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Farm Beta Kappa: A Newbie Learns from the Experts at the Wisconsin School for Beginning Market Growers
By Pat Yourell
I’ve been farming full time (eh, more or less) for one season. I worked off and on at an organic farm in Southeastern Wisconsin the season before that. And prior to that, I just tended a garden in our backyard. So, yeah, I’ve got a few seasons of planting and harvesting and farmers-marketing under my belt. I certainly don’t feel like I know it all, of course. But what do I know? What don’t I know?
What do I need to know?
That’s what I set out to discover over a three day weekend in late January, at the Wisconsin School for Beginning Market Growers in Madison.
Friday, January 20
In the school’s introductory letter, class coordinator, John Hendrickson, suggested that students arrived no later than 8:45 a.m. And despite a little parking confusion on my part, I arrived in room 205 of UW’s Babcock Hall on time Friday morning. At my desk I was greeted with a stack of materials in an enormous binder, along with the book Sustainable Vegetable Production From Start-up to Market by Vernon Grubinger, and a class schedule. Along with Hendrickson, three Wisconsin farmers served as the instructors for the class – Tricia Bross of Luna Circle Farm in Rio, Mike Racette of Spring Hill Community Farm in Prairie Farm, and Scott Williams of Garden To Be Farms in Mt Horeb.
After introducing themselves and their farms, Hendrickson and the growers led the class in a discussion about how to start a one acre market farm with $5,000. A luxury few farmers enjoy – and certainly not as easy as it may sound. The long-story-short version of that particular exercise is that a walk-in cooler may be the most important investment a new farmer can make. Without it, all that time and energy you put into seeding transplants, planting, harvesting, etc. could be compromised without proper cold storage. And, obviously, “the produce has to be in great shape for markets,” as Bross succinctly put it.
To make enough financial room in your budget for a cooler, you may end up having to compromise and go with, say, a used tiller, instead of a new one. Or hire tillage work from another farmer. Maybe go without a tractor for a few years.
This is just one of the litany of decisions that calls upon a farmer to utilize creative thinking. And – from planning out the season, to purchasing seeds, to observing crops, to harvesting, to doing your taxes – accurate, detailed record-keeping was a common thread among most of the topics discussed throughout the weekend. As one who used to work full-time in a creative field, I know that the quickest way to achieve creativity is to take an organized, informed approach.
The next subject we covered on Friday was marketing. Specifically, farmers markets, restaurants and community supported agriculture. While they are somewhat different approaches to marketing, consistent quality was a common theme among them. Bross, who concentrates much of her farm to selling at farmers market, stressed researching your marketing opportunities. “You may grow great food, but if you can’t sell it you won’t make any money.” And at a farmers market, she pointed out that quality is not only what sells, but what keeps customers coming back.
Bross also makes sure she takes note of what sells and what doesn’t, in order to provide an abundance of popular items and perhaps phase out veggies that no one seems to want as much. Presentation is also a big seller. She takes great care in giving her farm a recognizable persona at farmers market, like standardizing the price tags and keeping a consistent color scheme. So even if people don’t remember her farm’s name when they come back to the market, Bross says, “they’ll look for the purple farm.” Williams used to sell a lot of his produce at farmers market, but now concentrates primarily on growing specialty greens and vegetables for upscale restaurants. When initially contacting a chef, he said it’s effective to plan to meet them in person and bring along a lot of catalogs with pictures of what you plan to grow, remembering to ask them what they need. “I bring my laptop along when I visit a chef,” he said. “I can open it up and show them pictures of produce or the farm…it just brings it to life for them.”
And these days Williams uses his laptop just about as much as his scuffle hoe. Using the QuickBooks program, he can track what vegetables are selling well to a particular chef, or whether or not a chef is following through on his or her promise to buy a certain amount of a certain vegetable. Keeping in face-to-face, or at the very least, phone contact with chefs is critical. “If you’re just e-mailing (chefs), they tend to forget about you,” Wiliams said. “They’re busy too.”
Back in the early ‘90s, Racette and his family got into organic farming through community supported agriculture, a new concept at the time. They began with a core group of friends who lived over an hour away in the Twin Cities, and it just grew from there. But as they grew, they discovered that many of the things they did out of necessity early on – like having shareholders come to the farm to pick up weekly boxes, rather than delivering them – became part of the farm’s tradition. “Early on, think carefully about how you set up your CSA,” Racette advised. “Because 15 years later, we have a large group of visitors every week. It’s not a problem for us, but it might be for you and your family.” He suggests that listening to the shareholders may be the most important aspect of running a successful CSA. Keep track of what your members want – and most importantly, don’t want – and seek out their feedback. Racette accomplishes this with online surveys through the farm’s website and with a core group of shareholders who act as the formal conduit between the farm and its customers.
Saturday, January 21
Saturday was the most lengthy and intensive day of the school, filled with discussions of nuts-and-bolts topics. The soil fertility management discussion dealt with inputs, cover crops, rotations and tillage. The growers each took turns discussing production of onions, salad mix and winter squash. And each farmer offered their tips on greenhouses, season extension and irrigation. Plenty of quality info.
But the day’s highlight was a visit from University of Wisconsin entomologist Phil Pellitteri, whose name you may recognize from his frequent appearances on Wisconsin Public Radio. He spoke for an hour or so on common sense approaches to pest control, which include organic methods, as well as Integrated Pest Management – which is essentially using limited amounts of chemicals at strategic times.
