Front row, left to right: Rick & Karola Dalen, Northern Harvest Farm; Heather-Marie Bloom, Rising Phoenix Community Farm; Janna Goerdt, Fat Chicken Farm; Sarah Weik, YKer Acres; Lise Abazs, Round River Farm. Back row, left to right: Dave Hanlon, Food Farm; Charlie Kersey, La Finca, Janaki, John, & Jane Fisher-Merritt, Food Farm; me (Catherine Conover, Stone's Throw Farm); Matt Weik, YKer Acres. Unable to attend (but with us in spirit): Chelsea Morning Farm, Good Nature Farm, and Hermit Creek Farm.
Largely due to the example the Food Farm set early on and their great reputation among consumers in our community, as well as their efforts to educate, encourage and mentor beginning farmers, many new Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms have sprung up in recent years. There are now 11 vegetable CSA farms that I know of in the Lake Superior region.
We have five vegetable CSAs running in Wrenshall alone. Rick and Karola Dalen began their farm business, Northern Harvest Farm, at the Food Farm in 2005, and I learned at the Food Farm in 2008 and 2009 before starting Stone’s Throw Farm in 2010 across the road from Northern Harvest. Matt and Sarah Weik started YKer Acres just a few miles away the same year I started farming on my own. Heather-Marie Bloom interned at Northern Harvest Farm and is now running her business, Rising Phoenix Community Farm, on my land. So it seemed appropriate to me when Rick and Janaki Fisher-Merritt of the Food Farm invited the rest of us to meet at the Food Farm on March 17 to talk about how we CSA farmers could work together for the benefit of us all and of the community as a whole.
We talked about some common challenges and possible solutions, and also threw out some “big ideas” about organizing and effecting change in our communities. What this group ends up doing and looking like remains to be seen, but it’s exciting to me that we (almost) all got together and started officially working together.
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Stone's Throw Farm 