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Farm Beginnings™ Profile: Rachel Henderson & Anton Ptak
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Rachel Henderson & Anton Ptak |
On a chilly weekday morning in late March, sitting in a century–old plus Northeast Minneapolis house sipping coffee and getting ready for work, a farm in western Wisconsin seems far away, perhaps even a figment of one’s imagination.
“For me, being in the city there’s a little bit of out–of–sight, out–of–mind that goes on,” says Rachel Henderson, who lives in that Minneapolis house with her partner, Anton Ptak. “I get wrapped up in my week.”
Flash forward two weeks to a warm Saturday in April. On this day in Wisconsin’s Dunn County, some 80 miles from Ptak and Henderson’s home, that farm is very much on their mind. They are planting, building and doing all the tasks required to create a farming operation from the ground up.
Legs churning furiously, Ptak pushes a wheelbarrow full of cold–hardy peach trees to a fenced-off section while Henderson excavates holes to plant them in. After pruning the roots, setting the trees, packing soil around them and setting up homemade guards to ward off rabbits and deer, they head to a recently erected tool shed to sit for a moment and discuss what else needs to be done before heading back to the city Sunday night.
There’s a lot.
This 20–acre former hayfield, with its lack of a well or electrical utilities, combined with two rough–hewn sheds, has the look of a wide–open pioneer homestead. But the young couple–Henderson is 28 and Ptak 34–seem to be up to the task. In fact, the intense burst of work they’ve already completed this particular morning has energized them for more.
“One thing I’ve become aware of is just how much I love being here and how much energy I get from being here,” says Henderson. “There were definitely weeks last summer where I would be working Monday through Friday in the city and I’d be thinking my god we have so much to do and not feeling that energy, and then getting out here on a Friday afternoon or Saturday morning and just really feeling this overwhelming sense of wellbeing. The pleasant surprise is how easy it is to work hard and get all of this stuff done when we just feel good about being here.”
Henderson and Ptak are into the second year of an approximately five–year plan to create a farming enterprise from scratch. All of this started in 2008 when they bought the land and enrolled in the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings Program. Twice a month during the fall and winter of 2008-2009 the couple attended classes in the southeast Minnesota community of Goodhue. The course emphasizes goal setting, financial planning, business plan creation, alternative marketing and innovative production techniques. The classes are taught by established farmers and other ag professionals representing a range of enterprises: from grass-based livestock production and organic cropping to vegetables and specialty products. Farm Beginnings participants also have the opportunity to attend on–farm events where they see firsthand the use of innovative management techniques.
Ptak and Henderson say the course helped them develop a long–term plan for how they wanted to make a living on their land and gave them good grounding in the basics of financial management and business planning.
“Both of us have a natural tendency toward thriftiness and not spending, and Farm Beginnings helped reinforce that,” says Ptak. “That’s opposite of the agricultural model of large-scale investment up–front just to get started.”
Picking fruit
Farm Beginnings also gave them a better sense of what type of farming enterprise would fit best with their interests/situation. Before they took Farm Beginnings, Ptak and Henderson were already leaning toward fruit production as a result of the experience they had in 2007 working at an organic orchard in Argentina through the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) organization.
“Up until that time I hadn’t really done anything where I could say, gosh, I want to do this the rest of my life,” recalls Henderson of that experience in Argentina. Establishing an orchard and other perennials such as berries also dovetailed nicely with the couple’s plan of keeping their debt load as low as possible as they do the preliminary work of setting up a farm. Such plantings don’t require day–to–day management while they’re getting established. That means Ptak and Henderson can keep their city jobs–she works at a community center and he’s a self–employed site developer for wind energy projects–long enough to pay off the loan they took to buy the land. By the time their fruit trees and other plants are producing consistent product for the market, they can use income from sales to support themselves and the farm, rather than sinking it into the mortgage, says Ptak.
“It just seemed to be the thing we could start with that made sense in our transition plan,” he says. “And since then we’ve met a lot of fruit growers and they’re all fairly happy people and they’re all pretty friendly and helpful.”