Pellitteri emphasized that it’s in a farmer’s best interest to try to think in terms of working with pests, rather than working against them. It’s a notion that may seem a bit counterintuitive, until you consider the example of the Asian Lady Beetle. The beetle was originally brought to the United States in an effort to control aphid populations in the Southeast. But since the Asian Lady Beetle has no natural predator here in the U.S., their population has exploded so much so that now many of us spend all winter vacuuming thousands of them out of our light fixtures and windowsills.
Techniques such as shifting your planting dates in order to avoid certain pests’ life cycles, shielding your crops with row covers and utilizing bio-insecticides are some of the most effective non-chemical approaches to limiting the negative effects of insects on your farm. Another way is to observe and take detailed notes on pests on your own farm, so you can use that information to help protect your crops in the future. Seems like a lot of work, but task of cataloguing the comings and goings of insects throughout your growing season isn’t really so daunting. “There are really only a limited amount of pests for each crop,” Pellitteri said. “Make sure you get to know them.”
Sunday, January 22
Sunday morning was all about weed management and post harvest handling, two incredibly important topics for the market farm. But in my mind, the next two topics were of even greater importance. A discussion of farm economics preceded our lunch break, then Tricia Bross (who is also a CPA) attempted to demystify the art of preparing farm taxes.
The subject of economics, as it relates to market farming, is really quite nebulous. Your economic structure is dependent on a multitude of variables. How many acres can you work before you need to mechanize further? What kinds of crops are you growing? What kinds of crops do you want to grow? Are the crops you’re growing maximizing the gross profits of your land? The answers to each of those questions, and probably a million other variations on their theme, are different for each individual farm.
Racette, Bross and Williams each had different ideas of how their farm’s economic structure should work for them, because they each run fairly different operations. But, maybe not surprisingly, they each go about determining their farm’s economic structure in a very similar way. “Every winter my wife and I sit down with a pen and paper and literally write out what our goals are for the farm in the upcoming season,” Racette said. Bross does it, too. And so do Williams and his wife.
They determine things like whether to grow more, less or none at all of a certain crop. How much per acre gross profit do they need to maintain in order to keep their farm profitable? What kind of lifestyle do they want to live – i.e., do they want to work more or less? Will they need an off-farm job to help pay the bills? What will they do for health insurance? Each question seems to result in a flurry of more questions. But a farm is an ever-changing entity, which requires these issues be address and re-evaluated at least once a year. And, much like every other aspect of running a successful farm, the answer to handling it all seems to lie in getting everything down on paper…or at least into QuickBooks…so you can chart how close to or far from your goal you are as you move through the season.
Admittedly, scheduling an hour-long lecture on filing taxes after lunch on the third day of a very intensive, information-packed workshop seemed like a bad idea. And I know my eyes weren’t the only ones getting heavy. But I really wanted to pay attention to this one, mainly because, although it’s one of those things my poor brain has a hard time comprehending, it’s something I need to know and something I’ll definitely need to review from my notes until I get a handle on it. And I’d recommend the same thing to any other new farmer.
Reflections on quality of life
“Make sure you love farming. It’s too much work if you don’t.” – Tricia Bross
The final discussion on Sunday centered around the quality of life on a farm. Like farm economics, this is an issue that can be one thing to one farmer and a completely other thing to another farmer. And it may not be something that you can even begin to comprehend until you’ve actually lived and worked on your farm for a year or two. “When I started out, there were a lot of 18 hour days and 90 hour weeks,” Williams said. “But we’ve made a conscious effort now that we have a baby to not let the farm consume our every waking hour.”
Each farmer agreed that striking a balance between making the farm what you want it to be in terms of financial success and allowing yourself time away from it is the goal. Taking one day off a week just to let yourself recharge can do a lot more good for your farm than any work you may have gotten done in that time.
“The good thing about the farm is that the work is right there,” Racette said. “The bad thing about the farm is that the work is right there. Sometimes it’s hard to walk away from it, but you have to allow yourself that.”
But through it all – the long hours, the sore muscles, the lack of sleep, the tenuous relationships with chefs and produce buyers, the lack of adequate and affordable healthcare, and everything else – all three farmers thrive on their own farm in their own way. And perhaps Bross put it best when she said, simply, “I love my life.”
Applying what I learned Going into the School, I felt I had, at the very least, a handle on the physical aspects involved with farming. But I was hoping to learn ways to become more organized. To be able to map out my season each year, to know exactly where I was headed and be able to follow through. One failing of my own first year was that I was just kind of wandering aimlessly throughout the season.
For this upcoming season, I decided that definitely needed to change and the growers school really helped me clarify not only my goals, but how I would even figure out what my goals were. Using a spreadsheet program on my home computer, I’ll log each sowing, each harvest, when each crop was stored. Maybe even how much seed I have left of a certain variety and which varieties I can forget about ordering or saving seed for in the future. I’ll also use it to keep track of my restaurant and co-op customers, and, eventually, my CSA customers.
One other thing I’d like to employ that I’d never have thought of before attending the school was Mike Racette’s idea of online surveys to get CSA shareholder feedback. Even with, say, just a 20-member CSA, that instant feedback could prove to be invaluable as the farm continues to grow.
It’s a truly unique school that John Hendrickson and the folks at the University of Wisconsin-Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems (CIAS) have put together. I was a little hesitant to part with the $250.00 initially (probably just a signal that I’m becoming a real farmer).
But by the end of the weekend, I’d considered it a wise investment. In the few weeks since attending, I’ve honestly tried to think of some negative aspects to the school, but I just couldn’t. Well, other than the fact that I left on Sunday with a serious case of cognitive melt from information overload. But in observing my fellow students as they left that Sunday afternoon, I could definitely detect a sense that they’d been invigorated. They looked ready to get back to their own farms, or farms-in-progress and prepare for the upcoming season.
And I just thought to myself, “Yeah, me too.”
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