around here, “Protect the Herd.” Every decision that we make as a business is based around the idea that when the Herd does Better, every individual within the Herd will be Better. It is a simple notion to visualize and our team is stronger because of it. When you know that the person working next to you wants you to succeed, amazing things happen. Trust and shared visions become the norm and not the exception.

But this notion of Protecting the Herd spills outside of our work walls as we look at building the best regional food system that we can. Our Herd is all of the members who support our mission. Who support us and all of our local partners. You all have supported us for over 18 years and we want to support you and your family in anyway that we can. I believe in the strength of teams.

So follow me down this rabbit hole for a bit as I layout an expanded plan to reinforce our Herd.

I am a food nerd. I love trying different flavors. This is probably not a huge shock, but I feel that I have been able to try so many different things because on the farm you don’t have to buy stuff; you just eat what is around you. Could be a weed, could be a crazy variety of Asian greens. Just eat it. Try it out.

Most of us are not surrounded by weird flavors every day. We make a calculated decision in a market setting where we buy flavors. And for the most part, we buy flavors that we know. So it is hard to part with your pesos when you aren’t sure if you will like the food.

My goal is to help make SKRS a more educational & fun food experience for our Herd: Give you free food.

I am going to find foods that we will just give you for free. Sometimes it will be just a token of thanks for all your support. Like we are doing this week with gorgeous bunched carrots. But other weeks we will find nuanced flavors that may be new to you. We will offer these to you for free in hopes that you expand and have more fun with your food journey.

As I have shared before, one of the things that I am most grateful for in my life is being surrounded by tasty, healthy, and incredible foods on a daily basis. It is my life’s work to share this with as many people who are interested. I do not believe in force-feeding people my beliefs. I want to offer you things that enrich my life. If you like them, great. If not, we can still be amigos.

V.I.P.ing the Herd. We are getting closer to finalizing our Market/Café, The Stand. This space has taken longer to finish than I had hoped, but it will be one of the most unique and enjoyable food spaces you will ever visit. With that, we will be launching a “Soft Opening” coming up in early September. The soft opening is our way to test recipes. Gear up and educate staff. Basically, just kick the dust off the tires.

This Market/Café concept would not be happening without your continued support. Therefore, you will have the first chance to come visit and enjoy it (and offer us feedback). We will not be opening to the public until our current members have had an opportunity to eat, see, and feel the space.

I am committed that this new concept will enhance our service/products to you. This is not a distraction from our mission to feed New Mexicans who love our food. This project should help expand it to new heights.

Munch on, Farmer Monte

We are having a great month around here so far. Here is a quick brain dump for mid-July. Our Organic Juice Bar is back in full-tilt this week. The demand for our fresh juices has been so intense, that we broke our cold-pressed juicer. We are back squeezing right now though.

Few notes that are worth mentioning with our Juice program. We only (ever) use Organic products to juice. When you juice fruits and veggies, all of the nutrients and vitamins are concentrated into the juice. Which is obviously a great thing. But if you drink juice from non-Organic produce, you also concentrate all of the herbicides and pesticides that were used in the farming practices. So do yourself a huge favor and only drink Organic juices. Your body will thank you.

Secondly, our Juices are not pasteurized. This keeps all of the fresh vitamins and minerals intact. And maybe even more importantly, the flavor is garden fresh. Pasteurization alters the flavor, there is no denying that.

New Faces in our Juice Bar. Cocktail Mixers! For those of you keeping score at home, you know that the state of New Mexico passed a huge bill this year that allows home delivery of alcohol and food. I could not be happier about this.

Personally, I enjoy alcohol. But I absolutely hate Drinking and Driving. My brother, Jason, and I almost left this rock when we were involved in a car accident where the driver had been drinking. So it is near and dear to my heart to keep drunk drivers off the road. I feel like home delivery will help in this effort.

Additionally, there are some incredible flavors of beverages that pair so well with food. So we are launching 4 great new mixers this week. Crafted in our juice bar, that pair well with the alcohol of your choice…Or add them to soda water to make a fun Mocktail that is alcohol-free for kids or adults. Feel free to sip on these with your Pinkies out. You’ll still feel all classy eh.

