·:[ high hopes gardens ]:·
• • • • •

As many of you know, Linda met a long-awaited goal a few weeks ago. While teaching full-time, she managed to create a new academic program and get it certified by the State, converted 140 acres of cash-rent land to certified organic production at the college farm, and raised around $600,000 for some infrastructure (including some Leed-certified buildings), planning, and three year’s salary for a farm manager in her “spare” time. Since projects like these are ongoing and never seem to end, I thought that this would be a good time to stop and recognize the work she’s done.

The recently hired farm manager is a graduate of the Master’s Program in Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State and also holds an MBA. He will be a great person to lead the charge full-time to train young and old, new residents and old-timers in theory, field production, marketing, and business management for entrepreneurial farmers.

The program aims to be an “incubator farm” that people who want to start farming can access land, take classes as necessary, and a be part of a network of like-minded people who see opportunity in value-added, niche, and organic products. A planned second phase will include an incubator kitchen where packaged food can be produced and sold. It’s been a long and eventful four years from idea to where the program is today.

one year ago…”Most Used Piece of Equipment on the Farm”

Today we ventured to Cedar Rapids for the 13th annual Iowa Network for Community Agriculture annual meeting.  The morning’s speaker was tangerine farmer and film-maker Lisa Brenneis from Ojai, California.  You may ask, what is a California farmer doing in Iowa talking at a local food conference?  Quite simply, if you followed yesterday’s blog entry - she was taking us down a different road.

Her film “Eat at Bills” profiles the wildly successful Montery Produce Market - a kind of market that currently does not exist in Iowa.  It was her job to stretch our understanding how local foods could be offered to eaters.

Here’s Lisa showing off some of the just-picked Mandarin Oranges from her orchard.  We got to take some home to share with the kids!  What a treat in February.

one year ago…

The deep mid-winter is time to catch up on the pile-o-receipts from the past tax year. It’s not really too bad - I do a fairly good job of saving all pertinent materials in three-ring binders and entering sales as they happen, but the bill receipts get stuffed in a plastic pouch in the binder and finally get entered this time of year.

The scene is not especially inviting - a pile of receipts, last year and this year’s record books, and Quicken on the PC. It’s only a week or so until sales tax deadline, so that moves this up on the list of things to do. After the high hopes books get in shape, it’s time to move onto the personal taxes and accounting. Better in January than July.

one year ago…

Today, I attended two meetings in Ames. One with Practical Farmers of Iowa to talk to them about the system design of their new food cooperative. It is one of the missing links in a local food system. The press release about the project follows:

Practical Farmers of Iowa to launch Iowa Food Cooperative

AMES, Iowa—Iowa consumers soon will find it easier to have their pick of a wide variety of Iowa products, under a project starting through Practical Farmers of Iowa. Practical Farmers of Iowa has received a grant from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture to launch an Iowa Food Cooperative.
The Cooperative, when launched early next year, will be similar to ones now operating in Oklahoma and Nebraska. The effort will sell only food and non-food products that are produced by members of the cooperative directly to consumers.
The benefits of a direct-to-consumer distribution system like this are many. Consumers know more about the products they’re buying and they are supporting our Iowa economy, while farmers are getting the best price they can. Customers will know exactly who produced the food, where it was grown or raised, and what production practices the farmer or rancher used. “You don’t just order five pounds of generic hamburger, you order it from a specific producer. Our food has a story, and customers of locally raised foods are part of that story,” according to Eric Franzenburg, president of Practical Farmers of Iowa.
The Iowa Food Co-op will be modeled on the successful Oklahoma and Nebraska Food Cooperatives. The older of these two, the Oklahoma Food Co-op, has nearly 1500 different items available each month. As of February 2007, the coop has 1000 members, 101 of them are producers. Total sales average $25,000 - $35,000 each month. The advantage for consumers? “We are discovering the unique and authentic regional tastes of this area and rediscovering the importance of local food production to healthy, local communities,” said Eric. The project also recognizes that Iowa is unique with various local and regional farmer-led food distribution efforts. The project will work with these efforts to help deepen and broaden the base of consumers who buy products directly from farmers.
PFI is a non-profit sustainable agriculture group dedicated to farming that is profitable, environmentally sound, and healthy for consumers and communities. Founded in 1985, PFI has over 700 farmer and non-farmer members throughout Iowa.

The second meeting was at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. There was a meeting to discuss mechanisms for small niche agricultural producers to have access to capital. It was a brainstorming session for another Leopold project.
one year ago…

It’s now time for the shameless commerce portion of the blog. This year we’ve decided to offer gift boxes of products from our farm - various combinations of pure beeswax candles, hand made soap, and jams.

This is the big sampler box.

This is the medium sampler box.

