Farm Beginnings Making Room for Relationships
How Journeyperson is Helping Racing Heart Pace Itself By Brian DeVore
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son 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
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 in Connecticut and has worked on vegetable operations on both the East and West Coast. Dobrick, 45, grew up in Minneapolis, lived in Seattle for a dozen years, and came to farming through an interest in native plants and small-scale gardening. After the first year on the “sand farm,” they rented land for two more seasons on another piece of ground in the Twin Cities area. Through that experience, they gained
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 Els Dobrick (left) and Les Macare say training they received through LSP’s Journeyperson is helping them balance the needs of the land, community, and themselves. Having a common the requirements of the expanded CSA language to work with as a result of their Journeyperson training is key, says Macare. “It isn’t enterprise. But there was one downside just about our relationship with the land, it’s also about how we interact together.” (LSP Photo) to the CSA-centric shift: preparing more share boxes means more time in the packdecisions they are making contribute to the ing shed and less time with customers. more confidence in how to raise vegetables overall success of the farm or are leading “We like the efficiency of the CSA but on a larger scale for a combination of farmthem down unfruitful side roads. we also get a lot from the farmers’ market ers’ markets and CSA customers. But the “We can actually take a particular piece — it’s exhilarating, it’s fun, we get to have couple felt they still lacked the business out if it’s not working for us and that’s face-to-face interaction with the people who acumen needed to make farming a fulltime okay,” says Dobrick. “We don’t have to just are seeing the vegetables right in front of career. get so focused on one enterprise or spreadthem and oohing and ahhing,” says Macare. “We had no idea how to do the finances ing ourselves too thin, or focusing on someWould 2021 be another mega-CSA year, and just having some structure sounded rething that isn’t working out.” or would they shrink back that portion of the ally nice,” says Dobrick. enterprise to provide more face time at farmIn 2015, they enrolled in LSP’s JourFrom Sand to Soil ers’ markets? Fortunately, Dobrick and Maneyperson Course to get grounded in The couple has been thinking a lot about care feel equipped to make such decisions nuts-and-bolts financial management. The how to stay true to their values since launchthanks to the training they received through ing a small vegetable operation in Minnethe Land Stewardship Project’s JourneyperRacing Heart, see page 17… sota on a half-acre of rented land in 2014.
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No. 2, 2021
The Land Stewardship Letter
