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In 2008, we began planning and making trails on the 70 acres of woodlands that are nestled between our Lodge and Angelic Organics Farm. Our staff and volunteers have been working for years to remove invasive plants in order to liberate the native oak trees and restore balance in our woodlands. Although removing honeysuckle by hand is physically and personally rewarding, this is perhaps the slowest method of ecosystem restoration. Thanks to a generous donation, we were able to hire Bluestem Ecological Services to use their tools on our land. They drove a brush mower over the flattest areas and took down large invasive trees that block sunlight and steal nutrients from native plants. Although the land looks a bit barren now, the woods will be lush and green again in just a few weeks.
Our plan for the future of the woodland includes continuing our regular volunteer restoration work days, reintroducing fire as a natural maintenance tool, using our livestock to graze invasive resprouters, and planting more native species in the areas that have been opened up.
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If you’re looking for a sign that it’s time to turn your farm dream into reality, this is it! Stateline Farm Beginnings® is farmer led, community based, and rooted in sustainable agriculture. Cultivating a diverse network of aspiring and beginning farmers, the program gives participants a leg up in achieving viable farm dreams and fosters the growth of the regional farm leaders of the future.
Stateline Farm Beginnings® is a yearlong course, with 100+ hours of interactive class time and three courses: Farm Dreams Intensive Cohort 1: January to March | Cohort 2: May to July
Skill Building Practicum Cohort 1: March to October | Cohort 2: July to October
Farm Business Intensive Cohorts 1 & 2: October to December
We are excited about the upcoming season. We have scoured through the many seed catalogs, marveled at the beautiful vegetables inside, narrowed our selections down and now we wait with anticipation for them to arrive. While waiting, we recently received a generous gift that makes us very excited for the growing season. Tomato Bob is a family-run seed farm located in Hilliard, Ohio that has been growing for over 20 years. They offer high quality, unique heirloom seeds to local areas and they ship to various farm communities across the midwest. Tomato Bob and his family believe in helping farm communities as well. For the 2022 farming season, the family has donated various vegetable seeds to our Urban Farm, Roots & Wings. Thank you to Tomato Bob and his family for their contribution to our youth development through urban agriculture!
The seeds donated to Roots & Wings include eggplant, radish, swiss chard, tomato, cabbage, arugula, lettuce, beet, honeydew melon, squash, carrot, and broccoli. To learn more or order your own seeds from Tomato Bob, visit their website. Thank you to all who have purchased or donated a CSA share from Roots & Wings. We still have a few summer and fall shares available- details here.
Warm Regards, Tedd, Program Director of Roots & Wings and Yatte, Urban Farm Manager at Roots & Wings The Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education and Service (MOSES) is a nonprofit organization that provides education, resources and expertise to organic and sustainable farmers. A cornerstone of their work is the annual MOSES Organic Farming Conference, the country’s largest conference on organic and sustainable farming, which takes place in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Our native Floridian Farmer Training Program Coordinator, now frost-hardy upper Midwest transplant, Ritchie reported that he had “an immensely enjoyable time.” Not only was this the most time he has spent within leek-swinging distance with his organizational family since moving north, this was also the first time since the pandemic began that he had been in close company with so many immeasurably diverse food system people who have aligned and overlapping purposes, perspectives, and experiences. He thoroughly enjoyed learning about the use of topographically-tailored, wooded riparian buffers in surface water management. He was deeply grateful for the candor and solidarity within BIPOC sessions. And he was intrigued by both old and young farmer approaches towards, and their visions of, post-capitalist economies and organizations centered around informal currencies. “Thanks again to the joyful people with whom we made and shared meals, those we’ve journeyed far with in confined spaces, the late-night visitors, friends we’ve bickered loudly amongst regarding horoscope accuracies, jousted sarcastically against over friendship rankings, cooperatively faced eviction with in light of food pairings, and confronted on all planes of over-amiability including the howling embarrassment of drooling mid-speech. Let’s all do better next year." - Ritchie
How did you get started? I grew up surrounded by nature and animals in Michigan. My parents had a small hobby farm where my mom raised sheep and we had a mischievous goat named Sundance that I loved. A graduate school program brought me to Chicago for an internship and after graduation I took a job in the city. I always felt like something was not quite right and I missed open spaces, nature and animals. Eventually, I was able to change jobs and work in the suburbs. I was drawn to a Conservation Community in Grayslake called Prairie Crossing where at the heart of the neighborhood was a working organic farm. I met many local small farmers from living there and became passionate about local food in the Chicagoland area. Soon after moving there, I applied to a farm business development program that was offered at the farm. Most of the other beginning farmers there were growing vegetables, but I was super drawn to goats and all of the different products you could make from their milk and fiber. I never thought that I would be accepted into the program because I did not have degrees or a real background in agriculture. I was so excited when I was accepted. I purchased three goats as soon as I was accepted and the herd slowly grew from there! My husband and father-in-law built me a small barn on wheels where I could move the goats from pasture to pasture with portable electrical net fencing. I spent four years in the program before moving to Pecatonica and purchasing my own land and farm to build a dairy to make cheese.
