Features > Down on the Farm
Down on the Farm
From shifty markets to politics to unpredictable weather, locally-supported farmers have a lot on their plate
By Andy Steinke
Most jobs are predictable. You work the 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. shift, take your hour-long lunch breaks, schmooze at the holiday office parties and go home. You know what you’re going to do from one day to the next, and you deal with the same problems.
Unfortunately, things are rarely that cut and dry for farmers. Flash floods, intense summer heat waves, high seed prices and even higher fuel prices are only a fraction of the tribulations farmers have to worry about from day to day. Unlike office workers, farmers can never predict what will be this year’s biggest obstacle. Some large-scale farmers have been able to steady their racing hearts by receiving subsidies from the government through the Farm Bill for growing commodity crops, such as corn, soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton.
But what comfort is there for small-scale farmers who plant crops on a few acres, and rely on vegetable and fruit sales to local families and nearby food co-ops for part of their yearly income? Many of these specialized farmers work on the community-supported model, and don’t receive subsidies from the government for growing their crops. Minnesota commodity farmers, on the other hand, had their best year since the Nixon administration last year, according to University of Minnesota research. With farmers’ median net income at $105,000, last year’s high profits were due in large part to the demand for corn as fuel.
The market for locally grown produce also prospered recently as more Minnesotans choose to buy food directly from Minnesota farmers. But those farmers are far from making six figures on their crops. The Minnesota Grown program, run by the state’s Department of Agriculture, creates a directory every year of farmers who will sell crops directly to consumers. Since 2002, the list of locations where consumers can buy Minnesota grown produce has expanded from 531 to 676. The number of farmers’ markets alone in Minnesota has reached 82—37more than in 2002. But even with the apparent desire for local foods, every community-supported farmer still faces his or her own set of challenges: some environmental, some governmental and some occupational.
Finding a market, turning a profit
They call him “Botany” Bob. Fifty-four-year-old farmer Bob Pollock has been tilling soil in the Twin Cities’ southeast metro for close to 35 years. After earning his master’s degree in botany from the University of Minnesota, Crookston, Pollock bought 300 acres of land in Inver Grove Heights along with all the equipment he needed to farm it. What he grows on the land, however, has begun to change as the demand for commodity crops has grown and problems with local markets have arisen.
“Historically I’ve grown sweet corn, pumpkins, squash, gourds,” he says, “but I’ve been getting into soybeans lately.”
Pollock made the switch because the cost of growing vegetables was becoming less economical, and the money he could receive for soybeans was steadily increasing due to the search for alternative car fuel. The price of fuel to power his tractors was becoming too expensive to support a vegetable farm, but if he grew soybeans his business could remain viable.
“My vegetable business, because of the price of fuel, wasn’t economically feasible. The price of diesel has like, quadrupled, but the price of vegetables hasn’t gone up much,” he says. “I could make money [growing vegetables] when diesel was $1 a gallon, but not at $3 or $4 a gallon.”
Pollock has been trying to run a community supported agriculture farm, a CSA, but has found that the system has its own set of problems. CSAs sell consumers, families, food co-ops and restaurants food in shares. One share will feed four to six people. The shares generally come in boxes filled with a mixture of fruits and vegetables.
“I’m really close to the Twin Cities,” Pollock says, “so I’m in an excellent position to do a CSA. But people don’t want to give you the money for it. I had really low prices, and I still had problems getting people to put the money down.”
Many locally-supported farmers will also sell shares to food co-ops and markets. Pollock said he has had problems with both in recent years. He sold uncertified organic vegetables to the Riverside Market in Minneapolis for about 20 years, but recently the market had to leave because the building’s owner didn’t maintain the property. The Seward Co-op down the street bought the building, but not Pollock’s product.
“I went in and said ‘I soldto the market for 20 years; I’d like to talk to someone about selling my product here, too,’” he says. “They kicked me out of the store. They just asked me to leave. They didn’t even give me a reason.”