So they’ve spent the past two years attending fruit growing workshops, tapping into a network of other producers and paying off the mortgage on their land. And, of course, they’ve been planting: so far Ptak and Henderson have established 250 trees and 300 to 400 bushes/vines of various berries such as currants, raspberries and grapes. They’ve also planted asparagus and rhubarb. Eventually, they hope to have 500 to as many as 1,000 trees make up their orchard, which will include apples, pears, cherries, apricots and cold–hardy peaches.
They’ve also built two outbuildings to house their equipment, and not incidentally to provide tin roofs for directing rainwater into barrels. The couple currently camps out in a tent during their work weekends, and plans call for building a house, drilling a well and harnessing solar energy for the farm.
All of this preparation has involved a lot of miles on the road between Northeast Minneapolis and Dunn County, and Ptak concedes it’s starting to get old. “Organizationally it’s really tough living in one place and doing all your work in another one,” he says. “There’s always something you forget and you can’t just jump on your bike and run to the store.”
But, Ptak adds, maybe the hassle of setting up a farm remotely has given Henderson and him more of an incentive to move ahead with their multi-year plan, and perhaps even speed it up.
“Maybe we’ll accelerate our schedule a bit,” he says wistfully.
Marketing mysteries
But before they complete their transition, Henderson and Ptak have one big unknown to grapple with: the marketing of their products years down the road when those trees, bushes and vines are bearing fruit. They say one downside to Farm Beginnings was that the marketing part of the curriculum seemed to be geared more toward farmers who are going to have product ready their first growing season.
The orchard business is not the same as having Community Supported Agriculture shares or a half-cow sold before the season, or even having a verbal commitment from a restaurant that it will purchase a certain quantity come summer. Henderson and Ptak aren’t making seed orders based on what they can sell in a few months; they’re establishing rootstock that measures marketing schedules in years.
“There’s so much that’s in the Farm Beginnings curriculum that’s really universal and then there’s some things where the instructors kept saying, ‘Don’t plant anything until you’ve sold it,’” Henderson says with a laugh. “That was hard for us because we haven’t found anyone who’s buying apples seven years in the future.”
Despite all these unknowns, they’ve still been able to develop somewhat of a long–range marketing plan by talking to various people who are involved in the local food system (besides being within 80 miles of the Twin Cities, their farm is close to the Wisconsin communities of Menomonie and Eau Claire).
There are restaurants in the area that buy directly from farmers as well as farmers’ markets. A popular bike trail near the farm could offer an opportunity to sell products via a farm stand. There are also several Community Supported Agriculture operations in the area and the couple is looking into supplementing the shares these farms provide members.
Because plants like apple trees tend to ramp up their productivity over time, that will give them an opportunity to gradually test the waters when it comes to the markets.
“It may take awhile but I think it will pay off,” says Ptak. “And we’re invested in things that could live for 50 years.”
One key marketing tool they have is an unforgettable name for their farm: Mary Dirty Face. It’s based on an old story within the community of a Native American girl who had a mind of her own. “Mary Dirty Face sounds like was a pretty independent-minded woman and we feel she’s probably worth honoring,” says Henderson. “It also has a good ring to it.”
And besides, who can resist leaving the city on a regular basis to work a piece of land with such a gritty, colorful moniker?
—A version of this article originally appeared in the Spring 2010 Land Stewardship Letter. For more information on LSP’s Farm Beginnings program, see www.farmbeginnings.com. More information is also available by calling 507-523-3366 in southeast Minnesota or 320-269-2105 in western Minnesota.
Audio & visual of Mary Dirty Face
To listen to an Ear to the Ground podcast featuring Anton Ptak and Rachel Henderson (episode 78) see http://www.landstewardshipproject.org/podcast.html?t=2. On that web page you will find other interviews featuring Farm Beginnings graduates.
To view a short video of Mary Dirty Face Farm, see LSP’s new video site at http://www.youtube.com/user/LSPNOW.
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