I’d like to personally invite you to our Customer Appreciation Day, coming up fast on Saturday, October 2nd! This event has known many names over the years, starting as our Anniversary Open House in 2009, when we celebrated the first anniversary of our on-farm market opening. When I think back, making it to one year was quite a feat, [...]

I’m a believer in vocation, the idea that all work has purpose, and we can all contribute to a better world through our daily work. There’s no job that doesn’t have an impact on somebody else’s life or livelihood, so all work is important. You may be able to tell that in a past life I was an Admission [...]

Midwestern farmers aren’t supposed to brag, and typically I try to live up to that reputation. But when we learned that our Turkey Wiener had been named the BEST poultry hot dog in a tasting by Epicurious, we couldn’t keep it to ourselves! If you haven’t seen the article, you can find it here. We were as surprised as anybody [...]

When you live in a small town, it doesn’t take much to make the local news. In our case, it’s even easier, because our local newspaper runs a weekly “Yesteryear” column, featuring headlines from milestones years prior. As a history guy, I always seek them out (right up there with the police report and the obituaries), but two in [...]

Brooding days are a lot of work. It’s fresh in my mind because we just started (brooded) our spring flock a couple weeks ago. The work of starting poults is made all the more challenging because we’re doing it in intense heat in our brooder barn, with our air temp close to 100 degrees to keep the baby turkeys [...]

It’s the season of opening barn doors and chasing turkeys out to range! There’s probably no time on a farm that captures the eternal optimism in agriculture better than spring. No matter what happened last year, new seeds get planted each spring. Despite the muddy boots and surprise late season snowflakes, there’s an excitement to the season as we [...]

One year ago, we wrote our first COVID response statement after a hasty team meeting the morning after Minnesota’s school closure was announced.  Like everybody, we knew the world was about to change but had no way to sense the twists-and-turns we were in for.  I remember I started our statement with “we are all in this together.”  I’m [...]

In the grand scheme of things, the world doesn’t really need our Ferndale Market turkey.  The flocks we grow in a year are a rounding error in the billions of pounds of turkey grown annually, much of it by global meat companies.  The early pandemic processing plant worries showed many consumers just how concentrated the control in the meat [...]