T is for Tokarz

Andrew Tozarz in tradtional shepherd attire.

Just a couple of years into our farming experience, Beth and I were nearly burnt out, and we considered throwing in the towel and going back to our more conventional careers. Starting any business is stressful and time-consuming. Starting a diverse, sustainable, farm in a sea of corn and soybeans is that, plus it's lonely and isolating.

An early frost, ended our second season of vegetable CSA a couple of weeks early. To be perfectly honest, we were glad of it. That's how exhausted and discouraged we were. Fortunately, we didn't quit. Rather we regrouped and registered for our first farming conference - a CSA conference in Michigan. Although we'd beeen growing a Community Supported Agriculture business for two years and had cultivated a community of eaters, we hadn't tapped into a community of farmers.

The Michigan CSA conference showed us just how collaborative and supportive the people involved in sustainable farming truly are. Not only did we learn a lot about making a CSA work, we, also, learned that we weren't alone in our struggles. Not feeling alone was probably just as important as all the new knowledge we brought back. Beth and I credit that first conference with keeping us in farming.

Still, in our part of Illinois, sustainable farms are few and far between and staying connected in our busyness is not always easy - but it's the connections that keep us going. Over beers one night during the winter of 2008, Larry O'Toole and I concieved the North Central Illinois Farmer Network (aka greenfarmers) to make it easy for farmer like us to connect and support one another. 

So, we started a Yahoo group and invited all the sustainable farmers within a 1 1/2 hour drive to meet at a independent coffee shop in Joliet, IL, which was a central location. We asked everyone to share the invite as widely as they could. One of the farmers that came to that first meeting was Andrew Tokarz.

Andrew lives in Chicago, but he and a group of entrepreneurial Poles operate a cooperative sheep farm in Lemont, Illinois. The members of the group take turns at the farm caring for everyone's sheep (most have other jobs in the city). Andrew's enterprise is dairy sheep (& amazing sheep-milk cheeses) and Polish Tatras (a rare breed of livestock guardian dogs).

Jody with our guardian dogs - Sasha, Sophie, & Harry

At that meeting, we learned that he had a litter of Tatra pups that needed work. As we have every known predator in northern Illinois living (and eating chickens on our farm), it was serendipity. A few weeks later, Sasha and Sophie arrived on the farm. Harry was added last year. We've found them to be incredibly intelligent, friendly to our human visitors, fiercely protective of all our animals. They've definitely earned their kibble over the past four years!

Beth with Sasha.

Thanks Andrew!

K is for Kellner

That's Tracy Kellner of Provenance Food and Wine, in Logan Square and Lincoln Square in Chicago.

CVSF has had long relationship with Tracy and her husband Joe Patt. We first met Tracy at the Logan Square Farmers market five years ago. She was the markets cheesemonger when we started vending meats and delivering CSA shares there.

As the market season was coming to an end and we hadn't gotten all of our holiday turkeys pre-sold, we asked Tracy if she would like to offer them to her store customers. She said "Yes", and we went from there. On a cold November day we delivered turkeys - indoors- to about forty of her customers. That was a nice change from our outdoor market stall that cold fall.

Seeing the success of this venture (and the fact we hadn't really considered the logistics of delivering meat shares on brutally cold winter days or wet and dreary spring ones) we aske Tracy if she would like to host our CSA delivery as well. Again, "Yes."


When Tracy and Joe added a store in Lincolns Square, we added a CSA delivery there. Tracy and Joe are huge supporters of local foods and farmers and we're grateful for the relationship that's developed over the years. We even attended Tracy and Joe's "surprise wedding!"

It has definitely been a mutually beneficial relationship between Provenance and CVSF! We're definitely richer because of it - most of the riches are non-monetary; but the we've earned a fair number of dollars as well.

Thanks, Tracy!

G.H.

Ten years ago, when we were starting what we thought was the only Community Supported Agriculture vegetable farm in  LaSalle county, another farm was getting theirs in the ground as well. That farm is Growing Home Farm (aka Les Brown Memorial Farm) in Marseilles, IL just 13 miles east of Cedar Valley Sustainable Farm.

Larry O' Toole

It wasn't until our second season that we were made aware of Growing Home (G.H.). One day, a CSA member brought Larry O' Toole with him when he came to pick up his weekly box of vegetables. Meeting another sustainable vegetable farmer in the endless desert of corn and soybeans was a breath of fresh air, and the beginning of what continues to be a fruitful collaboration between our farms - that continues today. (In fact, I when I finish this post, I'm going out to till compost into our small garden with a tiller borrowed from G.H.)

