Profile 50: Area Farmers Markets are Opening for the Season! originally published in Hometown Focus

Farmers market season is here!  The Grand Rapids and Aitkin Farmers Markets are already open and the other six area markets will open soon.  They’re located in city parks and parking lots and empty lots and wherever they can find space to use, preferably without cost.  Most farmers markets up north are run by volunteers or vendors who double as managers.  Any joining fees that markets charge vendors are used for advertising or space rental.  So the profit generated at a farmers market goes directly to the farmers and other vendors who sell there.  Most markets around here have guidelines that limit vendors to those who make/grow/produce their goods within a certain number of miles of the market.  That means that the dollars you spend at a farmers market stay local and support the local economy.

Farmers markets are a tiny slice of food sales when you look at all food dollars spent.  But they are one of the ways that customers can buy directly from local farmers.  That means that you can ask the farmer how the food was produced—is this beef from grass fed cows, or are your pigs pastured, or do you use pesticides on your tomatoes, or how much sugar does your strawberry jam contain?  There’s something comforting about knowing where your food comes from and how it was made or grown.  There are also limitations—and seasonality is the main one in the northland.  I manage the Virginia Market Square Farmers Market and we always have someone who comes at the beginning of June asking when we’ll have tomatoes and sweetcorn.  That means that farmers markets have to be educators too.  If you want to eat fresh and local, you’ll be eating asparagus, rhubarb, chives, lettuce, spinach and some herbs in June, but that sweetcorn and those tomatoes don’t ripen until at least late July or August.  Zucchini you can get in early August, but winter squash like butternut or Hubbard won’t be ready until late September at least.  And pumpkins are ready just in time for Halloween.

Many of our area markets accept SNAP/EBT payments and FMNP checks.  SNAP stands for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and FMNP stands for Farmers Market Nutrition Program.  Both are funded by the USDA and are part of the Farm Bill.  Most markets also participate in “Market Bucks,” a matching program funded by the Minnesota Legislature and administered by Minnesota Hunger Solutions.  Each of these programs aims to increase the purchase of fresh local food at farmers markets by recipients.  In all cases, the market vendors reap the benefits in the amount they’re able to sell.  For the past several years, some area markets have offered the Power of Produce Club for kids.  Each child gets $2 worth of tokens to spend on veggies or fruit at the market.  And this year, several markets will pilot the Power of Produce Plus program for seniors.

Each market is unique in its mix of vendors.  Some include craft vendors as well as food.  Before COVID, many markets offered children’s activities and entertainment.  And we hope that can return sometime this summer!  Markets operate under the jurisdiction of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture and are considered part of the food service sector.  So we follow their rules.  The Minnesota Department of Health is also involved in the licensing of vendors who sell “value-added” products which add ingredients not grown on the farm.  And then there are all the Cottage Food producers who make jams, jellies and pickles and other foods that the Department of Agriculture considers “non-potentially hazardous” because of their acid and water content. 

Here are the area markets and opening dates, in order of opening:

Grand Rapids May 5, Aitkin May 8, Ely June 1, Virginia June 10, Hibbing June 15, Tower June 18,  Cook June 19, and the Mesabi East Environmental Education pop-up market opens July 31.  You can look up the days and hours that each market is open, the location, and whether they accept SNAP/FMNP in the farmers market directory at www.arrowheadgrown.org .  The markets are listed by region and the directory covers northeast Minnesota.  We’re working on adding a page to this website that gives the approximate month in which common vegetables and fruits are available in our northern climate…..coming soon!

A new feature for some markets is online ordering.  For example, the Grand Rapids market vendors list their products on the Open Food Network, an international open-source platform, so that customers can shop from home and pick up their order at the market.  Here’s a link to their online “store” as an example: https://openfoodnetwork.net/grand-rapids-farmers-market/shop#/shop .  Last year because of COVID,  the Cook Area Farmers Market conducted all of their sales via online ordering and pick up at the park with no live market.  This year they’ll be back with an in-person market at the park.  Some, like Virginia Market Square, use a combination of online and in-person sales.  For growers who work full time at off-farm jobs, online ordering provides a way to sell their produce without actually sitting at the farmers market.  It’s also a good way for markets to increase the products they have available.

In Minnesota, many markets are members of the Minnesota Farmers Market Association which provides insurance as well as marketing assistance, a farmers market manager guide, and an annual educational conference as well as weekly Zoom updates.  (www.mfma.org )  Many markets also join Minnesota Grown which publishes a statewide directory of producers and markets who sell directly to customers.  ( https://minnesotagrown.com/search-directory/ ) And the national Farmers Market Coalition keeps everyone up with all of the federal legislation and relevant programs.  (https://farmersmarketcoalition.org/ )

So check out the Arrowhead Grown directory and plan to visit your local farmers market as soon as it opens!  Thank you from all of the local growers and vendors who look forward to meeting you soon.

Profile 49: Family-owned and solar powered at Floodwood Farm & Feed, originally published in Hometown Focus

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

I took the backroads down to Floodwood in the early spring—no leaves were out yet, but everything was greening up.  I followed the St. Louis River part of the way along Hwy 29, and then landed, to my surprise, in “The Catfish Capital of the World.”  I LOVE catfish, having grown up in a Mississippi River town in Illinois.  But this is walleye country, right?  Not in Floodwood where the July 9-10-11 Catfish Festival gives this town its designation.  At the junction of the St. Louis, East Savannah and Floodwood Rivers, this community spreads over what was originally Anishinaabe land.  Its Savannah Portage was eventually important to fur-traders until its logging history began in 1890….but ended in 1926.  In the mean time, the pastures around the community supported dairy farms and the Floodwood Creamery Cooperative, established in 1911, sold dairy products across the world…..until the late 1960’s.  It echoes the story of evolving rural economies across northeastern Minnesota.

But the reason I came to Floodwood was to write about the Floodwood Farm and Feed store and its grain mill.  It has to be the tallest structure in town, and it was a coop until around 1980 when it came into the Manner family whose descendants, Nate and Maria, own and operate it today.  The mill has eight monstrous bins, all original to the structure, which hold oats, barley, non-GMO and two other kinds of corn, soybean meal, protein pellets, and an empty bin so that  farmers can  bring their own product to mix with the others for a custom feed.  That’s what Nate and Maria do best: help area farmers find the right feed for their animals.

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

The store used to sell mostly dairy feed, but that has changed over the years.  These days they sell a lot of hog and chicken feed and, increasingly, feed for nontraditional animals like emus and llamas.  They feature non-GMO ingredients and they don’t use any soy products.  Their customers come mainly from areas north of Floodwood, including Zim, Palo, Walker, Aurora, and Maple, Wisconsin.  And each customer wants a slightly different type of feed.  No one-size-fits-all here!  Nate and Maria live about 15 miles north on a farm where they have a few animals and two young daughters who help out in the store.

They’ve seen an influx of customers in the last few years who want to know where their animal-based food comes from and how the animals have been cared for.  They connect folks who want to know with folks who do, and folks who need a particular product (like hay) with folks who grow it.  Lots of networking happens here.  They also sell seeds, bedding plants, birding supplies, pet supplies, boots, a few tools, deer feed, cattle gates, fertilizer, seed oats and wood pellets.  Right now is the busiest season with everyone gearing up for summer up north.

The most unusual thing about Floodwood Farm and Seed is that it’s powered by solar panels located all across the south face of the roof.  When Minnesota Power offered a rebate for solar, Nate and Maria were approached by Energy Plus as a perfect site for solar.  They decided to go for it.  The system has been functional for a year now and just chalked up an energy-neutral month in March (they produced as much as they used).  They’re connected to the grid, so excess production goes back into the grid and when their panels don’t meet their needs, the grid supplies them.  All in all, they’re happy with the installation.  Like most solar panels in northern Minnesota, they produce less in the snowy season but make up for it in the summer.  

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

I was particularly interested in the fact that the store used to be a coop.  Finnish immigrants across northern Minnesota were known for establishing cooperatives throughout the area.  I tried to find the specific history of the Floodwood Grain Coop but wasn’t able to locate anything.  What I did find was a fascinating USDA magazine, “Rural Cooperatives,” that was published from 1934 until 2018.  The 1999 issue celebrated 65 years of publication with excerpts from each decade, tracing the “evolution of cooperatives as a vibrant sector of the farm economy.”  

In chronicling the 1980’s, the magazine titled the section “Mergers, Consolidations Change Look of U.S. Cooperatives.”  This section tells the story of an East Coast conference on cooperatives, where a corporate CEO tells the attendees that “cooperatives must seriously consider merger or consolidation” and that “there is no justification for the intricate web of more than 5,000 farmer cooperatives existing today…”  And so the story begins to end.  I suspect it was that kind of atmosphere that led to the sale of the Floodwood Coop first to a cousin of and then to Nate Manner’s father in 1983.  From farmer coop to multi-generation family-owned business, the Floodwood Farm and Feed lives on and now leads the town in renewable energy too.

Profile 48: Grown on the Range Farmshare to Pilot this summer, originally published in Hometown Focus

I’ve written about CSA farms here before, but just as a refresher, CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture.  It’s an arrangement where folks buy a “share” of farm produce from a local farmer up front, paid before the growing season begins, and they receive a box/basket of produce each week for a specified period of weeks or months.  In northern Minnesota, of course, that’s approximately June through October, but in some places it’s year-round.  The first documented CSA in the U.S. was established in western Massachusetts in 1985.  Since then, the idea has spread across the country.

I’m a bit of a research nerd, so I checked in to the latest research on CSAs.  In most of the U.S., CSAs are growing, morphing into new CSA-like arrangements, and competing for the local food/organic food market share.  There are no uniform state guidelines or regulations on what constitutes a CSA, so it can vary.  Some are all veggies and a few berries, some include meat, some are flower CSAs, some are purchasable at retail locations on a pay-as-you-go basis, some deliver, but most have grown out of a fairly specific set of values: that buying local is good, that small farms accountable to specific customers who want healthy food will treat the land with care, that building community is as important as profit,   and that alternative economic systems are worth trying out.  So, CSA farms started as a way to help folks eat local and healthy and to directly support their local farm economy.  With most food on our plates traveling an average of 1,500 miles to get to us, CSA food is different: it comes from the soil around us and the people who live nearby and it saves all that transport fuel.  And there are additional benefits.  If we want to know how the food was grown, we can visit the farm and ask.  CSA farms often welcome volunteers and interns who want to learn the trade.  And they buy their supplies locally too.

For the farmer, the CSA cuts out the middle folks—processors, warehouses, marketers, distributors, retailers and guarantees a fixed price for what is produced.  The farmer and the CSA members share the risk…of success or failure.  In areas where CSAs are competing with each other for members, you can imagine that innovations abound.  Want your CSA every two weeks?  Sure.  Want it delivered by mail?  OK.  Want the produce mixed with jams and jellies and breads?  Got it.  Want a discount for picking your own?  Yep.  Want to pack your own box from the variety of what’s available that week?  No problem.  Want to order and pay online?  Of course.  And on and on.  No matter the model, farmers need to keep marketing and retaining customers and customers need to keep up the demand for fresh local food each week.  There are CSAs in northern Minnesota, but not close by.  The CSA Guild lists eleven in the Duluth area and one in Grand Marais.  Minnesota Grown lists 80 in the entire state, but most are in central and southern Minnesota.

Now let’s shift our lens a bit farther north to the Iron Range of Minnesota, USDA Zone 3a, where we can have frost in July and snow in September.  Where we’ve mostly forgotten our foraging and farming roots.  And where your local grocer can get you bananas in January and sweet corn in April.  Despite this, we have had active local CSAs with 40-80 members each, but we’ve lost most of our CSAs on the Range in the past three years.  The farmers have given up on CSAs, at least for now.  Most have taken other jobs, or, in one case, kept the other job they’ve always had and turned their attention to a different project.  The exceptions are Fat Chicken Farm in Embarrass with about 20 shares, and a small brand new CSA just starting: Alfred Smith’s Farm outside of Hibbing.

With season extension strategies like hoop houses and high tunnels, storage options like root cellars, and new technology like deep winter greenhouses, you’d think we might be booming in CSAs.  But we’re not.  And given our recent past, I don’t think we’re lacking demand.  We just don’t seem to have farmers in positions where they can launch a CSA and stay with it.  So this summer, the Rutabaga Project, using a USDA grant, is piloting something new--an “aggregated CSA.”   We’re calling it the Grown on the Range FarmShare.  And we’ll be studying it in every detail to determine whether this model is feasible on the Range.