What are your proudest achievements? Our soap was featured on Oprah’s website in 2011 as one of her perfect presents. In addition, our soap was carried nationwide in Crate & Barrel stores for a one year contract. The biggest achievement was purchasing our own farm and figuring out how to build a certified dairy and a creamery! Do you have advice for someone who wants to start farming? My advice would be to keep your day job as long as you can. There is a tremendous amount of money that you will need to start a farming enterprise with unexpected costs when buying farm land or building infrastructure. Make friends in your community if moving to a rural place. You need your neighbors in the country! Find a good livestock veterinarian. They are worth their weight in gold and hard to find. You always end up needing one during kidding season in the middle of the night. Allyson Rosemore is one of our amazing Educators and is the founder of Owl’s Roost Farm, an urban farm located in Rockford, Illinois. As a passionate compost expert, Allyson teaches about the cycle of food production and consumption and why compost is important. She says:
Allyson says a fun fact about composting is that the microbiology of the soil the composting materials are in contact with has an impact on the microbiology (and nutritional profile) of the finished compost. This means that choosing your composting site based on what you intend to use your compost for can make a difference. Join the compost partyIf you have the ability and desire to compost at home, great! If not, consider joining the Owl’s Roost Community Compost program. It’s a bucket swap program, so you’ll get a bucket from Allyson, fill it up, then swap it for a clean one. Repeat! To compost with Owl’s Roost Farm, sign up through Grown By.
Letter from our Executive Director, February 2022 An equitable food system is one in which everyone, especially people living in low-income communities and communities of color, can participate, benefit and prosper. Please just sit with that for a moment: everyone can participate, benefit and prosper. Everyone can prosper.
An equitable food system is one in which everyone, especially people living in low-income communities and communities of color, can participate, benefit and prosper. Please just sit with that for a moment: everyone can participate, benefit and prosper. Everyone can prosper. To me, focusing on the word ‘prosper’ is key to increasing equity in the food system because it’s really easy to think that participation and benefit just mean access to fresh food, and that access to fresh food is enough. But it’s not even close. Should you support your local food pantry and advocate for food access in your community? Absolutely. But here are a few more ways you can deepen your efforts to bring about a more equitable food system:
February is the month we celebrate Black History, the month we celebrate love and friendship, the month we celebrate CSAs during CSA Week. The message is clear, don’t you think? Celebrate February by taking action today to support a more equitable food system. Everyone can and should prosper. AuthorJackie de Batista, Executive Director
Also, currently we are utilizing a heater to warm a portion of one of our high tunnels and we are experimenting with growing vegetables over the winter. This creates its own challenges because we run the heater during the day while we are on the farm and turn it off in the evening when we depart. Typically at night is when it’s the coldest outside and our plants are left under these conditions, but we cover all of our plants with row covers to try and provide an extra layer of insulation during this time. We are experimenting with growing both cool season crops (kale, spinach, collards, mustards, etc), and some warm season crops (beans, and summer squash). Also, we have to hand water our new seedlings because we don’t have access to water over the winter in our high tunnels. I’m encouraged that many of the vegetable seedlings are starting to grow. After all of this, we now have to decide how much to grow in the community garden for the residents of Blackhawk Courts, what to grow for upcoming events we hold annually, and how much to grow for our CSA business and for potential markets. Because all of these needs come at different times of the season, we have to plan a series of succession planting throughout the season to make sure we are consistently covering our needs. All of these decisions are daunting and challenging but will allow us to have a successful growing season.
