The Wegener Farm

Today I'm talking with Rob at The Wegener Farm.

00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprises entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. Today I'm talking with Rob at the Wegner Farm. Good morning, Rob, how are you? Good morning, Mary, I'm good. How are you doing? Good, how are things in Michigan? That's a beautiful day here in Michigan, finally. We had a little snow yesterday morning, which always sets you back mentally a bit here, but it's beautiful this morning, so.

00:29
We're loving it. Yeah, it's April. Spring is coming. It's going to get here sooner than we think. It's beautiful here today in Minnesota too. So tell me about what you guys do at the farm. Okay, so at the Waggoner Farm, we're an organic, certified organic regenerative farm. We focus really on, you know, you've heard it called probably dirt, farming the dirt.

00:57
uh... move away from the idea of uh... feeding plants and rather uh... think about feeding the food web in the in the soil itself so we've been very big since the beginning on treating treating the soil right and it'll grow the plants and uh... and they'll be great and uh... so far so good that we've been at this now this will be our fourth year uh... we started the first year on this property which was new to us

01:24
with only 10 CSA customers, just to see, and mostly, by the way, friends and family who were fairly low risk, in case it didn't work. And year two, we went to 50. Year three, we went to 120. And this year, we'll be 130 CSA members, as well as some wholesale relationships and possibly a couple of restaurants. Wow. That is, that's huge.

01:54
Um, yeah, anyone who's never run a CSA does not have any idea the work that goes into it. We did it for two years, three years, and we only had nine people at our highest number. And it's a lot of work and it's a lot of pressure because you want things to go right. Yeah, you've, uh, you're right about the pressure because basically, you know, the model.

02:22
is such that the people, you know, they've paid you and now you better deliver, you know, and deliver well or the model falls down. Sorry about the dogs. Okay. I have one too. She does the same thing. Yeah. But our CSA members are great. They're people that are like-minded about looking for quality food.

02:51
Excuse me, let me just close this. Yeah.

02:58
at looking for quality food and not being, let's say satisfied or comfortable, but with the way the food system works and the way commercial farming works. We have a lot of visitors to the farm who I think also realize that USDA organic labeling is nice, but really transparency into seeing how things work is really where it's at.

03:27
And we love to have people at the farm. We have some chickens that free range around the house. Kids love them. They're friendly, and they can feed them. And it really is an interesting, at CSA Pickup, a real interesting sense of community as people come to get their boxes every week. Yeah, we had baby bunnies two springs ago. And they were just big enough that the people who came to pick up their CSAs could hold them and pet them.

03:57
That was a big hit here. We don't do rabbits anymore. I've already talked about this a billion times, but our rabbits were stupid. They did not understand that they were supposed to make babies. So we weren't going to let them. Rabbits that didn't make babies, I didn't think that it was possible. They were broken. There's something wrong with these rabbits. So we decided that feeding them with no return was not a good investment. So we no longer have rabbits, and that's OK. You were saying feeding the dirt. So.

04:26
when you take care of the soil, the soil is fantastic. It grows fantastic food. So the soil is great. It feeds the plants. The plants are great. And then the plants feed us, which is great. Yeah, and I think this is what gets lost in the commercial food system, honestly, now. Two things, I think, make a world of difference. Actually, probably three. One is.

04:55
When you are not trying to feed plants directly with synthetically produced fertilizers, plants get what they should be in terms of all of the micro and macro nutrients that the food web creates. These vegetables are just different. They're better for you. They taste better.

05:22
We also use varieties that are not bred to be trucked from Mexico. And those varieties that are bred to be trucked from Mexico have been hybridized through the years to be tough. You know, and the result is that the flavor and the nutrition has been bred out of these plants and vegetables. And it's just unfortunate. And

05:51
I would say to anybody listening, if you're not already connected with a local farmer, get connected. What you will learn about how things are supposed to taste, and just blow your doors off. Yeah, absolutely. And I am right there with you because we used to wait and wait and wait in the summertime for the tomatoes to come in at the farmer's market.

06:17
We grew tomatoes, but our tomatoes were usually later coming in than the farmer's market tomatoes. So about the end of June, we would go over to the farmer's market every Saturday morning and be like, do you have tomatoes yet? Sometimes we got the first ripe tomato out of our little garden, but usually we bought them from the farmer's market because buying tomatoes at the store is something that I only want to do, and I really don't even want to do it, in January and February because they just...