Here’s how it works: 1) recruit farms to participate in a weekly CSA of just a few shares running from June through October.  We have recruited these farms: Aspen Falls Farm in Cook, Bear River Farm in Bear River, Early Frost Farms in Embarrass, Homegrown in Embarrass, and Murray Family Farms in Angora.   The farmers will pick the week’s produce and wash it so that it’s ready to be aggregated.  2) find funds to pay for a limited number of experimental shares—AEOA Senior Services will generously fund the initial shares for five seniors.  3) Identify recipients—Virginia HRA has identified five seniors in public housing in Virginia as recipients--they will be asked to share what they receive as they are able.  These seniors will then act as a focus group to provide feedback for needed changes and improvements for next year.  4) Hire an aggregator who will travel weekly to each farm, collect the share ingredients, pack them into rolling coolers, and deliver them.  We have an aggregator on board for this summer, paid through the USDA grant. 5)  Get the appropriate insurance and license.  With insurance provided through Virginia Market Square farmers market and the market site as the cooler-washing facility, we have applied for the appropriate Retail Mobile Food Handler License.

We’re going to give it a try and keep meticulous records of the costs involved, evaluate our progress frequently with the participating farmers and recipients, and decide whether an aggregated CSA like this can pay for itself with sufficient subscribers.  Wish us luck—if we succeed, you’ll have the opportunity to buy a Grown on the Range FarmShare next year.

Profile 47: Old Ed Kuehl's Work Farm, originally published in Hometown Focus

The sap is running in Minnesota and all over the northland, folks are trekking out to the sugar bush to monitor taps and collect sap.  I grew up in Illinois where spring came a lot earlier than it does here in Minnesota, and we thought pancake syrup was that dark corn syrup in the Karo bottle.  That thick dark goo is made from cornstarch and flavored with a kind of molasses called refiner’s sugar….sounds awful to me now that I live in maple syrup land and have grown used to that wonderful boiled down maple sap with no flavoring needed.  Minnesota is the farthest north and the farthest west of the 19 maple syrup producing states.  Forty-seven maple syrup vendors are selling members of Minnesota Grown, but many more produce syrup just for their own use.

That’s why I went to visit Ed Kuehl near Embarrass last week.  I’ve known Ed for a few years and have had the pleasure of tasting his wines, all made from local produce.  He and his neighbors made 36 gallons of wine last year.   And now they’re boiling down maple sap.  When the daytime temperatures are above freezing and the nights are below freezing, the trees start yielding sap.  Ed says a tree should be at least 8” across at chest height in order to support one tap.  And it takes about 10 trees to yield a gallon of finished syrup.  Ed and friends have tapped maples in a number of places on the Range, but right now they’re tapping 400 trees near Gilbert on land owned by a friend in St. Paul.  The land has been logged, but they left all the maples—perfect!  I just assumed that tapping meant pounding in a tap and hanging a 5-gallon bucket, but this is much more sophisticated.

Clear 5/16” plastic drop lines run from the tap to light blue cross lines making their way past each tree and into a 1” mainline that drains by gravity into a 240-gallon tank.  The sap is then pumped using a vacuum system (that runs on two 12V batteries) into a 150-gallon “pick up tank” in Ed’s truck bed.  The syrup goes back to Embarrass and the poll barn with all of the tanks and tubes and boilers.  The team hooks up Ed’s portable reverse-osmosis system (first photo, above) to the 150-gallon tank and pulls out about 2/3 of the water so that boiling down the sap takes much less time.  (Sap is about 98% water.)  And then it goes into the massive fuel-oil-powered boiler.  It was the steam from that boiler that I saw coming out of the chimney in the poll barn as I drove up.

As I drove up, I noticed something different about this farm.  Everything looked so NEAT, no junk pile around, no old tractors, no chickens underfoot, no roosters crowing.  There were large clean pole barns and an enormous (about 2 acres) fenced-in garden.  And field after field of white spruce and red pine.  I asked about that.  When Ed and his wife bought this 116-acre farm in 1985, it had been logged over and the fields left fallow.  They reforested the entire farm with 1,600 white spruce and 2,500 red pines.  They used to have chickens, but, according to Ed, the raccoon got the eggs at night and the fox got the chickens by day.  He gave away the survivors to a neighbor and got out of the chicken and egg business.

But he kept up with beekeeping.  He had two hives last year but will have about six this year.  He winters his bees (and those of a neighbor) in a partially heated poll building.  And, just like the wine and the syrup, he and the neighbors make honey.  They also help to tend the large garden and preserve its yield.  Blueberries, raspberries, potatoes, asparagus, squash, beans, peas, and all the usual garden produce are tended by Ed and three others who help out.  Among the neighbors and the helpers, it all gets eaten or canned or stored in Ed’s basement root cellar.  That’s where the wine is too.  And onions hanging from the ceiling in old pantyhose legs—a great idea that I’m going to use at home!  He says it keeps them crisp all winter.

Like most farm owners on the Range, Ed worked off-farm.  He operated heavy equipment for St. Louis County, then retired as the road foreman in Tower.  Early on he worked in the mines but didn’t like it. And he served in the Army and Army Reserves for 28 years.  I got to know Ed when we both participated in a book group as part of Congregations Caring for the Earth.  Ed is a passionate advocate for the health of the planet, and his life reflects that passion.  I know that Ed’s religion is part of that inspiration, but I wondered if there was anything else that feeds it.  Ed told me that when he was 67, he was in the hospital with heart issues and having two stents put in.  They “lost” hime had to shock him to bring him back.  During the time he was “out,” he had what is usually called a “near death experience.”  He recalls floating up into outer space in an experience that was beautiful beyond description—so incredible that he still can’t describe it.  But it ended when he knew that he had to come back, he couldn’t leave this life yet.  It’s often the case that those who have had near death experiences return to life with a passion for living and no fear of death.

Now Ed is 85 and has survived the loss of his wife and two of his six children.  A relatively recent heart attack resulted in clearing a 99% blockage in two blood vessels.  But he’s regained his health and vigor and grown a beard.  His enthusiasm for all these local food adventures that he and his neighbors do for each other is contagious.  I went back home with two bottles of Ed’s wine and one of maple syrup and ordered some more seeds for my garden.  It’s spring in Minnesota!

Ed in his basement root cellar.

Grown on the Range Profile 46: Hemp Farming comes to the Range!

Hemp farming is coming back in the U.S. and in northeast Minnesota, and I’m glad to see it happen.  Hemp has a very complicated history.  In 1937, the Marijuana Tax Act made it prohibitively expensive to grow hemp, which wasn’t then, and isn’t now, the same thing as marijuana.  But in the 1930’s, those who didn’t want hemp products competing with their products won out, and hemp farming went dormant.  So, what products came from hemp that made it so threatening?  Here are a few examples: paper, newsprint, paint and varnish, lamp oil, nutritious seeds, canvas, rope and twine, fabric, shoes, carpets, caulking, brake/clutch linings, cardboard, fiberboard insulation, cement, stucco, mortar, salad oil and cooking oils, printing ink, solvents, lubricants, granola, birdseed and animal feed.  The hemp plant’s components—its stalk and the resulting bast fibers and hurds, its seeds and the resulting oil and food products, and its leaves and flowers and the resulting animal bedding and medicinal products yielded an enormous range of products.  The whole plant itself could also be used as boiler fuel and pyrolysis feedstock.

Hemp was the universal crop.  The U.S. Census of 1850 listed 8,327 hemp plantations of 200 acres or more.  That’s 16,543,000 acres of hemp being grown in 1850.  What for?  At that time all flags were made of hemp fabric, all bibles printed on hemp paper, all quality paints and varnishes were made from completely nontoxic hempseed oil and linseed oil, most twine and cordage almost all ships’ sails and covered wagon covers were hemp canvas, most clothing, rugs, and diapers were made of hemp fabric, and oil lamps all burned hempseed oil until 1859 when oil was discovered in Pennsylvania.  Rudolph Diesel invented the Diesel engine in 1896 to run on vegetable fuels like hempseed oil.  In fact, the first draft of the Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper.  Medical researchers documented amazing successes with cannabis flowers for pain.  Between 1842 and 1900, cannabis made up half of all medicine sold in the U.S.  It was listed as the primary treatment for over 100 illnesses.  And then, in 1937 with the Marijuana Tax Act, hemp (and all related products) was effectively banished. 

If you’re curious, it’s a great research project to sort that decision out.  But, for our purposes here, hemp died.  Until the 2014 Farm Bill, which allowed state departments of agriculture to administer pilot programs to study the growth, cultivation, and marketing of hemp.  Duh!  In 1938, just months after hemp was effectively banned, Popular Mechanics called hemp the “new billion-dollar crop.”  And some of you might remember that, during World War II, when our hemp supplies were cut off from abroad, the USDA circulated a film “Hemp for Victory,” begging U.S. farmers to grow hemp and offering them exemptions from military service if they did so.  And then it died again.  But, in 2014 we allowed ourselves to open that door once more.  The 2014 Farm Bill allowed state departments of agricuture to administer pilot programs to study the growth, cultivation and marketing of hemp.  In 2015 the Minnesota Industrial Hemp Development Act (MINN.STAT.18K) became law.

Our state’s pilot program operated from 2016-2020.  In 2018 the Farm Bill legalized hemp cultivation for commercial purposes and in 2019 the USDA set up the regulatory framework for hemp cultivation nationwide.  Each state had to submit a plan and Minnesota submitted our plan.  Hemp growers have to report the location of each variety of hemp they plant to the MDA for sampling.  A trained inspector takes a cutting from 30 different plants randomly selected, then dried for testing.  They’re looking for THC, the stuff in hemp’s cousin, marijuana, that makes you high.  The hemp must contain less than 0.3% which means, as my students used to say, that you’d have to smoke a telephone-pole-sized joint to get high on industrial hemp.

In the 8-county Arrowhead area of Koochiching, Itasca, Aitkin, Crow Wing, Carlton, Lake, Cook and St. Louis, 18 growers hold permits from the MDA to grow hemp.  Most of them are growing what is called “craft hemp,” a smaller variety bred for its cannabinoid content.  They’re extracting CBD oil or harvesting buds and flowers for smoking.  You’ve likely seen CBD products popping up everywhere.  Folks use it for pain relief, anxiety, depression and insomnia.  This is different from “medical marijuana” which does contain THC, the component that gets you high, and is heavily regulated.  Craft hemp products are sold over the counter in retail outlets and online by producers.  The producers that I’m familiar with are Finnegan’s Farm in Two Harbors which sells CBD gummies and Northern Roots Organics in Angora which sells smokable flowers and buds.

But there’s an industrial hemp farm on the horizon just south of the Bois Forte Reservation.  Renika Love and Love LLC are planting a crop this summer that will be used for the kinds of things that industrial hemp is best known for: textiles, biodegradable plastics, building materials, paper, and fuel.  Their project was recently selected for technical assistance and funding by the Northland Food Network.  The focus is to grow industrial hemp and to share that knowledge and experience to encourage other farmers to begin producing hemp for environmental and medicinal purposes.  The long-term vision is for the project, called Love’s Hemp House, to harvest enough hemp to produce products that can be sold to benefit the tribal community.  Love has identified an experienced hemp grower and an equipment operator/farm laborer who will join the project.  They are purchasing 40 acres to begin.  Love is a member of the Bois Forte Band and sees a future where hemp profits will be reinvested into providing fresh foods for the area in a Wiisiniwin Waakaa’igan (food house).  Maybe other area farmers will join the trend to reclaim this amazing crop.  I hope so!

Grown on the Range Profile 45: Free Range Eggs, originally published in Hometown Focus

Jan Dircks grew up outside of Aurora, Minnesota, and has raised chickens all her life.  Her husband Joe grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin.  Jan worked at Great Scott Meats for 20 years and Joe worked in the mines.  But they had this small 40-acre farm down by Zim, too, and in 2006 they got their first hens and started an egg farm.  I met Jan several years ago at the Virginia Market Square Farmers Market where she sold Dircks Farm eggs.  At the time, she had about 800 hens.  Now there are closer to 400. 

