The New Beginnings of Glacier's End
How a Chicago couple's "Green Acres" transition has led to commercial success
City to Farm, Cottage Food to Commercial Kitchen
Libby and Derek Ervin describe their second careers as owners of Illinois’ Glacier’s End farm as a “Green Acres” experience, a reference to the 1960s TV comedy about a married couple who traded urban life for that countryside.
The couple met in Chicago, where Libby worked in senior care and Derek sought to “become a rock star, which never really materialized.” When the opportunity arose in 2019 to take over his ailing grandfather’s farm in far southern Illinois, they took the leap.
But after getting down to business at their farm in Johnston City, they quickly ran into an obstacle: Their hopes of paying their bills making value-added products — with ingredients from their farm and other local farmers — ran up against the state’s then-restrictive cottage food laws, which allowed homemade products to be sold only at farmers markets.
They became activists in the Illinois Stewardship Alliance’s campaign to get the state legislature to loosen cottage food restrictions, including allowing producers to sell and ship products anywhere in the state. That effort came to fruition in 2021 — and it earned Libby and Derek the Alliance’s first Changemakers of the Year Award. Libby also subsequently took on the role of president of the Illinois Farmers Market Association.
Their rise as packaged goods entrepreneurs as proceeded apace. The popularity of their hot sauces, drinking vinegars (aka shrubs) and other products spurred them to open a storefront in the city of Marion with a commercial-grade kitchen... which meant that they’d already graduated from cottage food producers.
Libby and Derek told their story, which takeaways for would-be value-added producers, at the recent Everything Local Conference in Springfield. The following are excerpts from their presentation.
Derek: We loved Chicago. But every opportunity we got, we would slip away to Wisconsin or Michigan for a weekend and to get in the country or a river or a lake, and get away from the city... My grandfather's health was slipping, and he said, ‘Hey, this is going to be yours someday. So why don't you come and start taking care of it?’
Libby: Our goal was to become a farm cidery, so we planted a bunch of pear and apple trees to produce hard ciders. Then we realized, it takes about five years [for the fruit trees to mature]. So what are we going to do now?
We connected with Food Works [a Carbondale-based non-profit that provides training courses for new farmers] to really learn not only how to farm but to look at it as a business. Our very first field day was on cottage food... We started looking around our farm and realizing we had a bunch of stuff already there. We foraged things from our woods, we picked flowers. All of our conventional farming neighbors think we're the crazy hippies from Chicago, which is in part true.
Derek: One thing that could move all over our property on its own was elderberry. It was native elderberry, and there was a lot of it... So using things that naturally grow and take a little input, less time and you don't have to baby them, that kind of became our signature.
Libby: We've grown a lot of vegetables over the years, turning into pickled stuff, making syrups, making shrubs... But the beauty is now we're supporting other farmers... In the five years we've been farming, we've sourced from about 60 different farmers. And we have farmers now reaching out to us wanting to grow hot peppers, wanting to grow cucumbers for us. So it's great supporting them and having them support us.
Really what attracted us to cottage food is being able to extend the life [of vegetables and fruit]... Working with Food Works, the Illinois Farmers Market Association, the Illinois Farm Bureau, your health department. If you're not friends with your health department, you need to be. The good, the bad, the ugly, they're going to be along along the ride with you and you need to be communicating with them every step of the way....
We created our own little farm store here in our garage, we had people coming out to our farm and that really got us thinking you know, we're gonna start needing to do something different... Let's start thinking about commercial kitchen.
Derek: We ended up finding a restaurant that had moved to a different space, in the square [Marion’s] downtown area. And we converted the kitchen into a processing facility. We had reached capacity for working in our home kitchen. Cottage food had been very great to us, but we had lived in a food manufacturing facility for about four years and it was getting very tiresome. We could never go home and get away from it, it was just always around us. We wanted our home back.
Libby: One thing that we realized when we had this little farm store, in our garage, is we really lost our privacy. We have people knocking at our door all hours of the days, and we were not really having that.
Derek: Here we get to the challenges of opening a commercial kitchen. There was no equipment, but the infrastructure was there. There were drains in the floor, there was a grease trap in the basement. So a lot of the things that we would have had to put in, and would have been very expensive, were there... If you are going to do this, and you move from cottage foods into a commercial kitchen, you need to think about where that's going to be, because there's going to be different regulations from where you establish that kitchen...
In the transitioning from cottage food to commercial kitchen, it's really important just to to establish these practices during your cottage food period. You're only going to need to continue those when it goes to commercial kitchen. So picking up the USDA Home Canning Guide is a really good idea. It has a lot of great information and has recipes in it that are approved... I went ahead and when I was doing cottage food and I took the Preventive Controls for Human Food [course]. I highly recommend this. It's not cheap. But if you're going to move into a commercial kitchen, you're gonna need to know this stuff...
Libby: We have found that we've grown less but again, we started sourcing from other farmers... We're kind of revisiting what we're growing... We're also going into more perennial things again...
When people come in, they have no idea of who we are what we do. They don't know what box to put us in. So we say we're a specialty food store. It's really just kind of educating people on who we are what we do... One of the good things to come out of COVID is people have really wanted to start supporting local more, knowing where their food comes from who's making it. We have a sign that we put out that says farm, so we have people coming in and thinking we have seeds or animals, screws.
Derek: The trees that we established when we first moved here are now coming into their own and bearing fruit... We’re doing some cool things with grafting those varieties onto wild stock that is growing on the property. So we're headed to be harnessing the invasives rather than cutting them off, and using the immune system of that and the vigor of the base of it.
Bob’s World, and Welcome to It
The Illinois Capitol building at sunset on January 19, taken from the Amtrak station as I awaited my train home from the Everything Local Conference in Springfield to home in Chicago. That weekend I got slammed with COVID, which is why this photo is part of my conference catchup binge.