White Pine Berry Farm

Today I'm talking with Andrew at White Pine Berry Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Andrew at White Pine Berry Farm. Good morning, Andrew. How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. So tell me about what part you play in White Pine Berry Farm and...

00:28
the story of White Pine Berry Farm. Great. I'll kind of start at the beginning. My dad was a dairy farmer for his whole life. Opportunity presented itself that some other family, my uncle, my cousins would continue the dairy farmer. And my dad went from dairy to berry and started a you pick berry and egg tourism farm from just a neighbor's, you know, kind of hobby bee farm. And.

00:56
I just was helping out a little bit the first couple of years, helping out the first couple of years just on the weekends and getting it going. And he ran it for seven years. And then in 2019, I came back as the manager and dad took a different full-time job, but it was still helping me a lot on the weekends. And I ran it for the last five years. And then this year we've been running it together as he retired from the...

01:27
the job that he took as a farm director at a local university. That is so fun. Was it his dream that you guys would end up working together? Not necessarily. It seemed like it worked out that way. It worked out that way. It was something that we talked about when he was looking at what we want to do if he ever wanted a farm.

01:54
This intrigued me a lot compared to just dairy farming. If you always look at different farms, I think this is both really good fit for our personalities. We enjoy working with people. It's having guests and public out to the farm. Yeah.

02:10
Okay. Is your dad Greg? Is that his name? Yes, Greg Farmer Greg. Okay. Yeah. Farmer Greg. I was looking at your Facebook page today because I have been crazy busy and hadn't actually looked at it since I booked the interview with you. And I was like, it looks like such a fun place to be. And your Facebook page is brilliant. I don't know who handles, who handles that, but whoever does it is doing a great job.

02:38
Well, thank you. It's something we've always enjoyed. My wife and I have done it for many years. The last couple of years we have joined with. So thanks for the comment on our Facebook page. My wife and I had been running the Facebook together for many years. And then we also have hired an intern the last four or five years to give us a hand with it, especially on the video editing side. But it takes a whole bunch of us to come up with some fun, creative ideas and put them together. Yeah.

03:08
looks super fun and the the way the videos and photos are taken it's very colorful and inviting and that's what you want for people to want to come see you. Yep and we like to think that our Facebook reflects our farm when you come out here you're out here to have experience it's not just about us growing you know fruit and vegetables and pumpkins it's about having a good time on the farm.

03:35
making memories with your family and friends. And yeah, I just want to be a place that is really welcoming and just something that people look forward to. And we reflect that on our Facebook and our website as well. Yes, I was just going to say your website is crazy full. Yeah, it's really hard to describe what we do just in one page because we, like you were saying, it's all summer and fall long.

04:02
We start out with strawberries usually mid-June. Follow that up with strawberries at the beginning of July. Then raspberries, blueberries, and currants come into play. Throughout those times we also have strawberry shortcake days where we have shortcake we sell out of our store and food and wagon rides. On Saturdays we typically do those.

04:26
In July, we have the ElocoCoop Farm Tour. We're a part of where other farms and us, we are kind of used to open our doors. We open our doors, have people from all over Western Wisconsin and the Twin Cities area come out and check out what we got going on. Moving into August, we saw some blueberries that we do our sunflowers and zinnias. In the fall, we do a corn maze pumpkin patch.

04:49
Sometimes we sell some flowers depending when the frost comes, fall raspberry pickin', we even have golden fall raspberries, guided wagon rides on the weekends. We had at least six to seven hundred kids come for field trips this year and always a blast. On top of that we planted Christmas trees which are still a ways out and we host a handful of weddings here as well in our wedding barn.

05:18
And those photos are stunning. I can't imagine being a young bride and having my wedding at your place and then seeing the photos afterwards. I think I would just cry in absolute sheer happiness. Yep, and the blessing with having a nice acreage is no matter what time of year it is, there's a beautiful place to take photos. And we'd have a neighbor who lets us use his ground for some sunset photos, because it has a nice slope to it.

