BYE-BYE TO GOOD BUY

PALMER — Glacier Valley Farm plans to stop distributing its popular weekly produce boxes starting next month — too popular, maybe.

The $35 boxes filled with local or organic fruits and vegetables have proven so sought-after that the farm’s suppliers can no longer keep up with demand.

The decision to suspend distribution is due to the summertime lack of local supply to keep up with demand, plus the wintertime challenge of finding an affordable, consistent stream of Lower 48 produce to round out the Alaska-grown contents. Participants in the Glacier Valley team that puts out the boxes also have day jobs — farmers, bakers, produce managers — and they say they feel a need to turn their attention back to those businesses as well as their families.

Glacier Valley’s team informed customers by email Friday that delivery of the boxes will end Sept. 25.

“We’re doing 250 boxes a week. Last year, I had cauliflower in the boxes every week, but we were doing 150 boxes last year. The farmer can’t keep up the supply,” said Glacier Valley Farm owner Arthur Keyes. “I had cucumbers in the boxes every week last year. The problem this year is I can’t pick enough cucumbers to fill the boxes.”

Glacier Valley started selling the boxes through a Community Supported Agriculture business in 2008, a few dozen a week at the South Anchorage Farmers Market Keyes founded.

By this year, the customer roster had grown to 500 with about three-quarters picking up the boxes at distribution points in Anchorage, the rest in the Mat-Su and Kenai. A half-dozen Mat-Su farms provide the bounty inside, with help from organic farms in the Lower 48.

Fans praised the high-quality selection of local stalwarts like carrots, lettuce and potatoes, but also the introduction they got to more exotic specimens — ugly but delicate-tasting celery root, leafy collard greens and pearly oyster mushrooms.

The boxes had plenty of cabbage, carrots and potatoes, but struggled at times to provide produce like strawberries, tomatoes and fennel, “things that when you sign up for a CSA, those are the things you want,” said Alison Arians, who runs the marketing, billing and administrative side of Glacier Valley’s CSA business.

And that was just the Alaska-grown products. For much of the year, the boxes contained fruits and vegetables grown organically in the Lower 48 along with Valley spuds and carrots.

Glacier Valley sometimes experienced problems with the quality and consistency of that produce, as well as the price, operators said.

Volatility of prices for Outside produce was a major challenge for a business model like Glacier Valley’s that forced it to keep customer prices stable, said Amy Pettit, a development specialist in the state Division of Agriculture’s marketing section in Palmer.

A grocery store that orders broccoli at one price and sees the price double when it arrives passes the cost increase to the customer, Pettit said. But Glacier Valley couldn’t do that with its boxes, which are priced at $35 a week no matter what.

“There were weeks when they lost money, a lot of money,” she said. “It just became unfeasible to keep it going.”

Customers sent a flurry of emails to Glacier Valley upon hearing that the CSA boxes would be ending.

“We have thoroughly enjoyed our experience and all the new things that we have learned about cooking locally grown vegetables,” Anchorage residents Dan and Traci McCue wrote in an email to Glacier Valley last weekend. “You will be truly missed at the McCue household; however, you have planted a seed here that we will continue to cultivate and grow as we find and experience new ways to enjoy organically grown vegetables and produce.”

Keyes says in the email to customers that he hopes to spend more time with his family and focus his attention on farmers markets and a new farm stand.

Members of the Glacier Valley CSA team have had to balance the time and work spent on the CSA with their own business pursuits, too. Arians and her husband, Dan, own Rise and Shine Bakery, which sells at farmers markets. Ken Barnhardt, in charge of the box packing team, works as a produce manager.

Barnhardt has talked about doing a summer-only, Alaska-grown CSA next year, Arians said.

Keyes, who just opened a farm stand at the old Colony barn on his property along Inner Springer Loop, would like to start selling winter-storage vegetables if he can get the barn finished and heated.

He’s selling at five farmers markets a week, Keyes said. “Things are so great we’re having to pick and choose what we want to do. I’d rather be at the farmers market and hanging out with my kids and seeing friends.”

Arians expressed the team’s gratitude to their customers.

“I feel like we’re really growing this local food movement and maybe we were just a little ahead of our time,” she said. “Maybe somebody can take the ball and roll with it.”