These hens produce what are called “pastured” eggs, which means that the hens are not caged and have free access to the outdoors.  In the winter, it’s a bit snowy in their large outdoor fenced area.  But in the summer, they alternate between two very large pastures where they eat greens and bugs in addition to their non-GMO feed.  They rotate from one pasture to another, eating down the grass and plants in one while the other re-grows.  Chickens are known to love grass and clover, dandelions and dock, and ticks and slugs, grasshoppers and crickets and spiders and flies.  And yes, they eat mosquitos!  While it’s easy to provide grass and bugs for the hens, it’s harder to find non-GMO feed.  The Dircks’ go-to source is Floodwood Farm and Feed where Nate and Maria Manner operate a solar-powered feed mill.  (check them out on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Floodwood-Farm-Feed-163195343880162 ).

The day I visit Dircks Farm it’s warming up, 39 degrees, but extremely windy.  Most of the hens are in the large barn just hanging out.  Some are in the laying boxes, some on the roosts, and others walking around.  I meet many heirloom breeds as well as some “production chickens” bred to lay lots of eggs and not eat too much.  There are Red Laced Wyandottes, Delawares, Barred Rocks, Lakenvelders, Mottled Javas (the second-oldest breed in the U.S.), Black Sex-Links, Hy-Line Browns, Silver Laced Wyandottes, some Guinea hens, and a few roosters.  The most interesting-looking hen is a Buff Brahma—known to lay through the cold winter when others quit.  She has “furry” feet that help to keep her warm.

I comment that the roosters here are pretty laid back and friendly.  I’ve known of some mean roosters.  Jan says if a rooster gets mean, she kills him.  Period.  Okay, that explains these gentlemen.  Roosters rule the roost, as the saying goes, and that’s part of the pecking order established within every flock in the world.  The top chicken gets the best place on the roosting bar at night as part of this complex hierarchy.  The pecking order has an influence on feeding, drinking, egg laying, roosting, crowing, mating and even dust bathing.  Chickens are very social animals and enjoy being together, but they’re intricately organized in that togetherness.

The barn is huge and cleaning it every few days is quite a job—taking 5 hours or more.  Sometimes the grandchildren or the neighbor Thronson boys help.  There is no smell at all in this barn, contrary to what folks think a barn full of chickens might be like.  Every few days the huge roosting frames are moved out into the open field and all the wood shavings and chicken poo are shoveled out to a manure pile where they are composted for a year, then spread on the gardens.   Jan and Joe plant the gardens with squash and pumpkins, which grow like crazy.  They freeze in the fall and, in the winter, the hens eat them as a special treat.  They love pecking them apart.  Jan says that a huge pumpkin will turn into a paper-thin remnant of skin overnight.  Their winter feed is also supplemented with organic alfalfa meal, a green treat.  And in the spring the old hens are culled, bought by a neighbor woman who, with her family, butchers them and cans the meat.  New chicks or pullets join the flock, and the circle continues.

In the washing shed, a gleaming stainless-steel counter and sink covers one wall.  Opposite that wall are huge refrigerator/coolers stacked high with the signature yellow cartons of Dircks Farm eggs.  Each carton is signed by Jan or one of the grandchildren and marked with an “x” when it is re-used.  The grandchildren who live closest have learned the trade.  The oldest, Marley, knows the whole process—gathering, washing, candling, and packing the eggs for sale.  The grandchildren also love the horse and the miniature goats who share this place.  And, until a bobcat killed them all recently, there was a breeding pair of geese and 23 banties in a separate building.  The bobcat’s footprints in the fresh snow showed that it had tried to get into the big barn, too, but hadn’t been able to breach the doors, thank heavens. 

Dircks Farm sells eggs to Natural Harvest Food Coop in Virginia, the Positively Third Street Bakery in Duluth, Cobb Cook Grocery in Hibbing, and The Grocery Store and Floodwood Farm & Feed in Floodwood.  Jan delivers out of their pickup truck which is fitted with an insulated box built by their son.  The bottom of the box slides out for easy delivery.  This is what farm-to-grocery looks like.  No industrial-style egg production here, just Jan and Joe delivering eggs from pastured hens to buyers they know by first name.  That’s what a local food system is all about: the food, the humane treatment and care of animals, and the human connection.

Grown on the Range Profile 44: Stress and Depression Visit the Farm, originally published in Hometown Focus

This is the time of year when many of us get cabin fever—we’re tired of the cold and the short days and the prospect of weeks more of winter, and we just want out!  And if we’re pretty resilient, we make it through without that getaway to a sunny beach.  But what if we’re stressed, worried, overwhelmed by the threatened economic prospects of our livelihood, and alone?  Those of us who live on the Range are rural—we don’t always have community resources at our fingertips, or just down the street.  And for those who farm, there’s even more isolation—most farmers up here farm alone.  In the depths of winter, that can be tough.

Recent research in the Community Mental Health Journal (2020, 56:126-134) points out that agriculture, in general, has been identified as a stressful industry, and that farming and ranching may actually contribute to poor mental health.  For young and beginning farmers especially, factors like limited access to land, capital and affordable healthcare are prominent.  Personal finances and time pressures were topics of the most concern for young Midwest farmers in this research.  Most work an off-farm job, too.  And then there’s the weather, something we think about a lot right now in northern Minnesota.

This study, one of the most recent available on farmer depression, anxiety and stress, found that 71% of young farmers surveyed met the criteria for “generalized anxiety disorder” and 53% met the criteria for “major depressive disorder.”  That’s serious stuff for a category of independent farmers who don’t easily call a mental health center for help.  A 2019 study of mental health outcomes among farming populations worldwide noted that male farmers in the U.S. experience an increased risk of suicide compared to the general population.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, male farmers, ranchers and other agricultural managers have a suicide rate of 43.2 per 100,000 compared to an overall male suicide rate of 27.4 (https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/84275)    A 2020 study in the Journal of Agromedicine (25(3):258-358) addressed the connection of chronic farm stress with high rates of workplace injury and occupational health problems as well.

So, there’s a problem here.  Who has stepped in to help? In 2008 Congress approved the “Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network Act” to grant funds to states for behavioral health programs for agricultural workers.  But they didn’t appropriate any money for the legislation until 2019.  And the funds have been slow to reach states.  Some states have acted on their own, though, and Minnesota is one of them!  In 1993, Tom Mollinar, Dean of Farm Business Management at Ridgewater College in Willmar called the FEMA counselor who was working with flood victims and asked if he could work with farmers.  Ted Matthews said yes and it grew from there.  Mollinar wrote many grants to get support.  And eventually the Minnesota Legislature funded, and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture hired Ted Matthews on contract to provide mental health services to farmers. 

Matthews works independently, not inside the bureaucracy that many farmers want to avoid.  He is based in Hutchinson and he answers the phone any time of day including weekends. You can reach him at 320-266-2390 and there’s no paperwork required to talk with him.  When I talked with him on a 25-degree below day while writing this, he was as passionate as ever about his work.  He grew up in northern Minnesota and he loves talking to farmers.  Recently, Ted got the MDA to add rural mental health specialist Monica Kramer McConkey.  You can reach her at 218-780-7785.   Both Matthews and McConkey come from farming backgrounds so they can understand the situation farmers are facing.  The Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s website also features a Minnesota Farm and Rural Helpline which includes mobile crisis teams.  A printable brochure detailing all of the MDA programs to help farmers in stress is located here https://www.mda.state.mn.us/sites/default/files/docs/2020-08/copefarmstressbrochure8-2020.pdf  There’s also a collection of radio shows and podcasts about farm stress available at TransFARMation  https://www.rrfn.com/transfarmation/

Closer to home, the Miller Dwan Foundation just funded a rural mental health program in Duluth.  It was originally targeted to farmers but has expanded to miners and foresters.  It’s free and confidential.  This program launched in March 2020, the same month that Covid turned our lives upside down.  Program coordinator Rich Tunell is available at 218-730-6833 and he will meet you wherever you’re most comfortable or just talk on the phone.  Tunell emphasizes that asking for help isn’t about being “mentally ill” but about taking care of your mental health.

Covid 19 is worsening an already difficult situation.  According to the Farm Bureau, “A strong majority of farmers/farmworkers say the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted their mental health, and more than half say they are personally experiencing more mental health challenges than they were a year ago, according to a new American Farm Bureau poll.”  The American Farm Bureau Federation president recently said ““My takeaway from this survey is that the need for support is real and we must not allow lack of access or a ‘too tough to need help’ mentality to stand in the way.”

The stigma associated with asking for mental health services is strong, and it prevents folks from getting the help they need.  The National Farmers Union has also become involved.  “While farmers experience higher levels of psychological distress and depression than the general population, they are less likely to seek help for mental health issues. Even for those who do seek help, resources may not be readily available, as 60 percent of rural Americans live in areas with mental health professional shortages.  Recognizing these immense challenges, National Farmers Union (NFU) is partnering with Farm Credit and American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) to help family members, friends, and neighbors address the farm stress crisis in their own communities.”  Farmers Union members can learn more about this course at https://www.canr.msu.edu/managing_farm_stress/rural-resiliency-online-course-nfu.

If you’re a farmer in distress, take heart.  There are folks who want to help.  And the spring equinox is less than a month away!

Grown on the Range Profile 43: Deep Winter Greenhouses, originally published in Hometown Focus

We are in the “depths” of winter in northern Minnesota, even though we have just passed Groundhog Day (or Imbolc if you follow earth-based nature festivals), which is the half-way point between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox.  We still have plenty of winter left.  Our outdoor growing season is long gone but leave it to Minnesotans to invent a way to grow greens in the winter using materials you can easily get up here: lumber, glass, big rocks, dirt, and sunshine.  The Deep Winter Greenhouse (DWG) has gone through several re-designs, but it all started with a book by Carol Ford and Chuck Waibel in 2009: The Northlands Winter Greenhouse Manual.  They lived in Chippewa County, Minnesota, several hours south of here, but the idea caught on with growers in the far north too.

As part of a statewide initiative, the University of Minnesota Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships (RSDP) have worked with the College of Design’s Center for Sustainable Building Research to develop construction documents for three DWG designs.  UM Extension has conducted ongoing studies of each successive design. The RSDPs funded the construction of five models of the first design, DWG 2.0., in conjunction with community partners.  They were completed in 2017-18, so they’ve been operational for awhile.  The closest ones to us are in Finland (at the Organic Consumers Association’s Agroecology Center) and in Bemidji (at the Bemidji Community Food Shelf).

So, what IS a DWG?  It is a passive solar greenhouse that captures the sun’s light and heat during the day and stores the heat it in the earth to recirculate at night.  The greenhouse is oriented east-west with a large south-facing glass or polycarbonate wall built at an angle that will catch as much of the sun’s energy as possible, given the latitude.  The other walls are solid and very well insulated, often with reflective interior surfaces, and the north wall is sometimes earth sheltered, if the landscape permits.  It is the dirt, and sometimes gravel or large stones about four feet deep UNDER the greenhouse that act as a battery to store the heat that’s captured during the day.  That heat is blown underground with a fan and then ducted out and up into the growing area at night.

DWGs usually have a back-up heat source in case of prolonged cloudiness, but the stored heat from the sun usually lasts three days without recharging.  When I visited the DWG at the Agroecology Center in Finland, I saw damage where the stored heat was so intense that it melted some vinyl vent covers.  Wow, that northern sun is powerful!  One of the challenges with building this DWG was drainage—it is on a wet site, so they had to add fill around the insulated four-foot basement to prevent moisture from getting in.  And there are still some problems with mold in the back room.  All challenges that designers are working to solve.

Stefan Meyer who manages the Finland DWG has been harvesting all winter.  Lettuce, Asian Greens, salad mix, rainbow chard and napa cabbage.  By the time you read this, they will have planted spinach, arugula, and more kinds of lettuce.  These all need the lengthening days which tend to become noticeable by early February.  The greens are sold at the Finland General store, the oldest Cooperative in Minnesota.

The DWG at the Bemidji Community Food Shelf is located on the food shelf farm, just south of the food shelf building.  The farm manager and volunteers run the greenhouse and grow microgreens, radishes, chard, peas, and salad greens which are given away at the food shelf.  The farm produces an amazing amount of fresh produce for the food shelf, too.  But the DWG allows production to continue all winter while the farm fields lie frozen under the snow.  The food shelf is within the industrial park in Bemidji, which has a high water table---not good for underground heat storage.  They raised the foundation 12 inches, but now wish it would have been more.  They installed a berm around the foundation and added insulation but keeping the rock bed dry so that it absorbs the heat optimally is an ongoing challenge.  On a positive note, the Bemidji DWG has a metal exterior which has worked out very well and is maintenance-free.

