In This Issue
• Northern Illinois Young Farmers Coalition’s Land Access Event
• Three Sisters Garden: Cultivating Plants and Memories in a Greenhouse
Northern IL Young Farmers Virtual Event 2/7
I’ve written several times about the critical need to build the ranks of young farmers, at a time when the USDA reports that the average age of farmers in the U.S. is around 60. Fortunately, there are many younger people who are interested in producing food, and many of those want to pursue regenerative and sustainable practices on the land.
That is why I am pleased to support the Northern Illinois Young Farmers Coalition, which launched last year and is gaining momentum. The Coalition’s first event of the year — “Solving the Puzzle,” to be held online on Monday, February 7 at 7 p.m. central — focuses on access to affordable and productive land, a crucial issue for those looking to get into farming or to scale up operations on existing small farms.
Please check out the release from the Coalition, and click the button below to register.
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Hi All,
We listened and heard - Land Access is the biggest issue our members are dealing with.
We are excited to announce our first event of 2022: a virtual event on Monday, February 7, 2022, at 7 pm to engage deeper with fellow NIYFC members regarding their experiences — both barriers and successes — with access to land in northern Illinois. We will be joined by Nathan from Liberty Prairie Foundation, Jim from Illinois LandLink, and Emy from The Conservation Fund to further learn about some of the opportunities that are already here for you to succeed.
Please register for the event here. While this conversation may impact beginning farmers in northern Illinois the most, we encourage all farmers, dreaming and current, from all stages of their careers or enterprises, to join us and share YOUR voice! Please reach out to us directly at northernillinoisyoungfarmers@gmail.com if you have a story you want to share.
This event is free and you do not need to be a member of NIYFC to attend! Please share registration link with your networks.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Joining Organizations
Nathan Aaberg is the Director of Conservation & Working Lands at Liberty Prairie Foundation and developer of the Foundation’s Northeast Illinois FarmLink program. Northeast Illinois FarmLink, made possible by funding from Food:Land:Opportunity, exists to help connect farmers and farmland owners and to enable them to work out mutually beneficial land access arrangements.
Jim Kurczodyna is the FarmLink Navigator for Northeast Illinois FarmLink. Jim manages the free profile posting service on the FarmLink website and also provides advice to farmers and farmland owners on their land access journeys. Jim and his family are homesteading on a five-acre property in Woodstock.
Emy Brawley is Illinois State Director for The Conservation Fund, a national organization with a dual mission of land conservation and sustainable economic development. In 2021, The Conservation Fund launched a new program to support next-generation farmers with affordable land access, leveraging the USDA’s Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP) in an innovative buy-lease-support-sell model.
Growing Plants and Memories in a Greenhouse
It is always a pleasure to share the insights of Tracey Vowell of Kankakee’s Three Sisters Garden. The pieces she writes are always informative and thoughtful.
I’m happy to share the following, borrowed from Three Sisters Garden’s newsletter, about her year-round greenhouse and memories of how her father, who passed on recently, took the lead in building it.
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Our Greenhouse, Keeping Us Warm in January
I love our greenhouse. The full on, heated, ventilated, inflated sides, concrete floors greenhouse, where we produce our pea shoots, microgreens, seasonal vegetable and flower transplants, and odd stuff, like my ginkgo trees that really should see planting outside this coming year.
In our first season, it was clear that we would not survive without year-round product, and we made it our business to do everything we could to develop a list of things that gave us a steady footing, even in the off season — hence all the beans and corn meal — but that year-round idea also made the idea of having a climate-controlled greenhouse, in which to produce tiny things, extremely important.
I shared my thoughts with my dad, and he agreed to be chief engineer on the project, as I was still full time in the kitchen at Frontera. I watched it go up without me, in fits and starts, as I got in and out of the car, commuting to the city, as my father commuted 1,000 miles each way from Louisiana.
I don’t have a guess how many weeks he spent here, some of them with my mother in tow, to get it built before fall. This fall and early winter, we went through a major project schedule with that greenhouse, rebuilding all the wood footings for anchoring the plastic siding, replacing aging inflation and circulating fans, plastic, and the water system.
I keep thinking about how grateful I am to my father, and what all he made possible for his 35-year-old, career-changing daughter who decided farming was the way to go. That greenhouse is but the tip of the iceberg. His hands are everywhere I look.
I lost him, and my farm lost him, our combined greatest supporter, last year. Take a look at our shiny bright greenhouse, all prepped up and raring to go for spring. Maybe we are hoping he is watching. Still right here with us.
We don’t talk much about the pea shoots, petites and micros because they have become so central to what we do that they have taken on lives of their own, with restaurants and now with home customers as well. The big thing to remember with those tiny greens is that flavor and nutrition run very high when a food is eaten so close to the seed.
I use the perfect little package analogy quite often, as it seems that my life as a farmer has really become much about seeds, so here we go.
In that perfect little seed package is all that the plant needs to get it germinated and grown, to emergence of that first true leaf. In the period from seed to first leaf, the individual plants are as efficient, and full of nutrition and flavor, as they ever will be.
For this reason, I almost never suggest cooking these greens, but I do often add a sprinkle of the radish or microgreens right over hot soup or stew, allowing them to wilt a bit. Perhaps a handful of pea shoots, sliced through once, and folded in to scrambled eggs, in the last 15 seconds of cooking.
I love the almost electric brightness, and bite, of a healthy sprinkle over something like braised mushrooms, or a lamb roast. Far and away, my home favorite is to roll spring rolls with bean threads, other raw vegetables, maybe cold, sheet-scrambled eggs, leftover shrimp, shredded chicken, and a side of sweet chili peanut sauce. I believe I went into detail on these rolls in a blog entry.
— Tracey