Sustainability Of Midwest Vegetable Production? Why We Choose This Path!
Greetings members and partners of Featherstone Farm!
My birthday happens to be the "Ides of November" ... this Friday 11/15. As a very casual golfer since growing up playing 9 hole "goat ranches" from Red Wing to Wabasha (my father's affectionate term), I've always imagined the day I might get to play on my birthday. This will be the first time in 58 years that this will be possible in SE Minnesota: my brother, my uncle, a HS friend of Emmet's (musician who organized all the music for our 30 anniversary party in September) and I are scheduled to play late morning Friday, under a warm sun and 54 degrees. The unexpected silver linings of climate change.
The significance of this is not lost on me, from the point of view of the sustainability of Featherstone Farm, operationally and financially. The chronically wet spring and early summer of 2024 was very, very hard on us. Critical plantings of winter storage crops- from winter squash to cabbage, beets to carrots- went in 2, even 3 weeks late due to disruptions from rainfall. They were therefore weeks behind in growth and development by early fall. A series of heavy rainfalls in mid September- or a handful of nights in the mid 20s, both very possible- might have meant that our storage crop coolers (and bank account) would have been half as full as projected.
Thank goodness, this did not happen. Instead, we were treated to 8+ weeks (still ongoing!!) of dry weather, 10-15 degrees above "normal" temperature. This has meant that a nearly certain B-/C+ season has become an A- one, possibly better. Winter storage crops are critical to FF's bottom line nowadays, and we have seldom had larger November stores of squash, root crops and especially cabbage: Again, the unexpected silver linings of climate change.
This kind of wild variability in a single growing season (saturated spring to sun splashed October) again begs the question I've been asking myself for a decade + : why attempt to grow fresh market vegetables in Minnesota in the first place? Seriously, why try to squeeze blood out of rocks in this way, when there are so, so few other farms attempting to do the same thing at a "grocery store scale"???. Why take the risk?
Last week I got a big part of the answer, sitting at a meeting room in the Featherstone Farm office. It was at a meeting of an informal board of advisors I convened on Thursday, to help plan for my retirement from Featherstone Farm within 18-20 months. Among the advisors were a farm business consultant from WI, and a veg farmer/ water resources manager from CA. This basic question came up right away: how can we legitimately pitch a mid-sized unicorn vegetable operation like Featherstone Farm to investors, given all the challenges and headwinds we face? Stated even more bluntly: What is the basic point of a farm like Featherstone existing in the first place??
Right away came two remarkably prescient answers: Tera (the WI consultant) spoke of orchards she is working with in Washington State (organic and conventional both), that are confronting a sort of "apple SIDS" (sudden death syndrome). Though the precise cause is unknown, it appears to be tied to stresses suffered by trees in back-to-back years 2022-23, when climate change driven flash-heat and wildfire smoke blanketed the region where a huge % of the nation's apples are produced.
Then Judith (the CA water researcher) commented that, in the coming decade, fully 10% of the agriculture in California's central valley is projected to dry up and disappear, just from lack of irrigation water. This is tens of thousands of acres of crops, many of them vegetables that compete with Featherstone Farm in Midwest markets.
The point that Tera and Judith were making is simple: as a society, we simply need to keep all food producing options on the table in an era of destabilized climate. With current conditions- from cheap diesel to not completely depleted aquifers in CA- it is difficult indeed for a mid-sized operation like Featherstone to compete on price, consistency and even quality (at times), with vegetable crops produced at industrial scale in the arid west (recall how hard spring rains were on us this year? Vegetable farms do not like rain!!!). But, as Tera and Judith reminded me last week, the cheap diesel, the moderate weather and especially, the west coast water will not be around forever. What happens when they are gone??
THIS is why we continue to take our chances with destabilized climate and plant fresh market vegetables in Minnesota: it is an act of profound hope for the future. And thanks to wonderful, dedicated customers like you, it is a very life affirming vocation, right here and now.
Warm dry autumns like this one make it pleasant sometimes. As does the engagement with fellow travelers like you!
Gratefully, Jack Hedin