Over the years, Cedar Valley Sustainable Farm has done A LOT with G.H. We've hosted trainees on our farm, helped put in transplants there, shared seed orders, eaten potlucks, complained, commiserated, and celebrated with Larry an the G.H. staff.

After hurricane Katrina (and the less well know but equally devastaing Rita) I and two staffers from G.H. traveled to southwest Louisiana to volunteer for two weeks. We left just after Thanksgiving 2005, for New Iberia where the Southern Mutual Help Association had a bunkhouse for volunteers set up in a church building. The multiple skills required for farming translated very well to helping with the storm recovery.

In 2008, upon our return from vacation in Texas, our walk-in freezer failed. We called G.H. for help. Larry and a crew of four others showed within an hour and helped move everything to alternative freezer storage. It is not a stretch to say that GH save our business that day! We're grateful to have G.H. as part of our community.

F is for facebook

Admittedly, this post is a bit disjointed...I'll work on it in the coming days. If you have some "clarifying" thoughts, please leave them for me...

I'm a "long-form" consumer of information. I read books, listen to National Public Radio, and enjoy meandering, in-depth, conversations. Unfortunately, we live in a short-form world that requires information in smaller chunks. Also, time constraints limit our ability to put out a lot of long-form information.

At Cedar Valley Sustainable Farm we try to give a combination of short and long-form information.  Our website has a number of pages where people can dig in and learn a lot about our farm and how our community support agriculture program works. This blog allows us to take a bit more time and delve into issues of farming and community and sustainability more thoroughly. We publish a monthly electronic newsletter that gives a snapshot of what's going on at the farm as well.

But, we've found that people like to get a picture of daily life on the farm. For that, we have a facebook page. Although, not social media experts, we enjoy posting pictures and links that relate to the farm. Plus it's interactive, with fans giving feedback, almost, in real-time. I know, once we get comfortable with our Twitter feed, it will be. Until then, facebook is a good way to connect with our community.

We're all about local food, so I'm amazed at the reach of this blog and the facebook page. It took me awhile to wrap my head around having fb fans in Iran and blog readers in New Zealand; but a fan pointed out that  "food and farming are such a universal concern." She's right, of course. The agriculture decisions made here in north central Illinois and the decisions made in Brazil and Niger and Thailand have global implications. Animal confinement in northern Europe? Palm-oil plantations in Indonesia? Super market or farmers market?

We're all inter-connected, and we're under a lot of pressure. The choices we make in the next few years, will have a huge impact on what the world looks like in 30 years when we have another 2 BILLION mouths to feed. I have a vision of a world where nutritous food and clean water are basic human rights and biological diversity in crops and livestock are tenets of a healthy ecology.

American farmers have bought into the concept that they "feed the world." I reject that premise and seek world where people are empowered to feed themselves, locally. Blogging, and fb allows me to connect with people who share this vision in all parts of the world - so we can work together to make it happen and change the world.

If you like to add to this effort, "like" us on fb and share this blog with your friends!

E is for....

Sustainable farming evokes pastoral images and often romantic notions of being balanced and in harmony with the land and it's ecology. Don't get me wrong, on our best days at Cedar Valley Sustainable Farm we enter a blissful state of flow that seems to exist outside of time. It's exhilarating; and, ten years in, this happens more and more often.

That's not always the case, sometimes there's a there's pressures, pushes, and pulls of time, of family, of deadlines, of weather, of bills, of .... that make our usually elastic bands of resilence brittle and ready to snap. It's at times like these that we have to dig down and find the strength and courage to - ask for help.

One of the times we needed help was when we were applying for our first Frontera Farmer Foundation grant. Part o f the application is tax returns and financial information including the current years taxes. When we applied January 31st was the application deadline. This was a tight turn around for us to get our taxes completed and the financial statements we needed were new to us (My degree is in English, and Beth's is in Education, so finance is not a strong suit).

We'd done our own taxes for the first couple of years on the farm - Beth was still teaching and the farm business was pretty small and seemed simple. In our third year, we decided to have our taxes done professionally by a CPA that neighboring farmer recommended. Unfortunately, his expertise seemed to be even less than ours. With the Frontera deadline looming, we felt overwhelmed; but Beth thought of a solution. A good friend of her's from high school (and a "farm-girl"), Carrie Echols, had her own CPA practice locally.

So, we reconnected with Carrie. She understood farm taxes and accounting and was willing to learn about our unique (community supported agriculture) business approach. Carrie worked with us to get everything completed by the deadline and has been our accountant ever since. It's liberating to know that we don't have to have all the answers and a comfort to have experts we can turn to when we need help. Sustainabilty is NOT about being totally self-sufficient; it's about cultivating and encouraging interdependent relationships that strengthens the whole system.

