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Farm Beginnings™ Profile: Eric & Lisa Klein
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| Lisa and Eric Klein, along with Katy and Ben |
When Lisa Klein was studying farm management at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, she didn’t always see eye-to-eye with her professors. Blame it on her upbringing: Lisa’s parents, Rosemary and Everett Koenig, are pioneers in a type of agriculture that doesn’t have its roots in the laboratories and test plots of academia. In 1972, after 11 years of dairy farming near the southeast Minnesota community of Elgin, the Koenigs dropped chemicals cold turkey. In 1991 they converted much of their operation to grass and started using managed rotational grazing. Such departures from the conventional system of agriculture were extreme, even by the time Lisa graduated from college in 1991. But her run-in with scientific naysayers didn’t dampen her enthusiasm for farming, especially if it could be done in a way that helped the soil.
“I kind of dreamed about farming someday,” Lisa, 37, recalls. “I didn’t tell anybody.”
After graduation, she worked for a few years at a laboratory that tested milk and feed. But she made it back to the farm a lot on weekends, helping out with the chores and shepherding a fledging business of direct marketing pasture-raised chicken, pork and beef. Meanwhile, Eric Klein, an agricultural engineering technology student from New Jersey that Lisa had met at River Falls, took a job on a 12,000-acre ranch in South Dakota. They eventually ended up marrying, and settled in Elgin in 1997. Eric, 36, had grown up on a hobby farm, and had caught the farming bug as well.
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By then, Everett and Rosemary had pretty much retired from farming, providing a perfect agricultural opening for the young couple. But Eric and Lisa felt they needed some structure to figure out how to actually launch the kind of farming enterprise that would allow them to quit their off-farm jobs. Everett had been one of the farmers who had helped start the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings™ course in the late 1990s, and he encouraged them to enroll in the program. The course, which provides hands-on, farmer-to-farmer training in alternative farming systems, among other things, may have seemed redundant to someone like Lisa, who grew up on an operation using such techniques. But Everett’s been around long enough to know that there’s always something new to be learned. A decade before, the Koenigs were one of 25 farm families who belonged to LSP’s Stewardship Farming Program. That initiative was set up to promote on-farm research and farmer-to-farmer education as it relates to alternative methods. In fact, it had more than a passing resemblance to today’s Farm Beginnings program.
“I thought by 1986 I knew how to farm without chemicals,” Everett recalls. “But then I got into the Stewardship Farming Program and found out I knew nothing. Through the program I met other farmers and exchanged ideas.”
The Kleins liked Farm Beginnings’ emphasis on business planning, marketing and enterprise analysis, and in 1998 they enrolled in the course. It proved a worthy successor to the original Stewardship Farming Program. The Kleins say they got invaluable exposure to the latest information on such techniques as managed intensive grazing. Just as importantly, they were able to network with farmers in the area that were using direct marketing as a way to add value to livestock, making it possible to make a living on a moderate number of acres. That was an eye-opener for Eric especially, whose main farming experience had been on the large ranch in South Dakota.
“It took me awhile to get out of the South Dakota mindset, to adjust my thinking to a smaller scale of farming,” he recalls. “The networking’s the key.”
What they learned from this networking was that the Koenig farm is in a prime location when it comes to direct marketing. It lies within a 30-minute drive of Rochester, and is less than two hours from the Twin Cities. After taking Farm Beginnings, the couple began ramping up the farm’s direct marketing enterprise. The hog marketing business had started years before when a pork lover was driving by the farm and, seeing pigs on pasture, offered to buy one. The chicken operation began with a modest 200 birds. Today, the Kleins’ Hidden Stream Farm annually markets 2,000 pasture-raised chickens, 150 pigs raised on pasture and in deep straw, and some two dozen grass-fed beef cattle. They market via farmers’ markets, home deliveries, a website (http://www.hiddenstreamfarm.com) and the Southeast Minnesota Food Network (http://www.localfoodnetwork.org). Hidden Stream’s products are also featured in a couple of area restaurants. They are raising cattle for a new business called Thousand Hills Beef and sell extra feeder pigs to Niman Ranch, a natural pork company. All of the Kleins’ products are certified by Food Alliance Midwest (http://www.landstewardshipproject.org/foodfarm-main.html#mfa).
The couple’s direct marketing business keeps them hopping—and two brightly painted trailers on the road during the spring, summer and fall. Their customer base consists of health-conscious consumers.
They also sell chickens to members of Rochester’s growing Muslim population who want the birds slaughtered to their religious specifications.
“We meet a lot of people at the market who say, ‘We appreciate how you raise your animals,’ ” says Eric.
“And the taste brings them back,” quips Lisa.
Producing that top quality meat is a full-time business in itself. They’ve converted 60 acres of the 180-acre farm to grass, updated the fencing and watering system and developed deep straw housing for their hogs. Although the farm had been a grazing operation, it hadn’t been a fully running enterprise for some time before the Kleins took over. Therefore upgrades were required, says Eric.
“In one respect, we had a farm set up. But in another respect we had to start from scratch.”
As they’ve fine-tuned their production system, the Kleins have found the network they developed through Farm Beginnings to be a great source of information. And it’s paid off: in 2004 they finally felt they had hit their stride with grazing.
“That was the first year in seven years we’ve really optimized the grazing,” says Eric.
And that networking works both ways: The Kleins are on the Farm Beginnings steering committee, and in recent years they have served as mentors on three separate occasions to people who have graduated from the course. Two of those mentees, Greg and Nancy Rasmussen, launched a beef operation in Missouri last year.
The Kleins like grazing because of its relatively low cost and the fact that it’s easier on the land and animals. They also feel it gives them the flexibility to expand their operation slowly as they work steadily toward making the farming enterprise a viable business. Eric and Lisa have quit their in-town jobs, but Eric still does some custom hay work as well as consulting. And with pasture farming the three Klein children—Andy, 5, Ben, 4, and Katy, 2—can be involved with the operation.
“We just feel like it’s a safer environment for the kids when we rely on grass rather than heavy machinery,” says Lisa. “And hopefully when they walk out in the pasture they also see the fun part of farming, and can start seeing a future for themselves on the land.”
—Originally published in the January/February/March 2005 Land Stewardship Letter
Click here for more on Farm Beginnings™. You can also call 507-523-3366 in southeast Minnesota or 320-269-2105 in western Minnesota.
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©Land Stewardship Project, 2001
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