Demographic information can be pretty dry and boring. But sometimes it helps us to understand the background for a topic, gives us the bigger picture. Our topic here is farms and growing food. And this column tries to tell the stories of farmers and growers in northern Minnesota. I chose “Grown on the Range” as a title, using Range in the broadest sense to include the three Iron Ranges: Cuyuna, Mesabi, and Vermillion. The Tribal lands of Mille Lacs, Fond du Lac, Leech Lake, and Bois Forte are also contained in this area. I tend to think of the greater Range in two parts, the five southwest counties and the five northeast counties.
The Arrowhead region of Minnesota—did you know that on January 10, 1925 “The Arrowhead” was selected as the official name for northern Minnesota? A nationwide contest sponsored by the Northeastern Minnesota Civic and Commerce Association of Duluth gave us this name. These ten counties of the Arrowhead (Pine, Carlton, Crow Wing, Aitkin and Cass in the southwest and Cook, Lake, St. Louis, Itasca and Koochiching in the northeast), are the proud home to 447,187 residents and 4,111 farms. A farm for about every hundred residents. About a third of those farms have annual sales of less than $2,500. We are perhaps most familiar with those kinds of farms—they sell honey at the farmers market or jams and jellies at the local craft fairs, maybe eggs and produce at a farm stand or direct-to-customer meat sales. These farmers also hold off-farm jobs to provide steady income and health care benefits. While writing this column for the past two years, I have only met two farmers who don’t have off-farm jobs.
The Arrowhead region varies widely in the market value of farm products sold between the five southwest counties ($107.4 million) and the five northeast counties ($31.4 million). And so does farm size. Farms over 500 acres, often growing row crops and/or livestock, number 247 in the southwest versus 104 in the northeast. So it’s a diverse area when we’re talking about farming. Only three of the ten counties noted an increase in the number of farms from the 2012 Census of Agriculture to the 2017 Census: St. Louis, Carlton, and Cook. Cook County has an interesting profile here with a 78% increase in the number of farms (no increase in the acres of land farmed though), and a 338% increase in net cash farm income. Interestingly, Cook County has the highest percent of farms that are farmed organically. It also has the highest percent of farmland categorized as woodland (75%). It appears that the local food movement and maybe forest farming is booming there along the North Shore of Lake Superior!
If we narrow our focus to just the “Iron Range,” the two counties where current or recently active mines are located, the landscape looks a bit different. Together, St. Louis and Itasca counties contain 1,116 farms which do $24 million in sales. All are classified as “family farms” (98 and 99 percent respectively). Forty percent of the farms in these two counties have sales less than $2,500 and 28% of farms are small--50 acres or less. There’s not a lot of pastureland in this area, only about 12-15% of farmland, with half of the farmed land in crops and about a third in woodland. Five hundred farmers here are listed as “new and beginning farmers” meaning that they have farmed less than 10 years! And we need more if we’re going to feed ourselves in the future!
Many of the farmers in northern Minnesota grow what the USDA calls “specialty crops.” This category includes all fruits and vegetables, tree nuts, orchard crops, and maple syrup in addition to hops, Christmas trees, nursery crops, and floriculture. To be considered a specialty crop, the item must be cultivated or managed and used by people for food, medicinal purposes, and/or aesthetic gratification. (Specialty crops tend to be dwarfed by the quantities of crops eaten by animals, or sold as commodities—hay, corn, soybeans, oats, wheat--in the general Census of Agriculture.) So it’s hard to get county-level data for fruits and veggies there. But it’s hard to find elsewhere too: in the Specialty Crop Census of Agriculture there are no county-level data at all. So we have to rely on state data. The entire state of Minnesota has 5,209 specialty crop farms. About half of those farms grow vegetables, 1,061 are orchards and 638 are in berries with the remainder being Christmas tree farms, farms that produce maple syrup, nursery plants, flowers, and wood lots for short harvest.
All of this background data points us to the future. Our future, economically speaking as well as nutritionally speaking. We spend millions of dollars each year on food, both in restaurants and in grocery and convenience stores and probably in mail-order food kits too. Most of those dollars leave our area because the food we buy is sourced globally. We have the ability to redirect our dollars to local growers. But it will take commitment on our part as consumers and on the part of local food businesses as providers. The Rutabaga Project for access to healthy local food is promoting the “Farm to Rural Grocery” effort, asking rural grocery store owners to consider buying locally. We’re recruiting local growers to plant for grocers and schools and institutional food buyers. Linking our local growing potential with our local buying potential is a massive economic opportunity for Minnesota’s Arrowhead.
Farmers markets are one small way to begin. Across the Arrowhead, many farmers markets provide an opportunity for local growers to sell directly to consumers. Visit www.arrowheadgrown.org to find the market nearest you. Then mark your calendar and pledge to GO and buy local every week. Yes, every week. It takes a concerted effort to support our growers. If you see a “local” section in your grocery store, buy from it! Better yet, ask your local grocer to get produce locally. If they don’t know where to begin, have them email the Rutabaga project manager, Kelsey.gantzer@aeoa.org. Or email me, mriffel@outlook.com and we’ll connect the growers and grocers and restaurants to make it happen!