“The (Farming) Wiz”: Farming Organically and, Yes, Making Money
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So you want to be a farmer. You get yourself a plot of land, some tools and seeds, and whatever else you’ll need to work the land (um—yeah, I’m not a farmer). And not only that, you want to farm organically. You want to feed your neighbors and yourself the most wholesome veggies around. Well, with all the expense of certification and the glut of factory-farmed veg already crowding grocery store shelves, you’ll end up barely scraping by. Right?
Not so, says organic farmer Richard Wiswall, author of The Organic Farmer’s Business Handbook: A Complete Guide to Managing Finances, Crops, and Staff—and Making a Profit, forthcoming from Chelsea Green.
Here’s a snippet from the Seven Days article by Suzanne Podhaizer profiling Richard Wiswall:
After six months of snow and sticks, the sight of a green field studded with dandelions is priceless. But you can’t actually make money growing the ubiquitous “weeds” — or can you?
Ask the owners of Montpelier’s Kismet, where patrons shell out $3.50 for a large “dandelion latte” made from the fuzzy flower’s roasted and steeped roots. The tan fluid may sound like a strange thing to swig, but fans go for its earthy, roasted flavors and hint of bitterness offset with maple syrup.
And, no, the restaurateurs aren’t sneaking around digging up lawns. They purchase organic dandelion root from Richard Wiswall and his wife, Sally Colman, who own Cate Farm in Plainfield, just 15 minutes down the road. Besides dandelions, Cate Farm proffers other crops you might find growing wild around your compost heap, such as burdock root and echinacea.
It may sound like niche production taken to an extreme, but the fact is, 52-year-old Wiswall has it down to a science. Years ago, the Middlebury grad determined that he could earn more growing dandelions than cultivating popular greens such as spinach and cilantro. “We have good demand for it,” he explains. “It’s not a big market, but we grow enough to saturate the market.”
This kind of tactic dovetails with Wiswall’s philosophy of farming “smart, not hard.” By microtargeting their efforts, he’s shown, savvy farmers can flourish crop by small crop.
This November Chelsea Green will release the fruit of Wiswall’s experience, The Organic Farmer’s Business Handbook, complete with worksheets on CD-ROM. With numerous speaking and consulting gigs under his belt, Wiswall feels qualified to offer advice on one of the riskiest — and, around here, trendiest — professions. “[The book] will hopefully keep people from repeating the same mistakes that I made, and give them a leg up and some shortcuts so they can get to a profitable state much quicker than they would have otherwise,” he says.
But the road from starting a farm to having enough knowledge to fill a book was a long one. “It’s only after 28 years of [farming] that I felt like I could do it,” says Wiswall. “Back when I started, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was 24 years old, very green and full of energy.”
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