05:43
There's no lacking of finding pretty places to take photos at our place.

05:50
Mm-hmm. Okay. So your season is over now for the summer, yes? Yes, our last fall event day was this Halloween weekend. And then we got just two little days will be open if somebody wants to come to get our corn maze the next couple of days. And then in winter time, since we now have a commercial kitchen, we had been open a little in the winter time. We have like we don't have Christmas trees yet, but we've been open in winter time.

06:19
found most people who wanted our fudge, we either do delivery or we bring our jams and jellies and fudge to craft fairs. So in Rochester, Minnesota, we're attending Feast for the first time. It's a food and beverage only event. We'll go to a couple other local craft shows kind of at the end of November and early December as well and bring our products there. Okay, so you're going to Rochester, Minnesota? Is that what you meant?

06:49
Yes, we'll be heading down there for a food and vendor fair. OK, so that I have a question about that. How does that work? I'm assuming because you have a commercial kitchen, you're not you're not strapped by the the the cottage food laws that Minnesota has. So basically, it doesn't matter that stuff is made in Wisconsin, but you bring it to Minnesota to sell it. Yeah, you got to fill out the forms for like sales tax in Minnesota. But as far as like with having to

07:19
our food license were able to sell both wholesale and at other states as well because the Minnesota college law wouldn't apply to us in Ternan, Minnesota. So it's because we have our retail food license we're able to. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. So when you say we, how many people are involved in this enterprise because it can't just be you and your dad?

07:48
have full-time jobs but also help out during our busy seasons and they take care of the books. So there's four of us family members involved. My sisters have each also played roles in the business as it's grown or throughout it's growing as well. But kind of the ones who us are mainly focused out of the four family members. And then we have about 50 seasonal part-time employees.

08:16
That includes our store managers who also do all the baking and fudge making and jams and jellies and caramel apples for us. We've got a lot of high school and middle school help that work throughout the summer and some in the fall. We've got a couple of college students and some adults who help out as well, but it takes a full crew for what we do. One of the things we're most known for is our organic strawberries.

08:42
that takes just a boatload of work to do. The weeding is unreal. We could, you know, me and dad would just be weeding all day if it was only the two of us out there trying to grow as many strawberries as we do. So we do bring in a full team to help us out. And I've just been blessed with a lot of great adults and kids who have helped out from the local community to put this all together. Wow, so you have a huge team and that's fantastic because otherwise it would never work.

09:12
When did this really start, the berry farm situation start? Yeah, 2012 was when Dad first started planting things. We started the first year with one fall family day where we had our pumpkins that we grew, did the corn maze. We had planted strawberries that year, but we plant June berries, so it takes a full year before you get a crop. So we started out in 2012.

09:42
planting some things. In 2013, dad really expanded a lot on planting blueberries and raspberries and currants and asparagus and really was the first year things took off but then also opened up for strawberries. The growth was a little slower than we expected. He planted two acres of strawberries to start out with and we only would have needed about a quarter or a half acre to meet customer demand that for those first couple years. But as we kind of get

10:09
got more well known and just wanted to be a place that people were happy to come. It's definitely grown a lot since then. We're at about four to five acres of strawberries now. Wow. So, I guess what I'm trying to get at without being nosy or rude is what would you say the percentage of growth has been since 2012 with the business?

10:38
I guess that's really tough to compare. I mean, the first year, let's just say we had a hundred customers come on the farm when we were open in 2013. Sorry. I think that got out there. So I was saying that, you know, first year we had maybe about a hundred customers. By year four, we were maybe about four to 500 customers. Now we're pushing, I would guess somewhere between 10 to 20,000, probably about 10,000 customers a year. That's just a guess.