To complete the overall vision, someday in the near future, you will be able to add Organically crafted Mixed Cocktails to your SKRS order. But for now, we will have fun working on the mixers and you can add whatever you feel like to them at your casa. Your feedback would be appreciated as we fine-tune the offerings.

Tangerines are back from our buddies in San Diego, Stehly Farms. The variety is called Golden Nugget and they are super yummy. Keep an eye out for those.

Losing the COVID-19. I am sure that I am not the only one who has put on a few lbs over the lockdown. Some comfort eating probably kept my sanity over the last 15 months. But I also noticed that our website was looking a little chubby too. So we are putting our website on a diet in hopes that it will be easier for you to use.

Quick math is that the top 50% of our products account for 89% of our sales. Therefore, we will be phasing out a lot of low demand items in exchange for weekly specials. I want to see items in high demand, or get the heck out of our store. Too many items make packing harder for our crew and the website less friendly for you.

The final vision for this is to have Kitchen Staples, more Weekly Specials, and then the Necessities like dish soap. If we can curate this properly (which we will) then you should feel showered with all you need to have a fantastic food journey, and more efficient for us.

Happy grazing, Farmer Monte

Meal Kit Highlight from Chef Jules: Smoked Pork Belly Tacos with Housemade Pineapple Salsa

Local Pork Belly from Robert Kyzer. Smoked for 8 hours with Applewood chips from Excelsior Orchards. Housemade Pineapple Salsa. SKRS Pickled Peppers and Onions. Cotija and Cilantro. Insane folks. Don’t miss this one.

Few Housekeeping Notes:
Our website just went through a little refresher. Nothing major, but the Harvest Boxes were affected. With this update, we will not be able to put as many items in the Harvest Boxes as we were before. We had to put them on a diet.

What you will see now is about 100 seasonal offerings all on 1 page. Still a very easy way to scroll through and add items to your order from several categories. We will, as we have for 2 decades, offer the weekly produce picks of the week. And these Harvest Boxes will be a fantastic way to stroll through our Produce aisles as well as see what our Kitchen Crew is highlighting.

One other functionality that I want to point out is our system’s ability to place Recurring Orders. If your family goes through a gallon of milk a week, just set it and forget it. Place any number of staple items on recurring order so you do not accidentally miss your cut-off time.

OK, enough housekeeping….So June is one of my favorite months of the year. Even though my back hair keeps me rather warm throughout the year, my body operates better in the heat. When the temps start to hit 90, then I am happy bear.

June is also Pride month. And I have to tell you that the word Pride has been spinning in my mind a lot recently.

As the grip of COVID continues to ease up, I feel very Proud of our crew. Since the world shut down on 3/11/20, our communities asked for our food more than ever. Demand shot up 500% and our crew had to be here to help feed New Mexicans. There was no option for Zoom in our world. We had to come into work.

And over the last 15 months, we have had No cases of COVID in our crew. Truly amazing. We masked up and came together as a team to accomplish so much. An incredible victory for the power of a team.

Furthermore, every single one of our crew members could have thrown in the towel and made more money living on inflated unemployment checks. Know this about our team…No one stayed here because of the money; they could have done better financially watching reruns of The Golden Girls. But everyone knew how important our work is and showed up and kicked butt. This makes me a very proud papa.

I am also a firm believer in the Inclusive nature of Pride month. It might be why I love food so much. Food brings people together. I would be willing to bet that food was involved in the best memories of your life. Food is an incredible uniter. We experience other cultures and people through food. The unity that food brings helps breakdown walls and barriers that we can arbitrarily put in place. Connect through food.

And lastly I will say that from the very first day we broke ground (3/3/2003), our mission has been about offering everyone a seat at our table. Our crew members are every color of the rainbow. Our customers are every color of the rainbow. And I love it.

