From Your Farmer

Football has the Super Bowl. Accountants have tax day. We have Thanksgiving. It’s our season to shine! Starting early each fall, folks ask me if we’re gearing up for the Thanksgiving season. The answer is yes, of course, but the truth is that we’ve been busy prepping for a year. It’s no stretch to say we spend all year working toward Thanksgiving. In fact, we order our poults a year ahead of time. Our retail partners place their turkey orders beginning in the spring. And we coordinate with local food partners and food trucks by the 4th of July to have all the pieces in place for TurkeyFest. By summertime, the poults have hatched and the daily care begins, both on our farm and partner farms. Now that we’re into the final stretch, we’re busy prepping shipping boxes and launching our online reservations for fresh turkeys at our on-farm market. Yes, all of this is many months in the [...]

I had the opportunity to enjoy a pork chop sandwich and stroll through big farm equipment at Farmfest earlier this summer, to receive the Goodhue County Farm Family of the Year award. We were surprised and honored to be recognized, and it was a joy to hear the stories of all the other Minnesota farm families chosen (87 unique farm stories!). Some of these families made us look like newbies in farming, while others were just getting started themselves. Dairy, crops, pigs, and vegetables – you name it, somebody in that shed grew it. I was struck by one commonality we all shared: farming is still hard work. I spoke to a group of community members at our local senior center earlier this summer and shared a similar message. Our society often times romanticizes farming and rural living, and Ferndale is guilty of contributing to the notion by sharing updates when everything is cooperating on the farm. After all, it’s a lot more [...]

We hit one of those unexpected milestones at our on-farm market recently. While doing paperwork on one of our newest hires, I noticed that she was born a couple weeks after Ferndale Market opened in 2008. It’s hard for me to believe that our market has now been around 17 years, longer than most teenagers. Our little baby is growing up! On one hand, it feels like just yesterday when we opened our doors for the first time. Then again, an awful lot has changed since those early days. We were a lean and mean retail team, with me, my wife, and my parents covering a good chunk of the initial store hours. We were initially open only five days a week, and I remember reading the newspaper during slow periods. I’m reluctant to share that with our current staff, because now there’s always so much to do! I have great memories from those early years from the pop-in [...]

Summer greetings from our flock here at Ferndale! We’ve had a busy stretch across the whole team: launching our new turkey bratwurst, mowing grass, building more range shelters, mowing grass again, and planning for our soon-to-arrive new outdoor seating space at the market. Much as I joke about the endless summer mowing, the good rains have been a blessing for our range pastures, particularly as we moved another flock out to range this week. Summer is a season I love on the farm. In the midst of all the summer activity, I always look forward to our annual farm tour, taking place this year on Saturday, July 19th. At the core, our summer farm tour highlights what makes our model so unique, as we strive to shorten the distance from farm to table. We hope the event gives our supporters a chance to see where their food comes from, plus an opportunity for us to thank those who see the [...]

It felt momentous last week when I grilled up our new turkey bratwurst line for my family. Sure, I’d tried many versions many times over the past few months (eating brats on the job is a perk of this gig), but there was a finality now that the brats were properly packed and labeled, with no tweaks left to make. I’ve shared all that goes into bringing a product to life, but it’s the partnerships behind these brats that we’re most proud of as they launch. From the beginning, we knew we wanted to create flavors with local collaborations and stories. We knew we needed another bratwurst with cheese, and how lucky are we to have CannonBelles right across town? We’re upping the game by using their cheese curds in our Cheddar Bratwurst for a true Cannon Falls partnership. Better still, these brats are crafted and smoked at Lorentz Meats, so they’re a Cannon Falls original from end to end. Similarly, we knew we [...]

It's finally the season where our turkeys are out on pasture. In fact, I just came in from moving a flock to range on one of these postcard-perfect spring days we’ve had. By the time this hits your inbox, the birds will be well adjusted to their new home outdoors, cruising through the range and following along as we move their home through the grass each week. This is the time of year that our points-of-difference are so visually evident. Barn doors open, birds out in the sun. Whether outside in a yard pen or on a pasture range, this type of poultry farming – free range – isn’t the norm today. As I so often say, we’re the throwbacks still doing it, even though it was industry standard just decades ago. When we host visitors on the farm, I often struggle to convey just how rare outdoor access is in commercial poultry farming today, but suffice it to say we’re [...]

In the midst of last fall’s hubbub, we had a special experience when Ferndale Market was announced a finalist for a Minnesota Family Business Award through Twin Cities Business. My wife, parents and I rubbed shoulders with fellow families in business, swapping stories on the commonalities among us. Of course, the third generation doesn’t deserve the credit for our family business. That’s reserved for my grandparents who got us started, and my parents who stayed the course, adapting when needed to keep us in the game. As I’ve surely said before, my grandparents were, in many ways, pioneers in turkey farming, but they’d never believe that their names – Fern and Dale – would adorn our market (much less a pack of turkey hot dogs!). I’m sure this isn’t quite the business they envisioned, but it’s absolutely one they’d recognize. And we’re still here! We made it through WWII, the 1980’s farm crisis, and converting our hatchery into a [...]

Around here, we often say that if a project isn’t done by July 4th, it probably won’t happen. One of the priorities this winter has been the development of a soon-to-come turkey bratwurst line. I’ll hold you in suspense on the particulars, but tease that we’re featuring Minnesota-inspired flavor collaborations and think they’re all delicious! Since we’ve put a lot of time toward these new products, I thought I’d pull back the curtain on all that goes into a new product launch. First, of course, comes a good idea. I’d be lying if I said our best ideas originate in my head. In fact, some of our concepts start from recurring customer requests, or a market gap seen by a retail partner or chef. In the case of the turkey bratwurst, a few of our key retail partners helped us see an opportunity to expand beyond our popular Turkey Rachael into a full lineup. Next comes the challenge of finding [...]

Bird flu is all over the news these days. Whether it is egg prices, dairy herds testing positive, or the staggering number of poultry lost, it’s hard to miss the talk about avian influenza. We are incredibly grateful that we’ve been largely spared from the worst, but it remains a nearly constant worry and one that’s created disruption at a moment’s notice. Fact is, bird flu isn’t a new worry for poultry farmers. It’s been on our minds in some way for nearly a decade, when highly-pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) first showed up in the US. Farmers like to think they can solve most problems, but this is a virus in nature without any know prevention or cure. We used to say that our geography served us well, away from heavily concentrated poultry farming and outside the primary migration path for ducks and geese. Now, that narrative has shifted a bit. Cases seem to pop like popcorn: big farms, [...]

My new Minnesota Cooks Calendar has officially turned to 2025. As we take stock of last year and look ahead to new opportunities, I thought I’d share what we learned at Ferndale Market in 2024: The formula for turkey farming is ever changing: Someone without a background in farming might assume it’s a straightforward, rinse-and-repeat occupation. For better or worse, it turns out there’s nothing static in turkey farming. Beyond the usual weather-related variables, 2024 surprised us with a new turkey virus (avian Metapneumovirus, for those of you keeping track at home) that appeared everywhere across the Midwest last spring, seemingly overnight. We still had the familiar poultry worry in the headlines: bird flu, now infecting dairy cows, which changed the storyline significantly this year. And, our hatchery partner changed the way our baby turkeys begin their lives outside of the shell, so we adapted our brooding here on the farm. The only constant was change! E-Commerce is a monster: Like [...]