Profile of Lida Farm

This month, we talked with Ryan Pesch of Lida Farm. Located in Otter Tail County, in Minnesota’s lakes district, Lida Farm is family-owned and operated.

How did you get into farming?
While I was raised in a small northern Minnesota town, my wife Maree grew up on a farm. I first became interested in the local foods movement when I was a student at Gustavus Adolphus College. That led me to work as a farm apprentice at Foxtail Farm in Osceola, Wisconsin. That experience was invaluable, and I learned all the nuts and bolts of farming and running a CSA there.

After college, Maree and I rented one acre to farm on in Lake Elmo, and we sold our produce at farmers’ markets. However, the cost of land in Lake Elmo made it difficult to afford a farmstead. When I was offered a full-time position with the University of Minnesota Extension, we jumped at the chance to move north to Otter Tail County.

We soon purchased a 20 acre farmstead. This afforded us the opportunity to come into a new market in the lakes district and start growing from scratch. For me and Maree, this started as a dream in a college dorm room. Today, we’re in our sixth growing season.

Describe your farm.
At Lida Farm, we have 1.5 to 2 acres of produce. We’ve always had a flock of sheep, too. They’re good for manure, but this is the first year that we’re going to have lambs to sell. We also have chickens, and we sell our eggs.

Maree and I have two children, Sylvia (4) and Willem (2). Our kids love getting involved in farm projects. For Sylvia and Willem, they’re part of the operation. At the farmers’ market, they’ll even talk to the customers and handle the produce.

Over the years, what have you learned about customer service?
For years, we have sold our food through our CSA, on-site farm stand, and the Lakes Area Farmers Market in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. We offer home deliveries, too. Today, we have 21 CSA members and many repeat customers at the market.

Since we are a smaller operation, we have been very intentional about what we can take on and we have steadily grown our business over the years. Market gardening, in comparison to other types of farming, is all about time management and logistics. With market gardening, there may be 40 or 50 crops over the course of a growing season. Unlike single-crop farms, this allows us to spread out the work and offer our customers a variety of produce.

We want to offer our customers fresh, locally grown food and other goods. We now partner with other businesses to do this, and we offer dairy products, flowers, honey, and chickens, including broilers, fryers, and roasters. Since Lida Farm is well known in the area, this has been a way to promote other local sellers.

How did you find out about Local Dirt?
I heard about Local Dirt from Paul and Chris Burkhouse of Foxtail Farm. Like them, I’m interested in issues of aggregating supply in order to make a variety of food (including produce and meat as well as quiches, pies, and other goods) available on a greater scale. We joined Local Dirt in May 2009, and we have been actively listing our produce and other food for a couple months now.

What does Local Dirt offer your farm?
In markets like the Twin Cities or Madison, co-ops and CSAs have been growing over decades rather than just years. For those of us with smaller farms in rural areas, it’s not cost effective to tool around the county trying to sell small amounts of produce. There needs to be an easier way to connect sellers to buyers, whether they’re families, café owners, or grocery store managers.

Right now, we’re starting with a group of pre-defined customers, and our goal is to use Local Dirt to add new customers and to allow all of our customers to customize their order. To do that, we offer multiple delivery and pick-up options and we are partners with nearby businesses to offer even more selection.