Wild Trillium: A New Season of Change
A chat with LFF Contributor Christine Johnson about upcoming year 2 on the farm
Wild Trillium Farm: A New Season of Change
The first major project I started when I launched Local Food Forum last April 1 was the Seasons of Change series, a platform for local farmers to walk us through the victories and challenges across the growing season. The first piece in that series was by Christine Johnson, who with business partners Katie Szymanski and Emmy May had just launched their tiny Wild Trillium Farm in the north-central Illinois town of Richmond.
Christine last year produced a series of articles that eloquently conveyed the joys and challenges of being a beginning farmer. The excerpted Q-and-A below is a follow-up discussion about what went well and not so well in 2021; about the juggling — experienced by many farmers these days — to schedule farm work around the day jobs needed to make personal budgets work; about fulfilling CSA promises despite periods of heat and drought, and the relationship with legendary organic farmer Gary Gauger, from whom the partners lease their land, that helped fill their CSA boxes; and what new and different approaches will be taken this year.
Christine is a strong advocate for a better food system. She is a leader in the development of the new Northern Illinois Young Farmers Coalition, the topic of a second Q-and-A that I’ll publish later this week.
_______________
Q: Let's talk first about the farm. What are your takeaways from Year 1?
A: I think that overall last season was a really good success, especially for me and my business partners in terms of actualizing what we hoped to do and how close we came to achieving it. So that was really, really great to see in terms of time commitment and things like that.
We all have our off-farm jobs. That just continues to be the most difficult thing in terms of scheduling and finding enough time for us to actually be at the farm, because really we want to be there every day. We know where a lot of our misses and fails were and could have maybe been managed if we had more actual physical time there.
But then there also were the massive curveballs of drought and heat that maybe we couldn't have tackled it. So you can’t lay in bed thinking all day, “If I had just done this it wouldn't have happened.”
We lost like 80 percent of our flower crop from the the heat wave at the beginning of June and we had some pretty tough germination in the field for our direct seeding. But it's a combination of so many factors like learning how to use new tools like tractors and seeders, like jumping from small scale to bigger scale. And then also working in soils in what was our first season there. So hopefully this year we'll have a better understanding of the weed pressure and the pest pressure that we have to anticipate for as opposed to reacting when it happens…
But overall, we never missed a [CSA] week. We learned that we will never do a 24-week CSA again, because that was insane. By the end of the year, we had a pretty good arrangement with Gary [Gauger] to supplement some important crop losses that we had with his field stuff. We had a really nice work for trade arrangement with him, which is one of the only reasons that we were able to provide such a beautiful, substantial basket.
We're also going to lean into that this year intentionally, instead of trying to do everything ourselves. Like understanding that Gary grows the best tomatoes around. And we'll focus on cherry tomatoes and he'll do his heirlooms and we'll make an arrangement there. So it's nice to have that flexibility, especially for long-term crops like garlic and potatoes and things. Maybe we'll get there eventually or when we have our own property. But there's no reason for us to grow potatoes if he grows potatoes and we all work together anyhow.
So trying to focus on the things that we are really good at and can focus our time and energy on. A lot of that's going to be more like herbs, flowers and specialty crops, where he's kind of got the staples down.
And that'll help us niche out to selling a little bit more wholesale this year, which is one of our goals, chefs and things. We're not increasing our output. We're just going to try to hone it down and have better production yields this year. So not trying to technically make any more money, which is tough because that again limits us in terms of time and off-farm job possibilities. Ideally in year three or four, maybe we can get closer to that pay-ourselves-full-time sort of feeling.
Q: So the kind of collaboration that you're talking about is really natural working with Gary, and also specialization is something that we’re starting to see a bit more of and I think we're going to see increasingly. You also collaborate with Timberfeast [a livestock farm in Chatsworth in central Illinois].
A: Yeah, I mean we don't house the chickens at all. We just arranged with Katie and Mark that we anticipate 15 cartons of eggs a week and then adjust it based on our sales, but that would just go forward from there. So that's a direct add-on. We're paying them.
Q: The weather and other problems aside, what did you learn about your patch of land there, about what grows really well, and what you're thinking now maybe not so much?
