My retirement plan is now to always have a dairy cow on my land. I might not always keep a herd of dairy cows and run this farm as a dairy business, but I like the idea of needing to be out of bed in the morning for a specific reason, every day, even if it is raining or snowing or if I am just tired. Some people keep doing crossword puzzles to keep their mind thinking and active; I plan on milking cows.
I was still running the restaurant but was now ready to take the first steps toward becoming a full-time farmer. I was naïve but committed. I enjoyed having animals and raising vegetables and thought that I could make it work on a full-time basis. Salad Bar Beef had captured my imagination, and the ninety-five-year-old former accountant had inspired me to pursue a farmer’s life, but tackling cows was simply not feasible. I didn’t have the land for beef cows, and constructing the facilities for a dairy would have been time consuming and expensive. Though I knew by this point that I was ready to sell it, I still had a restaurant to manage as well, at least for the short term. I would have to start small. I had heard from other farmers that vegetables are a good place to begin—cheap, quick and unregulated by the county, the state or the federal government. Plus, I knew there was a farmers’ market on Vashon where I could sell my crop. It seemed like the most logical first step.
Farmers’ markets are the face of small farms for much of the country. You see farmers and their helpers alongside their produce, their old pickup trucks parked next to the market. Every trip I made to a farmers’ market either on Vashon or in the city, I mused on what the lives of the farmers were like. The farmers looked very similar: youthful if not young, dressed in very utilitarian clothing with obvious signs of work and wear, with hands dry and callused from working with tools. Their helpers were younger, presumably politically liberal and generally very happy and carefree. I liked the feeling, the look, the attitude. I wanted to be like them. I perceived a sense of honesty and integrity among the farmers.
But how could I be welcomed into this club? A couple of years earlier I had requested the guidelines and application forms from the largest market organization in Seattle, thinking that I could start selling vegetables there. Their guidelines—really more like rules—were extensive. They detailed the acceptable size of the booth, the appropriate tent over the booth, the amount of weight needed to hold down each corner of the tent, the minimum and maximum dimensions and content for the farm sign, the time you had to set up, the time you had to break down, where you could park your trucks and so on. I was overwhelmed.
Farmers’ market managers are responsible for balancing the market. The goal is to give the customers a variety of product to buy and give the sellers a chance to sell all their product. If every booth at a market sells only tomatoes, few customers will show up, knowing that there will only be tomatoes. Furthermore, allowing multiple sellers with the same wares virtually guarantees that farmers will have to undercut other farmers by slashing prices. Everyone would lose. The result is a market manager that restricts what products come into the market and when. To this end on the application form was a long disclosure in which you detailed what you were planning on bringing to market and when. I had no idea if I could grow radishes and on which week they would be ready. I thought I would just plant some nice seeds and see what happened.
Restrictions aside, I still wanted to grow and sell, and as luck would have it, I met someone who would assist me in reaching that goal. While out having drinks with friends, I was introduced to a guy who had been an intern on a local vegetable farm. We began chatting and realized quickly that we had lots of common interests and similar goals.
Matt had worked on a successful farm a few miles outside of Seattle that was known for its quality vegetables. The farm where he had been an intern grew vegetables for Seattle farmers’ markets and also had a subscription program. At the beginning of the growing season the farm would sell subscriptions entitling each subscriber to come out and pick up a weekly box of vegetables (or have them delivered) from the late spring through the early fall. This program is common in small vegetable farms throughout the country and is termed CSA, for community-supported agriculture. Matt had learned a great deal about growing vegetables during his year working at this well-run and profitable farm. He wanted to learn more; to raise animals, to make honey, to cook food. He was interested in farm animals and how they could be integrated into a small farm such as the one that he worked on. I had by this time started a small orchard, grown vegetables for myself and had a few sheep but had never grown vegetables in any volume to sell at a local market.
Matt had anticipated returning for another year to continue his internship on the farm. When his plans unexpectedly changed and he needed a job, we decided quickly to work together, to change my place from a home where I raised a few animals to a full-time vegetable farm selling at the local farmers’ market. Until I met Matt I had no idea how I would ever break into the big-city farmers’ markets. We would tackle this challenge together, with his knowledge, my land and a lot of sweat. For both of us, the stakes were high. I was already preparing to sell my restaurant, and our vegetable venture would be Matt’s primary source of income.
We began getting ready for the summer growing season in the first week of February. I realized quickly how little I knew about growing vegetables. When I was growing up, my family often had a small garden. I had grown a respectable volume of food over the years—tomatoes, potatoes and strawberries, memorably. What I didn’t know was that even small farms have different goals and have different strategies than small home gardens.
I was also struck by the difference between my vision of a small farm and the reality of a small farm in regard to harvesting. I would see the farmers in Seattle at their stands at nine in the morning standing behind high stacks of carrots and beets and lettuce and think that they had picked those vegetables that very morning. Actually, everything that went to a market on a Saturday morning was picked on Friday during the day and cooled, cleaned and packaged.
