by Holly Hughes
Now in its third year, Kenney’s farm will serve about 60 members—she’s expanded to two acres of land, growing enough vegetables, flowers, fruit and herbs for her members as well as for a few restaurants, including The Market Restaurant in Annisquam. Her CSA has two levels, with the option of a deluxe add-on that might include honey, syrup or local cheese. Because her membership is small, she knows many of her customers personally and often tailors shares to what they want (such as arugula over kohlrabi or tatsoi). “My farm is really personal to me and I want everyone who is involved in it to enjoy it and to choose to be there,” she says. Most of her members have come through word of mouth—many of them through the riding center itself.
As for profitability, Kenney says the first few years have been flat—she lives rent free as the caretaker of another farm and has made enough through the CSA and weekly trips to the Newburyport Farmers Market to pay off the irrigation equipment, greenhouse costs, seed, fertilizer and market supplies that she uses each season. Last year, she brought on an apprentice/partner who now runs her market operation, plus she’s enlisted work-share volunteers and a few high school students as interns. She’s still a few seasons away from bringing in a salary, she says, but her quality of life is what really matters. “Having my own farm, there’s just so much purpose. It’s completely reshaped how I think about my life,” she says. “It’s challenging but there is a lot of joy in it.”
“I really didn’t expect to be a farmer at all,” says 33-year-old Christy Kantlehner of Wrentham’s White Barn Farm. “I thought I had a black thumb.”
It turned out, all Kantlehner really needed was a little confidence. After studying sustainable development at UMass Amherst, she took an internship on a farm out in Oregon where she also worked at a sustainable restaurant and started her first garden. She returned home to Wrentham where her grandparents lived on five acres—land that had been in the family for generations. There was an old horse barn and a back field that had been used for hay, but otherwise the property sat unused.
Kantlehner knew she wanted to do something with the land but took her time gaining the skills to turn it into a full-fledged farm. While waiting tables at Al Forno in Providence, she revived the family garden by growing a small selection of crops and flowers. But she needed more hands-on experience. She took 10 months to travel through Europe with World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF), a program that connects volunteers with organic farms around the world. Working her way through Switzerland, France and Italy, she picked up Old-World farming techniques while, along the way, a mental picture of her own farming life began to take shape. She spent the trip taking notes, drawing up crop plans and mapping out the best uses for her family’s land.
Back at home, Kantlehner took a class through the Department of Agricultural Resources called Tilling the Soil of Opportunity. The course helped her lay out a business plan and a name for the farm—both of which she presented to her family to make a case for her start-up. With their approval, she planted a quarter of an acre in 2008 and made plans to clear and plant an additional three acres by the following year. That first season, she farmed in the mornings, made it to markets on the weekends and waited tables at night. She also lived in her grandmother’s house rent-free.
“I didn’t pay myself at all and only had volunteer labor but was able to pay back all of my expenses that first year,” she says. With her earnings, she bought herself a disc harrow and a manure spreader—both of which she needed to open up the additional field—and spent that winter planning for her first CSA. She also started attending meetings of CRAFT, an Eastern Massachusetts collaborative alliance for farmer training, where she met another young farmer named Chris.
“One thing that was always terrifying for me was that I would be doing this alone,” admits Kantlehner. Her vision of a fulfilling farm life included meeting a farm husband—and Chris turned out to be the one. Once Kantlehner shared her farm vision, Chris immediately volunteered to partner up and the two started the CSA in 2009. They were married last year—and are expecting their first child in October.
Today, White Barn Farm has about 75 CSA members and a farm stand, which sells vegetables, flower bouquets and other local products like honey, seafood and coffee. Kantlehner is hoping to use the farm in other ways over the coming years, both as a venue for events (her own wedding took place on the farm last year) and a community gathering place for her CSA members—they sometimes project movies on the side of the barn and invite members to bring a picnic. For Kantlehner, the vision of the farming life and the reality are still very much aligned. “It’s amazing how it all worked out,” she says.
