2025-2026 Farm Beginnings Class

LSP is now accepting applications for its 2025-2026 Farm Beginnings class session. For details, click here.

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In a sense, when the brothers Andy and Ben Klein enrolled in the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings course in 2023, it was a return engagement for at least one of them.

“I was pregnant with Andy when we took the class,” says the brothers’ mother, Lisa, with a laugh while loading frozen chickens for a customer on a blustery October day. “That was a rough year.”

But that rough beginning helped launch the farming career of Lisa and her husband, Eric — a career that over the past 26 years has evolved into Hidden Stream Farm, a thriving pasture-based meat and egg production and marketing enterprise. And the connection to Farm Beginnings runs even deeper in the family: Lisa’s father, the late Everett Koenig, was part of a group of farmers that called themselves the “Wabasha County Give A Damns,” which encouraged LSP to start the Farm Beginnings course in 1998 as a way to train the next generation of innovative, regenerative farmers.

The Kleins have continued to pay back into the beginning farmer training course — after she graduated from Farm Beginnings in 2011, Hannah Breckbill had the opportunity to launch a vegetable enterprise on a piece of Hidden Stream’s land. Ben Klein actually helped Breckbill with the operation when he was an adolescent, and she went on to help found Humble Hands Harvest, a vegetable and livestock operation in northeastern Iowa.

So it’s no surprise that when Andy and Ben started talking seriously about going into farming, their parents encouraged them to take the course.

“Farm Beginnings is a big legacy thing for me, especially now that grandpa’s not here with us anymore,” says Andy. “I want that connection and to experience everything that he did to help get people started farming and go after their dreams.”

The 26-year-old is saying this while sitting in the warehouse/office that serves as the epicenter of Hidden Stream Farm’s meat retailing business. As he talks, Ben, 24, walks in after spending the morning cleaning out a grain bin. Eric stops by to check in before jumping into a truck he’s using to haul soybeans to an organic buyer in Wisconsin. “Turn and burn,” he says as he heads out the door.

But doing something out of deference to the older generation will only get one so far when it comes to launching a successful farm business that’s sustainable economically and environmentally in the long term. The brothers agree that the Farm Beginnings course also helped them develop a business plan, brainstorm new ideas with other beginning farmers, and go through a process that requires participants to outline specifically their strengths and weaknesses, as well as what opportunities and “threats” are out there. Perhaps most importantly, the course allowed the Kleins to network with others who have a similar outlook that they were raised with: successful farming does not need to entail running thousands of acres of corn and soybeans utilizing chemical inputs.

“There’s more than one way to do this,” Andy says. “We can farm and still take care of the land — it doesn’t have to be one way or the other.”

And through the business plan they developed and the goal-setting exercises provided by the class, the brothers were able to give some thought to what avenues they wanted to take to achieve their farm dream.

“There was some pretty deep dives on scenarios and costing stuff out on things you otherwise might not take the time to even think about,” says Andy. “We also kicked around new ideas we heard in the class.”

For example, through a discussion they had with classmates, Andy’s wife, Madison, who often sat in on classes, came up with the idea to renovate one of their large hoop buildings so it could be moved through their chicken pastures. This marked a change from the Kleins’ reliance on smaller box-like “chicken tractor” structures popularized by Virginia farmer Joel Salatin. It’s less labor to move the one larger structure around and offers the birds more room and protection from the elements, as well as predators.

It was also fun for the brothers to check in with their parents about how the class had evolved over the years. It originally started out as focusing on dairy production; now, enterprises ranging from vegetables and flowers to organic row crop production, along with regenerative livestock raising, are discussed. The class is also now offered as a hybrid of in-person and virtual sessions.

Opportunity Knocks Next Door

Having a background in the kind of planning and goal-setting provided by Farm Beginnings, as well as fortifying one’s commitment to regenerative farming, took on even greater relevance when a 120-acre farm came up for sale next door to Hidden Stream, which is located near the southeastern Minnesota town of Elgin. The brothers felt it was a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity, and they scrambled to get credit and other resources rounded up for the purchase. In the end, the process took several months. Ben and Andy appreciate that the owners were willing to give the beginning farmers time to pull financing together for an offer, given that another farmer with a check in-hand was also interested in the property.

“You can’t negotiate or anything when you’ve got that hanging,” says Andy. “I remember spending New Years doing cash flows on every aspect of our lives trying to make it so the bank would say ‘It’ll work. Even if it doesn’t work great, it’ll work.’ ”

They closed the deal on the farm in April 2023, planted corn, and watched apprehensively as it didn’t rain for two months. “So that was interesting — great way to start,” says Andy with a wry smile.

