The 2010 Season (Year 2 of ?)

Willa's wondering what she got herself into.

It's hard to believe, but it's that time of year again - when I give an incomplete summary of the farming year and what the future holds. So hold on!

Of course the most significant event was the birth of Willa Anne on September 28th. She didn’t enter this world without some hard work on Courtney’s part, but enter the world she did, pink and screaming. She’s been such a wonderful addition to our lives and she is growing so quickly. It seems a long time ago that we had to support her head when we held her. Now she does just fine without a hand on the back of her neck. She smiles a little more each day and is starting to grip things with her teeny-tiny hands. We’re so happy she’s here and can't wait for her to be gripping weeds.



This past growing season, I was able to work 3/4-time at my non-farm job, but unfortunately I won't be able to do that again this next year and will need to be working full-time. That will be quite a challenge, as even 3/4-time made for a severe shortage of hours to spend on the farm. This year we had a work-share arrangement with one of our vegetable CSA members and will do that again next year, but we will definitely need more help.

Just to add to babies and full-time jobs, there is the possibility next year that we will be farming the entire farm – all 260 acres. Though this has always been a goal of ours, it wasn’t something we wanted to tackle the first few years of starting the farm. Circumstances have thrown the opportunity at us quite a bit earlier than we’d anticipated.

The most obvious challenge to all of this (and even without adding an additional 245 acres onto what we’re already doing), is lack of time. I mentioned this earlier, but we’ll have to have interns and/or hired help for the vegetables and turkeys. For the larger scale field crops, we will likely need the help of Courtney's farmer dad.

Another challenge will be finding equipment to successfully manage such large acreage (large to us, anyway). Currently we use a 100-horsepower tractor which can pull a 12-foot duckfoot plow and an 8-foot seed drill. That works well for 15 acres, but since time is our primary challenge, it would require us to work day and night just to plow 260 acres in the spring. So, I’ve begun looking around for larger equipment, researching what is out there and how much it costs. I know that no matter what I discover, I will need to find financing somewhere. I've visited with our local FSA loan officer and will explore what the USDA offers. I’ve sat down with him before to discuss beginning farmer programs, so he knows me and what we’re up to.

This is all very scary to us. Are we in, or about to be, over our heads? Are we up for this? Are we foolish for taking all this on? Is there reasonableness in sight? Will this even work out? All rhetorical questions, of course.

Just to add to all of the above, we’re also still struggling to figure out how to live on the farm. We briefly figured out a way to rent the second house, but the timing wasn't right and the overall expense didn't make much sense, so we reconsidered moving a trailer house onto the property. But that has its own challenges, like access to water, power, and sewer. All that would have to be developed for the trailer house which is another expense lost to us after we’re done living in the trailer house. So, what we are considering now, is to simply (ha!) buy the 80 dryland acres on the farm and start building a home. Since that is our long-term goal (buy the farm ground and none of the existing buildings, building our own homestead infrastructure), why wait? Why spend all this money on temporary solutions to living on the farm when any investment is lost after a few years anyway? By buying 80 acres (again with the FSA’s help) and building a house, we’ve gained an investment in 80 acres and a house 3 miles from town. Whether or not any of this will play out as I imagine it remains to be seen. I guess the point to this diatribe is that it doesn’t look as though we will be living on the farm in 2011, a real letdown since I will already be stretched thin between my off-farm job and the farm and I don’t want to unnecessarily miss out on any baby daughter time.

Now that I’ve spent the bulk of this post on what-ifs, it’s time to let you know how everything went this past season. In short, it was a challenge, but we pulled it off. We successfully provided weekly vegetables to 24 CSA members – 15 in Great Falls, 6 in Conrad, 2 in Havre, and 1 in Choteau – and attended the Great Falls farmers’ market each Saturday morning. Using the Sonora heritage wheat we grew in 2009, each week for the farmers’ market I baked 20 loaves of 100% whole wheat sourdough bread that we called Farmer Bread. It was such a success with repeat customers, we created a Bread CSA for the winter, where we provide a weekly loaf of bread to 7 shareholders for 5 months.

We started a Grain and Seed CSA and opened it up to 12 members, who each received approximately 100 pounds of different heritage and ancient varieties of wheat, barley, lentils, and milk thistle. Just this past week, we delivered the grain to our customers and organized a grain grinding party where we offered up the use of our handcrank grain grinder, cooked a variety of dishes from our grains, and got to know our CSA members (stay tuned for a forthcoming post on the event).


Einkorn.

We also raised 81 heritage turkeys and fulfilled 21 Thanksgiving CSA shares. We had indispensable help from numerous friends to butcher the birds on the extremely cold weekend before Thanksgiving. One morning it was 19 below outside. Our turkeys ended up on tables in Shelby, Conrad, Dutton, Great Falls, Helena, Bozeman, Missoula, Lewistown, Livingston, Belgrade, Choteau, and Fairfield.

Next year, we will modify a few things to adjust for my full-time work. It’s unlikely we will continue to travel the 60 miles to the Great Falls farmers’ market each Saturday morning. Though being at the market the past 2 years has been like having a living business card – getting the word out, allowing us to experiment with baking bread, and building a strong customer base – it never really paid for itself. And, as competition increases in the Great Falls area (already 3 other growers, other than Hutterite colonies, have set up at the market), it will make even less sense to make the 120-mile trip and work 10 hours on a Saturday with little return and leftover vegetables. With our vegetables, we would like to focus on the Conrad area and 2011 may give us the chance to do so. Plus, we won’t have to wake up so God-awful early on Saturday mornings. By not having to supply the farmers’ market, we can increase the number of vegetable shareholders to 30 or possibly 40. We also won’t have any vegetable waste since we will know exactly how much to grow.

We’ll raise the same number of turkeys next year and continue our Thanksgiving CSA program. We’ll modify our pasturing system to make it more efficient and easier to manage. We bought a mixer/grinder which will allow us to make much of our own feed, helping cut one of the biggest expenses in raising turkeys.

Based on the shareholder feedback from our Grain and Seed CSA, we’ll modify and expand what we offer. We'll continue to trial different varieties of ancient and heritage grains and a variety of alternative crops such as amaranth, quinoa, teff, and fonio. This year we borrowed a small fanning mill to clean the grain, which worked okay. But I think the CSA and the different varieties of grains and alternative crops we will be able to offer will be a very successful enterprise for the farm, and it will be necessary to sufficiently clean and process the seeds. Eventually, I envision offering CSA shares to restaurants and bakeries.

All in all, I would say it was a very successful 2nd year. The next few years will be particularly challenging, largely due to unplanned circumstances, but I think we’re up to it. I stand by my belief it is possible to start and sustain a small-scale diversified family farm in rural Montana in this day in age. And for the foreseeable future, I will continue to make that statement. I look forward to the day when I can say, "it is possible to start and sustain a small-scale diversified family farm in rural Montana."