Friends in Linden Grove have built a modified DWG as part of a complex that also houses their sauna, beekeeping storage room, work room, and root cellar.  Their greenhouse is on the south side and its south-facing wall is polycarbonate but is built like a regular greenhouse with a vertical wall and roof rather than the full wall at a 60-degree angle that is typical of DWGs.  It is built over a four-foot soil and sand heat storage area with pipes zigzagging through the sand, bringing the heat from the top of the greenhouse near the roof down into the soil/sand.  This greenhouse does not have a mechanism for blowing the stored heat back into the growing area.  But it stays at 40 degrees during the coldest part of winter, offering some warming to the greenhouse above.  They use mini-tunnels and space heaters to supplement heat to grow greens at this time of year.

The main benefit of this design, according to the owner, is that it can be used year-round.  It has side doors that can be opened in the summer and, for added heat in the winter, the sauna vents into the greenhouse.  And, of course, the structure houses multiple work areas for the farm as well as a root cellar to store crops beyond their harvest.

The newest DWG design is called a Farm Scale Winter Greenhouse. It is like a hybrid between a DWG and a hoophouse. The intent was to make a structure that is affordable to construct and operate. It might require a little more added heat than the early DWG models.  The new design can be found here https://extension.umn.edu/growing-systems/deep-winter-greenhouses#design-and-construction-2066621   Is a deep winter greenhouse in your future?  A University of Minnesota Extension publication might be helpful.  You can find “Starting a DIY Deep Winter Greenhouse Operation on a Budget” here https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/199881/Starting-a-DIY-DWG-Operation-on-a-Budget.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y   And your local University of Minnesota Regional Sustainable Development Partnership can help.  Ours is the Northeast RSDP https://extension.umn.edu/regional-partnerships/northeast-rsdp .

Grown on the Range Profile 42: Introducing Arrowhead Grown, originally published in Hometown Focus

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!

Grown on the Range Profile 41: Bear Creek Acres, originally published in Hometown Focus

“No mean animals at this farm,” Mary Ann tells me as I survey the cattle munching on hay in the snow.  She and Shannon Wycoff have had this farm for 16 years.  In that time, they’ve crossbred their original Limosins with Herefords.  According to www.thecattlesite.com, “The Limousin has built a reputation for being The Carcase Breed. It produces beef with a low proportion of bone and fat, a top killing-out percentage and a high yield of saleable meat (73.3%).”  And they were very popular here in the north when the Wycoff’s started.  But, according to Mary Ann, those creatures were mean.  And that didn’t work.  Gradually, they’ve built a herd that is a Limosin-Hereford cross who appear to me to be pretty docile and friendly.

If you’d like to see happy cattle, check out the “Spring Fever” video of Shannon letting them out to fresh pasture after the winter last year.  It’s on the blog at www.bearcreekacres.com and here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i8uQIcqzQI&feature=emb_logo  The horse who lives with them thinks he’s one of them and is the happiest of all to feel spring.  The cattle spend winter in a huge pasture where Shannon places their hay at strategic points around the acreage, moving it every few weeks to a new spot.  They fertilize the whole pasture and this way it grows their food the next summer.  The Wycoff’s make some of their own hay, but buy quite a bit from other farmers.  Summer 2020 was so dry that they had to travel the whole state to find hay.

The pigs are off in another direction in a huge pasture with quonset houses filled with hay.  It’s chilly the day I arrive to visit and many of the 25 or so are snuggled inside.  The rest are feeding—they eat a traditional mix of corn and soy from Widdes Feed, a third-generation family-run operation in Esko.  The hogs are purchased as feeder pigs from a family-run operation in Park Rapids and are at least half Berkshire (the breed originated in Berkshire, England).  I notice that all of the pigs have their tails—a key difference from confinement raised hogs whose tails are docked because they are so crowded that they will chew each other’s tails.  These pigs have the run of many acres and don’t have to compete for space.

Shannon and Mary Ann added something new and innovative this fall with a micro-grant from Natural Harvest Food Coop in Virginia: a new watering system for the cattle and pigs.  Up until this year, Shannon was filling huge water tanks twice each day from a well in the barn.  And heating them with 1500-watt heaters which pulled a lot of power.  The new Ritchie waterers are pretty amazing.  According to the website, Ritchie—Fresh Water for Life, “The Pork King 1 is a single drink, durably designed, heated hog waterer using 304 stainless steel to withstand the rugged nature of a pen full of swine. Use in a single pen. Ideal for up to 40 hogs.”  The hogs open the lid with their snouts and drink warm water whenever they’d like.  This waterer and the cattle version, “The EcoFount 2 is an energy efficient double drink automatic waterer for horses or cattle…waters between 1-60 horses or beef,” are both connected by insulated hoses to the well in the barn.  The hoses are protected by the Canadian company Heat-Line’s heat trace system which senses when the conduit needs heat and uses very little electricity.  It’s a big improvement and energy savings over the traditional watering method!  

Ritchie Hog Waterer provides constant warm water for pigs

And the cattle version

After I meet the cattle and hogs, we walk a bit of the farm with the two Wycoff dogs, as friendly as ever---remember, no mean animals here!  Bear Creek runs through this 167 acres of dense woods and open pasture.  The stately barn was completed in 1925 and the original house was built during the 1940’s by the Tom Saranpaa family who dug the entire basement by hand.  It took them 10 years to build the house while they lived in the sauna.  When the Wycoff’s bought the farm, it hadn’t been farmed for a long time.  But Mary Ann discovered that the Saranpaas were still living in the area and invited them to visit.  That’s when they learned about the hand-dug basement.  The Saranpaas had dairy cows, then beef and turkey and potatoes.  The root cellar for the potatoes is still here, along with the sauna.

The sauna, where the original farmers lived while building a house

Bear Creek Acres is able to sell in retail outlets because they use two USDA processors.  Lake Haven Custom Meat Processing is in Sturgeon Lake and McDonald Meats is in Clear Lake.  Like these two, USDA processing facilities are several hours from most producers in northeast Minnesota.  Meat processing in the northland is a bit of a challenge: area producers of chicken, pork and beef are experiencing a high demand for their products as a result, in part, of Covid 19 and its disruption of the national meat supply chain.  And most of the processors in northeast Minnesota are booked all the way through 2021.  There are three types of meat processing plants in Minnesota.  1)Custom processors are exempt and may be inspected up to four times per year by the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.  Producers who use custom processors may only sell directly to individuals.  All of the meat must be labeled “not for sale.” 2) Equal-to processors are under daily inspection by an MDA inspector who inspects the animals before and after slaughter.  Meat from these processors can be sold wholesale or retail but only in Minnesota.  They bear the stamp of state inspection.  3) USDA inspected plants are under continuous inspection with the animals inspected before and after slaughter by a USDA inspector.  This meat can be sold wholesale or retail, within Minnesota or in other states.  It bears the USDA stamp that we are familiar with. Most area livestock and poultry farmers are small-scale and sell directly to individuals rather than to retail outlets.  But some, like Bear Creek Acres, also sell to retail outlets. And that requires the special processor. 

If we, as meat consumers, want local meat to be available in retail stores in the area, it will require more USDA processing.  The plans to expand meat processing at the Northeast Regional Corrections Center in Saginaw are addressing that need to some extent.  If we’re willing to buy directly from the farmer, processors 1 or 2 above will work, but they’re all booked up.  So in order to buy more local meat, our area needs more local processors.  That’s a key part of building a local food system so that a geographic area can sustain itself within its own “foodshed.”  And that’s a topic for a future Grown on the Range column.

Bear Creek Acres’ 1925 barn

Grown on the Range Profile 40: Wegner's Tree Farm, originally published in Hometown Focus

Carl Wegner in front of a Siberian pine.

I took off on a winter Saturday in search of an Iron Range Christmas tree farm in tiny Blackberry Minnesota.  My GPS took me down 169 and then on to a maze of country roads before I turned in at the sign for Wegner’s Tree Farm.  It’s way out in the woods about 10 miles from Grand Rapids.  Seventy acres of beautiful evergreens spread out from the house, barn, and storage buildings.  At 1,000 trees per acre, that’s alot of trees!  There used to be many more growers in Itasca County, around 40, but there are only 4 left, I learn from Carl Wegner, the man who started this farm in 1979.  The whole state of Minnesota has only 65 christmas tree operations with 1,241,000 trees planted according to the 2017 Census of Agriculture.

Carl is 78 now, retired in 1997 from the University of Minnesota Extension’s Forestry Service where he taught, among other things, Christmas tree growing.  At the time he hadn’t grown any, and one of his students challenged him on that.  So he and a college buddy bought some land and planted Christmas trees.  A few years later, he and his wife bought this farm and began with 5,000 Norways.  By the time they were mature enough to sell, though, folks weren’t buying Norways for Christmas trees anymore.  So Carl’s buddy came with logging equipment and took them all down.  Quite a risk for a newcomer!  These days the farm grows mostly Balsam (the most popular) along with White Pine, White Spruce, and a Frazier Fir from N. Carolina.

Carl’s son runs the day-to-day operation now, but Carl still works on the crew.  It’s a year-round job.  They plant new trees each year for 3-4 weeks starting April 20, walking the rows and planting by hand wherever there’s a tree missing.  They plant half the farm each year.  The trees being planted have been raised right here from seeds harvested from cones on the farm.  They pick cones very selectively, choosing cones from the best trees, extract the seeds, and plant them in a raised-bed nursery area in mid-October.  And there they grow in batches by year until they are about 5 years old and move to the transplant bed.  From there, the bigger ones go to the field in the spring. 

The tree nursery. New trees in various stages of growth, from youngest to oldest, left to right.

Once the trees are planted, fertilizer is applied from a tractor running between the rows.  As you can imagine, it takes several tons to feed this crop.  And the trees can grow as much as 12 inches in June!  On June 20, the shearing begins, cutting off the tips.  All shearing is done by hand with a very sharp knife.  It has an 18 inch handle and a 16 inch blade.  The trees are sheared early so that they set new buds from which the cones are picked for seed.  Shearing 70,000 trees takes time, but each tree is sheared once each year.  The quest for an “improved tree” takes many forms beyond shearing.

Carl and his crew graft different varieties onto small native Balsams.  There are some 30-foot trees here that were grafted with varieties from Maine, Vermont, and Hew Hampshire in 1990.  They still yield cones that are harvest for seed.  In 1988, Carl attended the National Christmas Tree Growers conference in Maine and stopped at a blue balsam farm on the way back and bought a pound of seed to experiment with.  There are 4 research plots here, testing different types of fir.  They’ve found that Siberian and Korean fir grow well here.  Carl is standing in front of a Siberian fir in this photo.  The Canaan fir does well, too—it’s a natural cross between a Balsam and a Frazier.  Trees are graded based on the number of buds in the top whorl, the needle length and color, and branch angle.  The goal is a fast growing tree with a blue tint—that sells best.

During the late summer, Wegner’s Tree Farm sends out price lists to customers and customers send in their orders with a downpayment.  This farm has about 25 wholesale customers, including Kunnari’s in Virginia, in addition to its choose and cut operation.  Then the trees are marked in the field for cutting.    The White Pine and White Spruce are tinted green, and in the fall, the cutting and baling begins.  The automated baler can do 100 trees an hour with two operators.  And then they’re off, by truck, to the retailers in Minnesota and North Dakota.

Baled trees, ready to ship.

I ask about weeds and pests—they don’t use herbicides here as they build up in the soil and kill trees.  They don’t spray, either, as they don’t have many insect pests.  But the deer do love to eat the sides of certain Frazier firs.  Not all of them, only certain ones…apparently deer are choosy.  We walk out to the field to see several examples.  A tree that’s been eaten near the bottom eventually will grow to 9 feet and can be cut as a 6 foot tree to avoid the damage.  Nothing is wasted at Wegner’s, it’s all salvaged.  Carl says he was taught never to waste anything.  He has a sawmill made by Woodmizer and sells pine boards and also cuts oak with a live edge.  The farm has 6 acres of red pine for lumber.

Examples of deer damage.

As I’m leaving I ask about some old cars near the barn.  Carl asks if I want to see his collection, and of course I do!  I used to date a guy who collected and restored vintage British cars and I know what a passion this can be.  Carl has a large pole building and a barn full of beautifully restored vintage Chryslers, some of which he has owned since they were new.  I notice a gray Plymouth from the late 40’s and it looks almost exactly like the gray 1949 Plymouth my parents had when I was very young.  Carl tells me the exact name of the gray color.  It brought back memories.  He loves restoring these beauties!  He and his wife go to national car club events during the summer…driving their prize vehicles around the country--or at least they hope to again this coming summer when Covid will be behind us.