Owners of St. Paul’s Mississippi Market also rejected Pollock’s product, but for a different reason. While he had 10 acres of squash to sell, the market was already selling squash it had received from California. Pollock was trying to sell his squash for 20 cents per pound, and the squash in the market was charging 10 times more. Why wouldn’t the market want the cheaper product?
“It was because I’m not certified organic, that’s what they would say,” he says. But in reality the market had already bought its produce from a wholesaler and didn’t need any more squash, no matter how much cheaper it was. Despite the local image various natural food co-ops try to portray, many of them still buy products from out West or down South because of the short growing season in Minnesota. In the end, Pollock wasn’t able to sell his squash, and it went to waste.
Pollock isn’t totally convinced the locally-grown market is thriving either.
“I think things are getting bleaker,” he says. “But they say people are on the bandwagon for locally grown. People want to get on the popular bandwagon, but the reality is it’s getting worse. The grocery business is just a huge corporation and there just isn’t a niche for small farmers.
“I saved my money and bought that 300-acre farm. I have all my own equipment. I spent years begging grocers to buy my product. And I only have three or four markets who will buy my product,” he says.
Pollock plans to plant most, if not all, of his land with soybeans this year because that is what he is able to sell. He isn’t too worried about making ends meet because he also runs a landscaping business, and has a job with the national park service as a botanist.
Starting up, going organic
Chris James, 45, runs a CSA farm in the southeast Twin Cities metro.
Boasting more than 150 different fruits, vegetables, flowers and herbs, his farm in Denmark Township has a little bit of everything. Afterleaving his software sales job in California about six years ago, James and his wife decided to move to Minnesota and try farming, even though they had no prior experience. James isn’t sure that he could have started a farming business without the money he received from selling his home in California. Land prices there are high, so James was able to use the money from that house to buy a 20-acre plot in Minnesota.
As the new Farm Bill continues through Congress, a new title to subsidize small, start-up farms will likely be included in the bill. Yet, James doesn’t understand why the government has given so much money in the past to big commodity farmers for growing foods that aren’t necessarily good for people to eat.
“If the government is going to subsidize anything, they should subsidize what the USDA says we should eat: fruits and vegetables,” he says.
Around $2 billion of the nearly $300 billion bill is expected to be set aside to help specialty crop farmers. About $250 million of that will be for block grants for research, product enhancement, consumer health, food safety programs and more. Another $225 million will be used to expand a program that provides fruits and vegetables to schoolchildren. And about $80 million will be for specialty crop research.
James doesn’t support cutting out farm subsidies altogether, but agrees that more money should go to start-up and smaller farms, and less money should go to mega-farms, because it takes a lot of money to get into the business. Not all farmers can afford to buy land like James did when they start a farm business.
After purchasing his land, James decided he wasn’t going to use chemicals on his crops. But his crops aren’t certified organic. Some farmers choose to goorganic because they can charge more money for their product if it’s certified. But to become certified organic, a piece of land must be chemical-free for at least three years, and the farmer must keep stringent records of every crop individually to remain certified.
“We grow organically, but we aren’t certified. It isn’t cost effective to do so,” James says. “If you are selling things wholesale and someone else is promoting your stuff, then it pays. If you are selling personally, like in a CSA, then that farmer can answer questions directly.”
A farmer must keep track of every certified crop; from the seed they buy, to the organic pesticides they use, to the soil they’re grown in. So a farmer would essentially keep the same records for five acres of a crop as he would for five rows of a crop. Because CSA farms are geared toward growing smaller portions of many products, the organic route isn’t always the most economical approach for a farmer to take, James says.
After the crops have matured and are ripe for sale, there is yet another hurdle that farmers must deal with: the customer. The biggest problem James says he faces is the idea that most Americans think everything should be cheap.
“Everyone feels food should be inexpensive.When you are a Minnesota farmer and have only 19 weeks to make your money for the year, it’s tough,” James says. “Yet there are people who want food to be cheap.”
