Save the Date: 2019 Farm Dinner Season Announced!
We hope to see you at the farm soon…!
Saturday, June 29th, 3pm Farm tour followed with dinner by Sarah Rinkavage and live music from the "Pickin Bubs."
Saturday, July 20th, 3pm Farm tour followed with dinner by Jess Galli & Mickey Neely of Middle Brow Bungalow and live music from "Belly of the Whale."
Sunday, Sept 1st, 3pm Farm tour followed with Labor Day weekend dinner by Lauren Freeburg & Kevin Quinn with live music from "Glad Rags."
Saturday, Sept 28th, 3pm Farm tour followed with dinner by Ethan Pikas and special feature of Sitka Salmon Shares fish alongside Mint Creek Farm meats. Talks about ecology, farming, & fishing from both farmer Harry Carr and fisherman Marsh Skeele. Live music from "Ali Baker."
If I had a bird’s eye view, this is how Mint Creek sheep and pigs would look right now. Our farm is small, but for a small farm, not unsubstantial in size. As you probably know, it spans a little over 220 acres of certified organic pastures. We have cows, goats, and poultry as well--and many guard dogs. But in this article, I feel like talking about our sheep and pigs.
It just so happens that currently the sheep are set up in the middle of the farm. Though now our farm is much more diversified, Mint Creek’s first animals were sheep. Head Farmer Harry often says “it was not that I found the sheep--it’s the other way around; they found me.” I am his daughter and when I was a young child in the early 1990s, a friend and neighbor of our family’s had some sheep that they wanted to get rid of. We gratefully took them in, and those were our first sheep. Jackie, Mercedes, & Wild Eyes were some of the names we gave the ewes in our first small flock. Shortly after we got sheep we added a small flock of laying chickens and occasional meat chickens to our family farm, but for many years to follow our farm was always “sheep-centric.” I remember that we even experimented with playing our pregnant ewes classical music one winter in the lambing barn to see if it helped soothe their birthing processes. We all agreed that it was nice, but we weren’t sure if the sheep cared about the music or not.
The sheep’s winter housing is called “the coverall” barn and it’s the central barn at Mint Creek. Clearly the sheep dominate this main barn which lies at the southern end of our largest swath of organic pasture. Sometimes a few of our pigs get to use a little corner of the coverall. Sometimes the goats or poultry get a corner temporarily, too. But the sheep have most of the coverall barn space reserved here for their comfort and warmth on rainy and/or cold days. However, much of the colder weather time, and most all of the summer, the sheep spend entirely outside. Currently they have a “run” setup from the barn to their late winter/early spring pasture paddocks. This run is basically a long hallway from barn access to the pasture paddock. It has been painstakingly created from portable fencing by us and our amazing farm staff. To their delight and as they please, the sheep go to-and-fro from their inner barn area to their expansive winter/spring paddocks (which stretch towards the center of our acreage).
Lately, with the first spring flush pasture growth, the sheep have been escaping pretty frequently through the fence and claiming an even larger section of our farm as their own. We haul water to them with our water wagon twice a day and offer them organic hay (dried grass & pasture greens) each day or so. The hay bales are so heavy on the front of our small Kubota tractor, that we need a counter-weight on the back of the tractor while feeding them the bales. Our water wagon is a large water tank on a trailer hooked to a powerful farm truck. Whoever does the water runs has to become an expert at backing it up every which way as our narrow driveways and paths do not often allow you to just turn around in a circle. If you were a bird flying over the farm, you’d spend a lot of time watching us haul water and backup a giant truck and trailer set-up.
This water wagon hauls water to our pigs as well. If any species is giving the sheep a competitor in farm animal supremacy right now, it is the pigs. They seem to be converging on every side. While our herbivorous farm animals eat leafy greens pretty exclusively, our pigs have a hunger for roots, as well, and they desire a variety of forage. Pigs leave something of a path of destruction wherever they go, like little rototillers. However, pigs continue to be a successful and growing part of the farm ecosystem at Mint Creek. Pigs play a different part. They make use of poorer pastures in a way that the grazers, in contrast, can’t. They love to root up sections of weeds, and turn piles of dirt. Pigs also provide some of the most delicious meat a farmer can raise. The art of multi-species farming on pasture is the art of balancing the strength of pigs into the farm ecosystem without allowing them to root up too many perennial prairie pasture roots. This is important because perennial prairie pasture plants and their roots are at the core of our farm’s environmental benefits. The perennial pastures fix carbon into the soil and support biodiverse plant & soil life.
