Abra Berens: A Seasons of Change Q&A
Plus, Meet the Recipients of the 2021 Frontera Farmer Foundation Grants
In This Issue
• Chef Abra Berens Walks the Walk at Granor Farm
• Frontera Foundation Gives $160K in Farmer Grants
Chef Abra Berens Walks the Walk at Granor Farm
A Seasons of Change Q-and-A
There are chefs who are local food advocates and there are farmers who are local food advocates. Abra Berens of Michigan’s certified organic Granor Farm is one of the few who is both… and quite possibly the only one who has been nominated by the James Beard Foundation for Best Chef Great Lakes and Best Cookbook.
Abra grew up on a farm, attended University of Michigan, and got the culinary bug while working at Ann Arbor’s famed Zingerman’s Deli. After benefiting from mentors — such as Darina Allen of Ireland’s Ballymaloe Cookery School and farm-to-table pioneer Paul Virant of Vie restaurant in suburban Chicago’s Western Springs — she made her mark as the opening chef for the café at Local Foods in Chicago.
All during this, Abra and her husband owned a farm in Traverse City, Michigan, and she planned at some point to return to her home state. Granor Farm, which had at first contacted Abra about participating in a farm dinner rotation, instead hired her full-time in May 2017. Since then, her acclaimed seven-course farm dinners and her vegetable cookbook Ruffage (from which Local Food Forum is re-publishing recipes) earned her those James Beard nominations, and she and the farm rode out the challenges of COVID-plagued 2020.
So let’s lead into the excerpted q-and-a from our interview with Abra with some good news: The farm dinners are coming back this year, in a brand new structure currently under construction, and she has a second cookbook coming out this fall called Grist, which will capture the growing importance of local small grains in our region’s food culture.
Q: Okay, so since we last talked at Local Foods, you've had a few things going on. Let's talk a little bit about your decision to move to Granor Farm.
A: Granor is a really special place because it's both a certified organic vegetable and small grain farm, but it was started to be farm camp for kids. And so there's always been this educational component to it…
One of the driving statistics for us is that about a hundred years ago, 30 percent of our population were farmers and today it's about 3 percent. And so one of the things I'm so fixated on, as someone who grew up on a farm, is how few people actually interact with farmers or actually have any sense of what it takes to grow this food. And so that's what we're trying to show. Certainly Granor is only one type of farm, but it's how we do it.
Q: You really hit the bullseye on what this newsletter is all about. That's really my intention to create a consumer-facing platform that raises people's consciousness about how food gets to your table.
A: The thing I really love about the meals that we host at Granor is that they are based exclusively around what we grow. Most traditional cooking schools will teach you to think up the dish and then find ingredients for it. And we do it the opposite way where we look at what we have, what we're excited about, what we have a lot of, and then write the menu from there… It hopefully gives people kind of a real snapshot of what our farm looks like at this particular moment in time…
We're growing biodiverse vegetables, intensively cultivated. Granor also has an additional 350 acres of small grain, which I think is really inspiring and incredible because they're mostly in organic certified grain, and that has really grown since I started. So when I first started in 2017, I think there were like 10 acres of rye that was mostly being harvested to be distilled into whiskey... There's wheat, rye, barley, oats, heritage wheats. There's heritage and heirloom corns. I think we did some soy beans last year and things like kernza… There was I think a two-month period this fall where all the bread we were making was with Granor-grown wheat, which was just awesome.
Q: It took me a long time to be confident enough to be a scratch cook, but now my philosophy is “what's in the fridge.”
A: The whole point of Ruffage was a give people a little window into what it takes to grow it, how to select it at the market and how to store it once you get it home, and to give people some foundational cooking techniques.
I think I learned the most from Paul Virant, we would make hundreds of jars of pickled ramps or pickled tomatoes or whatever, but then we would use them so differently so they never felt like the same ingredient. And so I think that's something chefs and good cooks really kind of understand and want to open people's eyes to that possibility.
Q: Okay, so everything is moving along, you probably had your farm dinner schedule set and then this monstrosity hit last year. How did that affect you and the farm and what pivots did you make?
