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Farm Beginnings® Profile: Ryan & Kristine Jepsen
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Ryan & Kristine Jepsen |
It’s one of those bone-hard days in late January when winter winds rake the ridges of southeast Minnesota and northeast Iowa, making 4 above zero feel like 40 below. Just south of the Minnesota border, Ryan Jepsen is on one of those ridges, hauling hay to his cattle with a tractor and front-end loader. Steam rises off the backs of the bovines as their stomachs cook down the forage into digestible nutrients. Jepsen finishes up, parks the tractor and moves his lanky frame briskly the few yards to a new pole barn that provides welcome relief from the wind.
“When I was a kid, I always said I’d either be a doctor or a farmer,” Ryan says later with a grin as he downs cup after cup of hot coffee in a cramped camper trailer parked inside the barn.
On days like this, a stethoscope, regular paycheck and warm examination room looks pretty good. But despite the hard work in sometimes-brutal weather conditions, Ryan and his wife Kristine are glad they chose life on the farm a few years ago. Thanks to training they received through the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings® course, Ryan, 30, and Kristine, 29, feel they have their livestock operation, Grass Run Farm, off to a solid start.
“I’ve eaten a lot of humble pie in the past few years,” says Ryan. “But going out there on a cold day and seeing those cattle chewing their cud, or hearing from someone about how much they liked our beef or seeing the soil improve where there was just dead brome grass before, that makes it worth it.”
The good life out West
A little more than two years ago, the Jepsens were getting a different kind of satisfaction out of life. At the time, Ryan, who has a degree in biology from Luther College in Decorah (just 30 miles from the farm), and Kristine, who graduated with an English-journalism degree from Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S. Dak., were living in Idaho. There, Ryan shoed horses and guided elk hunts while Kristine was an editor at Powder Mountain Press. For a time, they were caretakers on a 400-acre ranch in Wyoming that bordered a national forest—the country was breathtaking, with deep powder skiing out the back door. The living was also relatively debt-free, where financial decisions, according to Ryan, were along the lines of, “I looked at the Cabela’s catalog and bought a new pair of waders.”
But something was missing. The couple had long been interested in farming, and Ryan had actually interned on an organic operation while in college. Plus, while out West they had participated in food production as members of a Community Supported Agriculture biodynamic farm and learned the basics of beef production from a neighboring rancher.
“You read Stockman Grass Farmer for five years, and if you’re a dreamer like I am you can’t help but want to be on the farm,” says Ryan.
In fall 2005, they moved to northeast Iowa and rented a few acres of pasture. It didn’t take them long to begin raising and marketing pasture-raised beef and pork through the Decorah farmers’ market and directly to friends and family. They supplement their income with off-farm jobs: Kristine does website work at Luther College and Ryan works as a farrier. But soon after arriving back in Iowa, the Jepsens realized that if farming was to ever become a fulltime endeavor, they needed to brush up on their business planning and marketing.
“If you don’t know your net profit, you have no way of knowing when you can give up the horseshoeing or that job in town,” says Ryan. “I can’t just bust out a marketing plan. Marketing is one of those jobs I have to work at.”
On the advice of Chris Blanchard, a farming neighbor who regularly presents at LSP’s Farm Beginnings classes, Ryan and Kristine took the course during the winter of 2006-2007, making the 70-mile drive to Winona, Minn., twice a month.
LSP’s Farm Beginnings, which began its second decade in 2008, is a program in which established farmers and other ag professionals provide insights into low-cost, sustainable methods of farming. The course provides workshops on goal-setting, financial planning, business plan creation, alternative marketing and innovative production techniques. In addition, class participants have an opportunity to network with established farmers and utilize them as mentors.
While in Farm Beginnings, the Jepsens learned how to set goals and analyze various enterprises for profitability. They also learned the basics of Holistic Management, which helps farm families look at their operations as a whole and determine how to attain goals centered around the environment, quality of life and financial security.