Right now, we have a whopping six distinct groups of pigs, three of those being groups of a couple sows in an area mothering their piglets together. All pig groups ranging from 7-25 total pigs/piglets. So rest assured that while our pig herds are expanding in general, they are still in very small groups and total less than 100 in pig numbers on our farm. To put this in perspective, some other farmers’ market vendors have a few thousand pigs total. We prefer small groups because pigs have “pecking orders” of their own and it is always risky to combine groups that are not socialized to each other. Whenever the group of pigs gets larger, inevitably a certain small runt or two gets bullied by bigger, bolder ones. Smaller groups of pigs tend to help prevent this.
These two farm animal species, sheep and pigs, are very different (in both function and energy). Sheep started us off and continue to thrive on Mint Creek Farm (as well as lamb being in such high demand at the farmers’ market)! Meanwhile, we are getting to know and love pig farming more and more, as well, as time goes on. Our goal is a symbiotic farm ecosystem where many different species can thrive together.
If you were thinking of opting into this CSA share partnership last season and it sold out before you could, now is the time to look into it again! Late June through October you can opt into a joint delivery of weekly Mint Creek Farm meat & egg CSA shares and Three Plaid Farmers' heirloom veggie & herb CSA shares. Sign up online separately for each CSA share for the June-October season, just letting us know you'd like joint delivery. If you're in the Chicago city limits, you may want the Wednesday home delivery option, whereas, if you're in the suburbs, you may want to opt into one of Three Plaid Farmers' pickups in a variety of Chicago area suburbs.
With this produce and protein CSA partnership, you'll eat better this summer than ever! Not only are Mint Creek meats grassfed on organic pastures, but Three Plaid veggies and herbs are all heirloom varieties and farmed using organic methods locally in Winfield, IL. Can your tastebuds anticipate the upcoming summer season food bliss in store????
Farming is more than a job, it’s a whole lifestyle. I believe sharing from our lives, what we do and how it works is key, because it gains the cross-pollination of ideas with our community. Our culture prioritizing holistic farming & eating will be integral in many kinds of positive change, from individuals gaining improved physical health to animals being treated respectfully to the turning of tables in a direction towards increased environmental sustainability. Farming is just one of many parts of this whole picture, but it’s the part of the puzzle I will focus on. We can talk about these changes happening together as a community and do the small steps each of us can to support these causes. That’s what keeps my hopes up when it’s hard times.
What I want to try and share is a sense of what it’s like to be a small, ethically focused livestock farmer. It’s a lifetime sort of project. The idea that one could get very far as a farmer in a season or two is unrealistic and farmers’ have to tend to commit to their farming vision through thick and thin through many, many years of arduous work. Nothing about farming is quick. The beginning of it all isn’t quick and goes something like acquiring capital, to purchasing or leasing land, to learning how to setup your farming systems and bringing in your initial stock. But that’s just the beginning, before making all that actually work and run and learning from your mistakes and somehow figuring out how to be financially sustainable while keeping both your goals/values/ethics and your sanity intact. And then if and when you want to retire or get out of the farm you have the difficult and time consuming task of finding & training someone to pass on the torch to (no small matter) or getting rid of everything you have spent all those previous years attaining.
In our particular family farm, head farmer Harry already had a business that kept him working long work weeks, and that is what afforded him the opportunity financially to get into farming initially. It was many, many years before the farm had any staff at all other than our family members though. For my farming parents starting out, all animal care was done before and after the already taxing job of running a small manufacturing business and raising us kids. We certainly got very involved in the farm chores from a young age, too.
This is a huge reality check to realize that not just our family, but many family farms do all the farming work on top of entire other jobs or businesses. It really does mean probably not being able to take days off very often (certainly not two a week) and very seldom going out of town or on vacation. Many farms like ours are at least not yet “cash cows” but are actually still soaking in investment money (i.e. we are actually all in all paying for the privilege to be able to raise food on the land, not putting away extra cash).