06:45
don't taste like anything. It's the reason people don't like tomatoes, I'm convinced. Anybody who doesn't like tomatoes, if I ask them, have you ever had one from a farm, they would tell you, no, I get them from the supermarket. That's because those orange plasticky things in the supermarket are not really, they don't taste like tomatoes. No, and I would pick cherry tomatoes out of a salad if I got a salad at a restaurant because I knew they would be terrible. And I thought I hated cherry tomatoes now.

07:16
And then we started growing our own and I tried one and I was like, oh, I can finally have them in my salad again. Yay. Exactly. And you know, I thought I've known that about tomatoes since I was a little kid because my mom always grew a garden. My grandparents always grew gardens with tomatoes. What I didn't realize is it's also true of eggs. It's also true of basically anything that we produce.

07:45
intended to live the what they give you in terms of food is just a different it's just a different thing. Yeah. So did you always want to do what you're doing or was was it new? Were you working on it before? Oh, man. So, let's see the the genesis story of the Wagner farm. So by my family generations ago actually came here as German immigrants and they were farmers, potato farmers and

08:14
later on, row crop farmers. When I was 12, I was driving massive farm equipment, helping on my uncle's farm and my grandpa's farm, where I worked the summers. But it was never something that people aspired to be. It was the thing you thought of as what you could do if you couldn't do anything else. And I think that's really, really unfortunate. So I spent my life in corporate America, where I still am, by the way. I still work at...

08:43
farm career, which I'm approaching hopefully retirement age here before too long. But after years of that, in the year 2020, my 14-year-old daughter passed away from complications from a very, from a rare disease. In January, and then in March in 2020, the world shut down because of COVID.

09:09
And the grocery store shelves, you know, started to be empty. And it was really, really, if anyone can recall that time, it was really quite a shock to our, you know, to our thinking about food and health and both spiritual and physical. And at the same time, the business that I'm in also was, became more and more challenging to the point where I thought I just don't, I don't want to do this anymore.

09:36
You know, my basically my day job is helping people finance cars that they don't really need. And is that a legacy that I want to leave behind? And I stumbled across actually JM Fortier's book, The Market Gardener, and started to watch some YouTube videos. People like Connor Crickmore and the NeverSink Farm in New York. And a few other examples of farmers that were able to create.

10:06
actually a nice living and a nice community around this method of farming, which they basically got from Europe. These 30 inch beds and human scale without a lot of heavy equipment and without a lot of huge capital investment. I just thought that was the coolest thing. So I took some master courses and we started to build up the farm. We started the first shop for property.

10:33
We found the property here. We started to build the farm up. There was nothing here. Um, it was, it was an 18 acre lawn basically. So, um, yeah, so that's how we got started. And, and man, it was so much fun that first year I was, uh, we still lived in our, in our other house. So it was a 20 minute drive to the farm, um, every morning and evening to take care of things and I just loved it.

11:00
We moved now to the farmhouse which we renovated since. It's a significantly smaller house than we lived in before and made quite a lifestyle change to live out here on the farm. And it's just, it's really been quite fantastic. That is a beautiful story. And I'm sorry about your loss. That's sad, I'm sorry. So yeah, COVID again.

11:26
COVID keeps coming up because a lot of the people I've talked to made changes right around when COVID hit. And it really did change how a lot of people viewed their world, not necessarily the world, but their little part of the world. And I know that we were still living in our little house in Jordan, Minnesota in town when everything kind of got shut down.

11:56
We had always been kind of aware that it was smart to keep at least two weeks of food, you know, ready to have in case for some reason we had a massive ice storm and could not drive to the store. And so when things kind of got shut down, we were okay. I was definitely anxious about what

12:25
My husband actually worked as a, he was outsourced from his job to an account that was a bunch of hospitals. And so he couldn't work from home. So he was still going out into the world, into hospitals every day while all that was going on. Yeah. And he was so worried he was going to bring COVID home to me and the kid. And so he was constantly stressed.

12:55
And he said, honey, he said, I'm so glad that we have always lived as if there might be a problem around the corner that we're not foreseeing. He said, because if I had to worry about you running to the store to get stuff and being exposed, he said, I don't know how I would be functioning right now. And I didn't realize how stressed he was until like a month after.