11:08
Wow. Wow. Well, I guess that slow growth of first year must have gained some speed. Yep. Yep. And it's really changed a lot. And we added a farm store in 2020. That allowed us to have more event days and just be able to run our business a little more efficiently when we had these big event days. But that was

11:36
2020, which was a big year for us. You know, a lot of business, unfortunately, had to close their doors or had limited business they could handle. We were a outdoor-based business, so we had lots of people looking for activities to do with their kids that week. And that definitely helped us, but we're also, each year got bigger and bigger as far as the amount of people that came out.

11:58
Sure. The reason that I was trying to pinpoint a number is because a lot of people in 2020 decided they wanted to go do something different. And a lot of people decided they wanted to go buy land and grow things or raise animals and build a business out of it. And we're now four years later down the road and some people are having great success and some people are still struggling

12:27
The reason that I really like talking to people like you is because you are an example of you start it and you stick with it and you grow it and you grow it and you grow it and then here you are. And I mean, we are at a position that we are getting lots of customers. We think we've got a really good going thing. Our customers love the experience out here. I mean, we just hear awesome feedback.

12:54
once they leave, you know, they leave a smile on their faces. A lot of times they leave their kids without smiles on their faces because they're mad because they wanted to keep playing and they're drug out of a corn box or we're having a good time running on the bales or, you know, you know, that's, that's, we, we get more tears from kids leaving than, you know, other things here. So, um, there is a lot of success that we've had for getting people out, but I'll be honest growing products, the profitability isn't where we'd like it to be.

13:22
You know, this is a business we're trying to grow here and we've been able to increase the customers, but we're still looking at ways to say, okay, how can this be something that can sustain our families long term? And I think that there can be profit in growing vegetables, you pick side of things. But I think a lot of people look at us from the outside, whether they're customers or are other businesses similar to us.

13:51
You don't think, oh, they must be really doing great. Look at this full parking lot. And they got, you know, 500 to 1,000 people on their farm in one day on their really busy day. What you're really seeing there is to me the highlight reel. So that is all the work we've done, all the weeding we put into it, all the, you know, investment we made into the land and the plants and the store, like you're seeing the fruit of that, you know, the fruit of our labor, to put it in a funny little term.

14:20
But that all that stuff that we're putting on, even though it looks like it's going great, there's still very big investment in cost to that. So it's I'd love to say like, yes, it's been very, very profitable. We've had a lot of great successes, but there's still it's it's not what a lot of people I think might might make it seem from the outside. I mean, that the highlight reel these fun days. There's so much labor that goes into that work.

14:51
that that has been our biggest struggle and that's something we're really looking into and one, how can we decrease our expenses, but also how can we increase our income as well? It's two sides to it. So I think that there is ability to make profit when it comes to let's just say market garnering or you picks, you know that, but it's not as easy.

15:21
homesteading and trying to make a go at it. It's, there is profit out there, but it takes a lot of work. And I don't think it's something that if you're wanting to find a get rich quick scheme, you're not in the right business. If you're gonna do, whether that's you pick or market gardening. Yeah, no, this is not a get rich quick scheme and it's not an easy lifestyle to choose either. It's a lot of time and work and patience and heartbreak.

15:51
And I don't know what your summer was like in Wisconsin, but our market garden did terribly this year because we got so much rain in May and June. And then there was no way to get anything in the garden because it was soup. It was soup. And then when we finally did get stuff in, it stopped raining. So we were on the other end of the spectrum. So it's not easy and it's frustrating. And...

16:17
It's also joyful because we planted tomatoes. We did three plantings of tomatoes this year. First ones rotted out. Second ones just grew, but stalled out. Third ones grew and produced beautiful tomatoes, not as many as we would've liked. But we actually had tomatoes this year and we didn't think we're going to have any. So that was the one joy that we got out of this summer. I don't know what it was like for Wisconsin. What was it like for you? We completely got tons of rain in June and.

16:45
It saved us a little money on our irrigation bill, but I would guess we lost tens of thousands of potential dollars due to those rains because when we, the week that we got most of the rains was our prime picking strawberry week and rain does two things. Well, a couple of things. One, it can just cause Mary berries to get water logged. So that was potential profit loss that there's just berries that would have been beautiful, but just got too much water.

