North Creek Community Farm

Kate Stout has been been running North Creek Community Farm for about fifteen years now. Turns out she left my very own old stomping grounds (Berkeley) to start farming and felt so at home in Prairie Farm, Wisconsin that she got herself a place and moved in.

You might want to know what the life of a small scale farmer like Kate's is like. Well, during the season, which in Wisconsin is more or less from April (starting in the greenhouse) through October (ending with her very own harvest festival), it is about 25% paperwork (and what business isn't?), 25% miscellaneous fixing, carting, trucking, hauling & stuff, 25% riding around on tractors looking really cool and farmer-like, and 25% crawling and grubbing.

What, you might ask (and then again, you might not), is "crawling and grubbing?" Well, when you want to plant out the seedlings from your greenhouse, you have to crawl along, grubbing little holes in the ground to stuff seedlings into. And if you want to lay down some plastic mulch, or put down some reemay (a lightweight cover to protect plants from insects), you have to crawl along, grubbing a trough to bury the edges in. Then there's thinning and weeding the carrots, putting little collars around the tomato plants when you discover that the cut worms are coming up early this year, yanking quack grass (a nasty, invasive introduced to help hold soil, which it does all too well), and who knows what else.

And what do you get for all this hard labor? A really decent living and all the vegetables you could ever eat. (Have you ever tried to eat all the asparagus you can eat?) A share of Kate's vegetables runs the pretty standard price of $500.00 per season, and she's been running around 120 shares a year, so gross income is in the neighborhood of $60,000.00. She gets winters mostly off, lots of sun and exercise, a neat community of fellow farmers (there are two other CSAs in the immediate area, plus a tulip farmer, and some guys who are producing pumpkin seed oil), and a couple of trips a week to the "big city" (Minneapolis/St. Paul) to deliver vegetables in the summer. Kate has also raised sheep, pigs, and bred the Norwegian Fiord horses that she uses around the farm, and started and ran a restaurant in town for a while, but is currently concentrating on vegetables.

Not a bad life. Click the link at the top of this column to see Kate's web site, which includes enough pictures that I didn't feel like taking any myself.