You can look at all the boxes at the high hopes gardens web site.

For those wishing to order not in the local area, we’ll add actual shipping costs to the order and ship them where/when you want them to go. Just send us the shipping zip code and we’ll estimate shipping and let you know. The shipping should be between three and seven dollars, depending on location and shipping method.

You can pay us instantly via paypal or send a check in snail mail. Send us an e-mail to highhopes@prairieinet.net for more info or if you have questions.

one year ago…

I’m not sure what the political climate is around where you live, but in Missouri it was a whole ‘nother level. I realized certain things are taboo around here. One is political signs/advertising by businesses. It seems that putting up a political signs would offend about half your customers. In Missouri, lots of businesses had signs up in front of their establishment. At the gas station, the little computerized message screen that tells you “Begin Fueling Now” told me how to vote in the election!

Today, Linda saw Joel Salatin speak and I went to some shorter sessions and we are full of great ideas for our farm. We ended with an evening reviewing this year’s financials and setting some priorities for next year.

one year ago…

Today, we drove down to Columbia, Missouri to attend the National Small Farm Conference and Tradeshow. We’ll also use it as our “annual meeting” of high hopes LLC. The conference is a real interesting mix of people, some so far around each end of the political spectrum that they meet up here.

It was a nice drive down, we took some county roads (T61 from Eddyville to hwy 2 was a great drive and we avoided driving through Ottumwa).

I was able to listen to Joel Salatin talk about pasture-based farming. Joel is the poster child of ecological, community based farming. He was the hero of the best seller “Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan.

Perhaps some other day, I’ll summarize his presentation, but I do want to share one story.

I asked him if had any corrections or comments regarding his portrayal in the “Omnivore’s Dilemma.” He gushed a bit about Michael Pollan and then came with one little thing that raised his hackles. Pollan notes the lack of coffee at Polyface Farm, and seemingly begrudges, or at least can’t understand why there is not any coffee. Salatin says that is not true - there is indeed coffee on the farm, and if a guest asks, they are happy to brew a pot! Had only he asked, there would have been coffee.

one year ago…

O.K., the biggest thing that is missing from a local food system is a distributor. Someone to gather the product from farmers who don’t have time/inclination to market and ramp up quantities and sell to local outlets, like grocers, hospitals, etc.

We got to thinking about the 2,000 people or so who work in my building - wouldn’t it be great for them to have a stand of locally grown stuff waiting for them outside the door at 5:00 on their way home? Wouldn’t it be even better if you had a small truck - like a bread truck or so and filled it with veggies/frozen/ and refrigerated stuff and were mobile so you could be in a different location each day?

I did a quick search for “mobile grocer” on google and the only thing I came up with was an organic store in Oakland that had a mobile grocer that sold organic produce at wholesale cost in low-income sections of Oakland as part of their mission to make good food more widely available.

Ideas? Suggestions?

Last week Linda went to Athens, Ohio to tour ACEnet, one of the nation’s most successful incubator kitchens. An incubator kitchen is a place where a person or aspiring company can process food for retail sale, or ramp up a recipe in a batch food environment before building or taking it to a food manufacturer. So, you may be a sweet corn farmer who sells frozen cobettes (corn on the cob broken in half) to a rib restaurant - you could rent the kitchen for a week to legally process all your corn. You may have a great family dressing or salsa recipe you’d like to try to sell - this is the place to produce test batches and do some test marketing.

This is a picture of Bill, the food scientist/chef at ACEnet. He helps people with ideas batch up their recipes, among other things.

An incubator kitchen is one part of the dream for the entrepreneurial farm Linda is planning at the community college. They hope to use the 140 acres adjacent to the farm to rent out small plots - 1/2 to many acres for someone wanting to start an agricultural enterprise. Along with the classes, incubator kitchen, and farm - it could be a great way to recapture lost food dollars, begin a local food economy and provide meaningful employment. Linda has spent her “work” summer researching other entrepreneurial farms in planning the use of the land at MCC.

It is frustrating that this type of community-based agricultural venture does not gain traction. Especially in light of the farm subsidies paid to commodity farmers to produce crops that result in overproduction. The Environmental Working Group has published all the taxpayer money that goes to commodity subsidies. In Marshall County Iowa alone, the data is from 1995-2004 and the largest farmer received $1,302,739 in taxpayer money (or national debt as the case may be). It’s not an isolated case. There were 44 farmers who recieved over $750,000 and 164 farmers who received $250,000 or more. Just the payments from one of those farmers would go a long way to helping many more entrepreneurial farmers create community wealth.

It’s a drizzly, foggy day - a day for indoor work. Getting tax stuff ready and working on spring high hopes newsletter. As this is our first year filing as an LLC, I’m filling out the forms best I can, then taking it into the tax guy to finish.