17:12
Two, there can be some molds, which wasn't actually as bad as I would have expected. Traditionally, we have not put a lot of fungicide or any fungicide on our berries, and luckily it wasn't too bad. We had more that were just damaged to waterlog. And three, when you're a upick farm, people want a beautiful day to come picking. So if one day it rains, you hope that the next day it's nice so you can pick the berries before they get too waterlogged.

17:39
You know, people will come out and get them before they get too overripe. But when you get a couple of big rains in a row, it just kind of was the perfect storm for what would have been our biggest crop ever. What we believe would have been our biggest crop ever was actually one of our worst years we ever had in strawberries, just looking at per acre wise, only because of those rains in one specific week that just came too much and and not at the right time. So.

18:07
It's always a struggle when you're dealing with something that's dependent on the weather. Our pumpkin crop wasn't quite what we would have liked, but we're blessed that we had a pumpkin crop because I know some of our farms who didn't. We're just blessed that we were blessed for what we got. And then also really blessed that when we had a couple of days that had good weather.

18:33
of our customers just responded and we were really upfront with, hey, we need people to come out and pick. Like, this is the day. We had two really huge picking days that really helped us get a lot of berries off. That would have been, if it wasn't for those two days, we would have really had lots of berry loss. But one of the beauties of social media and kind of the marketing platform that we did is we try our best to be communicating with customers constantly what conditions are like and what's in season.

19:01
just appreciate the response they gave us when we said, hey, we need you guys to come out. Now's the time to come pick. And it was crazy. They came out. So just really blessed and grateful for them. Yeah. Come save the strawberries, please. Yeah, that's essentially what we said. Yup. So I was just, no, it was a long...

19:26
A long summer, I would say a long summer, but it was a interesting week for sure that all that rain came. Just unreal. Yes, it was a horrible, well, horrible is probably a little extreme. It was a rough summer for many, many people who were growing produce this year. Yep. We were, like I said, we were blessed that we have lighter soil that we did get some

19:56
some crops on it, but it wasn't what it could have been without. We were so blessed that we didn't have a frost early this year. Like it was warm. We thought great, no frost damage. And then all the rains came. So if it isn't one thing, it might be another, but that's also part of just farming. My dad's farmed for many years and you know, you get good crops and you get crops that are a struggle. It's, it's always been that way. Yes. And when my, uh, when my husband told me that he really.

20:25
eventually wanted to have land and grow a garden. I was like, are you talking about a garden? Are you talking about field crops? And he said, a garden. And I said, good, because if you said field crops, I would have said no, because there's so much risk in it. I didn't want to play that game. Yep. So we don't play that game. We have a really pretty garden and we sell what we can and we can and freeze what we can.

20:54
And we make the most of it and the best of it even when it's not doing great It's not the easiest thing in the world to grow produce and it's not the easiest thing in the world to raise animals either So when I started the podcast, I really wanted people to tell me How things were going in the most honest terms because people think that it's very pretty and it's very easy and it's not as You are explaining Yep

21:20
So we've done our best if another girl reaches out to us. We love being a resource, sharing our information, kind of saying, here's what's worked for us, here's what hasn't worked for us. We've done a lot of economic, internal bookkeeping and number crunching to try to find the cost of our labor. We have all of our team members track what they do.

21:48
Every single hour they work here on the farm and code it. Um, which my wife is an engineer, so this is very hard to duplicate, but she built the Excel spreadsheet program that when they check out, they write down, mark down what they do, um, every hour, they're actually every 15 minutes, they, they kind of record what they did that day. And it's a perfect no, but compare that to four years ago when we were looking and we're like, I don't know if we're making any money at strawberries. What's our labor in it?

22:17
Now we can get a pretty good estimate of where it's at based off what it is. But with 50 kids, that's a lot of training you need to do and a lot of time for them to clock out every day and mark down what it is. But it's been very interesting to take a look at those numbers and has really helped influence some of the decisions we're making going forward. Awesome. I love that. That's great. I didn't, your wife must be brilliant. She is. She's.