A farmers’ market is a perfect example of an open market, in the economic sense. People come together to buy and sell products. A local farmers’ market is really no different than the New York Stock Exchange or a large suburban mall. Sellers want to make the most money by selling at the highest price with the least expense. The basic method for achieving a high price is by selling unique products, through being either later or earlier than everyone else, or by having higher-quality products. Any of these factors can push the price up. If you sell ordinary green beans at the middle of the season when every other farmers’ market stall is selling green beans, you will make no money. If you have beautiful, unusual tomatoes weeks before everyone else, you will clean up. There are tried-and-true strategies for producing vegetables as early as possible. Most of them involve plastic; others are simply farming practices that push the seasons. At a farmers’ market, it is all about being first.
With Matt’s help, I began a small vegetable farm. Overnight Kurt’s farm was transformed to Kurtwood Farms—the s added at the end to make it sound grander than the humble reality. Together Matt and I ordered seeds, plowed and tilled two fields, installed an irrigation system, built one glass greenhouse for starting tomatoes and erected a long plastic greenhouse to grow tomatoes in the field.
Matt and I decided to sell vegetables at the local farmers’ market and to grow tomato starts for sale to home gardeners. We also sold CSA subscriptions for our vegetables, taking advance payment in exchange for a box of produce to be delivered weekly from June until October. CSA is ideal for small farms in that the farms get much-needed cash early in the season and guaranteed customers for the entire season. The customers also win, receiving a weekly selection of the best vegetables of that farm without having to make the effort to go to the weekly market and shop. Quickly we sold enough subscriptions to get started.
Thanks to Matt, I knew we needed an early crop that would beat competitors to the market. We seeded tomatoes as soon as the greenhouse was completed in
late February. Even though four hundred tomato plants would have been ample for our small farm, we enthusiastically seeded twelve hundred plants and quickly they germinated. The greenhouse was filled with flats and flats of small green plants. Matt made phone calls and in a couple of days we had a contract with a small chain of high-end gourmet grocery stores in Seattle to supply them with heirloom tomato starts.
Sitting in the dining room at the farm on blustery winter days planning vegetable fields and selling vegetable subscriptions was all good fun. In an effort to sell our vegetable subscriptions, I would make phone calls to potential customers describing weeks of fresh kale, verdant salad greens, cherry tomatoes sweet and juicy and boxes filled with winter squash and leeks in the fall weeks. I was a successful salesman, if an unproven farmer. Once we cashed the checks from the subscribers and winter turned to spring, we had twenty-five families expecting a box of vegetables delivered on June 1 and for each week after that into October. I knew these customers: they were friends and neighbors. The idea of failing them was inconceivable.
Following the tomatoes, we planted peppers, onions and leeks in February. Most of the spring plants started in March—cauliflower, broccoli, kale and salad greens. Then cucumbers in May, and squash in late May.
By mid-May the tomato plants had taken over the small glass greenhouse. The plants had been hardened off in the last week by bringing them out of the greenhouse for a few hours each day so they could get used to the cooler reality outside of the greenhouse. They had grown well, thankfully, and were ready to be delivered to the city grocery stores. I loaded up my dented old Toyota pickup truck with plants and headed to Seattle. With my cattle dog Daisy in the passenger seat and me wearing my filthy jeans, I felt like I had become that farmer I had seen all those years while shopping at the farmers’ markets.
Although we had agreed to deliver a box of vegetables worth a specific value each and every week from June into October, the vegetables didn’t always cooperate. Some weeks there were just a few vegetables ripe and ready to harvest, and some later weeks we had too much produce available. We had picked the start date of June 1 by convention, but that was not necessarily when a sufficient part of the garden would be ready to pick and deliver.
I was still working in the city at my restaurant a few days per week and, as many of our CSA customers lived in Seattle, I would deliver the boxes of vegetables to the customers. My responsibility was the subscriptions. The remaining vegetables from the farm Matt would sell at the local farmers’ market on the weekend while I was in the city at the restaurant.
In lean weeks, when there weren’t enough vegetables to harvest, the demand for vegetables for both the subscriptions and the farmers’ market created tension. I wanted my customers to have their boxes filled with beautiful vegetables. Even if the box contained the requisite dollar value of produce, I wanted the box to be physically full. Matt wanted ample vegetables remaining in the field so that he could harvest them on Friday afternoon for the Saturday morning market. Working on a commission system, the more vegetables that Matt could take to market, the more money he could make.
In addition to the unevenness of our harvest due to weather and difficult-to-predict vegetable growth, Matt and I also confronted the limitations of my land. He had worked on an established vegetable farm; they had spent years amending the soil, creating a rich, vital tilth. My fields, in their first year of growing vegetables, had no such vitality. The soil was thin, sandy and incapable of growing the bountiful crop I was expecting. Our plants were hardly vigorous, and weeds and predators quickly and easily overran many crops. The result was fields that looked nothing like the glossy color photos of the how-to books that I had read for years. We succeeded with the easy-to-grow vegetables: those that didn’t require rich, healthy soil. The kale did especially well, carrots too. With ample water pumped onto them, our tomatoes managed to flourish. Overall, though, our harvest was thin.
