The Farm Where It All Began
November/December 2023
As I write this, the view out the window is more muddy than merry, but Happy Christmas to everyone reading! El Niño hasn’t brought picturesque holiday vibes, but as the drought continues in the Midwest, we’ll take the precipitation.
It’s a double newsletter to end the year as I just never got around to writing November’s; we’ve got some quick updates and a holiday travel reflection.
End of the Year Updates
November and December means the transition from fall to winter, and though we’ve had warmer weather, the wet soil conditions has meant we’ve mostly just tinkered around the edges with things like mowing. At this point, the fields of cockleburs will probably have to wait until the ground dries out in the spring to meet the flail-mower. That doesn’t mean we haven’t had things to occupy us though.
We’ve embarked on two related moving tasks. First, the new flock of chickens now occupies the building that we call the old chicken coop; it held chickens before we arrived, but had been empty since that oak tree fell on it in July. Our nine hens and two roosters are set up for the winter and will live in that coop until it’s time for them to move out into the fenced orchard in the summer (more on that later). The building where our chickens had lived (an old grain silo) got mucked out and the shavings and manure spread on the peonies. That silo now holds our farm tools, a move that puts them all in one place and closer to the fields.
The seed catalogs have started arriving and I’ve been daydreaming and circling vegetables for next year. Since we won’t be expecting a baby at the beginning of the summer, we’re looking forward to planting and tending a garden for the first time on the farm. I also planted out the five apple trees that I grafted through a class at the Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa. They’re only about a foot tall right now, but I’m looking forward to pruning and tending them over the next few years. Right now we’re relying on plastic sleeves to keep the deer away, but next spring we’ll put up a deer fence.
Once the holidays are over, we’ll sit down and make our flower plan for next season. We have one small wedding on the docket, but a lot of our work will be experimenting with bed prep and growing different varieties. You can trust that the process will be covered in detail here in the newsletter.
Inside the house, the downstairs bathroom remodel is inching its way across the finish line, with mostly painting and trim left. Once that’s done, we’re setting our sights on a more ambitious set of projects: building a pantry and then remodeling the kitchen. Stay tuned!
The Home Farm
We’re spending the Christmas holiday in central Iowa on the farm that Julie grew up on, which makes for a good time for reflection on family traditions and farming. Now, you might guess that Julie chose to live on a small farm and grow cut-flowers as a reaction to corn and soybeans and Iowa agriculture. That’s not quite right though; for Julie and for us, Fair Oaks Farm is a continuation of a family heritage in agriculture. However seeing that heritage requires taking your eyes off of the current landscape of Iowa and peeking under the hood. From an outside observer’s perspective (Reminder: Kristofer writes these newsletters), I can think of two areas in particular that directly influence how we think about our flower farm and while I could write a whole book on this history, here they are in brief:
Area one: Off-farm income to fund experiments and excellence. Though he tends to wear his “farmer hat” more in public, Julie’s father, Dr. Gene Rouse worked for over thirty years as a professor of Animal Science. Working as a professor and having a stable off-farm income benefitted the Rouse farm in several important ways, but two in particular inform the way that Julie and I think: Number one, it allowed Dr. Rouse to invest in excellence. With his background in Animal Science and passion for pigs and cattle, that excellence showed up in their small hog breeding program and their Red Angus cattle herd. The legions of county and state fair champion ribbons that Julie and her siblings brought home attest to the care that he brought to those projects. A key ingredient of this approach was caring about the pigs as pigs and the cows as cows, not as commodities to satisfy the “cheap=best” market economy. As we think about flowers, we hope to do the same, using our off-farm income to concentrate on the overall health of our farm, flowers and livestock included, rather than the demands of the market. Stable off-farm income gives us the luxury of patience; Julie has an ingrained sense of thinking things through and doing things right. She values taking things slowly and that has been an important part of managing the overwhelming nature of buying an old farm. Because of the example of Dr. Rouse, we’re able to think longer term and not to feel pressured to make the farm our sole occupation right away, an approach that we’re hoping will pay-off down the road.
Area two: Small farms as a family tradition. Though it’s hard to believe it sometimes, the shift from small, diverse family farms to industrial agriculture took place over the course of Julie’s parents’ lives. As I’m fond of relating, both of Julie’s grandfathers started out farming with draft horses. The fact that Julie’s parents both grew up on small farms gives us both a store of wisdom to access and a vision for an alternate reality. That family history gives us insights into why farming has changed, a part of the story that’s often missing in protests against the current agricultural system that focus on high level policy. Having family connections to the history of farming in the upper Midwest helps us to see these systems from the inside and the outside, and to make informed decisions about what we hope to carry forward.
Though we’re endeavoring to carry on the family history of farming, we know that saying yes to tradition always involves a bit of saying no, too. Perhaps because I love cooking so much, I often think of our farm philosophy as a parallel to our favorite cookbook, The New Midwestern Table (if you don’t own it, we recommend it as a late Christmas present to yourself). In that cookbook, Amy Thielen interacts with her midwestern culinary heritage in two interconnected ways. On the one hand, she resurrects lost treasures, recipes like headcheese and kalvdans that have roots in the rhythm of farmlife. On the other, she refines mid-century dishes that had their hearts in the right place, but got lost in the processed food debacle. Her chicken wild-rice hotdish shows off how classy hotdish can be when it rejects its associations with Campbell’s soup. I think of the farm along those same lines: We’re resurrecting old ways of doing things, like sizing the farm to human scale and relying on small ruminants to do some of the work of machines and pesticides. We’re also hoping to refine the use of innovations that might have lost their way in farming, like tractors and business philosophy. We’re at the beginning of the process, of course, so only the Lord knows where it will go. But Christmas is a good day to hope that someday we’ll be able to hand off the Rouse/Ringkob farming tradition to Herbert (and any future siblings). Best wishes for the New Year!
Your contrary farmers,
Kristofer, Julie & Herbert (and Willmar the Labrador, too)