Ready to hit the road when Covid subsides and summer comes again!

By the time you read this, the holidays will be winding down.  But put Wegner’s Tree Farm on your list for next year and head on out to Blackberry for the real thing!

Grown on the Range Profile 39: Lions and Tigers and Bears Grown on the Range: Smokey Hollow Farms, originally published in Hometown Focus

The BIG cats’ turn for Christmas at Smokey Hollow Farms

‘Tis the season of holidays in many faith traditions.  I love the words to the Indigo Girls Holiday Song: “It’s your holiday song, no one more true or right or wrong.  When our faith calls our name, someone else’s does the same.  Hallelujah, thank you.”  No matter your tradition, I wish you happy holidays.  My story this time is about a Christmas tradition at a very unusual Iron Range farm.  Beginning in the late 1960’s, the Christmas tree at Smokey Hollow Farms in Balkan Township had to be bolted to the floor and anchored to the ceiling.  Christmas gifts of popcorn balls, meatballs, raw chicken, spaghetti, stew meat….and some toys were wrapped and ready for the seventy or so recipients who came in to gather ‘round the tree in small groups.  First, the bears, then the wolves, and on and on through the whole day.  Some could celebrate together, but the big cats (cougars, bobcats, even a lion) who lived in the basement for the winter came upstairs and had the tree to themselves while the human family took turns guarding the smaller animals like otters and skunks and raccoons who regularly lived in the house.

Wrapping paper flew everywhere and gifts of food were immediately devoured.  The skunks and raccoons loved popcorn balls.  The bears were fond of meatballs and spaghetti.  The big cats got raw chicken and the wolves, stew meat.  Sidney John, a chimpanzee who dressed in kids clothes, ate at the table with the family using a fork and spoon, and used the bathroom just like the humans got a red fire hat one year—it was his favorite toy.  Sidney was raised like a child, with Ruth and Lyle’s two daughters calling him their baby brother.

Tammy with Sidney John, the little brother

It all started when Lyle and Ruth LaBarge got married.  Ruth had always been an animal lover so Lyle bought Ruth a black bear as a wedding present--she named him Smokey.  Over the years, they adopted many animals as infants, bottle-feeding and raising them in their home.   At the peak, they had about 78 four-leggeds according to their daughter Tammy Hofsommer.  I met Tammy about a year ago when I wrote a story about the Hofsommer farm’s grass-fed beef and pastured pork operation.  Her husband mentioned to me that she was a “LaBarge girl” and grew up in a family that raised and trained animals for movies and television.  Right here on the Range.  I had to know more!

Ruth and one of her beloved bears training

Ruth LaBarge could train any animal to do absolutely anything according to Tammy.  When Tammy’s grandmother sent in a postcard to the television show “You Asked For It,” Ruth and her animals were featured.  Then a film company representative came looking for a tame bear.  That started a long career of training “Hollywood animal actors,” as Ruth calls them, for the film industry.  Though the farm has no animals today, Ruth is still actively training bears at a new location.  Her website http://www.bearwithus.xyz/bearwithus/about-us.html provides links to the many commercials and movies (Like The Jungle Book!) featuring her bears.  She has the largest selection of working Kodiak and Black bears in North America.  Lynn Rogers used to visit their farm often.  He later opened the North American Bear Center in Ely.  Ruth helped to design the bear enclosures there.  There’s a short video of some of her bears’ trained behavior on the Bear Center website at https://bear.org/training-bears/

I asked Tammy what it was like growing up in such an unusual environment.  She told me they were a fairly private family and seldom had people over because of concern about liability.  They constructed a 10 foot barrier fence all around their 80 acres.  Within that, each group of animals had separate accommodations.  For example, the Black bears had a large pasture with electric fencing.  Lyle built them hibernating dens out of cinder block, insulated and lined with rubber and bedded with straw, complete with a door.  Kodiaks had a separate pasture and the grizzlies yet another.  And the family trained horses who had their own pastures.  The wolves and other animals who were kept in large enclosures were regularly walked for exercise. 

As you can imagine, this whole operation was labor-intensive.  Ruth and Lyle both worked in the mines and spent all of their other time with the animals.  Tammy’s grandparents helped too and were there almost every day.  Tammy and her sister had long lists of chores.  Just cleaning up the poop and pee was a huge job.  The animals were tame, which allowed the girls to go right into the cages or enclosures to clean up.  There were litter boxes for the house animals.  I asked if Ruth considered any of their many animals to be pets.  “They were ALL pets to her” Tammy said emphatically.  Ruth could kiss and hug each of them.  Lyle liked big cats and had several at Smokey Hollow Farms but none of the cats were trained.  They were tame, but didn’t perform.  (If you’ve had cats as pets like I have, you’ll understand that completely.)

Big kitty in the snow

Keeping exotic animals is a state- and federally-regulated activity and Tammy remembers the inspectors popping in often to check on things.  Ruth would demonstrate her latest trained animal behavior for them.  Occasionally law enforcement called Ruth and Lyle for help in capturing a wild animal.  Farmers gave them dead animals to use for food and the DNR allowed them to collect roadkill deer.  Local grocery stores would allow the family to come pick up scrap and expired meat and breads and produce for feed.  And Tammy recalls regular trips to Central Mink Foods in Medford Wisconsin (animal feed and supplies for zoo and circus) to haul back truckloads of feed.

They bought animals from zoos and dealers including the Exotic Animal Auction in Macon, Missouri.  There was a magazine (no longer in print) called “Animal Finders Guide” (https://www.animalfindersguide.com/) available then.  It always stressed getting appropriate permits.  Early on, they purchased adult animals but soon learned that raising an animal from infancy, bottle feeding it in the house with the family yielded the best results.  Ruth’s current website says “All of Ruth’s bears and dogs have been with her since their eyes opened and will be with her for the rest of their lives.”  Tammy helped out at the farm well into her thirties and today she trains horses at Diamond Willow Corral, the farm she shares with her husband Chad.

Ruth LaBarge riding Ursula in the early days

Tammy remembers going on film shoots with Ruth and being gone for weeks at a time.  They had animals in Anchor Man, a history channel series on the Vikings, The Sopranos, and many many commercials for Ethan Allan Furniture, Hostess Twinkies, Farmers Insurance, even a Chobani yogurt commercial for the 2014 Super Bowl.  You can view some of the commercials on Ruth’s website (above) and learn more about her current work.  She is very involved in bear education—providing regular bear safety and awareness trainings and even simulations to help the public learn how to act if they encounter a wild bear.  She believes passionately in sharing our environment with “these magnificent creatures.”  So there you have it, lions and tigers and bears grown on the Range!

Holiday greetings!!!

Grown on the Range Profile 38: Thinking About Rations, originally published in Hometown Focus

My partner recently came across her mother’s World War II ration book and shared it with me.  Wow, it listed her full name, height, weight, eye color, hair color, address…and there were a few coupons/stamps left in it.  I had heard my mother talk of sugar and meat rations and not being able to get nylon stockings, but I hadn’t ever read up on the massive government effort that lasted four full years.  Rationing impacted folks’ lives enormously, but there was near complete compliance.  There must have been something that made rationing work, and I wanted to know what it was given our current situation of significant resistance to Covid-19 restrictions.

After the U.S. joined the war, it took the U.S. government just a month to establish the Office of Price Administration (OPA) to set price limits and to implement a nationwide effort to ration food, gasoline, rubber, nylon, sugar, coffee, and eventually meat, cheese, fats, canned fish, automobiles, coal, firewood, tires and many other items.  The goal was to insure that the troops and our allies were adequately supplied while discouraging hoarding and providing equitable distribution of scarce resources at home.  Sacrificing for the common good became the patriotic thing to do on the homefront.  The first ration books, allotted one to each citizen including infants, were issued in May 1942.

Within weeks of that first book’s issue, 91 percent of the population registered to receive the books.  Thousands of local “ration boards” staffed by volunteers, recruited by local officials, set up shop.  Amazing, right?  Well, war is quite a motivator.  But there was something else going on.  The U.S. government and American media took this on full force.  Hollywood and the broadcasting industry, radio at the time, played an enormous role as did print advertising.  The federal Office of War Information was created in 1942 and produced posters, pamphlets, newsreels, and radio pieces to support the war and encourage rationing at home.  You’ve probably seen some of the poster images.

“Rationing Means a Fair Share for All,” “Food—Don’t Waste It!,” “Grow Your Own—Can Your Own,” “Do with Less so They’ll Have Enough,” “Plant a Victory Garden—Our Food is Fighting,” and “Save Waste Fats for Explosives!” were common food rationing slogans.  And there’s the ever-popular Rosie the Riveter “We Can Do It!” poster.  But the most hard-hitting poster I came across while browsing was about conserving gasoline and tires by car sharing.  The poster shows a male driver with an outline of Hitler in the passenger seat and says “When you ride ALONE, you ride with Hitler!!!  Join a Car-Sharing Club.”  And the Victory Speed Limit was 35mph nationwide!

The U.S. War Advertising Council brought together advertising and government to spread a carefully crafted and unified message.  The Office of War Information’s Radio Division provided every national radio advertiser and broadcaster with propaganda themes to incorporate on a predetermined schedule.  Radio was a powerful tool.  Ninety percent of Americans owned at least one radio and families listened for an average of three to four hours a day.  President Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” drew half of the population to the radio!  And his leadership and encouragement were critical to public support.  Celebrities like Bob Hope, Jack Benny and the fictional Fibber McGee and Molly spread the conserve/ration messages using entertainment and humor.

We did our share here on the Range.  We had Victory Gardens in Virginia on the west side of Silver Lake, and probably in every small town. Folks with space planted them at home and folks on farms were in a good position to grow much of what they ate.  Victory Gardens provided an astonishing 60 percent of all produce consumed in the U.S. during the war.  Canned, frozen and dehydrated vegetables and fruits were rationed—from applesauce and asparagus to tomatoes and spinach, everything was assigned ration points.  One purchased rationed goods, if they were available at all, for cash and points.  A can of peaches, for example, required 24 points (coupons) in addition to the price.  In 1944, ration coins were introduced so that merchants could give change back for items bought with ration coupons/stamps.  Potlucks originated during the 1940’s food rationing too, with neighbors pooling their rationing points to contribute a dish.

Elder Iron Rangers have told me about putting their names on a list with the local dry-goods store for a pair of shoes.  Individuals were allotted two pairs of shoes.  When shoes, in short supply, became available, the store would let them know and they bought them with cash and points.  My mother told me of collecting old paper and pieces of metal and scraps of coal in a wagon---everything was reused, recycled, and conserved.  When women couldn’t buy nylon stockings for years, they drew lines up the backs of their legs to look like the seams.  (Remember seamed stockings??)  Even the size of hems and belts on garments were restricted to save yardage.  And people made do with less for the benefit of the war.     

Besides demanding an enormous portion of available food and other resources, the war cost money—more than $300 Billion ($4 Trillion in today’s dollars).  Patriotic citizens bought $25 War Bonds for $18.75, and waited ten years to redeem them at $25.  Children could buy war stamps at 25 cents, and paste them into War Bond booklets.  The War Finance Committee supervised all sales.  Advertisers donated an enormous effort, and, after only one month, 90 percent of respondents surveyed were aware of War Bonds.  Bond Rallies were held around the country with famous movie stars like Bette Davis and Rita Hayworth promoting bond sales.  Norman Rockwell’s 1941 illustrations aided the war bonds effort, and Irving Berlin’s song “Any Bonds Today” became the theme song of the campaign.  More than 85 million Americans (out of a population of 130 million) purchased $185.7 billion worth of bonds.  Now that’s fundraising!

Yes, there was a black market where things like $12 tires went for $60.  And there was other crime where trucks of high-demand goods were hijacked.  And there was illegal manufacturing of rationed goods.  But there was also widespread compliance and support for a massive effort at limiting America’s consumption for the war cause.  Rationing of nearly everything except sugar ended in August of 1945, and the post-war era of relative abundance was ushered in.  Government campaigns for compliance ended---until we faced Covid-19.  We know what works.

Grown on the Range Profile 37: Winter Gardening... Indoors! originally published in Hometown Focus

Sunflower microgreens in our basement grow room.