After a year of COVID and a bumpy election year, I think everyone should take a pause and be Prideful of where we are as a group. Celebrate our similarities. Celebrate (and learn) from our differences. And all take a deep breath and smile knowing that we have green pastures ahead of us and have overcome so much.

Pride On, Farmer Monte

For those food nerds out there (like me), you probably have seen one or a dozen articles concerning the rising cost of food that began in March and is not slowing down. And if you have not seen these articles yet, you will. Gas and food prices will be serious water-cooler chatter coming into the summer. I would like to give you some food for thought.

Our country’s love of cheap food rides on the back of cheap gas. When fuel is inexpensive, the world is your oyster. Find cheap labor, set up shop, and just ship to market. Nothing really fancy about it. But what hap-pens as fuel prices go up? Well, all of the gains that you earned by finding cheap labor get gobbled up in fuel costs and you are back to where you began.

Therefore, when you see rising fuel costs, you know that rising food costs are on the heels. This is where we are at right now amigos. Is this avoidable? Absolutely.

To get off this manic roller coaster, we must expand our scope for long-term solutions to our food system. We need to look beyond short-term gains and build a consistent sustainable food model.

We all remember this from a year ago when the cheap food industry failed us as shelves were empty and over-crowded processing warehouses became the breeding grounds for Covid outbreaks.

At that time, our local and regional food network of many small producers coming together to sell as One, kept food on our tables as we did not have to go to the store. Our strength came from our diversity. We did not put all of our eggs in one basket and because of that we flourished in a very challenging time.

But that was then. Where are we now? Well we are obviously in a different situation than we were a year ago, but our local/regional model is still bringing us stability. We are not held hostage by the price of fuel. By cutting down food miles and cutting out the middle men (and women), we can maintain serious value in our offerings. And so yes, the local food model wins again.

We have built a little safe harbor in the storm of uncertainty. But also know that this is not by accident. The security that our food model maintains comes from decades of relationship building and from you sup-porting our vendors through the good and the bad times.

Our partners know that you have supported their efforts when easier or cheaper options were available; now they support you by not raising prices. A true Win-Win situation for producers and consumers. And I have to tell you that I celebrate these Wins in a marketplace that seemingly acts like if you have a Winner you have to have a Loser. You do not. And we are showing that.

So I invite (ok Encourage) you to browse the website. Our offering of fresh healthy foods has never been more diverse and value-packed than it is right now. Our partner producers are scaling up with more demand and that is decreasing the cost to support lo-cal/regional. And this will only continue to grow as we continue to support one another. It is really exciting to see.

I also encourage you to try all of the prepared foods our kitchen team is putting together. These are quick, convenient, and healthy options for you and your familia to enjoy. Chef Jules is showing us that we do not need to sacrifice quality just because we are looking for quick options to get food on the table.

Enjoy! Farmer Monte

First to bat this week is a big welcome to Silver Leaf Farms to the party. I have known Aaron and Elan for many years and am/have been really impressed with how they have scaled their Corrales farm in a very thoughtful and professional way.

They have pretty much perfected growing butter lettuce and I am happy to have them on board and sup-porting their continued growth. We will see other offerings coming up later this season, but to kick things off, look for their butter lettuce in all Harvest Boxes this week.

Continuation from our last newsletter. As I mentioned, we bought the old Zacatecas restaurant in Nob Hill. And after receiving several emails telling me that I have fallen off the turnip truck, I want to flesh this vision out a bit.

As we have been building out our fresh market concept, The Stand, a crazy thing happened; the space became too small for what we were envisioning. Chef Jules and his team have really shown the demand for high quality, local, convenient, and healthy “fast-food.”

Our lives are very busy, hectic, and at times a bit chaotic. And what we have seen is that healthy food choices are usually sacrificed in the face of convenience. Furthermore, there are Zero fast-food options that support local producers. None.

Our goal/mission is to change this unnecessary paradigm. There is no reason why fast-food cannot be Healthy, Tasty, and Local. But as you can imagine, changing how people eat is not an easy task. But as my Viking dad always says, “If the challenge is easy, the Swedes would have already figured it out.” So let me share with you this 2.0 version of this goal.

