By Sandor Slomovits

Photos by Mary Bortmas

The Community Farm of Ann Arbor was founded in 1988. It was one of the first organic, and perhaps the only biodynamic, farm in Michigan, as well as one of the first CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture). A few years after the Farm began, and up until three years ago, it was run by Annie Elder and Paul Bantle. After Annie and Paul moved to California in 2018, several other farmers ran things, and then this spring, Dan Gannon was hired to run the Farm.

To learn about that transitional period, the current state, and the future of the Farm, I spoke with Karen Chalmer, one of its founding members and someone who, in the past 33 years, has devoted countless hours of work, in many different capacities, at the Farm. She jokingly says, “My official role now is as the farm grandmother.” She still leads a weekly weed and sing, which is exactly what it sounds like.

I asked Karen for her farm memories from the past 33 years.

Karen: In the fall of 1987, the Ann Arbor Public Library held a panel discussion with farmers about the plight of small farms in America. Dale Lesser, who’s one of our neighbors was speaking, so I decided to go and listen. There were four or five farmers, and they all told the same story—they just couldn’t compete with the big factory farms. In order to do what they loved, somebody had to work off the farm to support the farm. Then a man named Trauger Groh from the Temple-Wilton Community in New Hampshire (the first CSA in the US) said, ‘You know, there’s another way to do this, it’s called community supported agriculture.’

I’d never heard of that, but Cindy Olivas and Marcia Barton—Cindy worked at Wildfire Bakery and Marcia at the Ecology Center—had studied biodynamic farming and wanted to start a CSA in Ann Arbor. ‘Was anybody interested?’ About ten of us said, ‘Yeah.’ We met that weekend at the Steiner School and in 1988 we started on borrowed land. I think there were 150 members that first year and we all got such lovely produce that everybody wanted to keep playing. But the farmer we were renting from was so amazed at the life on his farm that he decided he wanted to farm again. So, we moved to Huron River Drive where we were for two or three years, and Marcia and Cindy were still farming.

Then Cindy left. She was sort of the Annie of that first part of the Farm, had that kind of heart. Marcia was kind of the Paul, and we thought the farm couldn’t possibly survive, but then Marcia found Annie and Paul, and they came on with Marcia. Then we had to move the whole farm again and it was September and we thought, ‘Oh my gosh, how’s this going to work? We should be planting garlic for next year.’ And that week I got a call from Isabelle Yingling who said, ‘I’ve got this farm in Chelsea that my husband and I intended to farm, but we’ve had five kids and we’ve never farmed it. My husband’s gone now. Do you know anybody who’d like to farm it?” (Laughter)

Margarete Walsh, Dan Gannon, and Karen Chalmer

So, we moved, and Annie and Paul started farming. We had to move a cow and a greenhouse. (Laughter) It was lots of fun. That was a big lesson, that the farm could survive and thrive. Annie and Paul became the farm and did wonderful things. They, created the community and the love… So, when they said they were leaving, it was like, ‘Oh, I know the farm can survive because I’ve seen this happen before.’

We started looking and found three dear, sweet, delightful young people, one of whom had actually farmed before. They were wonderful, and they did their very best, but they also had an impossible task. They were strangers to each other and three is not a great number, somebody often gets left out. They gave it their best and then one of them left and two of them carried on the next year, but life called them off into completely different things. So, there we were in October 2019 with no farmers.

Earlier, in 2017 or so, Randy Wright and Lucia Ruedenberg had bought the house [on the farm] and they were so happy to have a biodynamic farm in their backyard. So, there we were in 2019 with Randy and Lucia and some remnant of us who really wanted there to be a farm. We’d done some soil testing and we knew that the soil needed a rest. So, we thought, ‘Okay, we’ll plant cover crops and look for a farmer. If we can just figure out how to pay the taxes and electricity, the insurance… we’ll keep going.’ There were 30 members who were willing to support it for a chrysalis [transitional] year.

That might’ve been the most community year of the entire farm in some ways, because there was nobody in charge. It became so apparent that Annie and Paul had held all these different threads between them, and they tried their best to pass it on, but you don’t even know what you didn’t know until… So, we just kept putting our heads together and figuring things out. Then, Randy died of a heart attack one workday. That was a really traumatic thing. He and I had been the most intent on keeping the thing together. He was the only one that knew how to run the tractor. After he was gone, we had to get a bunch of people together to figure out how does this tractor work? How do you put equipment on it? Luckily there were some guys who knew a lot about that stuff, so we did it. We planted the cover crops, and we kept the farm going, but we still didn’t have a farmer.

And then this wonderful thing happened. Margarete Walsh encouraged us to put a little paragraph into the Journal for Anthroposophy. It was way at the very end in tiny little print and it said “the Community Farm of Ann Arbor needs a farmer.” Dan Gannon, a farmer out in California, saw it and was interested. We had interviewed maybe four or five people and there were some really great people, but nobody who really fit. But Dan did really fit, and I think the farm is a great fit for him.