Winter is here, but don’t give up on gardening!  It’s time to plant an indoor winter garden!  It’s amazing what you can grow inside with a little light and TLC.  You can grow herbs like basil, mint, thyme and rosemary in a sunny windowsill.  Lettuces, arugula and spinach will grow in a sunny south-facing window too.  You can even grow cherry tomatoes or chili peppers or root vegetables like carrots or beets if you’re willing to provide a grow light for about 16 hours each day.  You don’t need fancy pots or special tools, so indoor winter gardening doesn’t have to break your piggy bank.

Lettuces in the grow room in December.

Place your garden in a room that stays above sixty degrees at night for optimal results.  You’ll need some high-quality gardening soil, and planters, trays, or pots.  You can even make yourself a growing tray out of a used aluminum foil container, or re-purpose a jar or can as a pot.  Be sure to provide some drainage.  You can use all of that nonrecyclable plastic packaging for drainage trays under your growing containers.   If you’re trying root vegetables, get a bigger pot at least six inches deep, and an even bigger pot or bucket for cherry tomatoes.  Winter gardening will be easier if your growing room also has a water source, and, if you’re going to use grow lights, electricity. 

You might, if you’re brave, want to try growing mushrooms indoors.  The best source I’ve found for kits is www.fungiperfecti.com.  They’re fascinating to grow, but take a bit of attention with misting requirements.  You won’t need artificial lights for these.  I tried oyster and shiitake successfully a couple of years ago.  You can purchase a sawdust medium that’s already inoculated with spores, then just follow the directions on the package.  And mushrooms boost the human immune system, something we should all be paying attention to this winter.  Fungi Perfecti has a short article on mushroom varieties and immunity at  https://fungi.com/blogs/articles/mushrooms-and-the-immune-system

One of the most popular indoor garden crops these days is microgreens.  Microgreens are baby greens, grown in soil, often with artificial light, and harvested young, in 1-3 weeks, just after they leaf out.  They’re a brilliant green—a welcome sight in the dead of winter!  And they pack a nutritional punch.  The University of Maryland College of Agriculture and Natural Resources in conjunction with the USDA found that microgreens contain from four to forty times more nutrients than their mature counterparts.  My favorite microgreens are sunflowers and pea shoots, but we grow about eight different kinds.  We use grow lights and keep the lights about two inches above the plants, moving them up as the plants grow.  You can harvest microgreens when they’re about three inches high, using a scissors.  Some, like pea shoots, will re-grow after harvesting.

Microgreens are different than sprouts, although they’re often called “soil sprouts” because they grow in soil.  Traditional sprouts, like alfalfa sprouts, are grown in the dark and rinsed regularly until they just start to open.  When you eat a sprout, you eat only the sprouted part of the plant.  With microgreens, you’re eating the earliest leaves and stem.  Traditional sprouts are very nutritious, too, and if you don’t have any south windows and don’t want to get grow lights, you can grow them easily in a cupboard.  Here’s a website with directions https://www.darngoodveggies.com/plant-basics-how-to-grow-sprouts-in-a-jar/

In our house, we have a basement room that used to house a hot tub.  It’s warm and has no windows, but does have a shower, sink, and toilet—how convenient, eh?  We use a small fan to circulate the air.  Fungus gnats have been a regular problem for us—and I just found a solution at https://indoorgardening.com/eliminate-fungus-gnats-once-and-for-all/!  Be careful to buy good potting soil, organic preferably.  We don’t use any artificial chemicals.  Diluted fish emulsion works well for fertilizer if you can stand the smell.  We invested in shelves with attached grow lights several years ago.  A little pricey, but they have served us well for a long time.  (https://www.gardeners.com/buy/sunlite-3-tier-led-grow-light/8595554.html )  There are lots of You Tube videos on making your own grow shelves with lights, too.  We don’t have large windowsills in our house, but if you do, a south-facing window will do just fine.

Kale in the grow room in January.

We grow kale and chard to full size for soups and sautés, mizuna, arugula and mesclun lettuce mix for salads, basil for some of our favorite dishes, and lots of microgreens.  I shouldn’t really say “we,” because my partner Ellen is the real gardener.  She already has our first crop of microgreens planted this year and is starting on the lettuce, kale, chard and basil.  And we grow cat grass—our felines delight in winter edibles.  Wheat grass is also pretty easy to grow, and some folks use that for juicing—it’s also packed with vitamins, minerals, and enzymes.  You can get wheat berries for planting at a natural foods store.

Winter gardening allows us to have fresh greens all winter, no matter how cold and snowy it is outside.  If you just aren’t into this at all, you can buy both sprouts and microgreens at the store.  Natural Harvest Food Coop has Minnesota-grown microgreens for sale and they usually have sprouts too.  My favorite winter microgreen dish is to cook up some spicy ramen soup and pour it over sunflower shoots.  You can add your favorite herbs and feel proud of yourself for eating your fresh greens in January!

Grown on the Range Profile 36: Iron Range Root Cellars, originally published in Hometown Focus

Entrance to the Lehtonen root cellar.

If you were fortunate enough to buy one of the pasties from the second annual Iron Range Pasty Festival this year, you might be interested to know that the vegetables in that pasty were harvested locally and stored in a root cellar at an area farm.  Root cellars used to be common as folks without electricity preserved and stored food to last through our long winters.  According to local root cellar user Becky Gawboy, the Ojibwe inhabitants of this land stored food in underground “pit root cellars” dug into the soil in the shape of a large jar with a narrow opening at the top.  Sometimes they were lined with grass as a moisture barrier.  Produce was covered with birch bark, then wood ash to keep the vermin out, then dirt and leaves.  In a similar fashion, the Kikuyus of central Kenya mixed maize and beans with ash to keep insects away during long storage periods.  

A large cellar for food fermentation and storage dated 9,200 years ago was discovered in Sweden as construction crews prepared an area for a new road.  They fermented fish.  Native Australians are known to have buried food to insulate and protect it.  Underground and innovative food preservation shows up all over the world.  But the kind of walk-in food storage cellars that we now call root cellars were probably invented in the 1600’s in England.  Settlers to what is now the U.S. brought the idea with them and built many.  In fact, the tiny town of Elliston, Newfoundland, population 308, has 130 documented root cellars!  It’s known as the “Root Cellar Capital of the World.” (https://www.newfoundlandlabrador.com/trip-ideas/travel-stories/elliston-the-root-cellar-capital-of-the-world )  Here in Minnesota, Fort Snelling’s 1820 buildings include seven intact root cellars.

Entering through the double door system.

The local root cellar in these first photos is on the Lehtonen farm outside Virginia.  That’s where the pasty vegetables were stored this fall.  Arlene Wiermaa was a child when her father and brother built this root cellar, probably in 1945-6.  They built the forms and brought in concrete to pour a roof and four walls with a double entry to maintain the temperature and humidity.  When the concrete had set, they covered it with dirt which today stands about 25 feet tall.  There was no electricity on the farm, and Arlene remembers that they kept all of their milk and meat in the cellar in addition to the traditionally stored vegetables.  It is still in excellent condition.

Inside the Lehtonen root cellar.

The second photo (below) is of the root cellar that Mike Maleska’s grandfather Frank built about 1920 on the family property near Fish Lake.  They dug back a “seam” in the soil and threw the dirt off to the sides, then poured concrete walls and a ceiling and replaced the dirt.  They managed somehow to drain tile the cellar so it never leaked water, though it was below the surface about five feet.  Frank build two very heavy wooden doors at either end of a double-walled entrance.  The doors were wrapped in burlap for insulation.  He was a potato farmer and stored his potatoes plus rutabagas, onions, carrots in the cool humid cellar.  They didn’t have rodent problems but did have occasional mold.  When the Rural Electrification Administration came through, they wired a single bulb into the ceiling near the vent.  

Entrance to the Maleska root cellar.

The Finland Food Chain, a local food organization based on the North Shore, is exploring the idea of community root cellars as well as earthbag above-grade cellars.  Their goal is to see how root cellars might allow producers to continue to distribute their crops later into the year.  They recently visited Sugarloaf Cove Nature Center in Schroeder, formerly a staging area for the logging industry.  There’s a very large root cellar there, the last remaining structure from that era.  It sits at the base of a hill and is about ten feet wide and twenty feet deep.  The vent on top is still intact and there were even mushrooms growing in the soil over the cellar.  The cellar is sealed right now, and they are hoping to have it opened to evaluate its future use.

If you’re interested in root cellaring, there’s a set of great online resources detailing which kinds of produce can be stored in a root cellar, which ones need higher humidity and/or temperature, and various cellar designs.  You can find them here https://www.canr.msu.edu/hrt/uploads/535/78622/Root-Cellar-Handout-Diagram-6pgs.pdf  and here https://www.canr.msu.edu/hrt/uploads/535/78622/RootCellars-PowerPoint-6-per-page-14pgHandout.pdf  The root cellar takes advantage of the year round cool temperature of the earth at depths of 6-12 feet and uses that in place of electrical cooling to store crops such as root vegetables, seeds and fruits.  Some folks store canned goods, too, and fermented food.  Temperature, humidity, and ventilation are the key variables to control.

So, if you want to store beets, carrots, kohlrabi, leeks, rutabagas and parsnips you’ll need a very cold (just above freezing) and very damp (90-95% humidity) environment.  But if you grow mostly winter squash, pumpkins, and sweet potatoes, you’ll need a warmer (50-60 degrees) and a drier (60-70% humidity) environment.  You might be like me and have onions and garlic, too, and they like cool but dry.  You could experiment with venting to create different environments within one root cellar divided into several areas, or you could make use of unused basement space for two storage areas.  I use an insulated, home-built root cellar that is cold and moister, with controllable venting to the outside.  And a basement room without windows that is cool and a bit dryer.  According to all the sources I consulted, the best book out there to help you plan a root cellar is “Root Cellaring” by Mike & Nancy Bubel. 

Maybe you don’t personally want to root cellar, but you find the stories fascinating like I do.  Ask around, you’ll be surprised how many folks remember their parents’ or grandparents’ root cellars and the sights and smells, the local food memories that go with them.  They’re coming back and there might just be one near you.

Grown on the Range Profile 35: Finnegan's Farm, originally published in Hometown Focus

When Covid hit and the bottom fell out of the specialty herbs and microgreens market for restaurants, farmers Patrick Finnegan and Eric Pollard were more than ready.  Friends for decades, they have formed and transformed Finnegan’s Farm several times since it started in 2006.  Outside of Two Harbors, not far from the shores of Lake Superior, this 31-acre farm sits nestled in the woods.  Just over five of the acres are planted, all in sturdy and weatherproof raised beds made from recycled garage doors, thanks to Patrick’s father.  Last year there were six beautiful greenhouses but three were destroyed in a storm and are now being rebuilt. 

Instead of bursting with Thai Basil, Sweet basil, Cuban basil, Cilantro, Purple sage, English Thyme and French Thyme, they now overflow with craft hemp plants, “the girls” as they call them.  In the hemp world, it’s the unfertilized female plants that produce the buds and flowers that are the focus here these days for their oil.  And the processing building that used to package herbs and microgreens like Rock Chive, Arugula, Red Russian Kale, Sunflower Shoots, and Pea Shoots now handles hemp processing—resulting in CBD gummies.  Patrick and Eric planted their first craft hemp in the spring of 2019 and packaged their first gummies in February 2020. It’s been a booming business ever since.

Who would have thought that far northern Minnesota would be a place where all this could flourish?  Well, that’s part of the reason for writing this column.  I’m telling the story of the amazing things that grow here, even in our short growing season.  We have sunshine, long days, and water, a very scarce resource in many other places.  Patrick and Eric are cheerleaders for locally grown food, locally-raised animals, and local farming in general.  They’re also experimenting with Manitoba dwarf white sweet corn—and the results look good for our climate!  Patrick grew up in a mining community, played professional hockey abroad and spent his off-time working in greenhouses in the Netherlands, developing his love of growing.  When he retired back to the U.S., he had saved up enough to buy this farm and pursue his dream.Growing craft hemp for CBD oil is a booming business.  Even in northern Minnesota, it’s possible to get two outdoor crops per year.  It takes a special state permit to do this, and a fair amount of experimentation to get just the crop you want.  Patrick and Eric grew some 16-foot hemp last year and learned about the north shore’s wind capabilities.  This year’s plants are much more stout, and full of flowers on the September day when I visit.  All of the hemp products sold by Finnegan’s Farm are grown, harvested, extracted, formulated and packaged on the farm.  They are third-party tested and yield full-spectrum CBD oil complete with the essential oils.  This type of hemp has a legally-required and inspected low level of THC and is related to the “industrial” hemp grown for fiber. 

