Reaping the Harvest of Community Support

Some of you might have noticed products from Wintergreen Foods available for sale this past fall and early winter.

Like these ready to eat carrots.

Or these vending machine snacks.

If you missed them, no worries. You'll see plenty more products from Wintergreen Foods on the store shelves this coming season. Last fall was just the beginning.

We started with a soft launch of a few products, most notably Crinkle Cut Carrots, Coleslaw Mix, and Fruit and Flax Leathers, to figure out the logistics of this new aspect of our business and determine the smartest way to proceed. This year we'll increase production of the three products we began selling last year (Expect to see Fruit and Flax Leathers available year round starting this September!) and launch a few new ones, including Baby Greens, the first round of which is already growing in the hoophouse.

The baby arugula looks like this right now.

It has been just over a year and a half since we (made what some have described as a crazy decision and..) purchased an old restaurant and began the process of turning it into a produce processing facility. We're thrilled to be over the initial logistics hump and ready to expand our product availability, but we still have a long way to go and a lot of work to do before we achieve the objectives that led us to take on this (crazy?) project.

As produce farmers, we do not wish for the fruits of our labors to become luxury items. We grow good food that everyone should eat more of. At the same time, we do wish for ourselves and our food growing colleagues to earn a living wage for our hard work. At first glance these two objectives, affordable healthy food and better pay for farmers, might seem to be in opposition, but we don't think they are.

We think that businesses such as Wintergreen Foods, businesses which aim to pool the fruits of regional agricultural production and provide an avenue for growers to share resources when it comes to marketing products, are the key to making a greater variety of affordable healthy foods available to everyone and get consistently higher pay for farmers.

And we are by no means the only folks who think so. It seems that even John Cougar Mellancamp agrees with us. 

But what does all of this produce processing and wholesaling mean for Wintergreen Farm? Will anything change for our market customers and, most importantly, our CSA members--who have supported us from the beginning and are a major factor in the success we have enjoyed thus far as farmers in the Upper Peninsula?

The answer is mostly no.

But before I get to the small things that have and will change on the direct sale side of our business, I'd like to make something clear. We are eternally indebted to the core group of CSA members that has grown with us as we have built Wintergreen Farm. We could not be farmers without you and we never could have undertaken the somewhat lofty project that is Wintergreen Foods without your support.

The major changes that Wintergreen Foods will bring to our CSA program have already taken place. Last year we added a winter share option, something that was only possible because of the cold storage space at Wintergreen Foods, and this year we've seriously streamlined our CSA pick-up locations so that all of our CSA distribution will take place on one day each week. As Wintergreen Foods product distribution expands in the next few years, Wintergreen Farm CSA members are likely to see more changes similar to the changes that have already occurred: more CSA season options (we're toying with the idea of an early spring share) and more streamlining of CSA distributions.

With those small changes, in the forseeable future we will continue serving our CSA members as we have since 2008, and we humbly hope that our members will continue to appreciate and support our efforts as farmers so that we can bring healthy food to not only them, but the region as a whole.

We got Audited!

GAP audited that is.

GAP stands for good agricultural practices. GAP is a voluntary USDA inspection/certification program for farms that want proof they follow reasonable food safety protocols when growing and harvesting produce.

It's kind of a pain in the butt.

This is the cover page of our GAP log book. All those tabs
indicate logs we must fill out or on-farm food safety policies we
need to be aware of as we work.

The audit process is less an inspection of our farm, than an inspection of our log book, which is, you know, not fun. So why did we do it?

Well, GAP certification is a valuable thing for a farmer that wants to sell to institutional customers like schools, hospitals, grocery stores and restaurants. See, the farm to table movement is awesome for bringing local food to individual farmers market or CSA customers, but, while every consumer wants to buy the healthiest food possible (for both their body and their community) not every consumer is able to buy all of their food directly from a farmer or has the opportunity to tour every farm they are interested in buying from to ensure appropriate farming practices are followed.

Getting local food in every mouth in the community means small farms need to make institutional sales and local produce processing facilities need to exist. Farmers can't sit back and expect the world around us to change in a way that brings every hungry person directly to us, we need to change the world ourselves by jumping on to the path that leads to every table in our region.

Sometimes that path looks strange to idealistic farmers. Right now it's mainly tread by large agribusinesses that aren't concerned with producing food that increases the health of the land, local economies, or even the people that eat the food. But it doesn't have to be that way. The path isn't the problem, and it is possible for small farms to take it.

GAP certification is, for us, one of the many steps we can take to boost ourselves onto that path. It's also a part of keeping our farm open to our community and making our farming practices and goals obvious to anyone curious about them. The certification isn't anything like a member work day that brings CSA families out to our farm where they can learn how we farm by helping us do it. The certification is proof that we are using appropriate farming practices, so that the local school cafeteria manager can feel confident purchasing our produce. It just isn't possible for the average cafeteria manager to come spend a day on the farm.

One of the best things about our GAP certification process is that it has been a local process. There have been no anonymous "they" type auditors swooping onto our farm to tell us what we can and can't do. We have been fortunate to be a part of the Group GAP program via the U.P. Food Exchange. That's meant our experience with the GAP certification process (however frustrating it might be) has involved discussing appropriate farm practices and even pooling resources with other farmers in the region. The majority of the farm visits (including our audit) have been done by people we know and trust. People we were already partnering with to bring healthy food to our community.

People like Denina Kaunonen (from the Keweenaw Co-op) and Neal Curran
(from the Marquette Co-op). They're the lucky ones who got to wade
through my log book at audit time.

In the end a handful of the farms that are part of this Group GAP group will be audited by USDA inspectors, to ensure that we have developed appropriate standards as a group. And that's it. The rest is all about self regulation, teamwork, and trust between the farmers and other partners that have chosen to be a part of this Group GAP program.

So, while it's true that log books themselves will never be bucolic, our GAP audit was a valuable part of building the healthy rural community we're a part of. That's why we did it.

And the GAP auditors did have a chance to bring their
clipboards out for a little fresh air.

Nope, We're Not Opening a Restaurant

We are converting this restaurant

into a produce processing facility.

We plan to offer various products, such as bagged salad mixes, frozen squash puree, dried greens, and zucchini chips, for sale to local institutions (like school cafeterias), restaurants, and grocery stores. Items will be made entirely with Upper Peninsula grown produce, some grown by us and some by other area farmers.

Playing with our new Dehydrator.
It's going to be a few months before we really have
products for sale, but drying greens is fun :) 

We'll use the existing walk in cooler to store winter vegetables such as potatoes, beets, carrots, rutabaga, celeriac and anything else we (and other area farmers) decide to grow and, as soon as practical, we plan to build more cold storage in this section of the restaurant:

I imagine there are still some head scratchers out there, people wondering just what, exactly, we are up to. The best term for the business we are undertaking here is regional food hub. That term is quite general, just as any given store will look different from the next, there isn't one specific definition of a food hub. If you would like to learn more about the concept, this USDA publication should shed some light: USDA Regional Food Hub Resource Guide.

So, I hope that answers at least some of the questions that are floating around right now. Stay tuned for more details as we get things underway!