Country Life Wednesday, June 17, 2020 • lyndentribune.com • ferndalerecord.com
Gardening • B4 Dairy • B5 FFA/4-H • B5
County dairy farms down to about 70
Randy Kortus, still milking about 12 cows in April, now has just two remaining. (Calvin Bratt/Lynden Tribune)
The Widen family — from left, Levi, Brianna, Gracie, Ryan and Dean — operate Widnor Farms, and they take pride in offering truly local meat to their customers. (Brent Lindquist/Ferndale Record)
Local food, from the pasture Widnor Farms of Custer sells USDA meat straight to customers By Brent Lindquist brent@lyndentribune.com
CUSTER — For the owners of Widnor Farms on Valley View Road, “local” is a way of life. “We are basically your grocer for your meat,” coowner Brianna Widen said during a recent visit. “We’re your personal rancher.” The partner in this operation is
her husband, Ryan. The Widens sell pork, beef, lamb and chicken, all ethically sourced from their Custer farm plus leased properties in Whatcom and Skagit counties. There’s no middleman when it comes to purchasing from Widnor Farms, Brianna said. Customers can buy meat directly via the farm’s website and either pick it up fresh or have it shipped. “The demand for locally sourced food is insane,” she said. “It’s grown exponentially. I think people are starting to open up their eyes and starting to realize where their meat sources are coming from. They’re just not happy with
the fact that they’re not locally sourced.” Brianna said that this reality has become even stronger during the COVID-19 pandemic. There was so much demand for food when the pandemic first impacted grocery shelves that the farm sold through a year’s projection worth of meat in just two weeks. Luckily for the Widens, they had decided in February to fully commit to provide locally sourced food to the community. What began as a way to locally source food for their family, now five, had turned into an operation and a philosophy that the community was ready to adopt.
“We really wanted to be able to source ethical food for ourselves, and we bought property and we were homesteading and then all of a sudden we had people asking us, ‘Do you have anything for us?’” Brianna said. The farm, which produces USDA-certified meat, scheduled out all its butcher days and quickly sold out. “We sold out of product, but we already had the dates available for us, so we just filled the dates with more livestock,” Brianna said. The Widens decided See Widnor on B2
Some farmers speak on their reasons for going out now By Calvin Bratt editor@lyndentribune.com
WHATCOM — The number of dairy farms in the county, once in the hundreds and even in the thousands decades ago, is now down to around 70. Several local farms have gone out of business within the past year, as the farmgate price of milk has continued to struggle and farmers themselves get up toward retirement age. Also, a new assessment on the milk checks of Darigold producers for a $67 million investment in the company’s Boise, Idaho, processing plant was a factor in some farmers’ decisions. Darigold, operating a powder-making facility in Lynden, is the main receiver of Whatcom
County milk. “The future just looked very, very grim,” summarized John Vander Veen, 59, who grew up on the family TJ Veenacre Farms off Van Buren Road. His 24-year partnership in dairying with Rolf Veening saw cows leaving the farm on March 6. “If you borrow money, you have to pay it back,” he said. After that, updating obsolete equipment must be a top priority for a farm going forward before seeing a profit. Vander Veen can keep up the dairy nutrition consulting he does and has acreage in raspberries. Veening will stay busy this year still raising heifers on the premises and doing field work while assessing what’s next for him, and if it is in agriculture. “We kind of go through doors as we live our lives,” he said. The number of dairies in Whatcom County edged below 100 approximately See Dairy on B6
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