A Visit to Hermit Creek Farm
Gathered at Hermit Creek Farm on a hot sunny August afternoon as the humidity picks up, 11 participants learned about the history of Landis and Steven’s dream to turn an 80-acre homestead into a busting CSA farm. Hermit Creek Farm is located off the grid and away from electric lines therefore the farm relies heavily on solar power – having found tricks with water lines and little refrigeration. Also, a factor into why they decided to purchase their second farm, Beaver Brook. With 2 farms in play, Hermit Creek has mainly established high tunnels, smaller plantings, such as herbs, and is the seedling starter farm. Much of the in-ground vegetable growing takes place at Beaver Brook Farm.
Having been in the CSA business for the past 30 years, Landis has established long-lasting relationships with clients to customize and juggle each end users’ own style and process in requesting product availabilities. 60-70% of their revenue comes from their CSA business with 240 clients at 85% retention. Transitioning from farmers’ market (direct consumer) to wholesaling, they sell mainly to co-ops in northern WI and near Duluth, MN – transporting their own products to each location.
This year, they decided to spend $4,000 to work with an agency to obtain H2A farm workers from Mexico. H2A workers are paid an overall rate of $25/hour, including the cost of lodging, transportation, and other expenses. Hiring H2A workers is not to replace them with U.S. workers. Hiring H2A workers has bumped U.S workers’ pay rate to $17.34/hour. This opportunity heightened their communication methods and given an opportunity for them to learn Spanish. Having H2A workers on their farm has people who really enjoy being on a farm, know the work (and produce), and like doing farm work. A big reason that led them to make this decision – it was becoming too hard to recruit and hired U.S workers that enjoyed the farm work and who, realistically, wanted to work full-time during the summer months. “It is expensive and a high commitment [to get H2A workers] but very joyful,” Landis said.
Caravanned to Beaver Brook Farm, attendees took a cooling off break to sit inside the air-conditioned pack shed before continuing the tour and conversations to check out the equipment shed, luscious fields of vegetables and cover crops, and grazing land for lambs.
Ending the event on a note of thanks to the WI LFPA program in giving producers’ a helping hand with providing pre-season payments to help them off-set a little bit of their wholesale expenses and for working with producers to honor as much of their asking price per product as possible. Sharing that some of the hardest barriers to wholesale are non-negotiable prices and each buyer having too much dictation with their own specifications on packaging and labeling.
“When was it made that it was okay for farmers to be the lowest paying occupation?” attendee Tenzin Botsford said.