Over the years of growing up around this situation, I have asked myself so many times “why does it have to be this way? Why is farming so hard?” Maybe you have asked yourself this before, too. The conclusion I have come to is that farming is so hard because we are “pushing against stone” or “swimming upwards against the current” so to speak. The current and the stone we are up against is an extremely messed up food system that no one person can reverse by themselves. In the meantime, our struggle must be as a team and is somewhat gargantuan.
For starters, general expectations of food pricing and quality are way far in the direction of low prices and bad quality food. The industrial food system has taken such a hold over our diets and our minds that even us farmers doing this hard work often for free have trouble bringing themselves to charge what it costs to grow the food, let alone what it costs plus a decent profit margin. But even when we get up the courage to try to charge what we need to, we are met with some essential support from more knowledgeable consumers (you), but also often get complaints and attitude from people asking “are you out of your mind, this product only usually costs a fraction of what you’re asking in the store?!” One can’t take that kind of thing personally, but on a bad day, it’s hard to stomach the clueless attitude of many folks. It’s also often hard for chefs in restaurants to get their customers to pay the extra money for well sourced ingredients, they have to make it a big priority and also be intelligent about how they do it. There are so many food marketing buzzwords thrown into the mix of products at stores, markets, and in restaurants that people also get very confused about what’s what at times and so it’s easy to believe momentarily that something can be both cheap and holistically farmed.
That’s something we can all work together to do, we can talk about food pricing with friends, colleagues, and family, whoever it might be productive to talk to about. It can’t hurt to question everything as far as marketing & pricing goes and try to understand how farming works. Have we all considered lately how there are only a couple skirt steaks on an entire cow and that entire cow was a living, breathing creature for years before it was harvestable? Or what about the fact that a whole chicken was a living breathing creature that was cared for day after day for many weeks….? What about the responsibility of maintaining that animal’s life in a way that is good for the environment and nutritionally dense, in addition to being tasty? Twenty dollars starts to seem pretty cheap at that point. It just puts in perspective the “normal” commodity food pricing--that pricing is based on a system that treats living things like inanimate objects for exploitation.
That commodity system cares only about the business of profits and sales, and is a race to the bottom, a race to the cheapest pricing mixed with the best marketing. Conventional farms and food businesses do not in general even try to consider the long-term health and happiness of the consumer, or the animal, or the environment.
I want holistic, ethical farmers’ to start being able to charge enough for their products that they can pay for enough good staffing to have days off when they need, and for elderly farmers to have the savings to be able afford the farm help and rest they need especially later in life. I want ecological farmers that have just thrown their entire life energy into farming for decades to make more than minimum wage, or worse, under that, after all those years working at it.
The responsibility of having lots of living things to nurture (farm animals for the livestock farm, or for the produce farmer, plants) and to care for responsibly is extremely rewarding, but also relentless. Despite whatever time it is, whatever day it is, whatever the weather is, or your health, can one walk away from a farm of half-watered animals or plants? They would die. It is arguably just as burdensome as it is satisfying to take responsibility for this situation. Every season has its challenges at Mint Creek. We go from the bustle and never ending work hours of summer, to the concentrated pressure of Thanksgiving turkey season, to the long hard winter of keeping the animals fed, watered, warm, and comfortable through intense weather while the livestock also start to give birth to all their newborn babies. But farmers keep doing it for many reasons, among them the hope of healthy, happier lives for all those benefiting from the farms’ production. And for do occasionally experience the ever idealized but hardly describable communion and synergy with mother nature and living things that may flood the mind with peace. If we seem a little crazy at the farmers’ market, it’s probably because we are!
Don't forget that now is your last chance to secure tickets for this weekend's Farm Dinner with Chef Greg Biggers of Cafe des Architectes! It's going to be a beautiful evening with food, music, and of course all our farm animals!
What to look forward to in this farm event in particular?
June is a beautiful & busy month on Mint Creek Farm. In June, we are not yet well into the intense heat of summer, with the shadows of Spring still lingering in the green & blooming pastures, blue skies, and baby animals growing up to be not so baby anymore running about. What could be a better way to get in touch with local, organic-pasture farming the summer than to visit and have head farmer Harry show you around the groups of livestock and pasture? Adults and kids alike get drawn in by the magic of a herd of sheep or cows softly grazing the fields.
