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Farm Beginnings® Profile: Heather Smith
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Heather Smith |
By Brian DeVore
Heather Smith wades through 17 inches of new snow, makes her way past a dormant raspberry patch and stops in front of a hoop house, humped-up in the white landscape like a giant, anemic bale of hay. She digs out the drifted-in door, and slips inside. A December blizzard the day before has engulfed an area covering 23 states, including Smith’s corner of southwest Wisconsin. The storm has left in its wake a cold front that sends the mercury down to a handful of digits above zero. Despite no artificial heat source, it’s around 40 degrees in the hoop house—warm enough to steam up eyeglasses and cause one to remove hats and gloves. Beams of an early winter sun stream through the double-layered plastic, providing enough light to sustain a carpet of spinach and kale, which will be picked for one final delivery to members of the farmer’s “winter” Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) enterprise.
“It’s amazing how warm a hoop house can be,” the 31-year-old Smith exclaims. She picks a few fat leaves of spinach and takes a bite, savoring the sugars that are accentuated by the cold. The greens represent the last gasp of a successful 2009 growing season for Smith Gardens, a farming operation near the community of Cochrane. Smith, who graduated from the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings program in 2004, says 2009 was a “make-or-break” year for the farm. A business plan Smith worked up while a student in the course called for the 16 acres of picturesque property she owns to be a self-sustaining farming operation within five years.
“So the farm had to stand on its own this year,” she says. “And we had a good year.”
Not that it’s been an easy five years. During that time she’s not only launched a farming operation but had two children, built a house, barn and other outbuildings on the property and gone through a divorce. Even “launched a farming operation” is oversimplifying things by quite a bit. Smith Gardens is a diverse mix of CSA vegetables, pick-your-own raspberries, preserved jams and wood-fired pizza. Smith has added each enterprise in piecemeal fashion, keeping her financial risk low while being mindful of the limitations imposed by having two young children.
No way
Smith grew up just a few miles from her current home on a 60-cow dairy farm. As an only child, she was quite involved with the operation, and enjoyed it. “I was my dad’s hired hand,” Smith recalls.
But when she graduated from high school and her parents offered to sell the operation to her, Smith’s response was one of incredulity.
“I said, ‘You’re kidding—no way.’ ”
Smith went on to college and got degrees in biology and psychology. She was accepted into veterinary school but decided to take a year off from academics to think about her future. She hiked the Appalachian Trail for seven weeks, worked on a ranch out West and in general fell back in love with living and working on the land.
“I didn’t realize when I left home I would have that connection to the land and a desire to farm later,” she recalls.
After getting married, Smith returned to southwest Wisconsin in 2003 and bought 16 acres of land tucked between two coulees. Both she and her then-husband Jeremy worked off the farm as they slowly began erecting buildings on the land.
That fall Smith enrolled in the Farm Beginnings course. Twice a month from October to March she traveled to southeast Minnesota to participate in sessions on low-cost, sustainable methods of farming. 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 techniques.
Smith says she found the business planning, enterprise analysis and goal setting segments of the class particularly helpful.
“I knew I had 35 ideas for what I wanted to do on the farm. Farm Beginnings helped me narrow it down and put numbers on things financially and figure out what was physical possible from a labor and time perspective,” she says. “I only have 16 acres to work with so I had to be very careful in what I chose to do. Farm Beginnings helped me evaluate all the potential small enterprises that are part of the big picture on the farm.”
She says it was also inspiring to be around farmers who were proving that smaller agricultural enterprises are viable businesses, and not just “hobbies,” and were willing to share insights about the realities of making a living on the land.
“Farming can be a very romanticized idea you know,” says Smith, adding in a falsetto whisper: “Working on the land, day-in, day-out, la, la, la.”
In 2004, Smith Gardens (www.smithgardensfarm.com) cultivated one acre of vegetables and sold most of the produce at a local farmers’ market. By 2005, the operation was a CSA, selling shares in the farm before the growing season. In return, shareholders receive a weekly delivery of produce during the growing season. The Smith Gardens CSA enterprise has grown steadily over the years: from 12 family members in 2005 to 60 in 2009. The demand for shares outstrips the supply, and Smith says it’s tempting to expand the CSA operation. But doing that would mean more labor and increased mechanization, two things Smith doesn’t want to take on for financial and quality of life reasons.