The last few days I’ve been working on a high hopes newsletter and order form for the upcoming season. Today I called the locker where we take chickens to find out the minimum number we could sell to individuals and let them pick it up. They wouldn’t do it period. So something that was inconvenient for our customers becomes impossible.

Out options are to butcher the chickens on the farm or go to a locker licensed to sell retail - that would add about $3.50 to the price of the already expensive chickens without much of a margin for us. This is one enterprise where economies of scale sure help - driving 100 chickens to the locker plant vs driving 1000 would drive a lot of the costs significantly down, but growing 1,000 chickens does not fit into the balance of our farm at this point.

The chickens are such a wonderful product - but we can’t do it for free or little profit with all the risk that goes along with it. We NEED a plant closer to make it more economical.

So until we decide what to do - the newsletter is on hold.

Throughout the winter, we took a class Saturday mornings entitled “Growing Your Small Market Farm.” The culmination of the class was to write a business plan for your farm operation. Along the way, we formed High Hopes Gardens LLC for legal and financial protection of our non-farm assets, learned a great deal, and met some good people. We began writing a plan for an on-farm store - thinking that we spent too much time driving to and sitting at farmer’s markets and that our time would be better spent selling at retail from our farm - with poultry as one of the main draws.

The poultry processing rules put a kibosh on that aspect, but we still went ahead with a survey to other on-farm stores nationwide and to about 200 local consumers to gather info on profitability factors of on-farm stores and attitudes of local people towards shopping at an on-farm store.

Although not totally discouraging, we realized that it probably wouldn’t work on our location on a gravel road. So although we did lots of research, much of it original, we did not think it would work. We had our on-farm visit from our instructor last Friday and had looked at our schedules and life and found no room for a business. In some ways, Linda is starting a business in getting the sustainable and entrepreneurial program off the ground at school. The time in feeding ourselves, raising the kids, and having two other jobs doesn’t leave a lot of room for new adventures. Another challenge is that if we wanted to take the leap, having about three acres of hilly ground would be hard to replace one off-farm income.

So we’ll not have this immediate expectation of starting quite yet. We’ll look back and see if we’d like to do more long-term crops (christmas trees, nuts, lumber) or just try a short season at market with fruits, flowers and berries, or perhaps off-season hoops.

Deciding to let this drop, if even temporarily does not come easily or without its own angst. We’ll try it on for a while, breathe for a few seconds a day, and see where it brings us.

We have spent some time surveying farm store owners and have the results now in. See our web page for the results. We are now tabulating the results of the surveys to local residents about their local food purchases and will post that soon.

We’ve only been gone less than 36 hours - but it was two full days, a night away and drive-bys of 100’s of farms - most not doing too well. Rural southeastern Iowa is not a particularly prosperous part of the U.S. It was quite jarring driving up from the south to Iowa City after two days in small towns and rural lands and seeing the difference in wealth and opportunity. What makes us value town jobs more than rural jobs? What would it take to have a person who grows your food make as much money as a person who landscapes your yard?

Yesterday was good for hunkering down and working on the farm business plan. It was raining and snowing, so we weren’t tempted to go outside. We made some great strides and are grateful for that. Today, we had a nice chat with the owner of the Bed and Breakfast whose town of 35 residents has been declared a national historic district, in whole, due to the efforts of a “newcomer” (she moved there in 1955) who made enemies for life in trying to move the town from a collection of junk cars to a place worthy of preservation and opportunity. The buildings are all built of red brick, fired from local clay by the Mormons over 100 years ago. We wondered why it was when you lived in a shithole it was so hard to flush and make something new and better? Kudos to those in the Villages of Van Buren for making something new out of a treasure of history and architecture.

Today we visted Premiere Fencing near Washington, IA - one of the biggest purveyor of fencing supplies. We then went to Red Fern Farm to pick up some chestnut trees for our silvopasture. Tom is experimenting with alternative crops in Iowa like chestnuts, heartnuts, persimmons, medlars, and others. Red Fern had 6 inches of snow overnight.

An upshot from this time away and bit of perspective is that we are now thinking that we are going to stop offering poultry for sale. The lousy return (even charging $2.00 lb) and huge risk (predation, disease, dogs, weather) along with the liability insurance cost, just doesn’t make sense for us to sell on a small scale and we are not willing to grow the thousands it may take to make it worth our time. For our small farm, it just does not work right now. This might change if there was an inspected locker close by.

It is not easy to drop this enterprise as it is a product our customers cannot easily get in the store and we are not happy with the conditions commercial broilers are raised, but we can’t do it without a reasonable return. We are going to shift our focus a bit - but more about that later, as I am now rambling.