Like Karen Pettinelli at Terrosa Farm, Meryl LaTronica is totally into tractors. As farm manager of Powisset Farm in Dover, a property owned by the Trustees of Reservations, she’s in the fortunate position of having a few of them—as well as a barn to house them and a mechanic when she needs one. In 2006, the Trustees turned the Powisset land trust into a working CSA, something they’d also done with one of their properties in Ipswich. They hired LaTronica, who had apprenticed at Blue Heron Farm and Waltham Fields Community Farm, to be their farm manager.
“It wasn’t as if the money would be mine—it all goes back to the Trustees—but as a young person there was no possible way I could buy my own farm and make this all happen,” she says. “It was the best of both worlds.”
LaTronica grew up in Holliston and came to farming in her early 20s. About a year after finishing college at Simmons, when she was working at Veggie Planet in Harvard Square, she attended a protest against the war in Afghanistan and recognized one of the picketers—Ellery Kimball of Blue Heron Farm, a supplier for Veggie Planet—who held a “Farmers For Peace” sign. “I had been mulling over this idea of farming so I ran over and told her I what I was interested in. A week later I was working for her,” says LaTronica.
Her apprentice position with Blue Heron, and later at Waltham, gave her a solid foundation but when LaTronica arrived at Powisset, she was faced with the daunting task of starting a farm almost completely from scratch. There was a large cow barn, which she and her team cleared out and turned into a CSA pickup space, as well as eight acres of fields, which had been plowed but had no other infrastructure in place.
“I got here and they told me, ‘OK, you have 90 members signed up.’ It was a total whirlwind,” she says. Membership has since grown to about 340 members and they’ve plowed three additional acres. LaTronica now manages the farm with an assistant manager, three apprentices and a number of work-share volunteers; she and two of the apprentices have housing on the property.
Unlike Kenney, Kantlehner and Pettinelli, who are all self-employed, LaTronica is tasked with satisfying a much larger body of overseers. A 100-page document, written by the founders of the farm and managed by the Trustees, guides LaTronica’s vision for expansion, further farm development and CSA program growth. This year, in an effort to create more urban partnerships, Powisset will supply vegetables to the ReVision Urban Farm in Dorchester to help fill their CSA shares.
For LaTronica, filling a need in the community is one of the greatest rewards. “Farms have this way of gathering people—they’re drawn in by food and the energy,” she says, echoing a sentiment that Pettinelli, Kenney and Kantlehner also conveyed.
As the women gear up for another summer, they each expressed hope for a successful season and excitement for getting back in touch with their customers. Though there will be an unknown set of challenges facing them after this abnormally mild winter, they all understand that farming is their own choice and no matter how they came to it as a career, they’re grateful to be able to do it. Their motivations, after all—working outdoors, preserving and managing a piece of land, lifestyle, sensory experiences, tractors—are secondary to what is fundamentally a job that feeds and nourishes people in their community. LaTronica sums it up perfectly: “To be in the dirt and be outside and see the world happening . . . I have the best job in the world.”
THE CHEESE ARTIST
By Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl
From Minneapolis St. Paul Magazine
New-Yorker-turned-Minnesotan Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl has championed the dynamic Twin Cities food scene for over 15 years, winning five James Beard Awards along the way. She writes about food, she writes about wine—and naturally, the meeting point of the two: cheese.
What would a great horned owl want with a lamb? Just the brains, really. One will fly in over the flock of dairy sheep and grab a young lamb in its talons, then make like a zombie, and fly away. Eagles eat the whole lamb. So do black bears, wolves, and the primary problem, coyotes.
But to lamb guardian and artisan cheesemaker Mary Falk, co-owner of LoveTree Farmstead in Grantsburg, Wisconsin, the predators that target her prized Trade Lake sheep—the creatures that provide the milk from which she makes her exquisite cheese—aren’t the true danger. The real danger lurks in the cities, where people don’t understand what complex ecology means, where people think you can kill your way to abundance and pleasure. Because if your pleasure is cheese, you should know that Falk makes what many call some of the finest cheese in the United States—maybe even the world. And she does it by nurturing a complex ecology of top predators, gentle grazers, and many much smaller creatures. “The University of Wisconsin sent a guy out here who was doing a predator count in the state,” she says. “He counted ours and said we were crazy.”
