By Angela Madaras

Celebrating, preserving, and sharing our areas rich Agro-Centric heritage is one of my favorite interests. A somewhat new land preservation project has gained my interest over the past year and is ongoing at the corner of Scio Church and Zeeb Road. Follow me on a journey of one family’s dream passed on. This is yet another food-farm venture of Tantre` Farm’s stewards, Richard Andres and Deb Lentz.

Thanks to Richard’s mother’s desire to save historic farmland from development, and Scio Township’s Land Preservation project inspired and guided by Barry Lonik (a long-time conservationist in Washtenaw County), HoneyBee U-Pick Farm’s 160 acres is being planted with perennials. These plantings will include strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, blight resistant nut trees, and more. The farm sold U-Pick and pre-picked berries for its first year opened to the public in spring 2021. Barry Lonik is a consultant to Scio Township, and other townships, for preventing development on historical farmland. The property that is now HoneyBee U-Pick Farm was originally owned by the Aprill family; established by the German immigrant Alan A. Aprill who arrived just after the Civil War. Much of Scio Valley was owned by the Aprills. Scio Township’s Land Preservation Committee bought the land with a millage from its residents for $2.3 million with the goal of selling the farmland to farmers who agree to never develop the land. They also help the farmers apply for grants to help cover part of their cost. The land is in the Frederick G. Andres Trust, inspired by Richard’s mother, Lois Andres, and her dream to save historic farmland for sustainable farming thus curbing development. The Andres’ Trust paid $600,000 upfront for the land, which came from Lois selling farmland in Canton, and secured a temporary loan of $1.7 million. They are waiting for grant assistance to cover the rest of the purchase cost. The farm includes a barn and house which are being upgraded for continued use. I drive by daily and see the property being lovingly restored and planted, which makes me happy as a neighbor and organic gardener. I have a spiritual connection to our land and its people.

I sat down with Richard Andres of Tantre` Farm to learn more about their journey, their farm food projects, and their mission of operating a collection of agro-businesses with passion and mindfulness. I later spoke with Deb Lentz who is the “business” side of the business.

Angela Madaras: How did the time you spent at Ann Arbor Zen Temple inspire ideas on farming?

Richard Andres: I lived at the Ann Arbor Zen Center in the eighties where I gained experience in mindfulness and gardening, which I use today in operating Tantre` Farm (created in the early nineties). I am used to practicing mindfulness while working with community and finding what works for the greater good of the community and the whole of life: water, air, soil, humans, and animals. Eating healthy food was another gift as was learning how to be a service worker while living the austere life of a lay monk. This led me to pursue a greater vision of a vibrant and healthy climate for future generations. I learned about Permaculture which is a system of agriculture that uses a mix of trees, bushes, other perennial plants, and livestock to create a self-sustaining ecosystem that yields edible crops and flowers that attract bees and butterflies. Agro Economy, Regenerative Farming, Sustainable Growing as well as other names are used to describe a way of managing land in ways that will last for generations if the water, soil, air, and the cosmos are considered alive parts of our tender ecosystem-- all inter-connected. This is when my path moved me to envision Tantre` Farm.

Angela Madaras: How did your partner, and wife, Deb Lentz’s past experience, her 20-year work as a teacher, and as an advocate for Agrarian Adventure inspire her life as a farmer and business owner?

Richard Andres: Deb is the one who operates the business and communication end of the farm. Deb grew up in the southeastern area of Minnesota in a small town called Lake City. Her father was an agriculture teacher at the high school and owned a 160-acre farm with beef cattle surrounded by the Mississippi River Bluffs. Deb learned how to garden, bake, and preserve food from her grandmother while her dad taught her to forage. After Deb graduated high school, her dad took her, the family, and her friends to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) where she would eventually guide many others on water and land throughout the coming years. These wilderness experiences in protected lands led to a strong interest in environmental education for Deb which she integrated into her elementary school classrooms in Central Minnesota over the next ten years. Deb met me in 1994. She moved here in 1995 and taught at Ezra Eby Elementary School in Napoleon for another five years while farming on off hours. My day job was as a fulltime timber frame carpenter, and I would come home every day to farm in the evenings and on the weekends. When our daughter, Ariana, was born in 2001, Deb quit teaching and I quit carpentry to devote our full-time energies into starting a family and a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Farm, where education, local ecology, and feeding a supportive community was the focus. As our daughter began school at Honey Creek Community School in Ann Arbor, Deb helped found a Wellness Committee, a Farm to School program, and supported the school garden in order to continue to find ways to help children be in touch with the earth and making healthy food choices. During those years and onward, she also didn’t leave teaching too far behind: she helped pilot and develop the Agrarian Adventure’s “Farmer in the Classroom” programming and currently serves on the board of directors for the Agrarian Adventure (a nonprofit that works with schools to connect students with food, health, community and agriculture). We have a devoted group of employees and people who contribute.

