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Farm Beginnings™ Profile: Jennifer & Ray Mark
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Anne, Ray, Justin, Jennifer Mark |
Don’t farm. That’s what Jennifer Mark’s father told her for 15 years.
“I just kept telling him, ‘But I want to farm so bad,’ ” the daughter recalls.
Ray Mark’s pessimism was well founded. Even though his farm in southeast Minnesota’s Houston County had been in the family since 1855, by the late 1980s it wasn’t looking economically viable any more. In 1990, Jennifer left the 200-acre operation to study agricultural business. Ray sold the 30-cow milking herd, rented out the cropland and got a town job. Meanwhile, Jennifer ended up getting a degree in physical therapy and started a career, staying away from the farm for a dozen years. But the entire time, she still had plans to return and continue the Mark legacy on the operation. In 1992, she visited Australia and saw how farmers there were raising livestock using managed rotational grazing. Over the years, she also attended grazing field days sponsored by the Land Stewardship Project.
Jennifer, who had always enjoyed working with the cows growing up, became convinced that farming could be viable on the operation using grass-based livestock production (“I don’t have an affinity for sitting on a tractor,” she says). Jennifer now lives on the farm with Ray and her mother Anne. Also on the farm is Jennifer’s 10-year-old son, Justin.
“My son and brother’s kids are the sixth generation that would be on the farm,” Jennifer says. “I would like to pass it on to that generation.”
In 2001, she signed up for the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings™ course. Perhaps motivated a little by fear, her father signed up as well.
“He was afraid of what would happen if he didn’t go,” says his daughter, only half jokingly. Jennifer, 32, is less risk averse than her father, who is 55. She concedes that she is impatient to get back into farming and launch new enterprises. In the end having them both attend the classes was good, since Ray provided a stable balance to some of what Jennifer admits can be “her wild ideas.”
Ray Mark also saw that family farming could be viable. During the classes, local established farmers talked about how they were using innovative production and marketing techniques to make a go of it. They even heard from lenders who were excited about the potential of sustainable agriculture. In fact, at one point Ray Mark got a bit angry about how he had bought into the narrowly defined path of conventional agriculture early in his farming career, focusing on production without considering the cost of that production.
“If I had only known about these ideas 15 years ago, 20 years ago, we wouldn’t have been in the situation we were in,” he says.
Jennifer, for her part, got a chance to look at the farm from a different angle as she went through the Farm Beginnings™ brainstorming sessions and grappled with various enterprise options: “We were pretty traditional before, and we knew that wasn’t working.”
She also got a healthy dose of reality in terms of farming and balancing it with an in-town job.
“You can raise 3,000 chickens, but you have to get rid of 3,000 chickens,” she says. “And you have to get to work on time too.”
Since completing Farm Beginnings™, the Marks have moved forward to take the farm back and convert it to grass-based livestock production. In 2002 they got 28 ewe sheep and a ram through the no-interest livestock loan program administered by Farm Beginnings™. They chose a breed called “Border Lester,” because it is a good dual-purpose animal: it can be used for both meat and wool production. In 2004, they raised 700 broiler chickens and a few pigs. Most of the production is marketed to consumers and retailers through the Southeast Food Network, an alliance of area farmers. Jennifer is excited about future marketing opportunities through the Network, as well as at area farmers’ markets and natural food stores. Right now they are grazing 30 acres of the 200-acre farm, and the plan is to double that grazing acreage in the coming year. One thing that will help is USDA Environmental Quality Incentives Program cost-share money the family received for fencing.
The next big plan? The Marks are seriously considering bringing dairying back to the farm, perhaps as early as the spring of 2005. Because of the location of the farm in a narrow valley and the shallow water table in the area, it’s considered environmentally sensitive, and the size of a dairy herd would be limited. But the Marks have been researching adding value to a small milking herd through on-farm processing. Ray recently attended a Stockman Grass Farmer magazine conference in Pennsylvania where he met other farmers who are doing on-farm processing.
Jennifer feels this kind of value-added enterprise could help start bringing people back to the farm—currently she, Anne and Ray have town jobs. So who gets to return first to fulltime farming? This is where the Mark daughter shows some uncharacteristic patience.
“Dad gets to go back to the farm first.”
—Originally published in the Oct/Nov/Dec 2004 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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