22:47
I'm married up, I'll put it that way.

22:51
Yeah, with any luck, we all marry up. She probably thinks she married up by marrying you too. So only when it comes to talking to people that she doesn't know. That's the one time she's I've got a band to John. I'll talk to anybody and she's like, you take care of that. I will do all the back end stuff. Yeah, my husband does the farmers market. I do not because I am really anxious about people. And yes, I do a podcast, but that's because I don't have to be in front of people.

23:21
I'm just sitting in a room by myself talking to people. So do you guys have animals as well or is it just the produce? The animals are more on the egg tourism side that we truly have. We do a rented goat program with Leslie from Silent Rolling Acres, not too far from us in San Juan County here. She gives us a couple of goats that we can use throughout the summer and then she takes care of them in the winter.

23:51
Now you're like, what kind of name is that? If you said we bought a lot fast, you get, we bought a lot. Um, which is, which is, it's so funny when you say it, cause once people understand where it comes from, it's, it's, it's one of my favorite name farms in the area, um, they let us have their alpacas here over the summer and fall. And it's been so fun for people to enjoy seeing them and taking pictures of them and feeding them a little bit of food.

24:17
They're not quite as friendly as the goats because the goats will be yelling at you across the farm saying, hey, come pet me, come feed me. They'll back as they came up and they would eat if they wanted to and some are like, no, I'm not going to. We got seven chickens. We officially have gotten our first egg. So that's the first for White Pine Berry Farm. Okay. We haven't quite figured out what our winter plan is. If we have a neighbor, maybe take care of them or if we're gonna keep them here, but.

24:45
We'll see what we end up deciding on the chicken side. In the wintertime, we are usually around, dad lives here on the farm. I live about 15 minutes away, but have not been set up for winter animals except for the beef, which we have a nice pasture and a lean too for them now. So they just kind of, they can kind of do their own thing and you don't have to worry about predators or anything like that with the beef, with the fence we've got around it.

25:11
But those are the main animals we've had on our farm. And then during the Saturdays, we'll have a couple extra animals around the pet. And of course, our farm cat Izzy is always hard at work around the farm. Or he's actually our wedding host. So when we have weddings on our farm, he's the one who greets everybody as they're walking to the barn, because his home is right next to that. And he's very friendly and likes getting a lot of attention from any of our farm guests.

25:40
I bet he's exhausted for a week after a wedding because he gets all the loves and pets he can stand. Yep, yep, he'll just kind of do his own thing for a couple days, but when he wants love, he's the cuddliest cat you'll find around. But our main focus on a farm has been the berry picking. We sell about 90 to 95% of our berries that we grow here on the farm. Other main focus would be the egg tourism side,

26:09
corn maze, the activities for the kids in our fun zone, which we do in the summer and in the fall, the event days where people are coming out and maybe getting something from a food truck or buying some food out of our kitchen and getting some desserts, having a very cool atmosphere out here. So the animals are definitely more of a complement to what we're doing on the egg tourism side than it truly is we're trying to raise those for profit.

26:39
It's something for people to enjoy a farm experience out here to see those. So it's been great to have some farms who can partner up with that. Yeah. And smart too, because then you're not on the hook for feeding the animals all winter. That's a, it's, it's a, it gets to be a lot when you have a lot of animals around in wintertime.

27:04
to take care of them. And the chickens are one of the biggest concerns just with predators around, but we haven't done that. I know that could be a big issue there. The goats, it's just, it's a perfect combination that we can use our pasture. We got enough land that they can pasture out here, but in the wintertime we're not feeding them the hay. She's still taking care of them. And she's a goat expert, so she knows how to take care of them while in the wintertime.

