April 4, 2023
Ah, Spring!
Those words, "Spring on Love Farm" feel exquisite. The thaw of 2023 brings new projects, new growth and new friends. Winter is a bit daunting at the start - three months of dreary gray skies, fierce wind, ice, snow, etc. For the extended tribe of Love Farm, winter also means epic saunas and potlucks every Friday, the ever present wood stove fire, short days perfect for reading and introspection, assimilation of lessons learned in the year prior and optimistic plans for the new season.
Glance back at the Fall of 2022 to see what we accomplished last year. This Spring we're expanding our opportunities for self educating families, launching the Farm Store, wrapping up Crosshatch's Carbon Cohort, building Sanctuary Circles with robust support from Michigan's Department of Natural Resources, (if we're lucky), adding vermiculture to our composting expertise, expanding the produce and herb garden, planting fruit and nut trees from our nursery, taking over Bryan and Karla's Sleeping Bear Granola business, and launching a geosynchronous communications satellite.
Self Educating Families. Human Nature School's first day on Love Farm. Instructors Taylor and Kim with Crystal Lake beyond the pines.
Habitat
In 2021, we invited local tree service companies to drop off refuse timber, an amazing resource for growing food and wilds regeneration. These piles have also created habitat for rabbits and we've since seen an increase in predators like hawks and eagles who like to eat them. The tracks below show that coyotes seem to be patrolling these piles too, though we have yet to catch one on the trail cam. This was one of the inspirations for our recent grant proposal to the DNR.
Gold!
According to the Michigan Shoreline Partnership, Love Farm has achieved the Gold Level of shoreline stewardship for Long Lake and Rush Lake. This involved completing a survey about our practices near these lakes. Dan has been developing his shoreline ethic on Crystal Lake since the late 80s.
Lake Township Agricultural District
Lake Township is mostly National Park, indicated as gray on the map below. The purple area is a cluster of century old farms. Compared to the other colors / categories of land use, farms comprise a significant chunk of Lake Township. We have dubbed these 390 mostly contiguous acres the historic Lake Township Agriculture District, or LTAD. The LTAD was part of Love Farm's response to the proposed deletion of farming from Lake Township's draft Master Plan in February of 2023. Back in 2019 we had our first meeting with elected officials in support of farms and farming, in response to the banning of marijuana businesses.
The historic LTAD - a significant chunk of Lake Township
Operations
Dan invented a biochar producing furnace for evaporating Maple Syrup which works mostly as expected. This means we can make two profitable products at the same time.
The Wondrous Machine
Along with products from our farm businesses like maple syrup, innoculated biochar, and Benzie Terra Preta, our Farm Store will stock products from other local farms and businesses.
Truck Garden started to include local food in the Community Supported Grocery (CSG) buying club managed by Sarah, Lauren and Kim. After rave reviews and rapid membership growth, we're pausing the CSG for the summer. Curating fresh organic produce at near wholesale prices is a lot of work, so we'll either need to increase markup beyond 10% and/or involve members in management and logistics.
We aspire to form a local network of growers and makers, with the long term goal of community self reliance. We want to minimize food and home goods shipments from elsewhere and know who our food and home goods come from.
We've sort of lost count of the number of revenue streams flowing on Love Farm. Sarah has developed a hand written ledger system that integrates with Quickbooks, bringing us closer to consistent, stress free bookkeeping.
Here Sarah is sipping a Chaga and Maple sap infusion while developing spreadsheet virtuosity.
Updated May 25, 2023