Chef Greg Biggers' cuisine is not to be missed and neither is Glad Rags' music. Both the food and the music will nuanced, delicious, creative, and fun! We are excited to have Chef Greg Biggers out for his second farm dinner at Mint Creek Farm (he came out last July, as well). We are very grateful to Greg and the restaurant he is chef at,Cafe Des Arctitectes at the Sofitel Hotel. This will now be Glad Rag's third year performing at a Mint Creek Farm dinner, and their band evolves into something more and more delightful and interesting each year!
Special to June 24th is the optional, early-afternoon, pre farm tour yoga class taught by our very own CSA member Briana Kline, who is a certified yoga and pilates instructor base at her Chicago south loop studio: Roots of Integrity.
Glad Rags' Band Camp here.
We hope to see you on the farm! Don't forget to check out our full schedule of farm dinners, .
Gearing up for outdoor market season!
As spring comes well underway, things are very busy at the farm. Head farmer Harry just went a few weeks without a day off and finally got one off this Monday. There has been many births of baby lambs & calves, many of our pigs (including the infamous Miss Scarlet) are pregnant, and the grass is growing fast in the spring flush. The laying chickens & ducks are excited about all the fresh pasture & bugs and the big, furry, guard dogs are grateful for the comfortable temperatures. We constantly have portable fencing to move the animals into fresh paddocks to eat up the perennial pasture plants.
having fun walking with this sweet little newborn lamb after our Easter brunch event!
There's so much work to do on equipment and summer poultry & livestock housing, fencing, & shade-netting, and we are in the process training & hiring new farmhands and interns for the 2017 summer season (so if you know anyone well suited for this job, please send them our way).
On the sales & inventory fronts we are excited to start summer market season. Our farm has a bigger & better than ever organic-grassfed meat, egg, and (first ever) bone-broth product supply planned for you this season! But guess what? We don't have to wait long, as outdoor market season is almost here, just another week or two and it will be, and we almost are ready for it.
In the meantime, Don't forget to visit Green City Market inside the Nature Museum today, April 29th, from 8am-1pm as it will be the last indoor market of the the season! We have eggs, lamb, goat, beef, pork, chicken, duck, & turkey available tomorrow in addition to our farm's pasture flower honey & frozen poultry bone broth.
Outdoor markets' opening days at Green City Market (7am) & Evanston downtown market (7:30am) happen on May 6th, the following weekend. We will do 10 markets per week once the season is in full swing so be sure so be sure to check out our farmers' market tab, and mark your calendars!
In livestock news, our chicken egg production is way down right now because of lack of daylight hours (which the hens find just about as uninspiring as we do). Duck egg production from our laying ducks is completely at a stop until April or May.
It's been a wet & mucky week at the farm this week with temperatures roller-coasteering from one extreme to another. This is really hard on all parties involved, from our staff, livestock, poultry and also for our tractors & vehicles. Multiple trucks have had to go in for repairs--bad news for farm expense! The wind was insane & it was picking up large objects around the farm (including the back window of our utility vehicle), yesterday. The smaller farm animals had to hunker down and walk slowly & heavily braced against ground to avoid being picked up by the wind. My hat blew off so many times I gave up on wearing it.
We've continued caring for our new baby lambs and goats, but also had a baby calf born at the end of last week on one of those super frigid days! Our cattle are tough as the cowboys they once evolved among, though, and mind the weather least of all the farm animals. The calf was fine!
Birth has been happening, yes, but it's also been time to say goodbye to many of our meat poultries. Yesterday and today we've had to catch and harvest a combined few hundred stewing hens & turkeys for butchering into meat cuts, in addition to a small butcher load of four-legged livestock. This is always a somber task, but also what enables the farm to continue and our market & CSA community to eat well.
"...the organic movement is about keeping our community, ecosystems, and natural resources healthy. That’s such a beautiful and inspiring goal, I’m happy to devote my life to organic farming–hard work, low pay and all–to reach towards making our world healthier and more resilient!"
Not all organic farming is sustainable but all sustainable farming is organic, broadly speaking. For our farms to be able to produce wholesome foods requires that they avoid hormones, GMOs, pesticides, and other chemicals. The rise of many health problems can be linked to the use of all these contaminating and corrupting elements on and in the foods as they are grown conventionally. I am proud to be a part of the organic movement, because counteracting unhealthy, destructive farming methods is what it’s all about. On top of that, the organic movement is about keeping our community, ecosystems, and natural resources healthy. That’s such a beautiful and inspiring goal, I’m happy to devote my life to organic farming–hard work, low pay and all–to reach towards making our world healthier and more resilient! Additionally, food and animals are such a big part of life, or what I think of life to its fullest, and organic farming culture is very food and animal-centric, which I love.
