Loon Organics: A Youth Movement

Toblerone, the chocolate-colored farm dog with yellow eyes, patrols Loon Organics’ dusty gravel driveway, letting all newcomers know with his growling bark that he’s on to them.

“It’s his farm, really,” says farm hand Kate Strathmann dryly as she bags salad mix in the shade of the packing house. “We’re just visitors here.”

“Visitors” on Loon Organic Farm include Kate, Katharine, and farm co-owner Adam Cullip, who are packing veggies for farmers market, and Adam’s wife Laura Frerichs, who is harvesting green beans with three other hands, for a total of seven working the farm today. All are under the age of thirty.

The farm itself is young, too, in fact, with 2009 marking Loon Organics’ first year at this location. “Toblerone has been working this land longer than any of us,” Adam jokes.

While the team at Loon Organics is young, an organic farm staffed with twentysomethings is becoming a common sight. In fact, a real youth movement seems afoot in organic farming.

“Every year, we’re seeing more and more young people at the MOSES Organic Farming Conference,” says Faye Jones, director of Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Services (MOSES), host of the yearly Organic Farming Conference in La Crosse, WI. Jones says that the highest percentage of attendees at the MOSES Organic conference were aged 21-30 this last year.

Which is promising, since the rest of U.S. agriculture is graying rapidly. The average American farmer is 57, after all, up from 55 years old in 2002 (U.S. Census Bureau).

Despite their age (Kate tends to a hoop house brimming with sungolds and saladettes wearing a Rufus Wainright concert t-shirt), there’s an impressive amount of experience on Loon Organics. Adam and Laura began Loon Organics in 2005, actually, leasing land from organic pioneers Atina and Martin Diffley on Gardens of Eagan Farm. By running a successful CSA, Adam and Laura worked their way up to the purchase of this land, while continuing to put more seasons under their belts farming abroad in winter months (a biodynamic farm in Brazil one year; a stint in Del Cabo Organic farm in Mexico the next). Kate Strathman, too, has extensive experience for someone her age, working at Loon, a biodynamic farm in Idaho, and two six-month stints in India, including time on Vandana Shiva’s organic farm Navdanya.

What distinguishes many young organic farmers from those who started in the 1970s and 1980s is that there is no “conversion story.” Unlike, say, Dan Minar of Cedar Summit Dairy, who suffered a dose of agricultural chemicals, two weeks flat on his back with headaches, followed by a lengthy conversion to grass-fed and organic farming, the vision for Loon Organics was to be certified organic from the beginning, according to Laura Frerichs.

“I didn’t want to work with farm chemicals,” she says, walking out to the eggplant field. “I wanted to do something environmentally friendly from the beginning.”

In college, a professor was doing work with CSA (community supported agriculture) farms, which as Laura’s first exposure to such farming, but her transition into organics didn’t come until after college when high school friend Theresa Cuperus and friend Josh Engel, now of Driftless Organics, told her about Gardens of Eagan. It proved fateful on a number of levels, since her future husband Adam was working at Gardens of Eagan as well. They met shortly before starting at GOE, but farming sealed their relationship.

“We got know each other on that farm. We were lucky. We got to work hard, eat sweet corn, and be amazed,” Laura says. “As we worked and learned how complex organic farming is, how beneficial organic eating can be, it became so clear, why would you want to do any other kind of farming?”

In 2005, Loon Organics as a brand was born, after the Diffleys offered Laura and Adam a few acres on which to start a CSA. One of the toughest challenges of CSA farming was figuring out how much to produce.

“To start out, we sold at [Just Foods] co-op and Valley [Natural Foods Co-op] in Burnsville,” Laura says, “and a few farmers markets. How much you need to plant and how much yield you get from that took a while to figure out.” Indeed, consistent volume was a tricky task for the first-year CSA farmers, since they had guaranteed to fulfill their members’ boxes each and every week. Luckily, some very experienced farmers had their backs. “When we started, we knew we could buy from [Atina and Martin at GOE] to fill our boxes. That’s a great model for creating farmers, actually. Good to set it up so you know where product is coming from and you don’t have to grow 40 items in your first year.”

Things went well, so that by 2007, Laura and Adam decided it was time to stop leasing and start farming on their own land. Their criteria was 40 acres of mixed-use land (farmland, woods, water, diversity of habitat which could act as a buffer between their farm-to-be and any conventional farming neighbors). Certified organic land would have been ideal, but at the very least, farmland that could be easily converted would serve, as well.

“We were looking in southeast Minnesota, but it’s expensive, caught between development from the Twin Cities and Rochester.”

As it turns out, Toblerone’s farm, located outside Hutchinson, Minnesota, was perfect: Not only was it certified organic, with a pond, some woods, and a barn, but the owners were running a CSA themselves (August Land CSA), which provided Loon Organics with a ready base of customers. Some fifty-five Loon members are local and drive out to the farm themselves to pick up their CSA boxes.

But moving to new farmland is more than just moving across state. Because the farmer’s basic medium changes, too, it’s a little like an oil painter switching to watercolors or vice versa.
“It’s totally different,” Laura says of their new soil in Minnesota’s western flatlands. “GOE [located south of the Twin Cities] was more of a silty clay loam. This soil is really black, more of a clay loam, really heavy prairie soil, much heavier than GOE. It retains water well, this soil, which is good for our first year since we’ve been in a drought. It’s like chocolate cake. Perfect.”

Ironically, the drought has actually been good for Loon’s first year. Droughts are never good, but Lara says, “You can always irrigate. You can’t take water out.” The cool, dry weather suppressed molds, blights, and bugs that would bedevil any farmer attempting to grow without harsh pesticides (by that same token, this weather wasn’t so good for the honey guy). Nonetheless, the lack of rain was challenging, too.

“It was supposed to rain a tenth of an inch the other night, but it didn’t come,” Laura said, walking to a white loading van with her box of eggplants, ready to head back to the packing shed. “It makes it hard to sleep. You lie awake listening to the storm come in, hoping it’s going to be a good rain, but then it’s just enough to settle the dust.”

Thanks to good irrigation and a lack of pests, production has actually been quite good – so good, in fact, that Loon Organics has been grateful to have Mill City Farmers Market as another outlet for their veggies.

“Mill City is great for us,” Adam says, bagging salad mix for market. “We can sell whatever is left over after we pack the CSA boxes.”

Plus, the hoop houses they built before starting production this year meant coming to market first with greens, salad mix, and bok choy. “We were the only ones with organic produce for a few weeks in May,” Kate says.

All in all, it’s been an exceptionally decent first year for Loon. But will they appear in stores where non-CSA customers can enjoy their vegetables, too? Not any time soon. Selling to warehouses and stores would mean adding more land to production. At the moment, the operation seems balanced, sustainable. The following at Mill City is good, and the CSA is humming along with 125 boxes serving 200 families.

One of whom is coming up Loon Organics’ drive for a box and getting yelled at by Toblerone, as we speak.

“If we ever do [sell to local markets], maybe we’ll have to change our name to Toblerone Farm,” jokes Laura, throwing the dog an eggplant. Purple and white globe in his mouth, Toblerone walks away happily, as if eggplant is what he’s been waiting for all morning.

“Might as well. He’s been here longer than we have.”

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(All photos by Greg Thompson Photography)

* More photos of Loon Organics here.

* Loonatics (Loon Organics blog)

* Loon Organics Local Harvest listing