For Farmers, Resilience is a Must
Three Sisters Garden recaps a year that started terribly but ended well
Bright Start to a Cold Day
On Getting Knocked Down and Getting Back Up
It takes a good bit of steel in the spine to be a farmer under normal circumstances. While nature serves in the form of the food and other natural products that farmers produce, it can take away without warning by unleashing torrential rains, drought, untimely deep freezes, and damaging windstorms.
And farmers have to reach even further down when disasters such as fires put their livelihoods at risk.
Tracey Vowell of Three Sisters Garden in Kankakee, Illinois had to deal with just that this year. A fire at a nearby farm that provided her with storage destroyed crucial equipment and product inventory. Through her own strong will and the help of our local food community, Tracey bounced back and had a near-normal growing season, but it wasn’t easy.
Tracey recaps her year in the article below. Tomorrow, we’ll continue the theme with the stories of Alex Finn, owner of Finn’s Ranch livestock farm, and Peter Klein of Seedling Fruit, who shared their resilience stories at a Sustainable Supper presented recently by Green City Market.
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Some years are just more difficult than others. A fire year just adds a layer that cannot be completely described.
February 16 was a momentous day, and a signal of a great deal of unplanned change for Three Sisters Garden. I rolled up to the big barn to load up on black beans; we keep a working quantity here at my farm, but our main stores were at a nearby farm in a short semi trailer, literally inches away, along the north wall of the barn.
If you have not seen the pictures, imagine total destruction and incredible carnage, bringing down a substantial barn chock full of tractors, implements, trucks, tools, more tools, small farm wares, boxes, beans, popcorn, and literally thousands of the bags we use for our sweet corn, as we purchased the last of a type that has gone unavailable. There were enough bags alone to take us through a few seasons.
You deal with the big stuff. People help, you raise money, there is some insurance.
But it is the little stuff that eats you alive. Crates, buckets, tomato stakes and twine, drip irrigation stocks and tools. You remember the hoses and the fittings, but in our case, the punch tool and radiator clamps were more elusive. And it happened over and over again all summer.
It became my job to try to stay out in front of equipment and wares, but even then, time was lost to local procurement or waiting for supply chain problems to loosen up. Spring planting of our small seeds almost completely passed us by before we were able to replace our planter, because 3-inch U-bolts were unavailable. At every turn, there was some little prickle, sometimes an outright stab, of realization regarding how another part of our plan had been deeply affected.
We planted, did what we could with what we had, and although we really did — and still do with winter spinach — run late, this season has not been the farming career-ending disaster I expected it to be.
And along the way, I have felt a level of love and support from every angle of my world, much of it completely unexpected.
Home customers demanding a donation button on the website. Restaurants not asking how they could help, but asking when and where instead. Rick Bayless at Frontera IMMEDIATELY coming forward, making it clear they were already planning on doing something substantial to help [note: Tracey worked as executive chef at Rick’s restaurants before she embarked on her farming career]. Bob and his Local Food Forum newsletter actually being the first to spread the word outside of my website newsletter, set so much in motion at a time when I could barely remember my name. So much support came, quite literally from everywhere I went.
Did we have the best season ever? Well, no, but I can honestly say we did not have the worst season ever, and that counts for a great deal more to me. We tried to grow at least some of everything we normally would, and decided to move forward with expanding our herb program, which worked out fairly well. We pared back from the start, in some ways knowing that everything would take a bit longer.
Like everywhere else, good help has become pretty scarce in Kankakee, so we planned it to not be more than the three of us this year. We do usually have a couple guys around part-time in the biggest part of the summer.
Thankfully we were productive with the things that mattered. Sweet corn was strong, as were the squashes and cucumbers. Garlic was productive. Really nice poblanos, enough cayennes to dry for winter sales, and squashes through most of the summer. Perfect, no, but we showed up, and that is honestly more than I really thought we would be able to accomplish this year.
An event like a fire casts a bright light, I guess both literally and figuratively. So many have done so much for me and my tiny farm this year. In some ways, it was a marvelous season, as I went from the most isolating moments of my life to an extended period of most included.
A very illuminating season, indeed.
This Weekend’s Farmers Market Schedule
This is a big weekend for the region’s indoor farmers market schedule. Green City Market opens its winter market at a new location in Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood. I just learned this morning that the Wicker Park Farmers Market will be indoors on selected Sundays starting this weekend. And several markets that took the Thanksgiving weekend off are back at it.