During the seasons, eight to twenty employees and some volunteers are spread out between Tantre` Farm in Chelsea and the Aprill Farm. Liz Wizeman lives on Scio Church Road in her own renovated homestead, also previously in the Aprill family. She works around the HoneyBee Farm, carefully clearing out the home and barn, ensuring its history will remain intact and remembered, along with many hours of harvesting, weeding, mulching, and planting perennial food crops on the property. The property is also a site where arborists and tree trimming companies bring logs and wood chips to create a free fertility and carbon source for the farm. They are building berm structures modeled after Hugel Mounds in Austria. (You can learn more about Hugel Mounds at almanac.com/what-hugelkultur-ultimate-raised-bed.) Mound culture brings carbon into the ground for nutrients. Think of it as a large and permanently raised bed from which food can be grown efficiently and with little watering and fertilizing.

I also connected with Ryan Poe, project manager for Immune Booster CSA. He shared his passionate drive for the project Tantre` created as a way to bring value to locally prepared foods together with Tantre’s fresh produce as well as other farmer’s products. It was designed to support local food ventures while serving the community during the beginning of the pandemic.

Ryan Poe said, “I love the Immune Booster project and concept because when you zoom out a bit, I’m joining hands with all these local talents, helping drive our local food economy, reducing countless amounts of fossil fuel miles from food being shipped all over the world following the in-season narrative of seasonal eating. I also happen to love to cook, and I grew up on a small market style farm where we grew produce, raised animals, pickled, canned and processed food as the warmer season came to pass each year. My grandma was a professional chef and lived right across the street from me for the first fifteen years of my life. I worked with her from sun up to sun down long after everyone else had given up. I loved everything about the experience from starting the seed and hatching new chickens to eating apple pie from apples we had canned back on those summer and fall days. So, to sum it up, yes, I love this project. The challenges are making the menus each week, and then writing the weekly newsletter explaining the products in the Booster Share and offering ideas and humor to close it out. The newsletter is often a labor of love. It’s a challenging dynamic to write them each week and have new and interesting content in them. The main target there is gratification and collaboration, followed closely by humor. Food is fun! It’s also a journey about where the food came from, who grew it, who cooked it and why it’s important to support local food businesses and grow our own economy. This project was designed to help out quite a few people that were not sure if they were going to survive the pandemic, so it’s a constant feel-good narrative. The collaborations and bridges that have blossomed from this project are also so rewarding as well.”

I have been receiving this CSA share over the winter and both my husband and I find it fun, tasty, unique, and satisfying. We also found out about other local food producers we otherwise may not have discovered. In this way Tantre` created a market for small local producers.

Value added nutrients and products made with primarily local produce, grown in our bio-region (within about 100 miles of our area), are added to Tantre`’s weekly Immune Booster CSA box. It is available all year. The box includes products like The Brinery’s fermented goods, Harvest Kitchen’s prepared foods, sourdough bread from Raterman Bread, Vietnamese cuisine from Ginger Deli, Detroit Mushroom Company, and many more local food businesses. There is a link on the Tantre` Farm’s website with participating vendors. Anyone can sign up for their weekly newsletter directly from Tantre` Farm’s website. One can purchase week to week without making a long-term commitment for Immune Booster Shares. There is also a seasonal vegetable and fruit CSA from Tantre` Farm, which demands a little more commitment as they have served over 400 customers weekly during the summer and fall growing seasons, especially during these last couple of pandemic years, where feeding the community became a true commitment of support.

According to Deb Lentz, ecological economy is what they are attempting to create with both farms: Tantre` Farm and Honeybee U-Pick, as well as their Immune Booster CSA. This increases the local food economy and lowers carbon output and waste of trucking food. It is a more “clean” and gentle system in the long run. Ecology education demonstrates an understanding of the biome of a particular species, living and nonliving parts that are interdependent that develop this ecological consciousness. Trees are deeply rooted and can survive a drought and flood. Some of the trees will be ready in three years. Whole, unprocessed, complex plant-based carbohydrates and proteins flow from the trees and other perennials providing nutrient rich soil. Humans are the same as bacteria; we all want to digest carbohydrates, because it is more efficient as it builds good bacteria in the soil and our guts. The trees and animals the soil supports create a better environment. They are allowing nature to manage the land including air blown aspen spurs, dandelions which enrich and break down the soils polyculture, while berries and trees together feed people and place as we reconnect as a part of the ecosystem.

Angela Madaras: Deb, what is your long-term vision and how might people engage to assist in making these dreams come true?

Deb Lentz: Our long-term vision is what Aldo Leopold referred to in A Sand County Almanac , as a “land ethic” where we celebrate all biomes and ecosystems, making efforts to rebuild native biomes, and in developing an understanding of how they work together. We would like to create our human culture and economy from that rather than imposing extractive, industrial mechanisms that undermine the health of all beings. The earth is calling her children back to “step gently upon her skin.”

