Interview (YouTube) between Richard Perkins and Mark Anthony Anyfantakis about Terra, a cooperative running Luxembourg's first CSA vegetable scheme. The farm was established in 2014 in the city of Luxembourg and supplies vegetables to around 250 members via weekly baskets during a ~33-week season (April–December). The conversation covers team composition (three founders plus hired apprentice-turned-staff and one apprentice), recent operational highs (harvesting 150 baskets in one day), COVID-19 adaptations (reduced volunteers, safety measures), and weather challenges (prolonged dry spell).
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Okay. Welcome to a new episode of Farm Like a Hero, folks. I'm Richard Perkins. Today I'm here with Mark Anthony, Annie Fantakis, who's one of the three founding members of Terra, which is a cooperative built around Luxembourg's first CSA vegetable scheme, which was retrofitted under an existing orchard and featured in a video on our YouTube channel back in August. In 2017, we've actually been friends for getting on 15 years now. We met in Brighton and live together there. The farm Terra is located in the heart of the city of Luxembourg and was established 2014, same time as our farm was getting started. And they're supplying vegetables to over 200 members who pick up produce at pick up points around the city. Marco's hosted farm scale permaculture design training with me at his place some years ago. And together with his partners Pete and Sophie, they've really built up an amazing business with extensive outreach in their community. The social element has been a super important part of their project, which we'll hear a lot more about. So really excited for today's interview. Marky, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with us.
It's a pleasure.
Just give us a little background on the size of the farm and if that was the correct number of members that you're still serving for.
April 21 was the first first harvest and we're gonna keep on harvesting weekly until December and this year we're up to 250 baskets. There actually was a historic moment. Two days ago was our biggest harvest ever. We harvested 150 baskets in one day, plus other things, little things for shops and restaurants, and it was awesome. We're really happy. We've started the season pretty well. Everything's looking amazing. It's lovely to see people again and meet new members that have signed up. Since we've increased over the years, we've increased the number of members that we have. And yeah, it's just a bit weird in the current situation with everyone coming up with masks and during this whole Corona crisis, things have changed a bit how we do things. We'll maybe get into that. But yeah, in principle that's. Our harvest season is about 33 weeks from April to December. 250 baskets and then a little bit of extra sales for shops and restaurants. That's the current model and that's.
It's a pretty impressive thing. It's three of you running that at the heart and you have some agricultural school students come along to intern with you also. Don't You? Yeah.
So maybe another change this year is that we've hired a fourth person, Christiane, who finished her apprenticeship with us. So she did three years. When I say apprenticeship, I refer specifically to the local ag school program. That's a three year program where they do two days in school, three days on the farm. So Christiane finished as an apprentice with us and now we've hired her full time. So that's an amazing extra support and help to have here. And we have one more apprentice. So that's pretty much the three founders, Sophie Pitt and I, plus Christian and one apprentice. That's the core team right now. And since given the current situation, we can't have volunteers or other interns around, so we've kind of had to close off a bit, which is both a blessing and a curse. A curse, of course, because we have less human power to help us out, but a blessing because it means we can first of all put the team really to the test and see how resilient are we. Because we've always been claiming that we're not relying on volunteers or on external people coming in and helping us out, as well as just being able to focus and get the job done. That's actually really, really cool to be able to do that these in these times. So with that team, I think we're just about managing to do everything to make things work, to manage the harvest basically. But it's tight. It's tight and it's really interesting. We're really flirting and playing with that balance between, okay, how much, how much of our time energy can we put into this for, you know, it's like, where do you, where's that balancing equaling up point where it's just a really interesting process that we're going through to figure that out. And it's just all crazy, man. Like it hasn't rained since, for about a month and a half now. It's been really hot for this time of year. So that's, that's added that extra challenge that we generally wouldn't have at this time of year. On top of that we have this whole new situation with the coronavirus happening. And you know, the first time we have such this number of baskets. So for now it's all going smooth, but it's really going to be a test to see how well can we do this, how gracefully can we do this.
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