New Farmers Grow for Our Local Food System!
Driving east from Roscoe, Illinois, toward Angelic Organics farm one sees a familiar site: hundreds of new tract homes gobbling up rich agricultural land. It is a worrisome trend when viewed alongside daily stories of tainted imported foods. If we lose the farmland and continue to lose farmers, where will our food come from?
If you pass the tract homes and keep driving east, two bright signs crop up on the right hand side of Elevator Road: one reads “Pine Row Farm: vegetables, eggs” and the other “Margie’s Grass Kickin’ Chickens: vegetables, chicken, pork.” Hungry for fresh, local food, neighbors are downshifting and entering these two driveways in droves.
While the daily papers pose questions for us all about where, when, and how food ends up on the grocery store shelves, more and more people are looking for signs like these along the road that give them a chance to meet the farmers that grow their food face-to-face.
The Learning Center launched the Stateline Farm Beginnings® program two years ago to prepare the next generation of sustainable farmers for our local food system. Since then, more than 20 new farms have walked the path from dream to reality, with the support of experienced farmer mentors. We are seeing a great snapshot of the new face of agriculture. It’s a younger and more creative agriculture than twenty-five or thirty years ago, it’s distinctly more female, and it’s peopled by ex-engineers, lawyers, bond traders, college-age idealists, and more than a few artists, writers, and musicians. Only a minority has farm experience or was raised on a farm, but they have passion for it.
Don Larson, one of our new neighborhood farmers, is a music professor and jazz saxophone player in several area bands. He and his wife Tresea, a potter, learned about Stateline Farm Beginnings® through their neighbors Mark and Margaret Nelson of Margie’s Grass Kickin’ Chickens – graduates of the 2006 program. In 2007, the Larsons started Pine Row Farm.
Don and Tresea’s pasture-fed chicken eggs have become something of a sensation. Enough so that it led one customer to lean in toward Don one day and in a lowered voice exclaim, “You better watch it Don, you run out of eggs around here and you might have a revolution on your hands.”
Look for Farm Beginnings® graduates throughout the region and support them with a purchase and encouragement (farming is still one of the most demanding and difficult vocations). Graduates of the program are selling at Logan Square, Wicker Park, Deerfield, North Park, Lake Bluff, and Green City farmers’ markets in Chicago, in Geneva, Rockford, and directly from their farms.