Reclaiming Soil

On this October day, Andy and Ben make the short drive over to their new farm to take a look at a partially harvested cornfield, and it’s clear that despite the tough start — the 2024 growing season began with record rainfalls and then transitioned into drought… again — they are excited about the potential this land offers for advancing their farming career.

Their plan is to eventually transition it to organic. For now, they are raising conventional corn and soybeans as a way to make land payments; Andy jokes that he wished he had paid better attention when he was taking a college class on ag chemical use.

The farm also offers an opportunity for the brothers to put into action their passion for building soil health. The Klein family has long used cover cropping, rotational grazing of livestock, and diverse rotations to protect and build soil. This hilly parcel on the edge of the Driftless Region has suffered as a result of years of conventional row cropping, and is overdue for exposure to regenerative practices. In fact, a few years ago Eric posted a video on social media showing silt-laden soil washing off the farm onto Hidden Stream’s acres.

“There’s actually still a mound of dirt in the pasture from that field. I want to take it out and spread it back on that new farm,” says Ben, only half-joking.

Back at Hidden Stream’s office, Andy pulls up a Google Earth image of a pasture on the home farm where they had used moveable pens to graze chickens in 2024. The pale color of dried out, drought-stressed grass was evident, but where the chickens had grazed were patches of emerald green forage — it was clear the grazing system had built resilient soil. An image from the 2023 drought year showed the same contrast between brown and biology.

“That right there is a testament to getting livestock out there,” says Andy excitedly. “I really want to put chickens out on the new farm and see what effect that has on soil that’s been beaten up for 40-plus years. I gotta imagine it’s going to pop.”

SWOTing Ideas

Besides reclaiming the new farm’s soil and transitioning it to organic certification, Ben is refurbishing the house and plans to eventually move into it. This, all while juggling working at Hidden Stream Farm fulltime. Andy and one of his sisters, Katy, produce free-range eggs using a flock of 800 hens.

Andy also handles sales and deliveries, which is a significant responsibility — Hidden Stream ships chickens, eggs, pork, and beef to the Twin Cities, as well as to communities in southeastern Minnesota and southwestern Wisconsin. They sell to restaurants and food co-ops, and use delivery services to ship product as far away as California and Florida. Hidden Stream also distributes dairy products and vegetables produced by other farmers.

Ben manages the day-to-day operation of the crop and livestock aspects of the farm. The brothers joke that it’s like they have an off-farm job, except it’s next door.

“And we get no weekends off,” says Ben.

In fact, striking a work-life balance is more on Andy’s mind these days. He and Madison have a son, Colson, who’s less than a year old. The hiring of a driver and warehouse help has made life a little easier, but it can still be a struggle to avoid burn-out while working on an established farm business and launching a new one.

“By the time I get through 12 hours of deliveries, then I don’t want to sit in the tractor —I just want to go home,” says Andy.

“That’s where I shine right now,” Ben, who is unmarried, says with a laugh.

As the Farm Beginnings class makes clear, family dynamics can be a major issue in farming. When asked whether they get along, the brothers deflect a bit.

“Sure!” Andy exclaims.

“Let’s go with that,” Ben quips.

On a serious note, the brothers say while they may differ in their approach, they share the same goals of creating a diverse, resilient farm built on regenerative practices. “It’s just trying to agree on how to get there,” says Andy.

During the Farm Beginnings class they took in 2024, the brothers went through something called a SWOT — “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats” — analysis. Their strengths include being exposed to innovative farming growing up and being able to practice it hands-on. Weaknesses include, as Andy puts it, “The age-old question of how we are going to do it, with little to no money?”

Hidden Stream’s distribution system offers a major opportunity to expand sales. A big threat, as the Kleins see it, is dealing with land payments on conventional acres as grain prices drop.

Keeping in mind strengths and weaknesses has served the brothers well as they’ve grappled with setbacks in recent years, including struggles with raising an input-intensive crop like soybeans under extreme weather conditions, trying alternative crops without consistent access to good markets, and keeping an animal alive that doesn’t seem to have the best survival instincts.

“Every year when we move chickens out on pasture, you gotta watch out for that first rainstorm — they’re all sitting out in the rain trying to drown themselves,” says Andy. “It’s just like, ‘What are you doing?’ ”

And figuring out family dynamics may become an even bigger factor in the future. Ben and Andy have four younger siblings — besides Katy, there’s Sarah, Isaac, and April — and all of them have shown an interest in farming. Maybe Farm Beginnings is in their future?

“Exactly,” says Andy. ♦

This profile originally appeared in the No. 1, 2025, Land Stewardship Letter. To read other Farm Beginnings profiles, click here. You can hear the stories of Farm Beginnings grads on our Fresh Voices podcast series.