Thanksgiving Newsletter 2024———————————— Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Hello Little Big Sky Community,
The sun is shining this morning, creating light and shadow all over the house. I’ve been waiting for some stillness to be able to write, and this quiet morning after Thanksgiving day is just my moment. I won’t spend a lot of time recapping the season, but I do want to say a few thank yous. Last winter Dan and I decided we wanted to farm again, after 5 years of CSA, and a year off, we wanted to give it another try - simplify operations and grow the best food for a small group of members. Heather came along as an integral member of the team. There were fun planning sessions over dinner throughout the winter, and then come March we were off and running. Heather dedicated herself to the farm wholeheartedly with positivity and openness. If you’ve had the pleasure to work with Heather you know she is truly one of the hardest working people, and does it all while keeping things light. This is not always an easy way to be while farming. Even in the best of conditions, unforeseen challenges abound; this is the nature of farming. I want to thank Heather from the bottom of my heart for taking on the challenge of Little Big Sky Farm this year from beginning to end. It was truly a gift to have her on board. I am also so thankful for the friendship we’ve built.
I’d also like to thank our absolutely fabulous work share team. I say this every year, but people really SHOW UP right when you need them. We knew early on that we would need extra hands on delivery day and we weren’t really sure how to solve this labor issue, and there was Liza Turrittin, there with us every Wednesday, packing boxes and delivering to the St. Peter Coop. In the heat of July when the farm was erupting with food, and weeds, and the work was insurmountable, Heather’s dear farmer friend Jessie came in from New Orleans with a burst of fresh energy to see us through for a week. In the fall when I went back to teaching, Alicia Gazzola added on regular shifts on packing day. Dan’s mother Nancy dedicated a day each week to packing all of the greens. These integral moments plus our steady stream of workshare members made this season what it was. We thank you ALL from the bottom of our hearts.
Lastly, I want to thank YOU, our members, for joining us this season. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to farm again in the special CSA way. There’s nothing like it, and we feel intricately connected to you through the growing of this food. This was truly such a great season, and for us, as CSA farmers, it will be our last season. We’re not done farming, and have exciting offerings coming in the future, but we know that our CSA days are over. We’ll continue growing food, flowers and more - I’ll share more about that at a later date. I know Heather will keep on farming and creating as well and I really look forward to what’s around the corner.
We wish you all a peaceful Thanksgiving weekend.
Jenny (& Dan)
Happy Holidays and What’s Next for The Farm in 2024
December 27th, 2023
I’ve had pieces of this letter in my head for a long while, but the time and space to sit and write is only coming to me just now. Disclaimer - this is not a logistical email about how to sign up for our 2024 CSA- that will be coming soon.
There is much to be thankful for this year, and I’ll get to that, but first I’d like to dig right in. My approach to living at our farm this past season was, to me, similar to that meditation metaphor of imagining a river floating by you and the leaves are your thoughts … or you are the rocks and the water is washing over you… something like that. The farm felt like the river passing by, I watched it all and tried not to take note of much. It was time to fully compost the old way of existing within our farm system. Dan worked off farm all summer, and I dug in with the kids, busying myself with pool outings, excursions, friends and more. I felt lucky that being a teacher provided me with open summer time with Omer and Mirah. Ultimately though, watching the farm season go by like that, didn’t sit right with me. I realized how much I enjoy the flow of the season and how hard work is something I treasure. I left the summer with a keen awareness of wanting to pick the farm back up again, but with new life.
I spent 7 days in the Spring of 2021 at World’s End Farm in Upstate New York learning from the great florist Sarah Ryhanen of Saipua. While there, Sarah was very open about her business, finances, the move from NYC floral industry to the farm and all the ups and downs along the way. I appreciated her candidness and remembered observing the collaborative nature of their farm and business. I’ve thought of that space as I think of our future. Dan and I both have interests and skills beyond the farm, and both care deeply about this place and growing food. The future of the farm involves opening it up to more farmers.
This summer, quite serendipitously, we met Heather Drake, via friends. She and her farming partner were looking for new land to run their vegetable and cocktail CSA, Moshky Farm, and we had the right kind of space. This coming year, I am extremely excited to say, we will be running Little Big Sky Farm as a trio. While Dan and I will continue to own and operate the farm, Heather will be the farm manager. In addition, Heather will continue offering the cocktail side of Moshky Farm (they are truly the best cocktails/mocktails I’ve ever enjoyed) to interested Little Big Sky members. To me the future looks like a smaller CSA, (we’re aiming for 75 full share members), a robust, consistent workshare crew, dinners on the farm with Moshky cocktails, flower offerings and more.
Dan and Heather will work together this winter on crop planning, seed ordering and the general flow of the season. This summer Dan will be splitting his time between farming and his recently launched company - New Moon Sauna. In addition to farming, Dan has been working as a carpenter for 17 years and will now be building custom in home saunas and freestanding saunas to be enjoyed at cabins, homes and backyards. Check out all of that excitement at newmoonsauna.com and @newmoonsauna on instagram.
A major take away from this past summer and from life in general is that good food matters a lot. Food at its utmost can be a medicine, and at its most basic, keeps us alive. Local food matters a lot. Investing in your local economy matters a lot. Good local food costs more because it’s better. Local businesses last as long as people invest in them.
We hope you join up with us again on this journey. We appreciate you and are excited for the next chapter!
I will update the website and send out an email on January 2nd with CSA sign up details.
End of 2022 season Newsletter.
We each wrote end of season newsletters that we just couldn’t seem to combine - so below you will find both.