Any decision to increase income on the farm must be guided by the reality that Smith’s two sons—Ashlan and Ethan — are under the age of 5 and she is farming the land by herself.
“It’s very alluring to just keep growing shares, but often it’s exponentially more work,” she says, adding that expanding the enterprise would also probably mean taking on farm members that are more than 30 miles away, reducing the “local” feel of the operation and possibly reducing the quality of the CSA experience for current members.
A happening
So the young farmer has made a conscious decision to increase cash flow by adding value to what she already produces. In 2009 she began offering a winter CSA share that consists of storage crops like potatoes as well as leafy greens such as spinach that she raises in the winterized hoop house.
One future project is to build a 16 x 30 greenhouse on top of an existing root cellar to help move her seed-starting area from the basement. She would also like to start a community kitchen. The idea: people would come to the farm to process fresh produce, and would leave with a supply of preserved local food.
Smith also makes preserves made from raspberries on the farm. This latter enterprise has allowed the farmer’s marketing acumen to shine. After noticing that her raspberry preserves were being stocked at the local food co-op with jams that were not produced in the area (“Where it just blends in.”), she talked co-op personnel into putting her raspberry preserves in the produce section as a local, fresh product. “It’s summer in a jar, I told them.” It worked. The preserves are now selling briskly as a “local product.”
But perhaps the farmer’s most successful value-added enterprise is a wood-fired pizza business. Once a week from May to October she bakes pizzas in an oven facility set up next to the barn for some 350 people who come out to the farm. People either simply drive out to the farm or call ahead to order 16-inch pizzas, which are made from vegetables grown in Smith’s garden, as well as pork from neighboring Farm Beginnings graduates Jim and Alison Deutsch, cheese from local farmers and flour from an organic grain mill—Great River Organic Milling—that sits next to Smith Gardens.
While the pizza is baking, people can pick raspberries, watch the fires of the pizza oven or just relax. Farming can be a lonely business, and the pizza nights allow Smith to interact with people who enjoy good food and being out on the land. “It’s a chance to work with the public and get to talk about the farm and just see them enjoy the valley,” she says. “It’s really a happening.”
This “happening” has doubled in size in just a few short years, thanks to word-of-mouth, the Internet and some well-placed publicity in Wisconsin tourism literature. Smith also sets up a “farmers’ market” table on the farm during the pizza nights where she sells her preserves and handcrafted soaps, along with produce. “I sell as much as when I went to the farmers’ market,” she says. “I think people are surprised at all that’s available locally.”
Smith says the pizza nights have helped her come to terms with an important reality: products offered to farm customers don’t have to be 100 percent sourced on that particular farm. The pork, cheese and flour that go into the pizzas are being produced by people who are good at what they do. The pizza serves as a delicious, colorful platter for highlighting all those skills.
“I felt my time could be better used working with other people who had their specific areas of knowledge,” she says. “It makes sense to support them and they in turn can come here and cross-market their product on the pizza nights. We can all work together to showcase our local foods and what we have available as a region.”
Personal interest vs. what’s practical
One thing Smith has learned during the past five years is that it’s important to differentiate between what one has a personal interest in, and what can be done for a living day-in-and-day-out. For example, growing up on a dairy farm, Smith has always had an interest in livestock. When her farm was first launched, she began raising pastured chickens for local markets, growing up to 400 birds at one point. But processing all those chickens on the farm became a major labor issue for an operation that already had other enterprises going.
Smith still recalls her first butchering experience with a chuckle: “I had never butchered a chicken so I was holding a book on chickens in one hand and a chicken under my arm. That book is still blessed with some speckles from that first butchering.”
She’s since reduced bird numbers down to 100. She may eventually increase chicken production again, but only if a custom processor becomes available in her area.
“It’s just kind of an obvious choice: until maybe another processor comes along that enterprise won’t be one that I do on a commercial scale.”
Or maybe a neighbor who has the inclination to raise and process chickens will show up at the next pizza night.
— A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2010 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.
Listen to the Podcast
To listen to an Ear to the Ground podcast featuring Heather Smith (episode 73) see www.landstewardshipproject.org/podcast.html?t=2. On that web page you will find other interviews featuring Farm Beginnings graduates.
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