13:21
whatever the date was that the government said, okay, everybody started masking up. Don't go, you don't have to, blah, blah, blah. And he was just getting quieter and quieter and quieter with every week that passed. And I finally said, what's up with you? And he said, I just, he said, I don't know what's going to happen.

13:41
And I said, oh, that's why you're being so quiet. And he said, yeah, he said, I'm trying really hard to not be panicked by this. He said, but this is a real thing. This is scary. He said, yeah, it really is. So for us, it basically cemented that we wanted to be more capable of growing our own stuff. And we had a small garden at the old house, but...

14:09
It wasn't enough to put away stuff for the winter, you know? So we ended up buying a place in August of 2020. And we were really lucky because we were on the beginning swing of the housing boom that happened. So if we'd waited even six months, we would not have been able to go. So yeah, COVID was weird. Well, it certainly changed things.

14:38
I don't really want to do it again anytime soon. It was... No, no, hopefully not in our lifetime, right? It's kind of a statistical inevitability. It will happen. So I think it's, I hope that people start to change a little bit the way they live as you mentioned, not thinking about being able to or needing to be able to run out to program or whatever for dinner tonight.

15:08
Instead, have enough to sustain for a while. It's good for all of us. Yeah. And don't get me wrong, I do appreciate a Subway sandwich now and then because Subway makes them differently than I would. And I'm not saying everyone has to cook every meal that they eat every day from scratch all the time, but it's really good to know how to do those things. Right.

15:38
All right. So what else do you guys do? So you grow produce, you have a CSA. Do you have anything except chickens? We do have chickens. Yeah, we have got, so we have 400 layers. Actually, I had to euthanize our entire flock last year because we got a contracted a disease. No, I'm not going to remember the name of it. It's a very long name. Not, not bird flu, not. And interestingly enough, the state of Michigan.

16:08
because of how contagious this particular disease was, we had to euthanize the flock, which was a bummer for sure. We have no idea how it got on the farm. So just a lesson for anyone who might be listening, I think the only way we can sort it is that we bought six hens from a local farmer that was not necessarily a certified hatchery.

16:36
you do take a risk. You know, so the only thing, this particular disease only affects chickens, pheasants, and peacocks. So it didn't come in on a wild bird or something like that. So we're pretty certain it must have come in on those chickens. And because some of these diseases that affect poultry can be sort of without any symptoms for a very long time. And then suddenly for whatever reason, they

17:06
manifest themselves. Anyway, long story, but we had to euthanize our flock and we just got 400 new hens this year from a place in Fort Wayne that we deal with. So shout out to it's Wayne Trace Farms, by the way, in Fort Wayne. Tracy's great. And she supplies us with all of our hens other than those that I mentioned that we bought that I'm sure was a source for the problem.

17:33
She's great and we, so now we have 400 hens that are just starting to lay, which is nice. It was a very quiet period on the farm when we didn't have chickens and it was really a bummer. Now we got them back, it feels right. And also my wife is, she's the crazy chicken lady, so she's turned into this because this is her connection to the farm. She loves to buy exotic breeds.

18:00
and raise them. So we're going to get our first batch of those exotic new exotic chicks now here next week. It's not insanity. It's passion. She calls herself the crazy chicken lady so I can call her that. Okay, good. Yeah, I have a hard time with the whole crazy chicken lady, crazy cat lady, crazy horse lady thing.

18:30
I love cats and I love dogs and if I had my way I would have kittens around all the time, I would have puppies around all the time because I love them. So I don't have kittens and puppies around all the time because that becomes expensive and takes up a ton of time. And kittens and puppies don't really give back anything except love.

18:56
And love's great, but I don't need to be loved by 25 pups and a thousand kittens. I'm good. So, so yes, I think that there are people who might go slightly overboard. I think it becomes overboard when you can no longer handle it and you're never, you're not taking care of the animals in the way that they deserve anymore. That's, that's where it becomes the crazy part. Yeah, for sure. So I, I just.