This farm takes pride in using all natural methods: soil amendments, excellent compost, and supplements like glacial rock dust.  They know that soil health is where it all begins.  They’ve experimented enough to climatize a number of varieties to this northern Minnesota temperature range.  They buy all of their supplies as locally as possible, and they plant, harvest, and extract by hand.  Finnegan’s Farm uses ice water extraction to yield the CBD oil.  It’s considered a more pure method of extraction than extraction using butane or CO2.  The only thing used is water—and the well water at the farm is cold enough that they don’t even have to add much ice. 

Finnegan’s Farm works with Oregon CBD, a hemp seed research and development company affiliated with Oregon State University.  Founded in 2015, they operate with a federal permit in compliance with the 2018 Farm Bill.  They specialize in research and in providing non-GMO hemp seeds for production.  They also produce CBG seeds—CBG stands for cannabigerol, which is a non-intoxicating cannabinoid found in cannabis plants, including the hemp plants used to produce hemp oil.  It is thought to offer many of the same benefits as CBD (cannabidiol) and perhaps more.  Stay tuned, Finnegan’s Farm is experimenting with this!

Patrick’s brother helped them clear an area of dead wood for more raised beds in June 2019.  That wood may now provide heat for the three replacement greenhouses being constructed now.  The three still-standing greenhouses aren’t heated but are well-ventilated to deal with mold challenges.  And they play classical music for the girls.  Patrick tells me that the plant closest to the speaker in the largest greenhouse was stunted and bedraggled looking when they started experimenting with music by playing “bad rock.”  She recovered completely with classical music, so that’s what the girls get now.

Consumers buy CBD products for a variety of reasons, mostly related to relief from chronic pain, anxiety, PTSD and sleep challenges.  If you want to explore the potential health benefits, Harvard Medical School has a good review of current research on CBD for a variety of conditions at  https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/cannabidiol-cbd-what-we-know-and-what-we-dont-2018082414476   Finnegan’s Farm customers give their gummies a thumbs up!

You can find Finnegan’s Farm CBD Gummies at the main Super One in Virginia, the Super One stores in the Duluth area (at the service counter, if you’re 18 or older), and Dan’s Feed Bin in Superior, or you can order them online at https://finnegans-farm.myshopify.com/  Follow Finnegan’s Farm on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/finnegansfarmtwoharbors

Grown on the Range Profile 34: The Eclectic Carton Farm & Garden, originally published in Hometown Focus

Kate remembers when she got her first baby chick—she was two years old, riding in a cart at a grocery store.  And she has loved them ever since.  She was 14 when she got her first Spanish Mustang, another passion that she has carried with her through her thirties.  At the farm where she has established the “Eclectic Carton Farm & Garden” Spanish Mustangs graze in a large pasture and, farther down the winding road, Kate’s focal project emerges: the “Quack Shack” for the pair of Anacona ducks, is almost ready for winter.  There is a new very large coop attached to a super long run and many other portable “chicken tractors” that move about the farm.  And 50 rare birds are all around—a Lavender Wyandotte, for example, and some beautiful Silver Double-Laced Barnevelders.

Kate is a fanatic about keeping their quarters clean and giving them as much free range as possible.  She cleans up chicken poop three times each day, scrubs out the water dishes each morning, moves the chicken tractors, and opens and closes alternate pens and runs so that the birds can drink from the nearby artesian well and snack on all the bugs and worms they can find.  This farm is way out in the country, though, so at night, compatible groups of chickens are housed in large dog kennels inside the large coop to prevent predator casualties.  Kate really loves chickens and they apparently love her back.  She even paints their portraits in acrylics.

Most of the young chickens I meet on my visit were hatched right here from special-order eggs or mail-ordered at 1 day old from reputable national sources who are certified under the National Poultry Improvement Plan program.  White Bresse are a French breed that matures to have white feathers, blue legs and a red comb (suitable for both French and U.S. national colors!).  The Silver Double-Laced Barnevelders are a Dutch breed with dark feathers that look like they’re covered in antique lace.  And every chicken here has a name—some are kind of crazy—representing whatever Kate was thinking about at the time they were hatched.  That naming thing makes having meat birds hard, Kate tells me.  But she names them nonetheless.  On her Facebook page, Kate shares her philosophy: “Even roosters who may be bound for the table should still get to live their best life!”

Kate’s new “homegrown breed” chicks are a Barbezieux x Mosaic cross called Black Pearls and Colored Pearls.  Mosaic is a breed not yet recognized, created at Gold Feather Farms in Louisiana.  They are the culmination of years of selective breeding and have a distinctive rich blue skin color and iridescent turquoise earlobes.  Kate has sold a few of this cross to new homes on the Iron Range this summer.  In the summer of 2021, The Eclectic Carton Farm & Garden will offer rare breed White Bresse, Double Silver Laced Barnevelders, and Mosaic chicks and started birds for sale.

The chickens aren’t the only eclectic element at this farm.  In addition to the Spanish Mustang horses Kate grew up riding (she was an avid 4-H member!), she collects vintage camper trailers.  I see one that she has just purchased, soon to be converted to an art studio for her painting.  She also makes and sells hand-stamped metal work.  “Adventure Pendants” with sayings like “Glamp Tastic” and an image of a tiny camper, or “Get Out” (outside, that is) are for sale.  (Glamping, I learned, is a combination of glamourous and camping, referring to camping in style…..in a vintage camper, perhaps.)  I also learn that her Ancona ducks are a rare breed with very hardy feet and legs and they love snow.  So their “Quack Shack” will be placed to allow them to access the white fluffy stuff this winter.

I ask Kate where she would like to be with her business in five years.  She wants to not work outside her home and become self-sufficient.  She has a 9-month-old son who will grow up loving chickens and the outdoor life too.  Kate has a degree in marketing and public relations and has worked traditional jobs.  This new “gig,”though, is anything but traditional.  She loves what she’s doing.  It’s fun to get to know the birds.  She even has a chicken-watching chair that she bought at a rummage sale positioned at the end of one of the runs.  She loves watching the rooster find a treat and call “the girls” to come get some.  Or the ducks playing in the snow.  She wants to teach folks how to care for backyard chickens (sorry Virginia folks, your city council nixed that one).  And to barter—check her Facebook page for occasional bartering opportunities.  In fact, The Eclectic Carton Farm & Garden on Facebook is a great place to learn more.  Look her up!  And tell her I sent you.

Grown on the Range Profile 33: The Second Annual Iron Range Pasty Festival, originally published in Hometown Focus

Pasties from the first annual Iron Range Pasty Festival

This column is normally about a farm or a grower or food business on the Range.  But this time it’s about a particular food with a long Iron Range tradition and a new twist: the pasty.  Pasties came to the Iron Range with miners from Cornwall, England and caught on quickly.  They stayed warm in a miner’s lunchbox until noon and satisfied their hunger after a long morning’s hard work.  They represent the Range much like sarmas and potica and porketta do.  These days one can find breakfast pasties, dessert pasties, vegetarian pasties and probably some I haven’t yet heard of.  Served warm with ketchup, butter, or gravy, they make a perfect autumn dinner. 

Last year, the Iron Range Partnership for Sustainability (IRPS) held the first annual Iron Range Pasty Festival.  We hand-made each of the 834 pasties with all locally grown/produced ingredients—that’s the new twist.  And they were delicious!  Hundreds of us gathered to eat pasties and slaw at the Mt. Iron Community Center.  Some of us tried rutabaga bowling, some designed winning Mrs. Rutabaga Heads, children made Play-Doh pasties, and we all tried our hand at some Iron Range trivia.  This year, the second annual Iron Range Pasty Festival will look a bit different in order to comply with Covid guidelines and keep us all safe.  The festival will be virtual and drive-through, with trivia and Rutabaga Head contests happening on the IRPS Facebook page all day on October 10.  Pre-ordered frozen pasties can be picked up at Messiah Lutheran Church from 12-3 from your car in the parking lot where Sara Softich and Friends will be playing live.  And the pasty (we have a great pasty costume) and her ketchup bottle companion will be greeting folks in their cars.  We’ll be livestreaming some of the music to Facebook too.  Stay safely in your car and IRPS Board members will bring your frozen pasty order to you.

So what’s in these pasties and who are the local growers and producers who supply the ingredients?  Rutabagas are a signature ingredient, of course, and our rutabagas come from Sherry Erickson’s Elm Creek Farm near Orr (https://www.elmcreekfarmsmn.com/).  She also supplies some of the carrots and onions.  Janna Goerdt of Fat Chicken Farm near Embarrass grows some of the onions too, in addition to being our head chef (www.fatchickenfarm.com).  And Craig Turnboom grows the potatoes and the rest of the carrots and onions on his Skunk Creek Farm near Meadowlands (https://www.skunkcreekfarm.net/ ).  The fresh thyme that gives our pasties their superb taste is grown by the students at the Mesabi East Environmental Education Center in Aurora (https://www.facebook.com/mesabieastgardening/ ).

The meat for our pasties is grass-fed pastured beef from Jane Jewett’s Willow Sedge Farm outside of Palisade (http://www.janesfarm.com/ ).  And the pork comes from Fox Farm near Browerville, where pigs are housed in open-air hoop barns with lots of fresh air and sunshine and fed non-GMO grains grown right there on the farm.  Lard for the tender crust comes from Shannon and Mary Ann Wycoff’s Bear Creek Acres farm near Embarrass where animals have plenty of outside space to root, romp and roam (http://www.bearcreekacres.com/ ).  No antibiotics or animal by-product feed at these farms. 

The pat of butter that goes into each pasty just before it is baked comes from Dahl’s Sunrise Dairy in Babbitt where the butter wins prizes at the State Fair (https://www.dahlssunrisedairy.com/ ).  And the flour comes from Homestead Mills in Cook (https://www.homesteadmills.com/ ).  The secret to the excellent flavor of these pasties is more than just local ingredients.  It comes from the energy of the IRPS Board members who volunteer for 8-hour shifts to chop, peel, and mix the hundreds of pounds of ingredients and roll out the dough as they talk and laugh and dream about the Iron Range of the future.  This year, we’ll be masked and distanced, of course, but it will still be fun!  We have a temporary food stand license from the Minnesota Department of Health for our preparation and plenty of hair nets, gloves, and aprons to go around.  When the pasties finish baking and cooling, they’re bagged and taken to F&D Meats’ walk-in cooler for storage until the day of the festival.  Thank you F&D for your generosity!  (https://www.fanddmeats.com/ ).

Why go to all the trouble to source these ingredients locally?  First, because buying local food supports our local economy.  Every dollar we spend on the ingredients goes into the pocket of a farmer or producer in Orr, Embarrass, Meadowlands, Palisade, Babbitt, Aurora or Cook.  Second, it makes these pasties unique and we think a pasty festival deserves unique pasties.  And third, because this is the only fundraiser for the  Iron Range Partnership for Sustainability and we want to use this fundraiser to illustrate our values—we believe in local!  IRPS doesn’t have an office or a phone; we have only one very part time paid staff person, and we depend on this fundraiser to do the work that we carry out.  Learn more about us at www.irpsmn.org

Grown on the Range Profile 32: The Lavaliers Berry Patch, originally published in Hometown Focus

Lavaliers Berry Patch southeast of Grand Rapids has changed dramatically since 2000 when Stuart Lavalier added 15 apple trees.  It started when he asked the DNR for help protecting his delicious berries from the wide variety of Northwoods wild critters who love berries.  They cooperated in putting up a fence and, as they left, the DNR staff person remarked “Now you can grow apples.”  That piqued Stuart’s interest and he added 15 trees.  Today there are 1,200!  But it doesn’t look like the orchards of my childhood in the 1950’s at all.  I remember large trees forming a huge canopy and tall ladders for picking.  Lavalier employs the “slender spindle” system where dwarf trees grow on trellis systems.  It’s a low-flying orchard with thick rows of trees and very wide grassy aisles between them. 

At this orchard, they maintain trees three feet apart and take out 2-3 of the largest branches when they are young.  Stuart grows apples because it’s FUN, he says.  They are so challenging to grow, especially up here in northern Minnesota, and there are so many rootstocks and varieties to try.  Stuart has a degree in Horticulture from the University of Minnesota, and he keeps in regular touch with their Horticultural Research Center and grows many of their apples.  The public’s favorite right now seems to be Sweet Tango, a cross between the Zestar and Honeycrisp.  But back to rootstocks, a concept I knew nothing about.  I love how these farm visits are so educational for me—a big perk of writing this column!

