Carving out a farm niche in the county

John Fisher-Merritt knew his purpose, and did not hesitate before answering. He had created a demand for, and built a community around quality, sustainably grown food.

Then came the questions: Why would he take on young farmers as apprentices, giving them all the secrets of his farming success and even access to his customers? Didn't he feel like he might be creating competitors?

"Well, we had so many people on the waiting list," he said of demand for his organically grown produce. "I felt like we were growing a community."

Fisher-Merritt said that through the 1970s and 1980s he and his wife, Jane, had struggled just to keep his original Food Farm near Holyoke going. In 1976, he took a job at the Whole Foods Co-op in Duluth and introduced members to organic tomatoes from his farm.

Moving to a farm just south of Wrenshall in 1988, they opened up the Food Farm, allowing customers to pick from its fields. But they found that people were often too busy to drive out to the country and pick their own vegetables.

Fisher-Merritt tried to grow his farm through both farmers markets (he was the first president of the Carlton County Farmers Market) and delivery to customers who called in orders. Neither of these methods was enough to support full-time farming.

But an idea that would have a lasting impact on local farming was just around the corner.

"In 1992 or '93 we heard about the concept of community-supported agriculture," Fisher-Merritt said.

"I asked every one of our clients how they'd feel about the CSA concept - getting a delivery every week, all summer long, and paying in advance. Every one of them said, 'You mean I don't have to call in my order? You mean it just comes? Sure, I'll do that.' "

And that's how community supported agriculture came to Carlton County.

The idea was to engage farmers and eaters in sharing the risks and rewards of sustainable agriculture. Members would purchase shares before the growing season and have the assurance of knowing where their food came from, how it was grown, and who was growing it. They would receive an allotment of produce weekly, often harvested the same day, throughout the summer months and into the fall.

"We ended up with 50 shares the first year (1994), and that was the first year we were able to pay ourselves for our labor," Fisher-Merritt said.

The next year they wanted to get 75 people signed up and got 80.

"By the third or fourth year we had 100 shares, and people on a waiting list."

The Food Farm was quickly becoming a model of sustainable, organic farming practices and people wanted to learn more.

Welcome wagon

Rick and Karola Dalen, recent graduates from the University of Minnesota Duluth, were intent on becoming CSA farmers. Fisher-Merritt took them under his wing at the Food Farm in 2005. In exchange for their 40 hours of labor each week, he gave them his customer waiting list and let them farm an acre-and-a-half of his land to serve the new customers.

They were allowed to use Food Farm equipment and to put everything that they could learn from Fisher-Merritt about sustainable farming directly into their crop.

“We had about 30 members that first year,” Rick Dalen said. “We were living in West Duluth, an 18-mile commute, growing plants under lights, starting stuff in our apartment, and schlepping it out to the Food Farm.”

“We had a lot to learn, and this was the best way to learn it,” Dalen said.

The Dalens also had the help of Fisher-Merritt in locating a nearby farm, and they were soon able to purchase it for their Northern Harvest Farm, which, like the Food Farm, operates on the CSA farm model.

“The Food Farm really paved the way for us, opened up this market, helped train farmers like us, and gave us this opportunity,” Dalen said. “They have continued to be a huge source of inspiration and support for farmers like us. They were central to getting this whole thing going.”

Like other CSA farmers, Dalen maintains that the way crops are grown can make a real difference.

“If you taste our carrots, or the Food Farm’s carrots, there’s a quality that comes from doing farming the way we do it. It’s small scale, a more human scale, paying attention to the soil health, using good practices like crop rotation, cover crops, basic organic farming practices. It all makes a big difference. It’s like night and day, and you can taste it.”

Shortly after the Dalens left to start Northern Harvest Farm, Catherine Conover arrived at the Food Farm. She had been an apprenticeship on a CSA farm in Massachusetts but came to work for Fischer-Merritt in 2008 for additional training in sustainable farming practices. In 2010 she purchased the land for her Stone’s Throw Farm, just across the road from Northern Harvest Farm.

Conover said CSA shares are about 90 percent of her sales. She also likes to take her produce to farmers markets.

“The Carlton County Farmers Market is really low-key,” she said. “Come when you can, bring what you’ve got. Farmers markets are more affordable for many people than purchasing an entire share.” She said the market is a great way to meet new people interested in quality local food.

Conover still has shares available at Stone’s Throw Farm for this growing season.

Passed down

Janaki Fisher-Merritt, the son of John and Jane, followed the trail his parents had blazed. He is now co-owner of the Food Farm with his wife, Anne Dugan.

“My dad started building a community not of farmers, but of eaters, people who were interested in organic food and the environmental issues surrounding food, and in being connected to the land in a different way,” he said. “These people saw that their choices in how they ate and what they ate had a direct impact on how land was used.”

“Taking responsibility for how you eat is taking responsibility for how the land is used. People feel that fairly personally, once they get that bigger picture,” he said.

Still learning how to farm more sustainably, preserve water quality, and improve the land, the younger Fisher-Merritt has brought new innovations to old practices. In transforming a traditional root cellar on the farm into a state-of-the-art model of cooling efficiency, he enabled the Food Farm to preserve the freshness of their harvest and offer their members winter shares that last well into April.

“It was a whole different ballgame when we could sell winter shares, and people loved it,” John Fisher-Merritt said. “Last year we had 50,000 pounds of carrots in that root cellar, along with cabbage, rutabaga, beets, parsnips. The whole works.”