By adding a large commercial kitchen, we will not need The Stand to have a huge kitchen footprint. That market will be able to focus on being a true farm stand. It will have Daily Pickups of SKRS orders. It will have a fresh bakery. Healthy deli offerings from soups, salads, sandwiches, and of course our state breakfast, The Burrito. Organic fresh juice bar. Tons of produce. A Meat case to highlight all our awesome Local ranchers. And eventually a wine bar as we take advantage of the new liquor laws that just passed the state.

All in all, it will be a market that gives our community a place to meet, eat, and connect with our local food system. We should have this open in the next month.

That leaves us with an amazing restaurant and kitchen space. So I would like to introduce you to our newest concept, Carbón by Skarsgard Farms. Carbón in Spanish simply means Charcoal. And as I flip through my memories, the favorite flavors throughout my life have been cooked on coals. No fancy ovens, just heat paired with smoke. So Carbón is a space that will pay homage to foods cooked on coals. This will be an in-credible experience for omnivores and vegetarians alike.

Have a tasty weekend, Farmer Monte

Some of my taste buds favorite memories are harvesting strawberries, warmed by the sun, in our U-Pick patch in Santa Cruz. More berries then I could ever eat. It was the first time in my life that I could eat fresh berries until I was stuffed. I fell in love with the U-Pick.

And I have been thinking about that quite a bit recently. U-Pick signifies freshness, abundance, and maybe most importantly, Choice. I got to choose what and how much I wanted to eat of various items. Great experience.

As I have been chewing on (pun intended) our Meal Kit program, I have to tell you that I came to a point that hit me like a bat over the head; why do we have curry (for example) Meal Kits, but I can’t buy just curry sauce? This has become a torn in my bear paw. It doesn’t make sense. We have the ability to and must allow for customizations in our model. You deserve it.

Therefore, I want to introduce you to our newest iteration of New Mexico’s most amazing Meal Kit service.

1-Click Ordering. When you go to the 1-Click Meal Kit page, you will see several meal kits to choose from. Say you add a NM Pork Taco Kit. That whole recipe will default into your order. But here is the interesting part, you can customize it. Say you don’t like Cilantro, just remove it from you order and the price of the Kit will adjust. Say you want more tortillas with your Kit; add some and the price will adjust. Beautifully simple.

Basically, we are building these Kits to be more like how our Harvest Boxes act…We set the default that you will receive if you do not customize. Or open up the meal kit and customize all you like. Get what you like. I am not here to force you to eat cilantro.

Welcome U-Pick Meal Kits! The new addition to our family of Meal Kit inspiration. These kits you will design yourself. Example, click on our Build Your Own Pizza tab. Inside you will see various dough and toppings to choose from. If you want a Gluten Free pizza crust with Hatch green chile and Goat cheese, we have it! Design what you like, and we will bring it to you.

So what you can expect to see in the U-Pick Kits are items like Taco Tuesday, Burger Time, Pasta Night, Pizza Party, Links/Sausages, and Choose Your Own Pizza Adventure. We will be adding more categories to these meal kits as we move along, but this is our “Seed.”

With the addition of Customizations comes one change; we will No longer be packing kits into the cute brown paper bags. I like the bags, but the labor that we put into packing those individual kits is very expensive. So we pass those costs along to you. Unfortunately.

With this new system, all of the items for your meals will be in your order, but you will have to separate the items at your casa. This will help us to a) allow you to customize and b) $ave you Money! I think that you will be very impressed with the savings you will see with this new meal kit structure.

Last bit of fantastic news that I have been waiting to share with you…drum-roll please…we are the proud new parents of the old Zacatecas restaurant in Nob Hill. As we were building out The Stand’s kitchen, we realized that we were too limited on our scope. Our prepared food program is an absolute rocket ship. So we now have a large kitchen space that will expand offering through the home delivery platform, and yes, we will be opening a killer taco restaurant. More to come.

Hugs, Farmer Monte