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Farm Beginnings™ Profile: Sara Martinez & Matt Urch
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Sara Martinez & Matt Urch |
On this they agreed: both wanted to farm. But while taking the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings® course, Sara Martinez and Matt Urch realized there was a difference of opinion on just what their dream farm should consist of.
“I was more focused on berries and an orchard,” Martinez recalls. And Urch’s dream? “I had grandiose illusions of a grass-fed beef farm,” he says with a laugh. “She said five acres and I said no, 160.”
Farm Beginnings instructors recommended that the married couple sit down and make up a list of 25 criteria they wanted on a farm. So one night Urch and Martinez brainstormed room for compromise on their farming dreams. “We kind of had it out,” recalls Urch. One of the things they agreed on was that they did not want to be hobby farmers—the operation needed to earn its way, even if it was just a part-time income.
Martinez and Urch—both are 38—say that coming face-to-face with the reality of a goal can be difficult when it’s existed as a dream for so long. For Urch, the draw of farming has been a constant. It was there when he left his family’s southeast Minnesota crop and livestock operation in 1989 to study history at Carleton College, even though, “My parents specifically raised me to get off the farm,” he says. It became stronger still when he worked as a ranger at Mt. Rainier National Park in Washington. “I was really homesick even though I had the best job in the world,” Urch recalls.
Martinez, who met Urch at Carleton College, also had a draw to food production. She grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, but her grandfather owned a butcher shop, giving her grounding in where food comes from. Martinez, who has a master’s degree in occupational health nursing, also saw the negative effects of large-scale industrialized farming while she was at a clinic for farm workers in Washington’s Yakima Valley.
So in 1999 they moved back to the Midwest with the intention to farm. To jump-start their agriculture career, Urch and Martinez took the Farm Beginnings course in Plainview, Minn., in 2000-2001. LSP’s Farm Beginnings, which began its second decade in 2008, is a program in which established farmers and other ag professionals provide insights into low-cost, sustainable methods of farming. The course provides workshops on goal-setting, financial planning, business plan creation, alternative marketing and innovative production techniques. In addition, class participants have an opportunity to network with established farmers and utilize them as mentors.
Urch says they gained a lot from Farm Beginnings, but in the end the “visioning” session where they actually wrote down what they wanted in a farm was the most valuable. Armed with a clearer idea of what they were seeking as a family, in 2001 the couple bought an 80-acre farm near Viroqua, in southwest Wisconsin.
Today Indecision Ridge Farm, as they call their operation, represents their shared vision: over the past four years they’ve built their brood cow herd of registered Black Galloways from five to 15 head. They are raised on rotationally grazed pastures (Black Galloways do well on grass) on the hilly land that makes up the farm. During the past two summers the couple has also been raising pastured hogs, feeding them culled apples from their orchard, and selling the pork directly. The small apple orchard is established next to the homestead, along with a berry patch.
Urch and Martinez both work off the farm—he’s a teacher and she’s a nurse—but they are gradually taking steps to make this operation pay its own way. This year for the first time they sold registered heifers and direct-marketed beef. They are excited about the marketing possibilities that are offered by the interest in locally-produced sustainable food. Viroqua has a food co-op and the presence of the Organic Valley Cooperative down the road in La Farge has increased interest in organic and sustainably-produced food in the area.
In addition, a controversy surrounding the proposed construction of a large hog confinement facility in the county last year made more people aware of where their food comes from. Urch and Martinez, along with LSP organizers Bobby King and Adam Warthesen, worked with a local environmental group, the Valley Stewardship Network, to prevent the building of the confinement facility in an environmentally vulnerable area (that part of Wisconsin is full of sinkholes).
The couple is currently working with Valley Stewardship Network to develop a local food initiative. This summer the group organized a community harvest dinner, which featured locally produced foods, including donated Indecision Ridge beef, and served 250 people. The dinner was held at the Viroqua public school, which is beginning a project to serve local foods in its cafeteria. Urch is also a member of LSP’s Federal Farm Policy Committee, which worked extensively to get beginning farmer and local foods initiatives included in the 2008 Farm Bill.
Both Martinez and Urch concede they have a long ways to go before they completely make their farming dream a reality, but they say the operation is already producing other benefits for them and their two sons, Sam 7, and Henry 3. For example, Urch, who has a master’s degree in resource management, says one of the reasons he left his job as a guardian of a very public resource—a national park—is he wanted to try his hand at protecting and improving resources on his own piece of land.
On a sunny afternoon in early fall, the Urch family provides a quick tour of the fledgling farm. As the Galloways graze on a lush hillside and Sam and Henry try to coax them closer with strands of pulled grass, Matt excitedly describes how their pasture-based system is already proving that farming and stewardship can be a good mix.
“Last summer between two fence posts we had 10 bobolinks—I love those birds,” he says. “We have a pair of northern harriers here. We saw 25 meadowlarks in one shot. Farm Beginnings really helped us change our attitudes of what is success on the farm.”
— A version of this article originally appeared in the Autumn 2008 Land Stewardship Letter. For more information on LSP’s Farm Beginnings program, see www.farmbeginnings.org. More information is also available by calling 507-523-3366 in southeast Minnesota or 320-269-2105 in western Minnesota.
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©Land Stewardship Project, 2001
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