The empty boxes are piling up high in the back room, so Thanksgiving must be just around the corner!  Beginning mid-summer each year, we start saving empty boxes of all shapes and sizes to assist with turkey carryout during the Thanksgiving season. Because dressed turkeys tend to be heavy and awkwardly shaped, we give a lot of used boxes [...]

My Grandpa certainly wasn’t thinking about finding a good day-trip-destination community when he settled on our farm in the late 1930s.  He just wanted a good spot to grow turkeys, and who could have foreseen what an ideal destination Cannon Falls would become?  In that era, Highway 52 was a quiet two-lane road and Cannon Falls would have felt [...]

It seems like everybody is pivoting these days.  New ways of communicating, working, and shopping have become the norm.  Even my beloved Minnesota Twins are only playing 60 games this season, although I hope they manage a few more in October!  As many of you know, we’ve done our best to adapt to the current realities at Ferndale Market too, launching [...]

It’s mid-July and in any typical year that would mean we’d be busy with summer farm tours.  We’d have already hosted the annual Co-op Farm Tour and had an evening on the farm with the chefs and butchers that source our turkey.  Of course, this is no normal year.  Historically, these have been some of my favorite days each [...]

Maybe it’s the busy season on our farm that hits each year around this time. More likely, it’s the result of the turbulence in our world and the frayed thinking that results.  Either way, I struggled to build a cohesive theme to share this month.  Instead, I want to share a couple of loosely connected thoughts to all that’s [...]

In one of the final days before our world came to a virus-induced halt, I attended the funeral for Marlene Willis.  Marlene was our very first retail clerk at Ferndale Market, hired right before we opened our on-farm store in the fall of 2008.  Her hiring was purely a matter of dumb luck and good timing, as my mom [...]

It’s both an honor and a challenge to be an “essential business” during the COVID-19 pandemic.  No doubt most farmers would gladly tell you they’ve always been essential, but the impacts we’ve felt here at Ferndale Market have pulled us in many new directions.  We’re in the food business from farm to table at Ferndale Market, so it’s been [...]

I realized recently that we talk a lot about our baby turkeys (poults) and big birds on range, but not necessarily about the time in between those stages.  Although brooding (starting baby turkeys) and life outdoors are two of the high points (and definitely most labor intensive) on our farm, there is plenty that happens between those periods. I [...]