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Farm Beginnings™ Profile: Katie Hanson
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Katie Hanson |
While working as a guide and food service coordinator on the Gunflint Trail six years ago, Katie Hanson started thinking about the connections between where and how food is produced and environmental sustainability. What impact were eaters having on a region when they relied on food transported hundreds of miles or more, produced in systems heavily reliant on chemicals and energy?
“You think a place like the Boundary Waters is a perfect ecosystem, but it’s really not that sustainable to be dependent on places and systems so far away just to fulfill basics needs -- like food,” Hanson says. She adds that she became convinced that locally produced food was key to creating an environmentally and economically balanced community.
These days, Hanson is putting her money where her mouth is, so to speak, by raising food in Duluth’s backyards -- literally. She’s taking a creative -- some might say off-the-wall -- approach to fulfilling some of the local demand for fresh vegetables. But Hanson says a beginning farmer course she took two years ago in the Twin Cities made her aware that there’s more than one way to skin a zucchini. She says the course, Farm Beginnings®, provided her with a good grounding in innovative business management, whole farm planning and goal-setting. It also allowed her to network with established farmers who were using a variety of creative systems to grow and market food.
Today, as she begins the first season of her own urban farming enterprise, Hanson is excited that a new Farm Beginnings course is being launched in the Lake Superior region this fall.
“Farm Beginnings opens your mind to all the things you can do to get involved with local farming,” says the 29-year-old resident of Superior. “I think it could really open some doors for people who want to use creative methods to make this region more self-sufficient in food.”
Lake Superior Farm Beginnings, which begins classes in Cloquet this October, is the latest version of the Land Stewardship Project’s popular farmer development initiative. During the past 11 years, Farm Beginnings has provided seminars, skills sessions and on-farm educational programs to people of all ages from throughout the Midwest who are looking to adopt innovative farming systems that are profitable and good for the environment. As of 2008, over 300 people have completed Farm Beginnings courses in southeast Minnesota and western Minnesota, and 60 percent of the graduates are farming, making it one of the most successful beginning farmer initiatives in the country (Farm Beginnings is also offered in Nebraska, North Dakota and Illinois). Farm Beginnings graduates are involved in various innovative farming enterprises, including organic fruits and vegetables, grass-based livestock, Community Supported Agriculture and specialty products.
Now it’s the Lake Superior region’s turn to begin developing the next generation of farmers, says Cree Bradley, who is facilitating the program in the area for the nonprofit Lake Superior Sustainable Farming Association. As with other Farm Beginnings initiatives, at the core of the Lake Superior program will be a series of classroom sessions led by established farmers and other agricultural professionals from the area. Farm Beginnings participants learn goal setting, financial planning, business plan creation, alternative marketing and innovative production techniques. The students are also exposed to real-world farming through a series of on-farm educational sessions and mentorship experiences.
Bradley says the time is right for a beginning farmer training program in the area -- an informal food assessment of the region done a few years ago confirmed what farmers have been experiencing firsthand: there is a huge demand for local food.
“That’s when we realized, wow, we have much more demand than supply here,” recalls Bradley, adding that Farm Beginnings, with its emphasis on sound business planning and innovative marketing, is a good fit for people who want to produce food for local markets. “Farm Beginnings graduates in other parts of the Midwest have done a great job of satisfying the growing demand for local food.”
Farm Beginnings is useful for people who have extensive farming backgrounds, as well as those who have little or no agricultural experience, according to Bradley.
Hanson, for one, didn’t grow up on a farm or study agricultural production in college, but Farm Beginnings helped convince her that producing food in gardens was her life’s passion.
“What I figured out going through the whole farm planning process in Farm Beginnings was that I really like the small scale, getting my hands on it, the design aspect of it and teaching people how to do it themselves,“ she says.
Today, Hanson is combining all of these interests through Boreal Scapes, which she runs with business partner Francois Medion. The small business is raising vegetables in the yards of half-a-dozen Duluth homes. For a fee, Boreal Scapes subscribers will get fresh, chemical-free produce throughout the growing season. It’s a variation on the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farming/marketing model, where farmers sell shares in their operations. But Hanson and Medion are taking the concept one step further by producing the food in gardens owned by the shareholders—making the connection between consumer and food even more intimate. The plots range in size from 100 to 500 square feet.
Even though the first season of the enterprise is barely off the ground, Hanson says it’s already bearing important fruit: subscribers are learning about the vast variety of vegetables that can be grown in a unused corner of a yard in a northern climate. Hanson says this kind of knowledge could help people learn how to make their community more self-sufficient in food -- something she sees as a necessity in an era of high energy prices. She says it’s been fun to pass on her knowledge of gardening to local residents, much as established farmers passed on their knowledge to her through Farm Beginnings.
“Getting together with all these people who are making a living at farming really was a key part of what made Farm Beginnings useful for me,” she says. “I think that’s what’s kept me on this path.”
-- A version of this article originally appeared in the Summer 2008 Land Stewardship Letter. For more information on LSP’s Farm Beginnings program, see www.farmbeginnings.org. More information is also available by calling 507-523-3366 in southeast Minnesota or 320-269-2105 in western Minnesota.
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