Today, the Jepsens rent 150 acres from Ryan’s family. Around 135 acres was in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and 100 acres came out of the setaside program in 2007; the rest will come out later this year. In 2007, the Jepsens got funding through the USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) to put in fencing and watering systems for their managed rotational grazing operation. They have been transitioning the CRP land, which was mostly a monoculture of brome, into diverse stands of pasture grass.
By 2009, they hope to have all 150 acres in pasture and to expand their beef herd. Ryan and Kristine bought a two-acre homestead on the property—all was left on it from previous tenants was a small tin shed and an unfinished cabin. In March, they finished the “barn”—a 40 x 88 foot split-level structure. The lower floor is being used to store hay and equipment, as well as provide meat freezer space. Upstairs are the couple’s living quarters—one end has a balcony that offers a spectacular view of the valley that plunges way from the ridge, as well as a broken-down wagon from a previous farming era.
Throughout all these transitions, the Jepsens have continued to build a customer base for their meat, which is raised on certified organic pastures. Besides beef and a few hogs, they also sell humanely raised, grass-fed veal. They market mostly within 50 miles of the farm. Besides word-of-mouth sales and the farmers’ market, they sell beef and pork to the Oneota Community Food Co-op and the T-Bocks sports bar, both in Decorah. But their veal has a reputation that reaches beyond the region, with eaters as far away as Colorado giving it rave reviews. Part of the reason they’ve been able to market beyond the immediate locale is the website (www.grassrunfarm.com) Kristine has set up.
Although grass-based beef production is the focus of their operation presently, one thing the Jepsens learned from Farm Beginnings is not to limit their options. They see the farm as the potential source of many enterprises, including dairying, environmental education and poultry production.
“When you’re starting out, you kind of run the numbers on several different things and think about the possibilities and kind of fit the opportunities together as you go along. It’s fun to take on new challenges. We both trend toward that,” says Kristine, adding with a laugh: “Maybe we should buckle down.”
But “buckling down” may not make complete economic sense. The Jepsens remember well the marketing advice they received in Farm Beginnings: it’s easier to market three or four products to one customer than to find four new customers for the same product. As they consider all of these options, sitting in the back of their minds is some important advice they got from Chris Blanchard, the Farm Beginnings instructor.
“He said it’s important to eliminate enterprises that are not profitable,” says Ryan. “It frees you up to focus on profitable enterprises.”
Red-faced satisfaction
The sun has set and the mercury long ago raced into negative territory. As Ryan and Kristine bundle up to check on the livestock, they talk about another key component they will consider when weighing the pluses and minuses of various enterprises: the intangibles that don’t always show up on the bottom line.
They talk proudly of how much more organic matter is present in the soil after they converted their fields to well-managed pastures. Besides reducing erosion and runoff, the Jepsens are convinced such practices sequester carbon, helping in the fight against climate change.
And once in awhile they will drop in on T-Bocks for a meal. Inserted in the menus are Grass Run Farm fliers with the Jepsens’ photo. Sometimes customers will come up to the couples’ table to lavish praise on the job they’ve done.
“You just put your head down and turn a different color from embarrassment,” says Ryan.
“But it’s pretty gratifying to get that feedback,” adds Kristine. “I don’t know how the commodity farmer would get that same gratification. It’s really important to what we do and sometimes it’s the factor that revives us after going through months of drudgery. ”
Then it’s out into the bitter winter night, where a little drudgery plants the seeds of such heartwarming moments at a meal table.
— Originally published in the Spring 2008 Land Stewardship Letter
See www.farmbeginnings.org for more on LSP’s Farm Beginnings program. You can also call 507-523-3366 in southeast Minnesota or 320-269-2105 in western Minnesota for more information.
To listen to an audio podcast featuring Ryan and Kristine Jepsen, see Ear to the Ground episode 48 at www.digitalpodcast.com/detail-LSP_s_Ear_to_the_Ground-8811.html.
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