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The person behind the productJimenez Julien
Founder of MLJ, SASU, and the person who writes, ships and supports CropShareBox. If something in the planner is wrong on a Wednesday morning, he is the one who hears about it.
Why a software builder ended up in a packing shed
I did not grow up on a farm. I got here through a spreadsheet. A friend of the family ran a 140 member CSA outside a small town, and every Tuesday night she sat at the kitchen table with a legal pad, a crop list and a pot of coffee, trying to work out whether 140 households could each get a bunch of chard. Some weeks the answer was no, and she found out at 9am on Wednesday with sixty totes already on the floor. I offered to help with the spreadsheet. That spreadsheet turned into eleven months of ride alongs, and eventually into CropShareBox.
What I learned in that first season is the thing the rest of the software market keeps missing: a CSA is not an inventory problem, it is a promise problem. A grower has told 140 households that a box of good food will be waiting on Wednesday. Everything else, the bed feet, the succession plantings, the wash line, the route, exists to keep that promise. So a planner that starts from an idealized crop plan drawn up in January is useless by week 6. The only number that matters is what is standing in the field right now, and how it divides across the shares you have already sold.
The second thing I learned is that pack day is loud, wet and fast. Nobody is going to click through four screens with cold hands. Any feature that cannot survive a barn with two bars of signal and a crew of seasonal workers who started last week is a feature that will be abandoned by July. I have watched people give up on a tool in real time, and it is a quiet thing: they just print the old sheet again and never mention it. That is why the pack view is one page with large type, why it works offline, and why we ship fewer options than most competitors.
Experience and expertise
I have spent fifteen years building software for operations that run on deadlines, first in logistics scheduling and then in small business tooling, before founding MLJ, SASU. CropShareBox is what happens when that background meets a trade that has almost no margin for a bad tool. I am not an agronomist and I do not pretend to be one. I do not tell growers what to plant or how to space a bed. My expertise is in the shape of the week: how information moves from a field walk to a pack sheet to a member inbox, and where it gets dropped.
Every year between March and November I spend at least one full pack day on a working farm, unpaid and unannounced in the product roadmap. I have loaded totes at 5am in the Hudson Valley and stood in a wash line in Wisconsin. That habit is the reason substitution rules work in weight classes rather than in abstract categories, and the reason box labels print with the member note at the top rather than the bottom. Both of those came from watching someone squint at a sheet under a work light.
How this product is built and maintained
CropShareBox is built and supported by a small team under my direction, and I write a meaningful share of the code myself. We ship changes on a slow, deliberate cycle: nothing structural goes out between May and September, because that is when farms are packing and a surprise is a cost. Bugs that affect a pack day are fixed the same day, at any hour, and I publish what went wrong to affected farms rather than hiding it in a change log.
Every claim on this site is checked before it is published. The season numbers you read on the home page come from farms that finished a season on the product and agreed to share their close out figures. When I cannot substantiate a number, I remove it rather than round it up. Testimonials are printed with the grower's name, role, farm and town because a quote nobody can trace is worth nothing. Pricing on this site is the pricing you are charged, and it does not change for you mid season without your written agreement.
I am accountable for three things: that the planner tells the truth about what your field can cover, that your members' data stays yours, and that a human answers when you write. If any of those slips, write to me and say so plainly.
Published articles
Everything below was written for The Weekly Share, the CropShareBox magazine for CSA growers, and every piece was reported against real pack weeks on working farms.
- How to Build a 22 Week CSA Share Calendar From Seeding Dates
- Fixed Box vs Choice Box vs Market Credit: Three CSA Models Compared
- The Substitution Mistakes That Drive CSA Members to Cancel
- FSMA Produce Safety Rule: Qualified Exemptions for CSA Farms
- Temple-Wilton and Indian Line: How the First US CSAs Were Built
- The CSA Models Gaining Ground: Flex Shares, SNAP, and Storage Weeks
- The Harvest Morning Checklist for a 150 Box CSA Pack Out
- Pricing a CSA Share: Cost Per Box Math From Bed Feet to Break Even
- A Rain Week on a CSA Farm: Which Crops Hold and Which Are Lost
Contact the author
The fastest route is email at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. I read everything myself and answer within one business day, which during the season often means the same evening. If you want to talk through a pack week before you commit to anything, ask on the home page form and say what week of the season you are in.