For taste of farming, try Soil Sisters tour

By Patrick Barry

We got more than we expected when my wife Pam and I set off for the Soil Sisters farm tour in Southwestern Wisconsin. From Chicago we drove out past Rockford and then up into the charming town square of Monroe, WI, where we enjoyed small glasses of New Glarus beer and good Wisconsin cheese. Then we set off to our AirBnB rental at Dorothy’s Grange, a small pig farm and restored prairie near Blanchardville, whose proprietress April Prusia had hosted a Soil Sisters session earlier that day, Fermenting 101.

Eggplant ready to pick at Christensen Farm. All photos by Pam Barry.

Soil Sisters was founded in 2011 to focus on the fastest growing segment of the farm industry: women farmers. The areas around Monroe and Brodhead, WI, are filled with these entrepreneurial women, and this year 15 farms opened their gates to provide workshops, tours and sales of produce picked from the same fields that you could walk through (Meet the 2016 farmers).

We liked it. Over seven hours on a beautiful Sunday, we crisscrossed the winding roads of Green and Rock Counties, visiting five of the eight farms on this year’s tour. Katy Dickson was first, greeting us at Christenson Farm in Browntown, where her family has been farming for three generations. The fields were overflowing with August produce – okra, tomatoes, cukes, peppers – all splayed out in small plots around the farmhouse and barn. The hoophouse, with fans blowing, was laden with tomatoes and eggplant, which Katy said would be torn out early to make way for fall crops: kale, chard, carrots, head lettuce and spinach. Husband Mark told us how they had purchased that hoophouse used, fixed it up, and added a woodstove for winter heat. It was a good investment that helped the farm’s CSA program grow from 30 households to 100.

Lisa Kivirist with her new book, at Inn Serendipity B&B.

We bought some red potatoes on our way out and headed to nearby Inn Serendipity Bed and Breakfast, whose owner Lisa Kivirist has published a handful of books about rural entrepreneurship, the latest being Soil Sisters: A Toolkit for Women Farmers (2016). Leading a tour, Kivirist showed us the wind turbine, solar photovoltaic panels and solar water heaters that allow the Serendipity operation to earn money back from the local utility. It’s not a production farm so much as a country inn that offers zucchini-feta pancakes for breakfast, home-canned pickled vegetables and a selection of fresh produce for guests to take home. Lisa and husband John Ivanko, a photographer, have combined their hospitality business with book sales, public speaking and other ventures to create a rural lifestyle with a tiny ecological footprint.

Peg Sheaffer directs visitors at Sandhill Family Farms.

Sandhill Family Farms in Brodhead was next, with Peg Sheaffer and her son waiting behind the welcome table. It’s a bigger spread than the other farms, with some fields in cover crops, several prairie remnants and a movable pen full of chickens watched over by the farm’s donkey. In the shed, two trailers were covered with red shallots, almost dry. Every week through the CSA season, the Brodhead farm picks and ships a truckload of produce, then sends it to its sister operation in Grayslake, where it is combined with the output from Jen and Jeff Miller’s fields to fill 400 or 500 CSA boxes, depending on the week. “It’s a big responsibility,” acknowledges Peg, who shares the load with her husband Matt. “And it’s a lot of produce.” Indeed, the fields are heavy with zucchini, peppers, and of course tomatoes, which every farmer mentions as a key cash crop. We left with a dozen fresh eggs and a watermelon.

Lauren Rudersdorf ready to work, once she gets her boots on.

Raleigh’s Hillside Farm is just 12 miles away. It’s presided over by a cheerful Lauren Rudersdorf, who leads the farm tour barefoot, in a wrap skirt and green Soil Sisters T-shirt. She grew up on the farm and represents the family’s fourth generation of farmers. She and her husband Kyle went off to college but decided later that farming is for them; they are transitioning four acres of the larger family farm to organic. The fields include more than 70 crops and 20 varieties of tomatoes, all in plots small enough that most of the work is done with a walk-behind tiller (though her father brings in the big tractor now and then to spread manure). The Rudersdorfs build the soil with cover crops including winter rye, vetch, clover and buckwheat. Their farm supports 74 CSA customers, with two drop sites in Evansville and Stoughton and four more in Madison.

Lindsey Morris Carpenter of Grassroots Farm, with her hard-working vintage tractor. The photo at top shows the farm as viewed from its entrance drive.

Finally, as the sun falls low in the sky, we travel to Grassroots Farm near Monroe, where Lindsey Morris Carpenter and her mother Gail Carpenter took out a loan to buy 40 acres, which now include a four-acre vegetable garden, apple orchard, beehives, laying hens, meat chickens, turkeys and a few cows. It’s a beautiful farm that fills a valley and surrounding hills. With a sold-out CSA program and weekly trips to the Andersonville Farmers Market in Chicago, Lindsey says she has a “very modest income and fantastic quality of life.” We left that farm with a Red Kuri squash and a bag of winter wheat flour from Hazzard Free Farm in nearby Pecatonica, IL.   

Another Soil Sisters weekend will take place in August 2017, says event coordinator Lisa Kivirist of Inn Serendipity. “We look forward to continuing to celebrate and champion the increasing role women are playing in transforming our food system.”

For dinner that night, back at our rental-house-with-kitchen, we cooked pasta with fresh vegetables from the farms. A good breeze through the windows carried a cacophony of insect and bird sounds, along with the occasional pig grunt. We had learned so much seeing the farms, with their sandy soils, the weeds that organic farmers learn to manage, and the cycles of growth and succession as farmers plant and replant to meet demand from customers. For two lifelong city dwellers with just a backyard garden, it was a very fine way to spend a weekend.

Time didn’t allow a visit to all farms on the tour, so we missed out on Hawk’s Mill Winery, Browntown; Scotch Hill Farm, Brodhead; and Riemer Family Farm, Brodhead. 

Soil Sisters is made possible by the Wisconsin Farmers Union Foundation, Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) and Renewing the Countryside, with additional support from the Wisconsin Department of Tourism, Edible Madison magazine, Emmi Roth, Green County Tourism, Monroe Chamber of Commerce, South Central Chapter of the Wisconsin Farmers Union and Transition Green County.

The movable chicken pen at Sandhill Family Farms is watched over by the farm’s donkey.