This is largely up to the people of our nation and our world collectively. It’s quite the fight to stand up to large and powerful corporations like Monsanto that want to make it very hard to avoid their corrupted food products and keep our land free of their GMOs. But other nations have done this, so why can’t the U.S.A.? I think this is largely about embracing and creating a culture that is more focussed on the holistic process of food being grown and served. This culture has shown itself in nations such as France, where meals may take three hours to finish, and no one complains. This culture shows itself more in almost every other country where people are paying a higher percentage of their income towards foods than in the U.S. However, it seems , at least from my little bubble of the universe, that people are demanding better, healthier food in mass, and that awareness about how to get this food and what goes into growing it is increasing. A study down at Walmart of all places in the last few years showed that 99% of people would eat organic if the could afford it.
I am the sales manager at Mint Creek Farm. We are a small farm business so I am not a conventional sales manager, but wear many hats throughout the business. Basically I feel like having this role means that the buck stops with me when it comes to all issues sales/distribution/marketing. I also love to get down to the farm to help care for the animals and make sure to do this as much as I can.
My vision of our family farm is informed by my dad, who been the mastermind and visionary at Mint Creek since the beginning, my brother who has been such a key player in taking the business forward, and our lovely community of staff and customers. I am inspired by the dual forces of ambition/high-mindedness and practical change coming together at the farm. I see us working hard on knitty gritty details of how to run a successful diversified livestock farm business while making sure that this means improving our local ecosystem, our farm animals’ well-being, and our community. The direction that all of these focal points come together around is growth. Our business model requires us to scale our farming to a point where we can afford to have the infrastructure and staff we need. The lands around us look on sadly gray and depleted by conventional farming, dead to most signs of nature, and just asking to be converted to organic, holistic perennial pasture farming! In contrast, nature blooms in abundance here at Mint Creek on our IL prairie pasture farm–from grass to legume to wild pheasant to domesticated livestock–and the demand for our farms’ organic-grassfed meats, eggs, and CSAs is stronger than ever.
This very same focal point of the farm’s growth is where Iroquois Valley Farms has come into play. Without IVF we wouldn’t be able to follow all these demands for growth and our longevity as a business might have looked doubtful right now. I cannot stress enough how important IVF’s involvement, guidance, and financing support has to been to our family farm. Honestly, I don’t know if we would have survived another winter without the refinancing of our land that IVF offered. And this is all while there has been 3X more demand than supply of our products as we go to market! Financing can be very hard to get for the farmer focused on organic, holistic, diversified farming methods. It is incomprehensible to those that are conventionally minded and come from monoculture corn and beans farming backgrounds. Many banks we had spoken with before going with IVF were coming from that conventional background. You’d think working with nature instead of against it would be more common sense than it is these days in the U.S. farming world. Thank you IVF for seeing eye to eye with us on farmings’ future, and being rooted in holistic values. I love your mission statement and slogan about looking forward to seven generations from now and deciding what is wise from that perspective.
Having practiced a variety of rotational grazing techniques over the last several decades I am quite impressed with the beneficial sod forming capabilities of what is commonly known as mob grazing. By allowing long rest periods the pasture plants can set deep roots. They can spread thru rhizomes and stolons which allow a general thickening of the pasture along with natural reseeding.
The older more mature plants are often passed over by the animals who graze in high concentrations for very short time periods. This high concentration causes much trampling of the mature plants which enable a thick plant litter on the pasture floor. This litter holds moisture just like mulch in a garden. It also breaks down to feed the soil organisms which proliferate under this scheme. The animals select for the younger more tender plant shoots which are highly nutritious. Due to frequent moves they are always getting fresh choice fodder and the plants are allowed a faster regrowth by not overgrazing.
Truly a perennial polyculture of pasture plants grazed using this method has great potential to heal our environment through the building of soil organic matter (carbon sequestration), reducing erosion, and the improved economics of synergistic resource management.