2025-2026 Farm Beginnings Class
LSP is now accepting applications for its 2025-2026 Farm Beginnings class session. For details, click here.
Before jumping into agriculture, Kevin Keene worked as a data science consultant for 11 years. So it makes sense that he describes farming success in terms of a mathematical calculation.
“The way I think about it is there’s an equation,” he says on a mid-September morning while sitting in the midst of rows of produce thriving in the late-summer heat. “Growing stuff turns out to be 20% of that equation.”
That other 80% leaves a pretty big gap.
“That’s right,” the 40-year-old farmer says. “If you want to be able to make it real, be able to run a business, you gotta know about marketing, you gotta know about distribution, you gotta know about finance. There’s a lot that goes into this.”
That’s why, after learning the basics of raising produce through an innovative mentorship program at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, Keene enrolled in the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings course, which provided him the business planning and marketing acumen needed to take the growing skills he was acquiring to the next entrepreneurial level.
Such skills helped him deal with the ups, as well as the downs, of his first growing season on land he owns in Minnesota’s Carver County, just west of the Twin Cities. On the plus side, through his stand at a local farmers’ market in 2024, Keene learned firsthand that there was a demand for fresh, local produce. In particular, Keenes’ Greens has become known for its delicious tomatoes and strawberries, and, using a cottage food license, he’s developed some value-added products like pickles and jams. The farmer also got his basic infrastructure set up in the midst of a 20-acre hay field — half-an-acre of growing plots, along with a high tunnel and a well — and was able to improve the heavy clay soil with the use of compost and cover crops. Plus, the farm now has a website and logo.
“I feel like I checked off a lot of milestones that I wanted to get done my first year,” Keene says.
Keenes’ Greens presence at a local farmers’ market that first year wasn’t a financial bonanza, but it provided a treasure chest full of knowledge about what eaters prefer, which may not necessarily always be what the farmer likes to grow.
“They want tomatoes, they want green beans, they like the strawberries, they want onions,” he says of the customers. “I was bringing kohlrabi and shishito peppers and they were like, ‘What are those?’ But I brought my stuff to market and I sold out at market.”
Keene bought his land in 2019 from a farmer who was willing to carve out the 20 acres from a larger parcel; it’s a 30-minute commute from his home in Excelsior, Minn. Starting a farm in an open field is no easy task. For one, it was clear he would need irrigation, so that’s why a well was a requirement. It also needed a driveway, something that would have cost another $20,000 to have done; Keene ended up constructing it himself.
Wild Ride
Keene’s first growing season on his own was also full of bumps in the road. That well cost $22,000, his plots were flooded out early in the season and several farmers’ market days were canceled due to inclement weather. And although he received funding through the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service to put in the high tunnel, he was unsuccessful in getting a Farm Service Agency loan for the irrigation well. He was also turned down for government grants related to food safety and preparing for extreme weather. To Keene, the local USDA office seemed more geared toward servicing larger corn and soybean farmers than a small produce start-up raising dozens of crops. It can be frustrating that many grants require at least $5,000 in annual sales in order to qualify, and yet they are supposedly targeted at “beginning farmers.”
And when he approached local zoning officials about getting an address for his farm, their first question was, where’s the building permit? In an area where McMansions are sprouting on former ag land, they were perplexed that someone was reversing the development trend and establishing a farm.
“It’s like the system is not made for me,” says Keene with a laugh. “For every one ‘yes,’ I get 20 ‘nos.’ ”
The former college baseball player grew up in Florida, and he sees his transition from being on an incubator vegetable operation to managing his own farm business as similar to spending the day at a certain amusement park in the Sunshine State — and then exiting the gate to return to the real world.
“It’s kind of like you’re at Disney World,” he says. “You’ve got all the tools and the fun stuff at your disposal, but when you get to reality, it’s a little different story.”
One thing that’s helped him not feel so isolated is that through Farm Beginnings he was able to connect with Red Kirkman, who runs Fox and Fawn Farm, a vegetable enterprise just a few miles from Keene’s operation. Kirkman has shared knowledge as well as equipment.
And Keene is willing to put up with a few “nos” for the sake of building a career he’s passionate about: feeding people healthy, local food. He’s long been interested in the source of his food, and while working as a data consultant gardened on a small scale at his home in Excelsior between work Zoom meetings. His wife, Courtney, is a vegan, which also sparked Kevin’s interest in growing fruits and vegetables for local consumption. (They have three young children and Courtney runs her own recruiting company, which Kevin helps with.)
The Arboretum program, which he was involved with during the 2022 and 2023 growing seasons, “did a great job of getting you next to some world class growers,” Keene says. And he was able to gain this experience without investing in infrastructure or having to worry about marketing.
Taking the Farm Beginnings course during the winter of 2023-2024 helped him figure out how to fill in that “other 80%” in running a farm business: marketing, financial management, goal-setting, and planning.
Through the class, Keene was exposed to holistic business planning, which provides a big-picture view of farm management by putting the land, finances, community, and a farmer’s quality of life on the same level of importance. Farmers and experts in the area of finance, legal issues, and insurance, for example, presented during the class. He says he found it particularly helpful to hear how established farmers were using platforms like Facebook Marketplace to sell niche products such as hay to horse owners. Keene was impressed with how these farmers structured their businesses around what customers in the area wanted and found efficient ways to distribute the product.
While he still has a table at the Excelsior Farmers’ Market during the 2025 season, a key goal is to diversify his distribution channels. The farmer has recently taken significant steps to do just that. He has partnered with a local school district to provide produce for its cafeteria during the 2025-2026 school year. The farmer has also connected with a local business that provides a fall porch decoration service; Keene is growing pumpkins and squash for the service.
Knowledge is Power
Entering new markets means planning, and the “data guy” in Keene emerges when he describes how he strategizes what and how much he will grow. He works on the basis of 100-foot growing beds and calculates the amount of “bed feet” he will need to plant to each crop to meet demand. His wintertime calculations allow Keene to take some of the decision-making out of the picture when he’s in the heat of the season. But his system has enough flexibility built in to pivot when unplanned events occur, like when heavy rains washed out his early plantings and he had to buy plants from a nursery. Keene also knows such proactive planning will become easier, and more effective, with each passing growing/marketing season, and the experience-fueled data it provides.
“There’s more to come,” he says as he returns to the harvest. ♦
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.