Established 1994

Our Story

Who We Are

Located on 225 acres alongside the beautiful Root River near Rushford, Minnesota, Featherstone Farm grows more than 95 varieties of certified organic fruits, vegetables, salad greens, and herbs. Planted and harvested largely by hand (with some mechanical help!), our fresh produce finds its way to kitchens across the Upper Midwest. Our customers include retail stores and members of our community supported agriculture (CSA) fresh farm box subscription program.

Our Commitments

  1. Featherstone Farm is dedicated to building soil, protecting resources, creating renewable energy and to enhancing the rural environment in which it operates.

  2. Featherstone Farm is committed to being a fair, transparent and accountable agricultural employer, and to making farm work a safe, respected and personally sustainable profession. 

  3. Featherstone Farm is dedicated to placing good regional food at the center of a vital rural-urban community of people.

Our History

Jack Hedin and Jenni McHugh started Featherstone Fruits and Vegetables (Featherstone Farm) in 1994 after many years working on various organic farms in New England, the Mid-Atlantic region, and California’s Sacramento Valley.

People often ask us where the farm’s name comes from. Both the name and the focus on environmental sustainability are rooted in the Featherstone Township homestead (80 miles up the Mississippi River), where Jack's great-grandfather farmed, observed the impacts of early European agriculture on the land, and developed a sense of the deep ecology of the driftless region.  His 1941 memoir is the inspiration for everything Jack has done at Featherstone Farm. (See more about Jack’s great-grandfather below.)

Featherstone’s first home was in the Zephyr Valley Community Land Co-operative in the bluffs south of Winona, Minnesota. (Jack and Jenni were among the six founders of the cooperative.) They had a number of farm partners in the early years, including Jack’s brother Ed and an old friend of Jenni’s from an orchard in New York, Rhys Williams. They also began raising three sons.

 The devastating 2007 floods forced Featherstone to relocate to its current location just outside Rushford, Minnesota, a few hundred yards from the Root River. The location proved to be ideal for four-season fresh market vegetable farming: over thousands of years, the flooding of the Root River deposited nearly eight feet of organic matter over a deep layer of sandy glacial outwash, providing a rich soil with great water drainage.

 “If you're going to grow vegetables, you've got to have the best, best soil, and we've got it right here,” Jack says. “We're really fortunate.”

 The soil conditions on the farm have attracted the attention of University of Minnesota soil researcher Nic Jelinski, who has brought students to the farm every year since 2017 in order to study the unique soils here.

In 2010, the Featherstone purchased 118 acres of farmland on the ridgetop above its larger fields by the river, providing even more growing options.

Over the years, Featherstone has become a well-known source of certified organic fresh market produce for retail outlets across the Midwest. In addition, it provides fresh produce direct to more than 1,000 households through its year-round customizable CSA program. It employs about a dozen people year-round, and an additional 20 to 30 farmworkers during the growing season. Some of these farmworkers are local, but the majority come to the farm from Mexico under the federal H2A visa program.

The Featherstone Mission

 

Mission Statement

 

Featherstone Farm is committed to produce and distribute high quality, certified organic fresh vegetables, in a way that reflects values of personal, financial and environmental sustainability.

 

Enhanced Statement

 

Featherstone Farm is dedicated to building soil, protecting resources, creating renewable energy and to enhancing the rural environment in which it operates.

Featherstone Farm operates a mid-sized, significantly mechanized, certified organic farm, which balances big picture goals of ecological and human health with day-to-day realities of economics (both the need to be profitable as a foundation of sustainability, and the need to be efficient to make quality food affordable and accessible to large numbers of people).

Featherstone Farm is committed to being a fair, transparent and accountable agricultural employer, and to making farmwork a safe, respected and personally sustainable profession.

Featherstone Farm is dedicated to placing good regional food at the center of a vital rural-urban community of people.

 

Nature and Purpose of this Statement

 

This mission statement is meant to be a living document, to be actively (re)considered and revised on a periodic basis.

The Original Featherstone Farm

The name “Featherstone Farm” is taken from the township in Goodhue County (west of Red Wing, about 80 miles north of Rushford) where Jack’s great grandfather homesteaded in the late 19th century. Handed down to us through his memoir, this man’s vision for agriculture and the environment continues to inspire all that we do at Featherstone Farm a century later.

Alexander Pierce (AP) Anderson was born in a dugout house in the “Little Smaland” valley of Featherstone Township in 1862. He spent his first 30 years on the homestead and teaching at the one-room schoolhouse just down the road. After losing his home to a fire in the early 1890s (and his parents’ death shortly thereafter), AP left the farm to attend the University of Minnesota and study botany. He spent the next 30 years as a teacher, farmer, inventor, and world traveler. 

In the early 1900s, AP Anderson returned to his roots in Featherstone Township to raise a family and to buy back the original homestead and farmland around it. By the 1920s, he was farming nearly 500 acres and experimenting with conservation tillage and a number of grain cultivars. Generating all of its own energy and fertility and feed, this original “Featherstone Farm” was undoubtedly more sustainable than the one we operate today.

In 1889, it was reported in the Red Wing Daily Republican that: 

"A. P. Anderson has 60 acres of very fine beans on his farm this season, over 40 acres in No. 1 corn, and some 5 acres of pumpkins for the pigs of which he has 115 small ones and 31 old ones. He has 100 acres in cultivation this season and thinks that a good yield of everything is now certain. Mr. Anderson is one of those progressive farmers who are bound to succeed in whatever line they engage."

But AP saw the destructiveness of pre-dust bowl agriculture in the area as well. He was keenly sensitive to the richness and diversity of the high-grass prairies and woodlands that he helped to plow up, chop down, and grub out in his youth. As a trained botanist, he understood the vastness of what had been lost. He became an early conservationist; when he returned to Featherstone Township in midlife, AP began planting tens of thousands of trees and shrubs on his farm “to replace what [he] destroyed.”

AP Anderson’s legacy was passed on through a memoir, The Seventh Reader, a collection of verse and writings on the prairie homesteads of his youth that AP assembled and self-published in 1932. This memoir came to be a huge inspiration for his great grandson Jack Hedin, who discovered it during his idealistic college days. The book is full of the original “Featherstone Farmer’s” musings on nature and agriculture and humanity’s place in the environment. Above all, it gives a rich glimpse into this man’s curiosity and generosity of spirit…qualities that  we try to bring to the present, 21st-century Featherstone Farm.