Bozeman News

Guest Column: Small Farms in a Mega-World

Can Sustainable Farms be a Sustainable Lifestyle?

By By Holly Zadra, Community Food Co-op , Guest Writer, 2-09-09

Last year, Mariann Van Den Elzen of Field Day Farms farmed her own chemical-free vegetables from a 1.25-acre plot she leased from a local rancher. It was the first year of her life devoted to farming as a way of life. So when I asked her how a small farmer makes a living, she replied with a chuckle, “That’s a great question. If you have the answer, please share.”

This year, Van Den Elzen plans to add five more acres of leased land to her workload.

Van Den Elzen noted, “Up until the hailstorm last summer, I could make a living.” Van Den Elzen had quit her landscaping job and devoted herself full-time to the farming endeavor. But she lost three weeks of income after that storm. She was lucky enough to be able to broker peaches and Rainier cherries from Forbidden Fruit of Paradise, Mont., and then returned to selling produce once the veggies sprung back to life.

But alone, even just one acre can be overwhelming at peak harvest time. Mostly by herself, Van Den Elzen balanced her time carefully between harvesting produce and preparing it for market and local chefs. Over the winter, Van Den Elzen took a part-time job with Thirteen Mile Lamb & Wool Company. She brokers their lamb and wool and sells eggs through direct e-mail and the new Winter Farmers’ Market at the Emerson Cultural Center. She also takes random jobs house-sitting, chopping wood and shoveling to make ends meet.

Perhaps a product of her youth combined with diet of local, in-season food, Van Den Elzen is zealous of mind, vigorous in action, and passionate for turning broken systems into more humane ones, starting with local food. She is physically capable, she makes her own way financially, little by little, and she has no children. She exists in the minds of many as the symbol for “no excuses.” And yet, she doesn’t own a home, she has no land of her own, no health insurance, and her worn, down coat is patched with duct tape.

The Diversified Family Farm

When I volunteered to weed for Van Den Elzen last summer, she fed me, among many scrumptious local foods, goat cheese given to her by Kathryn Hainsworth of Camp Creek Farm. Nine miles west of Four Corners, Kathryn and Rick Hainsworth and their children Deeanne, 12, and Tommy, 10, run a 20-acre diversified family farm. Their focus is on heirloom seeds and Heritage breeds including one small Jersey cow; Cuckoo Maran, Wyandotte and Auricana chickens; Bronze turkeys; Nigerian Dwarf and Nubian goats; and one pig who will have piglets in April. They have four horses, and they grow everything possible, save corn and potatoes. Kathryn’s neighbors quip, “Doctor Dolittle lives there.”

All this work takes anywhere from 12 to 15 hours a day three seasons of the year for Hainsworth, who also trades food with five to six volunteers in exchange for their work on the farm. She then sells vegetables, animals, and value-added products from the farm directly and at the Bogert Farmers’ Market.

When asked how they make it, Hainsworth responded, “We live cyclically – we’re not working 15-hour days in the dark of winter...We put our money away and live low.” Her husband Rick is a full-time, year-round carpenter. She also works off the farm in the winter when things are slower at the farm.

The Organic Sheep Ranch

For Becky Weed and Dave Tyler of Thirteen Mile Lamb & Wool Company. the ranching picture is a little different, although not without its financial pressures. Both Weed and Tyler work their 160-acre (plus a couple hundred more leased acres) ranch on North Springhill full-time, but only after many years of working off the ranch. For years, Weed worked as a geologist cleaning up contaminated ground water. Tyler taught Civil Engineering at MSU, then later worked for a private software engineering firm that helped usher in “precision farming” – the grand-scale, agri-industrial farming navigated via GPS – and would come home each night to his small organic sheep ranch.

When the two bought the land they now ranch, the rusty old “For Sale” sign in the weeds at the side of the road wasn’t the only symbol of the mid-80s recession. Tyler mentioned that the property sold for about one-tenth of what the land is now worth.

These days, Thirteen Mile Ranch mixes cattle and sheep grazing, finishes calves for slaughter, raises and sells lamb directly, and custom processes wool into batts, roving and yarn from start to finish in the wool mill. But initially, the two tried to eke out a living by selling commodities – wool to a regional wool pool and feeder lambs to livestock auctions. They were paid the going market rate, taking a loss whenever the market would give it.

Said Weed, “Until I actually did it for a few years. I really didn’t understand how humiliating it was to work hard – really, really hard – all year long and then to sell at prices so low and/or so volatile that they felt like an insult.”

That led to the value-added products now processed and sold at the ranch facility, but not without new frustrations. At the heart of the food dilemma, Weed and Tyler point out, is a conundrum we haven’t yet solved. Their choice is to either take a loss each year, or sell expensive, sometimes exclusive products. For some, small-scale decentralized industry is the key to viability, but, as Weed noted, “We aren’t a local food system yet.”

In a cash-dependent economy, the feeling of pride over doing what’s right environmentally doesn’t pay the high cost of private, independent insurance for a man approaching 65. It doesn’t always pay for infrastructure maintenance. And it doesn’t leave much room for vacation, which is why the two are planning a two-year hiatus from the sheep.

The Real Value of Community Farms and Ranches

This way of farming and ranching pays homage to a more traditional way of husbandry that simultaneously requires good care of the land and the animals that depend upon that land. It brings neighbors together and provides children with healthy food and real-world skills that will be necessary as the climate changes. And it does present a less sexy, less cynical sense of who we are as people and what we are meant to do while we’re here. That identity courses through Van Den Elzen as she flips through the pages of FedCo seed company’s 2009 offerings the way some do the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. It can’t be hidden beneath the dirt on Weed’s Levi’s or the worn elbows of her wool sweater as she articulates a question that gets to the heart of the sustainability movement: Maybe, she asks, in six years, we should ask Hainsworth’s daughter Deeanne if she’ll leave the farm or continue in her parents’ footsteps.

Holly Zadra writes a bi-monthly column for the Community Food News, a publication of the Bozeman Community Food Co-op, and continually contemplates what her children ingest to their tempeh-intolerant chagrin.

NewWest.Net welcomes guest columns of all stripes. Submit yours to editor@newwest.net.

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