Dan’s Letter:
I’ve been writing this newsletter in my head all season. I’ve had a lot of time to mull this decision over, and still it’s not any easier for me to write and send out. I think we’ve done a good job over the years sharing exciting news from our farm. Usually the pictures we share are of smiling workers harvesting and beautiful views of the fields that have the fewest weeds and the healthiest looking crops. These are all realities of our day to day life here, we do have a lot of fun in the field and we have become skilled at reliably producing good crops. What often doesn’t get shared is the really challenging and stressful stuff. The failures, the long hours, the physical toll on our bodies, the missed opportunities because farming can be all consuming and endless in it’s demands. We’ve pushed ourselves pretty hard to grow this farm and chase this dream. It has been an incredible privilege to be able to even attempt it! But it’s time for us to pause for a moment and reevaluate our dream. We’re always worn out at the end of a season, but this season we’re burnt out. We grew in size this year to over 200 members in order to meet our financial goals for the farm. We had one of our best seasons yet! I was very pleased with the quality and quantity of our produce and we were able to fulfill our commitments to our members each week. I was very proud of ourselves and our small crew for harvesting so much food for so many folks from such a small acreage. I’m always remarking about how incredible it is that so much food can come from such a small amount of land! You may have heard me say it before, but we grow all this produce on around 2 ½ acres. When you divide it out, each member’s share for the season comes from around 500 square feet! The lesson I’ve finally learned the hard way this year is that it takes quite a lot of skilled workers to produce that much food in a way that is truly sustainable for everyone involved. More than we can afford it seems. Labor is expensive, and it should be! People are important and deserve to make a fair, living wage for doing essential work. We’ve stretched ourselves to pay our employees between $13-$15 an hour. We sold around $100,000 worth of produce this year through our CSA and wholesale to our local food co-op and coffee shop! Unfortunately the costs of materials, labor, repairs, improvements etc consume quite a lot of that, and what’s left for us to pay ourselves is simply not enough. It would be one thing if the lifestyle that farming rewarded us with was exactly what we had been dreaming of, but there are far too many hard 70-80 hour work weeks every season for that to be true. Both Jenny and I work off farm jobs. Jenny is a full time special education teacher and I work full time as a carpenter from November-March. I share all this to paint an honest picture of what it takes for our family to operate this farm and earn a living. Put simply, farming this way has been too much work for too little in return.
And so we’ve decided to take a break, to pause and sit a season out. A sabbatical season. We will continue working our off farm jobs. We plan to grow a mix of cover crops in our fields to help rest and rebuild our soil. We’ll keep a small garden for our family. And that’s as much as we know right now. Both Jenny and I believe there will be more farming in our future. We just don’t know yet what that will look like. We need time to rest and reflect on what we’ve been fortunate enough to learn and experience. We need time to consider again why we want to farm and how we will do it in a way that is sustainable for our family, our business and our land.
I want to end this letter with a sincere thank you. Thank you for choosing to buy local food and supporting our family farm. Thank you for investing in your community. Thank you for caring about our story and reading these words. Thank you for your patience as we try to figure out our way forward. I think of farming as a long game, and hopefully by taking a season off we will be able to farm into the future with a healthier and more sustainable approach for our family. I hope you will stay tuned and that we will be able to share more stories, experiences and good harvests from this land with you all. In the meantime, I hope you will still continue to support local farmers and your local food co-op!
Sincerely,
Dan Kapernick
Little Big Sky Farm
A New Beginning at Little Big Sky Farm
As we finish up and reflect on the 2022 CSA season we feel it's important to share with you our gratitude for the year we’ve had here on the farm. I don’t think we’ve ever been more proud of the vegetables we’ve grown and the boxes we’ve packed than this year. Our workshare has been more robust than ever and our crew so dedicated to the cause. Each day this season at 7am the farm filled up with folks ready to make the farm go. Dan served us all as the farm leader, barista, lunch maker and overall caretaker. I found new focus this year behind the scenes, allowing myself to mostly enjoy my summer alongside our children, apart from the field - the gift of a teacher’s schedule. Mary Traxler finished their 4th season on the farm, and Frances Kelliher her second. Dan’s mom Nancy and my sister Bethany became full time members of the crew during the last 6 weeks of farming, bringing new life and energy to the team. Nikki Praus, dare I say, fresh out of college, worked with us through the summer months and was a light of positivity and humor. It’s hard to describe what happens in a day out here. There are the obvious things, tons of harvesting, labor, work - all the heavy words that go along with farming. But, there are also the more nuanced occurrences- conversations, connections, laughter and often tears. All too often as humans we are hard pressed to find opportunities to be outside, using our bodies working towards a shared goal. We are thankful we’ve found that in farming.
This year, I think in part because of the goodness of the vegetables and people around us, we have come to the realization that moving forward with the CSA in this type of model is not sustainable for our family. We are in need of a pause, time to refocus, and dream again about what this farm and land can be. We know all the things about it that work - the community, the good food, the beauty of the place. We also know there are so many things about small scale farming that leave the farm family, be it ours or another, set up to be spread too thin, without the security that many other professions provide. We know that local food, and small farms are a very good answer to the crippling food crisis our country faces, but this solution cannot rest on the backs of farmers. Sometimes this fact becomes laughable - but it’s true: if we added up all the hours of work - 80 plus hours a week in the summer and divided by wages, we farmers are in a dire situation. That being said, we also have a major privilege to be able to make the choice to farm. We are also privileged to call ourselves skilled people with other job opportunities that offer more security and stability for our family and future. This is the time to pause, consider, rest, and rethink the work we do here at Little Big Sky Farm.
We want to thank you deeply for being a part of our journey. Some of you have been with us for all 5 years -thank you! You’ve given us energy to keep growing good food. We encourage you to stay in touch and stay with us as we create a new kind of farm. We’ll continue to give updates periodically as we go along. In the meantime, be well, take care of yourself, and someone else if you can.
With Love and gratitude,
Jenny