A: A tremendous amount of work by the farm manager and the farm store manager went into converting our entire retail operation to an online and e-commerce platform. For me the biggest thing, we ended up canceling all of the dinners last year…
We cancelled farm camp, but we had such a big uptick in demand for the produce and the things we were selling through the farm store, which also include local meat and dairy and eggs and other grains and things like that… It's not like sandwiches that are ready to go but more things to go with the produce, different dressings and condiments, and then we have the bread available. So we went from kind of tinkering around with bread for the dinner program, which would mean five or six loaves for a weekend, to making about 70 loaves a week all for pickup…
I certainly think we saw [during the pandemic] that the demand [for local food] is there. I think Americans as a whole got kind of a crash course in how sort of ruthlessly efficient our food supply system or our food chain is, but then also I think for a lot of people it’s the first time they’d ever seen grocery store shelves bare and what that means and how that makes them feel. And I think the groundwork was laid for the local food movement.
Special offer for paid subscribers: The above are excerpts of the interview with Abra Berens. I am sure that some of you want to hear more from this talented and thoughtful chef, so I am going to clean up the transcript and publish it as a new benefit for paid subscribers only. We will be adding more paid subscriber benefits over the next few weeks. We love our free subscribers too, but paid subscriptions will make Local Food Forum a sustainable business, and we’re all about sustainability, aren’t we?
Frontera Foundation Gives $160K in Farmer Grants
The Frontera Farmer Foundation, created in 2003 by Chef Rick Bayless, announced its annual outright grants with 14 local farmers sharing in a total of $160,000. The grants provide support for capital development projects that enable the recipients to grow their businesses.
Bayless arrived in Chicago in 1987 to start Frontera Grill after a long sojourn in Mexico, bringing an encyclopedic knowledge of regional Mexican food and a belief that locally produced food improves the quality of prepared dishes.
Discovering that little locally farmed food could be found in Chicago at the time, he cultivated sourcing relationships with farmers, began lending them money to expand their operations, and then, with wife/business partner Deann Bayless, created the nonprofit Frontera Farmer Foundation. The Foundation has since made well more than $2 million in farmer grants.
Here are the 2021 recipients:
Bike a Bee
Chicago — Urban beekeeping
Project: Expand to 80 beehives (from 40) located across three larger “production apiaries” to increase honey production
Blue Moon Community Farm
Stoughton, Wisconsin — Produce farm
Project: Pack shed improvements for efficiency and food safety
Branches and Berries
Wauzeka, Wisconsin — Berry, rhubarb and decorative branches farm
Project: Purchase of a commercial dehydrator to make berry juice and dehydrated berries
Caveny Farm
Monticello, Illinois — Poultry and lamb farm
Project: Finish the installation of permanent woven wire fences on 33 acres of grazed highly erodible land
Cook Farm
Bloomington, Illinois — Produce farm
Project: Farm infrastructure improvement
Craig Farm Katahdins
Decatur, Michigan — Sheep farm
Project: Purchase of a fully functioning sheep working system to assist with husbandry and transport between home and leased pastures, and to update fencing throughout the farm including building fence-line feeders for clean and efficient winter feeding
Door Creek Orchard
Cottage Grove, Wisconsin — Apple farm
Project: Acquisition of a flail mower and side arm mower attachment for use on our farm
Froggy Meadow Farm
Beloit, Wisconsin — Produce farm
Project: Construction of a 20’ X 10′ packing/pump shed
Grounded Earth Farm
Crown Point, Indiana — Vegetable, fruit and nut farm
Project: Construction of a year-round propagation house to expand our ability to serve the community, increase production capacity, expand to wholesale and further diversify our crops
Steadfast Acres
Lone Rock, Wisconsin — Produce farm
Project: Expansion of on-farm greenhouse
The Victory Garden Farm
Fredonia, Wisconsin — Produce and poultry farm
Project: Purchase of a a 16×24 mobile chicken tractor & 72×30 high tunnel
Three Sisters Community Farm
Campbellsport, Wisconsin — Vegetable farm
Project: Purchase of a high-pressure rinse conveyor used to wash and sanitize both produce and plastic crates & purchase of an electric hydraulic stacking machine used to lift and convey pallet loads of produce onto and off vehicles and into coolers
Timberfeast
Chatsworth, Illinois — Grass-fed livestock farm
Project: Down payment on a refrigerated van & safety upgrade for farmers and consumers
Willow Ridge Organic Farm
Wauzeka, Wisconsin — Produce farm
Project: Rebuilding a storm-damaged storage shed