From Your Farmer

When it comes to farming, there’s no secret recipe, simple hack or product that solves everything. For better or for worse, I think most farming and animal care knowledge is gained best through experience. If we have a secret sauce around here, it’s that we’re blessed with an incredibly experienced farm team. For those keeping track at home, this is certainly one of our good fortunes over the years at Ferndale Market. As evidence of our staff tenure, we had an employee retire last fall after working beside us for 50 years. He was hired out of high school by my grandpa, a decade before I was born. Over the years, he’d likely seen it all. He knew the seemingly small, everyday things that keep turkeys happy. As he liked to remind us before he retired, our farm may fall apart without him. Thankfully, the rest of our small farm team has been at this for years too. My [...]

On a recent spring morning, we moved some of our free-range turkeys from their outdoor yard to one of our range pastures. As the birds made their way out, one of our longtime staff members commented that it looked like a modern range, with our recently-built feeders and shelters, and a newly revamped water system. I responded that “modern range” would be an oxymoron to most poultry farmers, but he was right: we’ve re-invested in the way we’ve grown our turkeys on our family farm for 85 years. This got me thinking about another good fortune at Ferndale Market, following in the "greatest hits" theme I’ve been sharing here lately. We’re fortunate that my dad and grandpa stuck with free-range farming through an era when most folks moved indoors. As I often tell visitors, when my grandpa started farming, this was the way everybody raised turkeys. He wasn’t trying some new-fangled technique. It was in the decades following that [...]

I haven’t run out of stories, so I’ll continue with the theme of good fortune that’s benefited our on-farm market over the past 15 years. I think many of you know that the building we call home is our former turkey hatchery, and the changes it’s seen are a walk through our evolution. Coincidently, we had stopped hatching our own poults in 2007. It had simply become too labor intensive, and we were a very little fish amongst the big guys in the business. So, our hatchery building was sitting idle when we decided to repurpose it into an on-farm market. We paved the driveway, tore down walls, turned truck garages into our front door, and gave the floors a smooth and shiny upgrade. Initially, we had a test kitchen and small event seating space in the front of the store, but time taught us that our customers weren’t eager to attend cooking classes. And, we needed more display space [...]

It goes without saying that this Minnesota winter has been out of the norm. As a turkey farmer, that’s had its advantages. We’ve spent less time moving snow around, which gives us time to tackle other off-season farm projects. We’ve spent less time worrying about keeping poults warm. We’ve hardly had to salt the market parking lot. And, I doubt we’ve ever had turkeys running outside this early. It’s one for the record books! I’ve really enjoyed playing with this “Greatest Hits” theme in belated celebration of our 15th anniversary and I’d like to share another fun one here. One of our most recognized Ferndale Market visuals is our “turkey t-shirt.” Our staff wear them, we sell them in the market, and I’ve worn through many of them over the years. They catch your eye from a distance with a big white turkey and up close you can see the feathers make up words that describe us: free-range, raised [...]

I’m going to continue the theme from last month, sharing another stroke of good fortune that has sustained us for 15 years in business at Ferndale Market. None of us can do it alone, and nothing has been more central to our continued growth than our partner farms. They’re tops in our “Greatest Hits” of good fortune. I’d argue that we’ve got the best of the very best. We’re a unique group of longtime farmers and new farmers. Diversified farms and turkey-or-bust farms. Some were former poult customers from our hatchery days and others discovered us through the grapevine. But, we all have one thing in common: we’re independent farmers who want to do things a little differently – to be a part of a different model in agriculture. You might ask why we need partner farms in the first place. The initial response is simple: we’re at a sustainable flock size here on our home farm. It fits [...]

Happy New Year from all of us at Ferndale Market!  Many of you may recall that we celebrated the 15th anniversary of our market opening last fall. As we discussed the milestone here as a team, someone jokingly suggested we should release a “Greatest Hits” album to commemorate. We may not have any hits to re-release, but the humorous idea got me thinking about the long list of good fortune that’s fueled us over these past 15 years. I thought I’d share a few of our good fortune “hits” in my monthly updates over the year ahead. So, in no particular order, here’s the first track of our Ferndale Good Fortune album: Thousand Hills Cattle Company was one of the very first brands we carried at Ferndale Market, in part because they were literally our neighbors across the highway. Founded in Cannon Falls just a few years before we opened, we knew them well and admired the model they [...]