CSA Spotlight: Vine and Virtue Farm
Vine Ripened ⵜ Virtue Raised
Farm fresh veggies, chicken, and eggs that you can feel good about feeding your family.
1. What inspired you to start Vine and Virtue Farm? What is your Mission & Value?
We started Vine and Virtue Farm at the end of 2022 out of a love for food, the environment, and our community. Our mission is to bring people together around food that was grown/raised in a way that they can feel confident feeding their family.
2. Can you tell us about the history and location of your farm?
Our farm is located at W841 County Road VV, Seymour, WI 54165. Prior to Vine and Virtue Farm, the land that we are on was a conventional dairy farm up until the early 2000s. From that time, the barns have sat empty while the surrounding land has been cash-cropped.
3. What type of farming practices do you follow at Vine and Virtue Farm? Are you organic, sustainable, or biodynamic?
We follow regenerative farming practices encompassed by permaculture. Though we are not organic certified, we grow organically without the use of chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Our vegetables are raised in a no-till system and our animals are raised on pasture which will eventually become a silvopasture system incorporating trees, crops, and animals.
4. What crops or products do you specialize in?
Currently, we specialize in vegetables, pastured poultry, and eggs. This spring we are adding hundreds of fruit trees that will be added to our product line allowing us to create value-added products on the farm such as hard cider.
5. Do you offer a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program? If so, what can members expect from your CSA shares?
We offer a market-style CSA in which our customers pay for their share sometime before the end of February. Throughout our season, June-October, customers reserve the produce they want through our online store and pick it up at our Thursdays on the Farm weekly event. They can use their CSA funds to purchase anything we have available on our farm - whole chickens, duck or chicken eggs or a variety of organically grown fruits and vegetables.
6. Are there any upcoming events or workshops at Vine and Virtue Farm that the community can participate in?
We will be having a tree planting day in late April 2024 to plant a fruit orchard, which will supply our customers with fruits like apples, pears, peaches, cherries and plums in the years to come.
After that, customers can come check us out any Thursday from 3-7 pm for Thursdays on the Farm, June through October. Our Facebook page and our email list is a great way to stay up to date with events happening on the farm.
7. How do you engage with the local community? Do you participate in farmers' markets, farm-to-table dinners, or other community events?
We offer an open-farm event weekly, that is designed for families to come out and unplug. Thursdays on the Farm is a great opportunity to purchase local produce, but we also have lawn games and music set up so families can come out and unplug from the busyness of their everyday lives, meet others in the community and rest.
We also offer a “Give a Share” option, where anyone can donate any dollar amount and we will use that donation to get fresh produce to those in need in the community!
8. Can visitors tour your farm? If so, what can they expect to see and experience during a farm tour?
We do informal farm tours on our Thursdays on the Farm nights, walking customers around the farm and allowing them to ask questions and observe the food and animals as they grow throughout the season.
9. Are there any unique or innovative farming techniques or projects happening at Vine and Virtue Farm that you'd like to share?
The majority of our long-term farming decisions are based on permaculture principles. Permaculture, a style of regenerative farming, aims to work with nature versus against it, in order to leverage natural processes to support our farming practices. For example, in our orchards, we don’t plan to spray herbicides or pesticides to prevent weeds or pests. Rather, we will run our chickens and goats underneath the trees, who will eat any diseased fruits and pests, protecting our orchard from pest overgrowth and supplementing our animals with extra organically grown food.
In our annual crop production, we follow organic practices and use techniques like relay and succession planting to make the most of our smaller space to produce abundant food.
10. What challenges do you face as a farmer, and how do you overcome them?
Working directly with nature is both a blessing and a challenge. Weather is unpredictable and uncontrollable, and we are at the mercy of what happens outdoors in our crop production. We are currently waiting for fields to dry up after an unanticipated snowstorm in April so that we can plant our orchard. Last year there was a severe drought, which meant we needed to invest in irrigation infrastructure to ensure our plants received the hydration they needed. We’ve had issues with predators attacking our chicks, pests attacking our crops, and gusty winds damaging our greenhouses. The key attribute that we’ve needed to practice as farmers is resilience; each problem will require a unique solution, and a new problem will likely pop up soon after that will require a different solution. Overall, we’ve learned to trust that we are not in control, and that’s for the best. God will grow things on our farm, we just need to do as much as we can to support that process.