Falk doesn’t look crazy. She looks like Jane Fonda playing the role of a farmer who has been out in the sun all day. Her hair is the color of honey, her eyes like a light-green leaf in a sun-dappled forest. She came to the Twin Cities as a radio host, and she has the perfect voice for it, gravelly like Kathleen Turner’s, the kind of voice that makes you lean in to hear more. And when she laughs, her voice broadens and deepens into a welcoming boom. It even does this when she’s telling a rueful tale, like the time she let coyote hunters on her land and they mistakenly took out “the alpha bitch,” disrupting a long-established hierarchy. “She had been running things around here for 10 years, managing two packs of coyotes, keeping them away from the sheep. Once she was gone, all hell broke loose. We went from having perfectly well-behaved coyotes, as those things go, to civil war.”
There are many reasons for the great number of predators on LoveTree Farmstead, where Falk and her husband, Dave, have been raising dairy sheep since 1989. The St. Croix River isn’t far, and it’s a major reserve for great birds such as bald eagles and red-tailed hawks. The land around LoveTree holds eight lakes that act as a water road to the river, attracting all sorts of critters, and there is a string of state forests and wildlife reserves just north of LoveTree. Then there’s the fact that Dave and Mary like predators, insofar as they support the grand balance of nature. That’s why they keep half of their 130 acres as their very own “wildlife refuge.” This gives trumpeter swans, osprey, otters, and several less benign animals free run of the spring-fed ponds and rolling hills covered with lavender clouds of bluestem and yellow sparks of birdsfoot trefoil.
To combat the predators without actually waging full-scale war, Mary has assembled a sort of Dr. Doolittle–style SWAT team of protective animals. There are the lookouts: tall, shaggy llamas who spy predators at the perimeters no matter which way the wind is blowing. If the llamas see something, they let the guard dogs know. Mary’s guard dogs are a special crossbreed of Spanish Ranch Mastiffs, American-bred Italian Maremmas, and Polish Tatras. They are the size of a timber wolf and are fiercely committed to their lambs and ewes, among whom they live 12 months a year. On any given day, these impressive dogs can be seen poking their heads up a few inches above an ocean of wool, like seals in the sea. They can easily take down a coyote, and they can make a wolf think a lamb is more trouble than it’s worth.
The final members of the SWAT team are the border collies, who take on crowd management in the event of an attack, rounding the sheep into a tight flock.
By nature, the LoveTree dairy sheep don’t flock; they eat, outside, year round, making the sweet milk that Mary gathers and turns into cheese. On Saturdays, she sets up shop at the St. Paul Farmers’ Market and sells cheese to people who, curiously enough, have no idea that they are buying some of the best-tasting cheese in the world.
The Taste of Genius
Tami Lax is the founder of Madison’s Slow Food chapter and owns two of Madison’s best restaurants: the famous white-tablecloth Harvest and the casual Old Fashioned Tavern. Before that, she was the chief buyer and forager for an even-more-famous Madison restaurant, L’Etoile. That’s where she met Mary.
“To this day, I’ve never had a cheese culinary experience like the day I met Mary,” she remembers. “I was at L’Etoile, and she brought in all these little samples. I don’t want to say it was life-changing, but I was absolutely speechless at every sample of cheese. The word ‘genius’ is the first thing that came to my mind, and it’s the word that has stayed.”
As the chief cheese buyer for her restaurants, and a former American Cheese Society judge, Lax has tasted as many Wisconsin cheeses as anyone. “Mary’s easily one of the top three cheesemakers in Wisconsin, there is no doubt in my mind,” she says. “The originality of what she does—each of her cheeses has such a unique flavor profile. Such depth, such texture—her cheese is always a mind-blowing experience for me, even years later.”