According to the Minnesota Historical Society, early experts in the state warned against the use of dwarfing rootstocks.  In 1928, Dr. William H. Alderman, professor at the U of M and the state’s most influential horticulturalist, warned against dwarf apples.  But in the 1950’s a British expert, Gordon Yates, imported dwarfing rootstocks from England and Holland and started a flourishing orchard near LaCrescent, Minnesota.  The idea spread quickly, and the U of M began testing various dwarf rootstocks.  Now, they are the norm.  Stuart grafts buds into rootstocks with names like M26 and Geneva41.  Grafting involves inserting a bud in a slit on the tree and wrapping in plastic.  He has a whole field of rootstock to work with.

A grower can’t propagate licensed apples without a contract with the University of Minnesota.  So, Stuart pays a flat fee per tree each year for the privilege of growing varieties like Sweet Tango and First Kiss and Kindercrisp.  He tries new varieties all the time from one of the four breeding programs in the nation.  Every tree is an experiment.  And he adds 50 trees each year.  Because the trees are close together, attached to a trellis and only 11-12 feet tall with wide aisles between rows, harvesting is a different animal than it used to be.  The trees are loaded with apples within easy reach.  And the spacing of the rows means that each tree gets plenty of sun.  The week I visit they are beautiful shades of orange turning to red.  Soon he’ll be selling them at the Grand Rapids Farmers Market.

The apples are only one part of Lavaliers Berry Patch, though.  Of this 20-acre farm, 12 acres are fenced and inside that fence are the apples, but also the strawberries, blueberries, honeyberries, bush cherries, squash, Brussels sprouts and pumpkins that defined this berry patch prior to 2000.  It’s a u-pick or we-pick operation.  It started with strawberries, and Stuart’s parents helped to plant and weed and pick in the early hears.  The whole family has been involved in the farm over the years.  They added blueberries, lingonberries and sour cherries as the years went along.  Stuart was visiting a grower who had cherries and decided to try them.  He explored varieties of cherries and contacted the University of Saskatchewan which had a hardy cherry rated for zone 2!  He drove up to Canada, got a USDA permit to bring some back, and started growing the “Romance” series of bush cherries: Juliet, Romeo, Cupid, Crimson Passion and Carmine Jewel.  Cherries have just ended the week I visit, with a sold-out season.

We walk the rows of crops so that I can see the layout.  The berries are rotated every year and fallow patches are planted with cover crops like sorghum, black eyed peas, rye, vetch, oats, crimson clover, and facelia.  Two years of picking then two years of cover crops.  There’s not much tilling here—new berries are planted into the cover crop.  This process of rotation and cover cropping feeds the soil and interrupts the disease cycle naturally.  The farm uses organic practices such as integrated pest management, too.  They trap insects in order to keep track of which ones are where and use exclusion netting to protect the plants.  That means almost no spraying.  Straw mulch helps preserve moisture from the “triple irrigation” system of drip tapes in the middle of each row.  And the pigs down the road get all the windfalls and waste—a perfect recycling system.

All in all, it’s a very tidy-looking operation, complete with a shelter and picnic tables and a small shop for selling.  You can find this gem of a place at 28056 County Road 91 Grand Rapids and online at https://www.lavaliersberrypatch.com/ where you can sign up for a newsletter telling you what is ripe when and the hours they’re open for picking.  Customers are encouraged to call the berry hotline at 218-327-9199 to verify what’s ripe and the hours for picking.  I’d suggest setting aside a couple of hours to walk the beautiful grounds, pick your own, and enjoy a snack in the picnic shelter.  By the time this column runs, it will be close to pumpkin season—what fun to go and pick your own!

Grown on the Range Guest Column

Cultivating a sustainable local food system across Northeast Minnesota

Executive Director David Abazs of the University of Minnesota Extension Northeast Regional Sustainable Development Partnership (Northeast RSDP) is no stranger to exploring  – and applying – models for sustainable agriculture. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Abazs has spent more time working from his farmstead in Finland along Lake Superior’s North Shore.

“I was up late, tilling cover crops into the soil. We only had a 48-hour window on our eight acres in intensive vegetable, fruit, nuts and small livestock production this year,” Abazs prefaced before digging into details and history of sustainable agriculture and local food systems efforts in northeastern Minnesota. In addition to his leadership role with RSDP, Abazs is a longtime farmer. 

In recent years, interest and work on these topics has expanded across the Iron Range and North Shore with participation, support and additional capacity from Northeast RSDP.

“The reemergence and importance of local food and food security has provided a platform for our work and efforts moving forward,” said Abazs. He credited community member and AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer Sarah Verke, based in the Extension Grand Rapids regional office, with helping connect and integrate a variety of community-based efforts happening across the region. Verke has supported Northeast RSDP’s sustainable agriculture and food systems work through a year-long appointment that concludes in August.

“Sarah has been living here and is invested. It’s nice to have someone local who knows the area, who can help keep our food systems work spread throughout the region,” Abazs said. “Having support from Sarah has greatly improved our capacity in building a broader program.”

Rooted in community

Cultivating RSDP presence and relationships across the region’s diverse landscape and food system has not necessarily been simple, but Verke has not shied away from the challenge. She contributed to a broad coalition of local partners working on related topics and helped educate community members and deepen local connections to farm-to-school programs.

A community member, parent and self-described “noble workaholic,” Verke believes strongly in community organizing, public service and a food system effort led by volunteers and consumers to increase access to local food. For the last five years, Verke has served on the board of the start-up Free Range Food Co-op, which she credited as her “entry into local food.” She also helped convene a local food conference and community conversation in the region, organized around the 2018 report, Local food as an economic driver: A study of the potential impact of local foods in the Taconite Assistance Area.

“This work is about community members talking to community members and about how and why we have to support local farmers — building ownership and that understanding,” Verke explained.

“Having that presence, someone who knows the community, I could see how my connections in the community mattered, how I knew people and recognized people,” Verke said. “I had already built many of these connections, so reinforcing those this year has made my service work even more valuable to RSDP and memorable for me.”

Not starting from scratch

Verke is adamant about the importance of not “starting from scratch” in creating a more sustainable food system in the region, but instead learning from existing networks, resources and community efforts. Drawing on lessons learned from different geographies and existing partnerships has been critical to moving work forward.

“I’ve brought learning from the statewide Minnesota Food Charter Network. Even though it’s no longer active, I’ve used their final letter as a guide to our work — understanding how to support regional efforts and the importance of telling stories of food organizations and stories of food,” Verke explained, referencing statewide efforts with a track record of promoting a healthier, more sustainable food system in Minnesota.

In addition to statewide efforts, Verke and Abazs noted how local models and project success stories can resonate even more with community members throughout the region.

One of these local models, The Rutabaga Project, which received initial funding from an Extension SNAP-Ed Community Partnerships grant and is jointly administered by the Arrowhead Economic Opportunity Agency and the Iron Range Partnership for Sustainability, has been working to “craft community-based solutions to make produce more accessible and affordable.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Farmers Market Promotion Program recently awarded the project a three-year grant to expand its efforts, which will allow even greater regional collaboration.

Over the years, Northeast RSDP has supported a variety of ways for community members to participate in food systems work throughout the region. Funded projects have included joint research, outreach and education on the topic of Deep Winter Greenhouses through a prototype in Finland, “Farm-2-Family” events in Aitkin to connect local farmers to consumers in their communities, farmer’s market aggregation projects in Grand Rapids that help leverage existing market infrastructure to connect vendors to larger buyers such as area schools and hospitals, and an ongoing Grown on the Range blog and newspaper column that engages readers in local food topics.

Digging in and sharing farm-to-school resources

This year, Northeast RSDP expanded its farm-to-school work, helping schools increase access to healthy, local food grown or raised by Minnesota farmers. Local and regional programming helped area partners learn about this topic and strengthen connections between school districts and farms.

“One of the most notable things I worked on was an event in February that centered on the topic of farm-to-school,” Verke noted of a collaborative workshop that Northeast RSDP helped coordinate and convene with local partners and sponsors including Renewing the Countryside, the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture (MISA), Grand Rapids Farmers Market Aggregation Project, and the Minnesota Farmers Market Association. Financial support for the workshop came from Compeer Financial and a USDA Farm to School grant.

A total of 47 people participated in the event. Attendees included representatives from nine school districts ranging from school administrators and district superintendents to school board members and food nutrition staff. Community members and representatives from area hospitals and state and county agencies also attended.

The day’s programming posed questions about what makes farm-to-school programs successful, what barriers exist that make it challenging for local districts to implement and maintain these programs, and what roles existing resources such as the Farmers Market Aggregation Program and Grand Rapids Farmers Market can play in regional farm-to-school efforts.

“One of the biggest things a superintendent who attended told me was that he learned and took to heart that farm-to-school programs aren’t ‘all or nothing.’ They can be different from school to school and built upon to tailor to their needs,” Verke said.

In addition to this winter workshop, Northeast RSDP recently provided resources to support ongoing farm-to-school work in Grand Rapids through a project entitled, “Let’s Get Growing.” Rachel Newman, a local teacher, farmer and volunteer who helped lead the project, described how Grand Rapids High School students successfully grew microgreens, created kits to share with students and families at home, and incorporated related activities into other programming.

Microgreen-growing kits.

“We worked with partners to create clear microgreen growing and harvesting safety guidelines. Students grew microgreens at home with their families during distance learning this May, and we planted three apple trees near our outdoor classroom area,” explained Newman. “A student from the class works with me at the Grand Rapids Farmers Market to sell microgreens, with all proceeds donated back to the high school program for growing more food for the cafeteria during the school year.”

“I have been working constantly to adapt to current conditions, and get as many people as possible, especially youth, in our community to eat microgreens,” Newman said.

In addition to these recent regional efforts, RSDP staff and leadership were instrumental in early efforts to synthesize the needs of farm-to-school pilot programs and institutionalize such programming in the state over a decade ago. These efforts ultimately helped Extension increase its capacity and support for local communities working on this topic.

Today, farm-to-school programming in Minnesota has continued to expand. Numerous farm-to-school resources available from Extension provide entry points for communities interested in this work. They also illustrate the breadth and diversity of farm-to-school programming in the state — from coordinating and promoting the state’s annual Farm to School Month in October to building relationships with local farmers, supporting food skills development, cultivating school gardens and providing coordination and facilitation for local and statewide efforts.

While the COVID-19 pandemic may complicate ongoing farm-to-school efforts, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture released a Farm-to-School Rapid Response grant opportunity that can provide assistance to schools and farmers needing additional support to improve market access in summer and fall 2020.

Looking forward

Even as Northeast RSDP has adjusted its programming this spring and summer to ensure the public health and safety of community members, Verke and Abazs remain optimistic about the future of farm-to-school, sustainable agriculture, food systems and food justice work in the region.

While her formal work with Northeast RSDP will conclude this summer, Verke stressed her commitment to stay engaged and serve as a resource on these topics and as partners develop more “shovel ready” local food projects. “I do plan to continue to participate, even [if] on a volunteer basis,” she said. “We’re a team and still in this trust-building stage, and I know I have perspective to lend as we keep talking about the needs of our region.”

Abazs will be looking more closely at how social, environmental and economic issues intersect throughout local food system projects and the importance of bringing a lens of justice to RSDP work in the region.

"There are a lot of equity issues in our region. Communities are varied and diverse, some ethnically, some economically. We really can’t build sustainability without justice; we can’t have one without the other," he said.

With this in mind, Northeast RSDP is prioritizing projects and partnerships that more explicitly address historic injustices embedded in agriculture and illustrate models for transforming inequities in the food system. Existing relationships with partners in the region that include Bois Forte Band of Chippewa, Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and 40 Acre Co-op will help inform and co-create such efforts.

“We need to keep building these relationships, connect with and listen to communities most harmed, and not blow it,” Abazs said.

Learn more about sustainable agriculture and food systems projects supported by the Northeast RSDP. For an example of sustainable agriculture modeling in Northeast Minnesota, see 

“The miracle of Finland: What a tiny northern Minnesota town can teach America,” featuring David Abazs in his role as a farmer prior to his position with RSDP.

Marie Donahue, July 2020

Marie Donahue works as a statewide sustainability storyteller with the University of Minnesota Extension Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships (RSDP) and Clean Energy Resource Teams (CERTs).