11. How do you ensure the quality and freshness of your produce or products?
The benefit of buying from a small farmer is the knowledge that we look at our crops several times a day. We don’t have acres of carrots, we have a 36 square foot bed that will produce carrots for our customers. Shane and I love what we do, so we are constantly out in the fields, admiring the growing food, noticing problems, and working to resolve them. We hand-pick our produce the day it’s going to be picked up on the farm, ensuring that the maximum flavor and nutritional value are preserved. Plus, if I wouldn’t serve it to my family, it’s not going home with our customers.
12. Are there opportunities for volunteering or internships at Vine and Virtue Farm?
We have volunteer opportunities on our farm throughout the growing season. We offer farm work days a few times a summer that are open to the whole family. We plan to raise our children deeply involved in their food system, and we love to use volunteer work days as a way to educate community members and their children about their food system.
We’ve also been in conversations with local FFA groups in the area about service projects they could do with our farm, getting as many students out to the farm as possible, exposing them to a form of agriculture that aims to enrich our land, rather than deplete it.
13. Do you have any plans for expanding or diversifying your farm in the future?
Currently, we offer a produce/egg/chicken CSA to 24 families in the Green Bay area. We raise pastured chickens to sell for meat, as well as eggs.
This year, we are putting together an orchard that will supply fruit to our customers, as well as apples to be used for hard ciders, that we could use in partnership with local breweries or for an on-farm tap. In the tree rows, we will also have other perennial crops like berries, asparagus, and rhubarb, as well as medicinal herbs that can be sold in our community. We have a windbreak to protect our orchard from pesticide drift and excessive winds, which will include evergreen trees that can be coppiced (cut and come again) that we will be able to offer our customers as Christmas trees.
We’d love to offer brunch or pizzas on the farm in the future, using products grown on our farm.
In a further agrotourism idea, we are hoping to eventually convert some of our old silos on the farm into living spaces, and rent them out to families who’d like to come and stay on the farm for a weekend, allowing more and more people to see and experience our farm.
14. How do you prioritize sustainability and environmental stewardship on your farm?
We feel strongly that we are entrusted with the responsibility of stewardship on our farm. Industrialized agriculture has done much to deplete our topsoil, pollute our waterways and create food scarcity issues - not necessarily intentionally, but it is a real result of the way we as a country have been using the land.
Now that we are aware of the damage that’s being done, and the ways that we can work to regenerate our soil, water and health, there is a deeper responsibility to do so. We are working to install gutters on our greenhouses to collect rainwater to irrigate our crops. We explore other ways to mitigate pests, rather than pesticides - even organically certified pesticides. We work to educate our customers about food waste, land stewardship and ways to spot and avoid greenwashing because we believe that our farm isn’t going to solve many of the issues being seen in our area. It requires a large group of people who believe in environmental stewardship to continue spreading the word and making purchasing decisions that will lead to the outcomes we want to see, not just what’s easy and convenient.
15. Can you share some success stories or memorable moments from your experience running Vine and Virtue Farm?
We had our first baby 6 weeks before our first Thursday on the Farm event. In the middle of planting, planning and preparing, we had to stop for a few weeks and recalibrate! God was so faithful in this. Our first CSA pickup, we had figured we could offer eggs and good intentions for the following week, but walking out to take stock of the crop situation, we had an abundance of produce available for our customers - most of which had reseeded from the previous year. “Weeds” like mustard greens, kale, and spinach were in abundance, as well as herbs. We will never forget that provision.
We also were so grateful for our first season and the customers who took a risk on a brand-new farm! We weren’t sure what to expect going into our first season, but after our one-week sale, we had nine customers that we’d be growing for in the first season. It was so fun getting to know each of the families who’d invested in our first farm season and to share our dreams and our farm with them. The kids loved coming out to the farm and playing, while we were able to chat with their parents. The families we got to feed in our first year will always have a special place in our hearts!
16. What is hope for the future of Agriculture in Wisconsin?
Our hope for the future of Agriculture in Wisconsin is that it would return to the local farmer. We hear so often that small farms can’t feed the world, but the majority of the crops being produced currently are used in the production of animal feed, ethanol, and food additives. Our hope would be that every person in Wisconsin would know a local farmer and be able to feed their family by supporting them. We can’t feed every family in Northeast Wisconsin. This summer, though, we are feeding 24 of them, and we intend to feed them the same quality of food that we want our kids to eat. If more farmers decide to feed their neighbors, the amount of fresh food that will be available to the residents of Wisconsin will continue to grow, and our reliance on a global food supply will be less, creating more resilient communities with more resilient food systems.
