Making Room for Relationships—
How Journeyperson is Helping Racing Heart Pace Itself BY BRIAN DE VORE Land Stewardship Project landstewardshipproject.org Reprinted by permission.
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ack-shed or people? That’s the question Les Macare and Els Dobrick are grappling with on a dank day in mid-March as they brave a biting wind to inspect the garden plots, cover crops, and outbuildings on Racing Heart Farm in western Wisconsin. With the exception of some onions sprouting in one of the hoop houses, little sign of the coming spring is in sight, but the vegetable farmers need to decide soon how they will approach the 2021 growing season. Like many Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) operations, COVID-19 launched Racing Heart on a bit of a roller coaster ride in 2020. Demand for shares exploded as the pandemic fueled concerns about the food system and people were spending more time at home, cooking. “We had a hard time saying ‘no’ last year. We capped it at 100 members and then opened it up again when we were hearing everybody’s CSA was filling up,” recalls Macare. “And also we heard that one of our farmers’ markets was going totally online.” As a result, the CSA portion of Macare and Dobrick’s farm more than doubled from 70 to 200 shares in one year. The vegetables produced for those shares were shifted away from what they had been selling through two farmers’ markets they serviced on a weekly basis, so they didn’t have to cultivate more land to meet the requirements of the expanded CSA enterprise. But there was one downside to the CSA-centric shift: preparing more share boxes means more time in the packing shed and less time with customers. “We like the efficiency of the CSA but we also get a lot from the farmers’ market — it’s exhilarating, it’s fun, we get to have face-to-face interaction with the people who are seeing the vegetables right in front of them and oohing and ahhing,” says Macare. Would 2021 be another mega-CSA year, or would they shrink back that portion of the enterprise to provide more face time at farmers’ markets? Fortunately, Dobrick and Macare feel equipped to make such decisions thanks
to the training they received through the Land Stewardship Project’s Journeyperson Course. Through that experience, they learned that when making farming decisions, it’s not just about dollars and cents, productivity, and efficiency— it’s also about meeting the needs of every aspect of the farm in a holistic way, from the health of the soil to the quality-of-life of the farmers themselves. That training has given them the tools to regularly “check in” and assess whether the decisions they are making contribute to the overall success of the farm or are leading them down unfruitful side roads. “We can actually take a particular piece out if it’s not working for us and that’s okay,” says Dobrick. “We don’t have to just get so focused on one enterprise or spreading ourselves too thin, or focusing on something that isn’t working out.”
From Sand to Soil
the business acumen needed to make farming a full-time career. “We had no idea how to do the finances and just having some structure sounded really nice,” says Dobrick. In 2015, they enrolled in LSP’s Journeyperson Course to get grounded in nutsand-bolts financial management. The year-long Journeyperson Course is designed to support people who have several years of managing a farm under their belt, and are working to take their operation to the next level. It provides advanced farm business planning, a matched savings account, and a mentorship, as well as guidance on balancing farm, family, and personal needs. In a sense, Journeyperson is a good “postgraduate” step for people who take LSP’s Farm Beginnings course. However, like some other Journeyperson participants, Dobrick and Macare are actually not Farm Beginnings grads. They found Journeyperson’s focus on Holistic Management particularly useful. Holistic Management, which was developed four decades ago by Allan Savory, focuses on “big picture” decision-making and goal setting processes. Savory’s expertise is in the area of
The couple has been thinking a lot about how to stay true to their values since launching a small vegetable operation in Minnesota on a half-acre of rented land in 2014. They concede that first foray into farming together was a flop agronomically—it was on extremely sandy soil with a pH level only a pickle maker could love. But it helped them realize they liked farming and that they could work together raising food. Neither Dobrick nor Macare grew up on a farm, although they both have grandparents with farming backgrounds. Macare, 38, grew up Els Dobrick and Les Macare. in Connecticut and has worked on vegetable operations on both the livestock grazing, but over the years Holistic East and West Coast. Dobrick, 45, grew up in Management has helped farmers of all types, as Minneapolis, lived in Seattle for a dozen years, well as other entrepreneurs and natural resource and came to farming through an interest in professionals, achieve a “triple bottom line” of native plants and small-scale gardening. sustainable economic, environmental, and social After the first year on the “sand farm,” they benefits. In a Holistic Management system, rented land for two more seasons on another a farmer’s quality of life is put on the same piece of ground in the Twin Cities area. Through level as the health of the soil or the operation’s that experience, they gained more confidence economic viability. Holistic Management relies in how to raise vegetables on a larger scale for on a process of constantly monitoring whether a combination of farmers’ markets and CSA a certain decision on the farm is helping meet customers. But the couple felt they still lacked CONTINUED ON PAGE 8 Num ber 2 02
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