Tag: Minnesota farming

Grass Fed for Good at KDE Farms

Welcome to KDE Farms

Say hello to the happiest Grass Fed Highland Cattle I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out with!  They are living their best lives out in their fields just north of the Twin Cities in Hugo MN on a 3rd generation family farm.

At first glance the rolling hills look like your average small family cattle farm, but then you realize there’s no barn, you see horns on the cattle and can’t find a feed trough. Welcome to KDE Farms, where they raise grass fed Highland cattle, meat and layer chickens and produce some fabulous maple syrup. You can jump right to their online shop if you can’t wait.

Walking the Fields

Visiting these down to earth farmers earlier this Summer, I fell in love with their farmland- and the way they raise their animals. These docile Scottish Highland cattle can take three years to finish off. But they balance out their keep with having a double coat that is water proof and down-like, eliminating the need for a barn. And they’ve naturally developed to thrive off of grass.

This leads this kind of farmer to maintain their land in a way that conventional farmers (usually) don’t. Because they are feeding their ‘product’ from what they grow and not what they purchase, grass fed cattle farmers blend their knowledge of raising healthy grass with raising healthy animals. And, as Brian and Roberta Ehret can attest to- that all starts with healthy land.
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CSA’s So Many Ways

I’m already a pretty big fan of supporting your local farmer, and YOU all are my wonderful community- so “Community Supported Agriculture” is an obvious sweet spot.

**Updated 2/21/2023 with current links**

Turnip Rock Farm’s very own Farmer Josh

CSA’s (Community Supported Agriculture) have been around for in some form or another since the mid 1980’s- which first struck me as a much shorter history than I’d imagined. But, then I realized that the CSA idea came about jointly from both Farmers and consumers looking for new ways to grow good food- and eat good food.

This was one way to make a concrete change in how those consumers ate, and who grew their food. The basic idea of a CSA is that farmers get the purchase price up front to help cover costs of the upcoming farming season. With farmers knowing that they have that money, they are able to move forward with confidence, and maybe without a bank breathing down their necks…

Half Share from 2017, Photo Credit: Big River Farms

The rewards for a member of a CSA are manyfold; fresh in-season produce boxed up and ready to go weekly at a pick up location of your choice, often with a newsletter or recipe ideas included. As I see it, the biggest reward is building a relationship with a farmer.

My husband and I purchased our first CSA back about nine years ago to get fresh, locally grown produce while I was still working full time. It is kind of funny that I can’t remember the name of the farm, but I do remember I picked up my weekly boxes from one of the quaint little shops (The Nest) in downtown White Bear Lake. I never met the farmer, and there was never an invite from the farmer to do so.

CSAs give you a few of everything each week, instead of everything all at once! Photo Credit, Costa Farm

Things have changed, on both the farmer and the consumer sides. Farmers are being more proactive in forging relationships, and consumers are looking for more than good food grown cheap- more and more, the people buying CSAs are doing it for a chance to connect to a farm, a farmer, a piece of land…and to benefit from the GOOD food these farmers provide.

Now that the CSA idea has had time to take root- it has also branched out in a few different directions. For this article, I’ve chosen a few local farms that represent the wide variety of options available to those of us lucky enough to live around the Twin Cities. Each of the following farms has a unique twist to them, showing again there’s so many ways to grow good food!

I would absolutely recommend any of the farms covered- but I’d also urge you to do your own research too, there are more and more (yay!) CSAs popping up every year. Currently, according the powerful MNGrown CSA search engine there are 86 CSAs in Minnesota. Use these ‘case studies’ as a launch pad to get yourself thinking what you want out of a CSA… Continue reading

Mhonpaj’s Organic Garden Farm

 

These women just had to be my first ‘full on’ farmer interview. They have helped my kids fall deeper in love with many veggies, they’re the only certified organic farmer at our local White Bear Lake Farmer’s Market and they are a great example of giving back and educating their own community.

Let’s back up, shall we so you too can fall head over heels with Mhonpaj’s Garden (pronounced mon-pahs).

May is the head farmer, and Mhonpaj, her daughter is the farm manager; their care and love for each other is mirrored in the farm. “She’s my shining star,” Mhonpaj says of her mother.

When I walked into their greenhouse up in Marine on the St. Croix I was hit by two things; May’s smile and the amazing smell.

May at her greenhouse

May’s smile is positively contagious, and the smell of warm earth was heaven after the cold snap mother nature had thrown at us. ( fingers crossed for no more frost!). If you’ve ever taken a stroll through a commercial vegetable greenhouse, or even a floral greenhouse, you’ll remember the smell of chemical fertilizers clinging to you.

In May’s greenhouse, only rich, pleasant organic soil smells wafted by…

May came to Minnesota in 1981, a refugee from Laos. She spent many years picking produce in the summers and assisting farms. Then she watched her mother, who had picked in fields while pesticides were being sprayed the next row over, lose her battle with cancer. At one point the doctors asked if May’s mother had eaten pesticides the cancer in her intestines was so bad.  Deeply affected by the loss, both May and Mhonpaj were determined to do things differently moving forward.

Mhonpaj’s experiences around food lead her to a degree in Health Education/Health Fitness. It was during a college trip to Thailand where she saw their practices of sustainable agriculture that she became hooked.

Around the same time Mhonpaj’s fiancé (now husband) took a position as the SE Asian coordinator at the Minnesota Food Association (MFA). He suggested her parents look at MFA because of their love of farming. May enrolled and took the 4-year organic farming program. The program included everything you need to know to become a certified organic farmer in Minnesota. They teach hands-on techniques, technical support, record keeping and marketing.

starting a second planting of green onions

10 years later they are organically farming 6 acres and *almost* making their livings from farming. They rent 4 acres at MFA, and feel lucky to have access to that certified organic land with irrigation, deer fencing and available tillage – all the costly infrastructure pieces that constrain many other farmers from getting started. They also rent and farm a 2-acre parcel in Stillwater.

I got a chance to speak with Laura Hedeen, programs manager at MFA about May. “Everyone values her expertise so much, her knowledge is evident when she teaches,” Laura said. May has been mentoring farmers informally for years, and now is in her third season as an official staff member of MFA, teaching organic farming to immigrant farmers.   “She teaches visually, and her techniques are really efficient, we’re lucky to have her help,” Laura added. Then Laura filled me in on a long and impressive list of speaking and teaching engagements ( MOSES Organic Farming Conference speaker, Keynote Speaker at the Immigrant and Minority Farmers Conference, children’s groups, farmers groups etc) that, of course, May didn’t see the need to share.

“Organic farming and gardening, it’s not just a technique, it’s a lifestyle,” was Mhonpaj’s immediate response to my asking if the organic piece was really ‘that’ important to her. Next she said, “what you’re putting into your body matters; what the vegetable comes with, I mean what they put on them, is just as important as the nutrition inside the veggies.”  So yes, people- this family is ‘all in’ on growing organic.

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