A: Everything grows really well at Gary's land. It's been a family farm since the ‘20s and it's been organic forever. He's been working the lands for 40, 50 years and it's just like gold. It's really lovely.
I think that the issues that we had were dealing with major crop pests like potato beetles. So we're dialing back on those sorts of things and waiting until we understand what tools we can use, whether that's labor… or if it's learning how to implement different beneficials like intercropping… So I think this year we're going to focus on weed control over pests and use a lot of clover pathways to increase pollination on our cucumbers and squash or flowers and things like that, as opposed to seeking out add-ons that we can plug into our field…
Q: With climate… one of the things I tried to do last summer was get across to people how it's not all one thing, how the gradations can be incredible. And the point I made was the Cook Farm down near Bloomington had their crop totaled by flooding. Then you drove two hours due north on I-39 and you got this extreme heat and drought. How do you even intellectually plan for what the next year can bring?
A: It's tough because there's extremes, but there's measures that we have to combat that, like shade cloth and irrigation, but eventually you know the water won't be there either. It's the anticipation, because so much time and planning goes into your field. You can't just throw a seed and like, cool now, that's it. Especially for a CSA. You have to depend on timing to make sure that there's something there as opposed to letting Mother Nature kind of take her course and you sell as you grow.
I think the biggest thing for us was we waited, we were hesitantly cautious on planting in the field because we had that last week of May that was a freeze. And then the first two weeks of June were 95 degrees. So like our infants were just thrown into this extreme sort of destruction.
If they just had a little bit more time to get their roots down it would have maybe been significantly better, but how do you anticipate that? If that was true, then we would have put our plants out in the field and hoped that they made it through the frost, but frost generally is the biggest killer for early starts as opposed to that early heat. So it's tough, and we're learning every day as we go how to make our field plans and seeding schedules and things, just for scale. It changes the game so much.
Q: So in terms of the CSA and selling in Chicago, that worked well for you, are you planning on doing the same outlets, or doing more, or what's your plans?
A: Yes, it worked mostly because we live and work here as well… We were so excited to work with two brand new businesses also, so I think we had a lot of flexibility and forgiveness there and we're going to try to streamline that process a little bit more.
We're staying in the same spots at Big Kids [a sandwich shop in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood] and at Eco and the Flamingo [a “zero waste general store” in Lincoln Square], and Eco just opened their second storefront in Evanston, which is so exciting. We're toying with the idea of having that as a third drop site to expand our market, but not necessarily expand our quantity. So we haven't really decided yet.
It's just a lot more time in the car, which none of us love, but maybe that's just the reality of it. The makeup of Jackie's and Bethany's customer base is so similar to ours. People that care about what they're putting in their body and on their body and where it comes from and why. So it doesn't hurt us at all. We don't have to try to convince these people to think about local food. So that's really great.
Q: In terms of juggling your time, how many days a week did you generally get to spend up in Richmond?
A: So it changes through the season. We were there two to three days a week, each of us rotating, during the seeding schedule. And then once things are in the field during planting season I was there twice a week. We'd go three to four days for CSA harvest and get some field work done, and then run back over the weekend to get some more things in the ground. So maybe like five days of the week. But once I started back at work, we were really only there from Tuesday til Friday and that made it tough to leave a lot of things during those really temperature-sensitive times.
This year, Sheri Doyel [director of the Center for Agrarian Learning at McHenry County College in Crystal Lake, IL] is going to share her greenhouse with us. And that's where we're going to start most of our seeds. So we'll be able to relieve our time needs at the beginning the season because will be trading off on like watering and that sort of stuff, which will be really helpful.
By May, we'll have put up a real hoop house. So we're real excited. Last year, we were using a low tunnel that was in a little bit of disarray. It's got a full hole in it now, so we just can't use it at all.
That's also a new thing. We've never built a hoop house before. So that's our biggest project right now. And then we'll be able to do a lot more consecutive succession seedings throughout the season.
Q: So you're thinking about it right now in terms of starters. Is there any planning going on for season extension as well?
A: Yeah, last year we had tried to start some fall radish, beets and kale and small Romaine heads in our little tunnel, but we just abandoned that project. It was nice to try, but this year we're going to try to have some winter greens in the tunnel and then do starts and biennials and things that we want in the field for 2023.