D is for Duncan

An A-Z blog theme on our farm's community needs to include some mention of family. Today, I'm going to introduce you to Duncan. He is our farm's naturalist and the one who always up for a walk in the woods or explore the creek. This week, he was hanging out/helping me trouble-shoot a shorted out electric fence.

As I worked, he climbed trees and explored. Walking along the pasture's edge, I told him that the best place to find night crawlers was under old cow pies. So, we started to turn some of them over. Not only did we discover worms in the well rotted manure but many other living things from fungi to grubs to a sprouted honey locust seed (the cows eat the pods in the fall and deposit the undigested seeds all around the pasture - a perfect seed starter medium).

Yesterday, we ate a salad that Duncan had foraged with Beth and his little brother, Jack. The salad included water cress that grow along one of the many natural springs on farm, and sorrel a perrenial that is great as a cooked green (scrambled eggs and sorrel is favorite of our friend John Breslin) but works in a salad when the tender leaves are picked. It's so gratifying to have our kids so connected to our farm way of living.

 Duncan is a Lego designer as well - hopefully those design skills will translate into useful stuff for the farm as he gets bigger!

Here, he takes a break with Beth on a recent trip to the Field Museum.

Chicago Honey Co-op

Again this departs from the A-Z format (wait no it doesn't - it's my "C"), but I want to wrap up  the Terra Madre thing. (Also, Michael Thompson is part of our farm's community - which I'll be posting about today as well.)

Terra Madre - Short essay #4

Please describe 1-2 experiences, if any, that highlight your relationship to the Slow Food or Terra Madre networks. If you have not previously interacted with Slow Food or Terra Madre, please tell us how you or your organization might build a relationship with these networks.

Michael Thompson is a founder of the Chicago HoneyCo-op.  He vends honey and beeswax products at the same market our farm does. I’ve gotten to know him well over the past seven years – from the market as well as running into each other at various local food and farming functions through the Chicago region.  Michael has been a leader in local foods, biological diversity, “slow food,” and urban agriculture for decades.

In 2008, Michael and his partner, Sydney, attended Terra Madre as delegates.  When I asked him about his trip, he told me: “Jody, I generally don’t put a lot of stock in the phrase ‘a life changing experience,’ but I have to tell you; it (Terra Madre) changed my life.” Ever since that conversation, I’ve wanted to be a Terra Madre delegate.

B is for Butcher

Okay, we run a meat CSA - that's community supported agriculture. (If you're new to this and would like to learn more our farm and CSA visit us at Cedar Valley Sustainable Farm. If you'd like to find a CSA in your area got to Local Harvest. If you're in Chicago, visit The Local Beet.)

Raise our animals in ways that nurture their true natures. We're mindful that their well being is dependent upon us, just as our sustenance is dependent on them. It is a relationship grounded with respect and reverence.

But, to become the nourishing goodness that goes into our monthly shares, their lives must end. We take great care with our animals and work to ensure that the same care is taken when they become meat.

Luckily, we have a fantastic  butcher who does his job as thoughtfully as we do ours. His name is Scott Bittner.

Scott runs the only buthcher shop in the state of Illinois that can do certified organic butchering for red meat animals (beef, pork, lamb, goat). Although we are NOT a certfied organic farm, this is important to us and our customers as it means that only organic methods and ingredients are used in the processing of our meats (no MSG, added nitrates etc).

Bittners (Scott and his wonderful staff) are an important part of our farm's community, and we appreciate all they do!

 

Terra Madre - second essay

What is your vision for the food movement? How have you contributed to this vision locally, nationally, and globally?

Just now, my youngest (5) asked me “What are you doing?”  I told him I was writing; but, the real answer is that I’m changing the world.  This would have been hubris when our family embarked on our sustainable farming adventure ten years ago. Over the past decade, I’ve learned that sustainability is as much about the support and involvement of community as it is about farming practices.  

Just as we are feeling the effects of Norman Borlaug’s “green revolution” forty years hence, the eating and farming decisions we make today will ripple into tomorrow.  My vision is that I help to teach people to eat thoughtfully with import and a connection to their food and their grower.  My hope is that my small efforts combined with many others locally, nationally, and globally will reach Malcolm Gladwell’s “magic moment” when it “…tips, and spreads like wildfire.”

A to Z blog challenge

So.... beginning this Sunday, we will be posting nearly daily (A-Z through April) to this blog. I'd like to say that I'm prepared and have a backlog of posts all ready to go.

I don't, but I've got a theme. I'm going to focus on COMMUNITY, specifically, on Cedar Valley Sustainable Farm's community. As I've thought about it, delivering food to over 200 families a month is definitely a group effort!

Over the next month, I hope to give an overview of what our farm's community is and just how important it is.