19:23
Every time somebody says crazy cat lady, I'm like, but are they crazy? Really? Well, I'll just give you an example. She's out wallpapering their coop right now. They have to have a pretty place to live. Yeah. I'm sure she thinks I'm the crazy vegetable guy, so maybe that's fair. Yeah. I don't call my husband the crazy gardening dude, but it's close. He loves it.

19:53
And right now he and the kid are out putting up the framing for the walls on our heated winter greenhouse that we're building right now. Oh, very nice. Yes, I'm very excited. We've been excited since we found out we were going to do it. And we have baby plants on our kitchen table right now. And as soon as that greenhouse is done, the baby plants are going outside early this year, which is great. Yeah, very good.

20:22
We're excited. Congratulations. Yeah, it's a lovely project and it's gonna allow us to extend our growing season this fall. So, don't have enough words and I don't actually have all, I don't think words have been invented yet for how excited we are about this project. It does change the game for sure. We started here in year one with a 30 by 72 hoop house, you know, we went with.

20:50
basically full automation. So there's climate control inside and the rest. We bought a speckin' one in year two, so that first one was 70 by 30, the second one's 120 by 30. Last year we added a heated propagation house, so that one's 26 by 36. And now actually I just came in from building our second caterpillar tunnel.

21:18
So we keep, you know, there's really, it makes a huge difference to be able to put things under cover even if they're not heated. The sun does a whole lot in terms of keeping things warm. As long as you can keep them from freezing, the sun will keep it warm there during the day. So that's, it makes all the difference in the world. Yeah, last spring, I'm sorry, last fall, our barn cat had kittens and

21:47
once they were big enough to be out wandering around, she would direct them into the small hoop house greenhouse that we had up because it was warm in there. And we'd go in there and they'd just be playing because it was so warm. It was really cute. Okay. So do you have any other animals or is it just the chickens in your gardens? We don't. We want to. But...

22:17
My wife and I both work full-time jobs, so there is a certain limitation when it comes to time. I was fortunate enough here, which this is something else I'm really proud of, that the first second year actually that we did this, I found an intern, a young lady who was a sustainability major at Grand Valley State University, one of the local Michigan colleges. And

22:44
She started year one on the farm and just kind of found a passion for farming. So she came back in our, in last year and ran the farm. She was a production manager, you know, 23 year old college graduate, um, starting farming. And, you know, just looking back at what it was like when I was a young, a young guy working on my, um, uncle's farm, you know, and basically being told this isn't what you want to do for a living. I think it's really.

23:11
fantastic to try and close that loop and show Riley that, yeah, you can actually make quite a nice living doing this and have a different lifestyle than just heading into the corporate jungle every day. So Riley's back again this year, again, managing production and learning a little bit more about the business side of things. So...

23:36
I'm pretty excited about that. I'm looking for Riley 2.0 because I'm sure Riley at some point is on her way to owning her own farm and I'd love to have another Riley at this point to try and help develop their passion. Riley will be ready to run her own farm pretty soon. She understands what needs to happen and how it all works. I'm pretty proud of that actually.

24:03
She's part of the group of kids that I refer to as the light and the hope of the future. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Our son is 22 and he still lives with us and he is, he's getting a very nice education in how to build buildings and how to grow food and how to take care of chickens. And we call him the intern who gets paid with room and board right now. There you go. Yeah, it's a paid internship.

24:32
Yep. And he loves it. I mean, he'll say that he doesn't. He'll say that he would really like to, I don't know, do something else eventually. But every morning when he gets up and he actually slept, because he's got some insomnia issues going on right now, he gets up and he's like, did dad check the wood stove before he left? And it's a yes or a no. And if it's a no, he's like, okay. And he goes up and

25:01
puts on his shoes and jacket and stuff and heads out and makes sure the wood stove is fed. And that's important too on the homestead. So he chips in all the time. And I'm so proud of him because I don't know that he really, really wanted to move here. He had a job at a comic book store that he really loved. It was within walking distance of where we lived.

25:31
He loved his job. And sometimes I feel bad that we left because it's half an hour away and he can't drive right now. Whole bunch of stuff about the kid that I'm not allowed to say. There's a reason he's not allowed to drive and it's beyond his control. So sometimes I'm afraid that he feels trapped, but.