27:32
Yep, absolutely. I think that when farms work together or businesses work together, everybody wins because you're doing what you're good at, she's doing what she's good at, and they just happen to compliment each other. There is another animal we got that I didn't mention before when you talked about partnerships. We also have over a million bees that help us out in the summer as well. So we partner up with a local beekeeper named Dale Wolf from Wolf Honey Farm. He takes care of the bees, bottles up the honey, we buy it back.

28:02
from him and then resell it at our store. So that's, when you talk about partnerships and working with other farms, it's been so great to have partners like that, that we're getting the beneficial side of the pollination from the honey bees. He's getting a place where we grow three acres of flowers, sunflowers, zinnias, plus we have pollinator mix, plus we got strawberries and raspberries, which they do a great job pollinating, a lot of good food sources for the bees. So they do very well here.

28:31
And he's got all equipment set up for taking care of the bees. So best of both worlds, great to have partners like that. We also partner up with a local creamery where we sell them berries. And then they we buy back the, you know, we can get ice cream made with our berries from them and they can send a scooper out here and scoop the ice cream here on the weekends and stuff. And then we also partner up with a kombucha company called Manifest Kombucha where we sell her the berries.

29:00
she processes them into kombucha. And then we actually had kegs with kombucha made from our berries, but we didn't have to do all the work to do it. And her recipes are amazing. So it was great to compliment our berries into her kombucha. It's been another great partnership we've got. Okay, so I have a question about all the partnerships. Was this a plan or was this just, you were chatting with somebody and they said you should talk to so-and-so?

29:30
Um, so the bees, my dad worked that out with Dale. He's been a local beekeeper and it partners up with a couple of different orchards and farms like ours. So like he, he kind of had that from the beginning that that would be a, be a great person to work with the ice, both the ice cream and the kombucha. We got to thank our, thank our friend Jerry from Shane Valley orchard. He's our local honey berry expert here in Western Wisconsin. Um, he.

29:58
has a commercial kitchen as well and he rented it out to Manifest Kombucha. When I talked with him about the commercial kitchen one day he's like, oh yeah they're making kombucha. And I'm like, that's awesome. I've been wanting, you know, I've been hearing about this kombucha, I want to learn more about it and possibly sell it at our store. So he's it's a different farmer, Jerry, who connected us up with Manifest Kombucha.

30:22
He's also, I saw on Facebook that he was the one who was partnering up with the creamery on his honeyberries. So I was like, who's this? What's this ice cream place that's opened up in Hudson? Let's get them some of our blueberries or strawberries and our raspberries. So another one of our partner farms is Jerry's farm because he's just done, he actually got married on our farm about 10 years ago, but he's just done an awesome job of saying, okay, you guys are experts at blueberries and strawberries.

30:50
and raspberries, I'm going to focus on honey berries. And we throw business back and forth and say, hey, check out Jerry's farm. And Jerry says, hey, go, you want strawberries? Go to White Pine. So been really cool to have lots of other farms that we're just able to all share each other's businesses with. And he's done an awesome job of just kind of finding a way that we can be berry farms but not competitive against each other.

31:20
It takes a village. I don't care what you're working on. It takes a village of people to figure out how to make it go. Okay, my dog is barking her head off and we're at like 32 minutes. So I'm gonna wrap this up with you, Andrew. I so appreciate your time today. Thank you so much. Yeah, well, thank you for having us on. If people wanna learn more about, check out our Facebook, Instagram, our website is kind of the main places where we're kind of.

31:48
out there saying what we're up to. And if they have any questions, they can always reach out. You know, winter time is a great time for us to get in contact with some other businesses or people asking questions to to learn more. You know, we're members of WADA, the Wisconsin Aged Tourism Association. Wisconsin berry growers are actually part of the Minnesota Christmas tree growers. And the networking you can find with people is great. And we just want to be an awesome resource for people. And they're trying to do that. And

32:17
Just love opening up our doors and winter time is a great time to catch up with other farmers and learn from each other. Fabulous. Thank you so much, Andrew. Okay. Sounds great. Bye.