I’m happy to say this was a huge success! Practically every seed we requested was granted. I want to thank Choices Natural Market and their customers for supporting our program in this way. Finally, if you are interested in receiving fresh organically grown fruits, vegetables, and herbs, please consider purchasing a CSA share from us. Visit our webpage for more information about our program. Warm Regards,
Tedd, Program Director of Roots & Wings and Yatte, Urban Farm Manager at Roots & Wings Vanessa Quiñones, the dynamic owner-operator of The Victory Garden Farm, joined Angelic Organics Learning Center’s farmer training community in 2014 as a Stateline Farm BeginningsⓇ participant. In 2021, the public voted her as Beginning Farmer of the Year, an award presented by Routes to Farm, an alliance of farmer training organizations across Illinois and Indiana.
The Victory Garden Farm sits on five beautiful acres in Fredonia, Wisconsin. The farm’s mission statement reads, “We strive to leave the land better than how we found it by increasing biodiversity and building strong sustainable systems. We supply our local community, friends and family with the healthiest, best tasting food possible.”
The farm operates a successful farm store, with products that have been featured on many local restaurant menus. Vanessa understands the need to continually pivot, and the viability of her farm grows each year. In 2021, despite the constraints of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, The Victory Garden Farm doubled in size and hired its first two employees. Her latest accomplishment? Vanessa went on vacation at the end of the 2021 growing season – something all farmers know as a feat to behold.
Vanessa masterfully balances her passion with the realities of the unforgiving trade. When asked what advice she would give to her younger self, Vanessa says, “Start small! Do not take on too many enterprises at once.” Great advice from a farmer who has learned to roll with the punches. Keep up with Vanessa’s work by following The Victory Garden Farm on Facebook and Instagram. about the AwardThe Beginning Farmer of the Year award is sponsored by the collaborating Farmer Alliances in Routes to Farm, serving beginning farmers across the greater Chicago foodshed. Routes to Farm is generously supported by Searle Funds at The Chicago Community Trust.
Perry first heard about Angelic Organics Learning Center through our friend Bob Benson, author of Local Food Forum. Last August, Perry and his wife attended our Welcome to the Farm dinner and he says, “I was sold.” Perry prioritizes sourcing his ingredients from biodynamic farms, and he appreciates that Angelic Organics Learning Center educates people of all ages on the value of biodynamic agriculture. He has witnessed miraculous results using regeneratively grown and spagerically extracted botanicals and mushrooms.
Perry joined 1% for the Planet because “It’s the right thing to do, and aligns with our mission of placing our planet and product quality first.” In addition to donating 1% of his business profits to Angelic Organics Learning Center, Perry plans to get involved with us by attending programs and sending his children to our Farm Camp. He says he can’t wait to get dirty and learn! Located in Northfield, Illinois, FuFlun’s Foods offers artisanally crafted adaptogenic herbs and fungi perfected in nature, not a laboratory. Their products are proven and appreciated by naturopathic doctors, acupuncturists, and some of the most discerning retailers in the world including California’s ultra-trendy Erewhon Market. Learn more about their practices and products at FuFlunsFoods.com.
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Angelic Organics Learning Center
1545 Rockton Rd. | Caledonia, IL 61011
815-389-8455 | connect@learngrowconnect.org
1545 Rockton Rd. | Caledonia, IL 61011
815-389-8455 | connect@learngrowconnect.org
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