HoneyBee U-pick Farm is closer to Ann Arbor and could be a good location for outdoor education about sustainability, farming, edible farm walks, parts of the plant lessons, relationship to bacteria, fungus, insects for both perennial and annual plants, web of life interrelationship of plants and animals. Emerson and Honey Creek Community Schools, being just around the corner, along with a number of daycares and preschools could really benefit from this type of programming. In 2022, it also will be a new Summer CSA distribution site for those members who live nearby, providing great u-pick opportunities for our members.

Angela Madaras: Richard, who inspires you in the agricultural, educational, and spiritual arena?

Richard Andres: Some of the people who inspired me are Wes Jackson, Fred Kirschenmann, Wendell Berry, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Wangari Muta Maathai to name a few well-known people, along with many neighbors, friends, and community members. Social justice, mindfulness, and purpose align with austerity and seriously hard work in this sizeable co-adventure. The folks who inspire our efforts have been through experiences from which we learned as well. Our “business” is a co-creation between many people and businesses working together for a better agro-economy society based on community caring for all its members to include soil, air, water, critters, animals and people.

I was lucky enough to interview one of Richard’s mentors Fred Kirschenmann. He is retired now but was the director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and is still active in sustainable farming as the president of the board at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture outside of New York City. He began educating farmers and non-farmers alike about the importance of organic practices and a spiritual community where everyone takes care of their neighbors and land for generations to come. He transitioned his father’s North Dakota 1,800 acre farm from conventional to organic in 1976. Kirschenmann still runs his family’s third generation farm.

Angela Madaras: How do you see climate change, the cosmos, the magnetosphere, solar rays, an expanding global economy, and an increasing population affecting our time on the planet? Can we nurture mother earth enough for her to let us live within the totality of all life—considering how rapid the changes are occurring in real-time? Can you offer "Hopefulness in Action?” And what actions do you see are realistic for creating a local-sustainable food system based on organic-polyculture methods of farming and in creating greater demand through market outlets that connect all the dots, so to speak?

Fred Kirschenmann: Well, every issue you mention will give us significant challenges. However, we also know from a long history of our planet, that it does have significant capacity to regenerate. The key problem is that we humans have now developed a long history of introducing a culture which assumes that we are “the masters and possessors” of nature and that we must “bend” her “to our will.” That is the culture we must change, and Aldo Leopold proposed the center of such a culture shift which recognizes that we humans are simply “plain members and citizens” of earth’s “biotic community.” This culture shift will not be easy to accomplish, but in a small way it has already begun because the “masters and possessors” approach is already beginning to unravel since all the inputs we have used to achieve our goal are in a state of depletion, and at least a few of the next, younger generation have begun to see that and have begun to relate to nature as partners rather than possessors. We may not be at 20% of that generation yet, but I see an increasing number evolving, but cannot yet predict that the needed shift will happen, given the time we as a planet and people have left, but I am “hopeful.”

Angela Madaras: Do you have any advice to offer younger organic farmers? Especially when some community members do not understand this type of agriculture and the spiritual connection to the land. What do people need to understand based on the need to change for the better?

Fred Kirschenmann: I think it is important to for them to form, and or, join, communities of young farmers who have begun to move in this direction. In Iowa, such a community is the “Practical Farmers of Iowa,” and as we mentioned in our conversation, CSA’s are another option.

Angela Madaras: Do you think humans are ready to commit to caring for one another and our mother? Or could it be too late? You mentioned the 20% needed for a revolution in agriculture transition. Can you elaborate?

Fred Kirschenmann: I have recently been encouraged by the new literature which has been published—James Rebanks, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey; Paul Freedman, Why Food Matters; Beth Hoffman, Bet The Farm: The Dollars and Sense of Growing Food in America, and, Stephen Erickson, Regenerative Agriculture: The Climate Crisis Solution. Also, I did not refer to the 20% as a measure for agriculture, but as a measure of the young generation!

Tantre` Farms will continue to have their annual Nut Festival at HoneyBee U-Pick farm in the fall, invite school groups to harvest berries and nuts and explore the land through nature hikes, and they have dreams of community flower gardens, and community bee keeping with plenty of volunteer opportunities. HoneyBee is a place for people to find some quiet, connect with nature, and explore our relationship to each other and the earth. Through active mindfulness we can find our interconnectedness and direct it toward a good ecological balance through deeply rooted relationships. We would like to encourage our community of eaters to learn how to live and share with one another—both our time and our food.

Visit Deb Lentz and Richard Andres at Tantre` Farm at 2510 Hayes Road, Chelsea, MI. Learn more about their businesses and mission at tantrefarm.com, email info@Tantrefarm.com, or call (734) 475-4323.