Steven Jenkins, another fan, wrote the book on cheese, literally. His 1996 book, Steven Jenkins Cheese Primer, is the definitive reference for Americans who want to understand cheese. “Mary is the most talented, drop-dead cheesemaker of my career,” he proclaims. “Her Trade Lake Cedar is an American treasure. What she does to get her sheep’s milk—my God. Her sheepdogs have to protect that flock from eagles, bears, wolves—it’s a wild wonderland. That she’s not a superstar and as rich as some bogus so-called ‘celebrity’ chef is criminal.”
Jenkins’s beef with celebrity chefs is this: He feels that artisans like Mary do all the work, and chefs get all the credit. “All chefs do is pick over and buy what artisans and retailers have spent 20 years working on.” In Jenkins’s view, these poseur chefs are aided and abetted by “hackneyed food writers who keep talking about terroir. What lunacy this idea of striving for terroir is! Cheese is either well made or it’s not. It’s either made by somebody who has that magical spark or it isn’t. You can’t actively imbue your foodstuff with terroir. That happens by God and the supernatural, and it’s a natural outgrowth of your talent as a cheesemaker.”
Terroir is indeed a popular idea in food right now, and it looks to be growing in importance. The idea is this: If a food is from a specific place, and only that place, it will taste of that place. What makes Italy, Bordeaux, and Wisconsin different are the plants, trees, soil, bedrock, rain, rivers, ponds, and lakes there, all the way down the life chain to the tiny microscopic molds and microflora that, incidentally, make cheese possible.
The idea of terroir finds its fullest flower in wine writing: Austrian riesling vines plunge their taproots 40 feet under the ground to retrieve water, and in the process somehow come back with the taste of slate. That idea of terroir is almost entirely responsible for the difference between $10 and $400 wines. But terroir is a critical underpinning of cheese as well. For instance, Roquefort, the famous blue cheese, came about because of the specific natural interactions of a certain little part of southern France, called the Larzac Plateau, where there is a plain of red clay that isn’t much good for tilling but is very good for grazing. Sheep were fed there, and their milk turned into cheese, which was stored in natural limestone caves of the region that happened to provide an excellent medium for growing a wild, bluish mold indigenous to those caves, a mold now named Penicillium roqueforti, which is cultivated and distributed worldwide.
Cheddar cheese came from a similar but different interplay between the milk of cows from a certain part of southwestern England and wild molds in the caves of the Cheddar gorge. Gruyere cheese has the same story in Switzer
land. Today, around the world, and especially in the United States, most cheeses are a sort of 40th-generation carbon copy of that original moment of lightning in a bottle: They’re made with commercially cultivated strains of the original molds and bacteria and milk that has been pasteurized, then named after that original tangle of animal, plants, and cave.
An American Original
To make an American cheese with the significance of Roquefort, Cheddar, or real Swiss Fribourg Gruyere is not easy. It requires three things: one, a belief that making such a cheese is possible; two, the willingness to do what it takes to make it happen; and three, an essential erasure of the modern world.
LoveTree Farmstead is where Mary effectively erases the modern world. There are the wolves and great horned owls, of course, but more germane to cheese production are the untilled, herbicide-free, pesticide-free fields of wild grasses, nettles, sedges, and assorted plants on her land. The dairy sheep rotate through the fields, contained by mobile electric fences—her one concession to modernity. The Falks move the sheep into one meadow, with their attendant animal SWAT team, then the sheep and lambs advance, often standing single file like a herd of munching Rockettes, slowly chewing. At the end of the day, the Falks retrieve them, milk them, and then move them into another field.
I toured these fields with Mary one day—fields with names such as Little Eden and Beer Can Stand—and with each footfall a hundred little bugs would hop and skitter: grasshoppers, crickets, odd little leaf jumpers. It sounded like we were walking through a bag of potato chips. “A guy from the USDA came out here to take soil samples for a statewide census of what’s living in the soil,” Mary says. “He said we had more worms than anybody.”