At the end of the growing season, after the last pumpkin had been delivered, the last tomato gleaned from the field, the last bit of kale harvested from the tired plants, Matt and I took stock of the year. I had worked part-time on the farm, part-time at the restaurant; Matt had worked full-time at the farm from early February until we finished up in late October. We added up the sales for the year: CSA sales, market sales and sales of tomato starts. The total came to a measly $17,500.
Our expenses were tremendous: I can’t recall their exact total, but in the ballpark of $10,000. We built a greenhouse, a long hoop house, installed irrigation lines, bought seeds, flats, pots, potting soil, packaging materials and so on. Much of the investment would prove useful in the future, but our economic model was flawed.
Kurtwood Farms’ first growing season ended on a sour note; we failed to crack the challenge of the vegetable farm. Matt quickly quit to work on another farm on the island and I could hardly blame him; he hadn’t made very much money. Our harvest had been far thinner than either of us had expected. I had argued against taking disfigured, insect-eaten leeks to market and for reserving the best produce for subscription boxes, and as a result Matt made less money each week at the farmers’ market. I had my restaurant income to fall back on, but vegetable sales were Matt’s sole livelihood.
I wouldn’t, however, be able to rely on my restaurant for long. Over the course of the growing season I had negotiated the sale of the restaurant, and just as we harvested the last vegetables, the sale went through. Although losing the stability of a city job was scary, I had no interest in abandoning my dream of being a farmer and returning to commuting. I would have to find a working model, and now without the safety net of my job in the city. As a result of the sale of my restaurant, I was going to be paid $40,000 per year for the next five years. At the time, it felt like a fortune that would last forever, but in retrospect it was barely enough to get off the ground. I’ve spent $5,000 to $10,000 several times to hire a crew to fell and burn trees in order to open up adequate pasture for my cows. Simply keeping my driveway functional was difficult. Although when I first drove down the driveway in 1991 I thought it a great asset, I’ve spent over $1,000 on many occasions to fill the four-hundred-foot length with gravel. I had a small cushion, but the money wouldn’t last forever, especially operating at a loss.
I had a number of options before me. The infrastructure for growing vegetables had been installed. Parts of the farm were fenced for animals and I had a few sheep; pastures were seeded and growing even if they were a bit rough. Here and there were fruit trees that I had planted when I first arrived on the island; the orchard puttered on. Through Matt I had met young farmers-to-be who wanted to work for me as interns. Jorge, one of my old cooks from the restaurant, came asking me for work and I quickly hired him part-time. I knew that I couldn’t run the farm by myself and more than anything I wanted someone here with me, if only for a few hours each week. My goals of making this farm sustainable, profitable and enjoyable would be a process of selection and elimination: trying out sheep and goats, pigs and cows, bees and chickens, vegetables and fruits. I was excited; I wanted everything, and as much as possible. I would crack this nut.
Three
Bees
Beekeeping was the first project that I started on my farm, just a few weeks after I moved in, and long before my misadventures in farmers’ market economics. I had always wanted bees, and now that I owned a house, I had no excuse for putting it off. I recall being terribly excited about the prospect of having bees. The restaurant in downtown Seattle was in a one-story building, and I had researched the idea of keeping bees with the intention of placing hives on the building’s low roof in the hopes of collecting honey for the restaurant, which then I still owned, and for myself.
I looked into the equipment necessary and the city zoning required and how to keep the bees themselves. The city assured me that having hives in the city was not a problem as long as I kept them a few feet from the property line. As I remember, the people from the city were actually quite intrigued
with the project and encouraged my downtown beekeeping. I collected beekeeping supply catalogues and proceeded to start my apiary when the deal came through with the Vashon property. The bees would now be country dwellers and not live among the buildings of the city.
I had no one to turn to for advice on keeping bees at the time. I had an old book—First Lessons in Beekeeping by C. P. Dadant—that my friend Michelle had given me for my twenty-first birthday. It is a classic volume that is reissued annually by the largest beekeeping supply house in the country, a slim book with a heavy manila cover and the most dated but charming photographs. She probably gave it to me for its vintage feel, not for its content, but I enjoyed both. I pored over the book, learning the names of the different bees, their seasonal food preferences, the old-fashioned methods of wrapping the hives in tar paper to protect them through the deep winters. I felt like I knew the young man in the book, dressed head to toe in a bee outfit, the long white thick fabric tied at the hands and feet to keep the bees out, a helmet with a veil to protect his face.
I found an ad for a beekeeping supply house in the back of a Mother Earth News magazine. The Brushy Mountain Bee Farm in North Carolina made beehives and sold them through the mail. I ordered their catalogue and when it arrived I studied it obsessively, choosing what I would need to begin my apiary.
Growing a Farmer Page 4