25:56
He seems to have adjusted well and he really does like helping dad out on the quote unquote farm. So it's working out okay. So do you have other kids? While we had just the two and as I mentioned, my daughter passed away in 2020. I have Matthew who's now 15 who is actually out making sandbags as we speak. So he's maybe not so enthusiastic about it.

26:25
Which is, I am hoping that he grows into it still, I guess. And my hope was when we bought the farm that he would, you know, he was enthusiastic when we bought it. And I think he's, well, he's 15. He'd rather play video games than work. So. That sounds about right. Yeah. Makes him, I think, pretty normal. Even though we hope for more, you know? Yeah, but you never know who he's gonna become. I have, I have four kids.

26:55
and they all have turned out to be really, really good people.

27:02
There's nothing bad I can really say about them, so they're good people. I'm also their mommy, I'm going to say they're good people, but you know how that goes. Okay, so you mentioned video games and stuff here. One of the things that's most interesting to me about this wave of folks who decided to move out of the cities and...

27:30
start growing their own food and raising animals and stuff is that every time I talk with them, I watched a bunch of YouTube videos to learn what I didn't know. And it is so incredibly interesting to me that we are using this pretty, I don't have a word, intense is the wrong word, this technology that is so high.

28:00
tech to learn about old school things and then implement those old school things. Because it sounds like you've done the same thing. You've watched videos and stuff to learn how to do things. Yeah. And I guess I never thought about it that way, but it is interesting how the circle closes, right? And I think it's just I view these channels like YouTube as...

28:29
really just democratizing education. And there's a whole lot of people out there willing to contribute because they also have a passion for what they're doing. I think it goes farther. I mean, I think, for example, both JM Fortier who's in Conor Crickmore, who are both kind of pioneers in their own right about this sort of farm approach.

28:53
definitely have a passion and want to teach other people. You know, and JM is actually now working on a big research farm, you know, as to try and help find better ways to do some of this stuff. But you can also connect with these folks personally and in exchange.

29:15
they make a living doing it, right? So both JM and Connor have master classes, which by the way, I highly, highly recommend. Because if you're going to try and do this farming gig, the systems that you need to have in place to be efficient are absolutely the key. Because it's the whole thing is based on intensive use of space and

29:40
and lots and growing lots of stuff. You know, like for example, we grew 50,000 pounds of food last year on our little 1.3 acres. And this year, this year we'll grow another 30% more in the same space. So it is it is a little bit democratizing education, you don't have to go to university anymore to learn this, you can learn it directly from the practitioner, which I think is really great. Yeah, and not end up with them.

30:09
hundreds of thousand dollars student loans to pay back to. Right. Right. My basic, I love Elon Musk's approach to it. If this, he says, uh, if you can't learn it on YouTube, it's probably not worth knowing. So, yeah, my daughter has a two year degree in something, just the basic beginner degree, you know, and I had asked her a couple of years ago if she was going to go back to continue and

30:39
There she didn't even miss a beat. She was crying immediately and I was like what is wrong and she said mom She said I'm still paying my student loans from the two-year degree that I'm never actually going to use She said I'm never going to spend money to go back to a college class in my life that's that's how much it bothered her and I felt so bad for her and

31:07
I don't have the money to pay her student loans off. If I did, I'd do it. She did end up taking an online course to learn computer coding, and she loves it. And she's been doing like freelance stuff with that for the last few years. And that didn't cost her nearly as much money, and it was an accelerated course, and she loved it. So maybe, maybe the idea is that we don't have to spend.

31:36
hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education anymore. We just need to know where to learn the information from. Right, right. So. Right. Agreed. Yeah, it was a rough patch for her and she is incredibly bright. And I think that she just felt like she had wasted her time and her money on that degree because she thought she was supposed to get it. So yeah, it's really hard.

32:06
when the world tells you go to school, get straight A's, and then go to college and get straight A's and then try to find a job in the field you went to school for because it's not as easy as it sounds. For sure not. So anyway, I could talk about that for months. I have had long conversations with other friends who have kids who have been through the college path and we're pretty much all on the same page.

32:36
So anyway, Rob, I'm really, I don't know, I got a lot going on today, so I'm gonna keep this short. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. I appreciate it. Thank you, Mary. Appreciate it, appreciate you too. Appreciate what you're doing. I'm trying to get you guys' information out to the world as much as I can. Thank you. All right, have a great day. Thank you. Bye.