When other farmers cut their profits by cutting their prices, it doesn’t always help people realize that the price they arepaying for a fruit or vegetable isn’t the price it costs to grow and sell, he says.
“I think there [are] a lot of farmers in the market who don’t understand that not everyone is your customer,” James says. “So they think we have to sell everything we have for as cheap as we can. As opposed to what I do, which is sell a good crop at a higher price and have some people walk away.”
And James knows which potential buyers are just shopping around, looking for that lowest price.
“If someone calls you up and asks what the delivery sites are, what are the costs and how big the boxes are, those are the people you aren’t going to get because they are Wal-Mart shoppers,” he says.
Labor prices and health insurance
About 50 miles from the Twin Cities is another small farm. David Hougen-Eitzman has been farming south of the Twin Cities in Nerstrand for 15 years. Hougen-Eitzman, 48, grows vegetables for his CSA on six acres of land. Because his farm is so small, he only employs three people during the summer months, not including himself and his wife, but the cost of the labor is an issue he worries about.
“Things like price of labor are an issue, price of vegetables is slightly a problem too,” he says. “The price isn’t going up and it seems like farm products in general,until ethanol came in, aren’t going up.”
There is only so much a farmer can charge for their product and still expect a customer to pay for it. So as costs like fuel and wages increase, Hougen-Eitzman’s profits are cut into more because he can’t raise the prices of his produce.
“First of all, we’d like to be able to pay a fair wage,” he says. “But at the same time, the costs of labor are significant costs for our business.”
While balancing fair wages for his workers against the farm’s profitability is something he struggles with, an even bigger issue he faces is health care.
Though he receives some support from the Minnesota Healthcare System, Hougen-Eitzman also holds another job as a teacher to ensure that he has health insurance for himself and his family. Most of the farmers Hougen-Eitzman knows hold down a second job so they can have some kind of health insurance, he says. For those that don’t hold a second job, Minnesota Care, a state-subsidized health care plan would likely be their best choice, Hougen-Eitzman says.
Weather: The X factor
Sometimes markets and consumers aren’t the problem. Sometimes it’s the most uncontrollable element a farmer faces that is the biggest challenge. Greg Reynolds, 51, a CSA farmer in Delano, says unpredictable weather is what sometimes drives up his costs.
“The weather is changing faster every year,” he says. “Last year we had 10 weeks when we had rain hardly at all. It’s hardto prepare for something like that.”
The state of Minnesota was in a severe drought for almost all of the 2007 growing season. Rainfall across the central portion of the state was less than eight inches from Jun. 5 through Sept. 24, according to University of Minnesota’s climatologists. May through September has historically been the wettest time of the year for the state.
During a drought, Reynolds says it isn’t necessarily the electricity used to pump extra water from underground wells that incurs the biggest cost, it’s the man hours. When there is no rain and everything needs to be watered at the same time to remain healthy, sprinklers and irrigation pipes have to be moved around a lot. But even with all the shifting, Reynolds’ crops weren’t as fruitful as he imagined they were going to be last year.
“We weren’t able to put on the water needed, so the yields were less. We got 30 to 35 percent of the squash we usually get,” he says. His tomato yields were also cut in half.
One upside for Midwest farmers, Reynolds says, are the natural disasters in California, a big produce state. The prices of California crops are slightly higherbecause of the fires, and that allows farmers like Reynolds to push their prices up a little as demand is increased.
Natural disasters like floods are something that Minnesota farmers, especially ones in the southern half of the state who receive a lot of precipitation, have to worry about too. But according to Minnesota Farm Bureau Federation President Kevin Paap, the Farm Bill provides insurance for 25 different crops. However, the current bill doesn’t provide subsidies for fruit and vegetable farmers.
“They have not asked for it,” Paap says. “I’m guessing there is a reason, maybe because they are a smaller market and they chose not be part of it. Maybe they do benefit by the farm bill because of a [natural] disaster or because of crop insurance.”
“The important thing is that we recognize that specialty crops are a part of agriculture, and that part of agriculture needs to be addressed too,” Paap says.