Margarete Walsh and her family have been members of the Farm for about thirty years, but after she retired last year, she upped her commitment. She began regularly working at the Farm, joined the Farm’s Board, and became a member of the chrysalis group, which is the educational arm of the Farm.

Margarete: Last year, because of the pandemic, I think everybody was looking for community and Karen put the call out, [asking] who of the former members would be interested in having a workday to come to the farm and take care of the many, many tasks that have been not done for a while.

San: It’s almost a silver lining of the pandemic that the community came together, that something good has come out of it.

Margarete: We definitely called it a silver lining. People came who, I don’t know how they found out, but they saw an opportunity to be cooperative with other, similar-minded people. We were outside, we kept our distance, we wore masks when we were inside cleaning up the barn or whatever. It was lots of laughter, some singing with masks. (Laughter) I think it really fulfilled a need. And it was an open, inviting gesture to enter into the community.

There are many, many reasons why people come. Of course, certainly for the vegetables, but it’s more than that. Often, again and again, I feel healthier, happier, more in balance, just having greater equanimity, after I’ve been at the farm for an hour.

There was this absolute determination to keep going and also to create a new vision. We, in any particular time in our lives, act according to what we know. And that’s exactly what Annie and Paul did, they did the best they knew how to do. I’m really full of admiration to this day for all that they gave on many, many different levels.

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Finally, in early July I interviewed Dan Gannon, the Community Farm’s new farmer. Along with his 13-year-old daughter, Frankie, he moved to the Farm in August of 2020. Dan, 41, is a solidly built six-footer with a full, scraggly black and grey beard and a vigorous way of speaking. He wore a blue ballcap, heavy boots, and tan overalls.

San: How did you come to farming? Is it something that you grew up with, or came to later in life?

Dan: It was in college, in a student organic community garden at University of California Berkeley. That was the first time I ever had the experience of gardening or growing food. I was studying microbiology, and one day the professor said, ‘You guys are the smartest folks at the school. You’ll never have to worry about a job. You can either work in human waste, processing human waste, or lab research.’ I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I’m not interested in any of those things.’ At the same time, I happened to be taking a student-run class in the student organic community garden and saw a practical application for microbiology, compost, disease suppression, and nutrient cycling in the soil. But more importantly than that was also having the experience for the first time of working together with a community of people in the garden.

San: When was this?

Dan: Twenty years ago, now, in about 2001.

San: What was next?

Dan: I had a no-till farm that was the first small farm in West Sacramento, in California. The city was trying to find creative ways of making use of empty land, city lots, and small properties. There was a good community of people trying to initiate a local food system. I started a program working with other new farmers and we had a little online farm stand that we collaborated on. I was always trying to find ways of working with other people, essentially working with the community. If it was just farming for myself it wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying.

San: So, what brought you here to Michigan?

Dan: It was this particular farm. I saw an advertisement that they needed a farmer. It seemed pretty appealing to be able to come here and step into something that had been in operation for 30 years using a similar model to what I was already using.

San: What is different now at the Community Farm than when Paul and Annie were farming?

Dan: I don’t know too much about the transition years, not having been here, but I think what’s still unique about this CSA, compared to others in the area, is that it’s really exclusively a CSA. You know, occasionally, if I’ve got a whole field of tomatoes, I’ll probably end up having a few extra tomatoes that I sell off, but principally it’s designed around the membership as being the primary, if not exclusive, revenue source.

San: You don’t, for example, go to the farmers market, right?

Dan: That’s correct. The farm produce proper is really centered on the CSA members.

San: And that’s how it is still.

Dan: Yeah. I think the community itself went through more of a transition than the farm did in the sense that there was a loss from what they’d known and what they’d gotten comfortable with. And a little bit of an expectation of, ‘How do we get back to that’ rather than ‘how do we go forward from here?’ Last year there was no farmer, and I think that was a really critical experience because what people found was that when there was more direct responsibility for the care of the land—because there were still two dozen or so members who split the costs to maintain the land, and also had to put in work to do it—they found that actually it was, surprisingly, much more satisfying to feel a more direct sense of responsibility for the space, rather than just to come and pick up your produce and then leave again. That to me is really the exciting part of this, people working together, being together, forming bonds that way. I think that’s kind of what we’re building on going forward in terms of what’s similar or what has carried through. And then certainly the production is different. We’re no till completely.

San: That’s a change?

Dan: That’s a big change. I think that the land was overly tilled until now. That was part of the system for providing as much produce, importing a fair amount of manure to make compost and then really working the fields heavily. That’s pretty common for organic farms, that the farm is sort of a pass through; you’re bringing in imports and you’re exporting off produce. But what you find is that little by little it’s exhausting the capacity of the soil to sustain life, not just in a nutrient way, nutrients are relatively easy to replace. If I take off some amount of produce I have to put on some amount of fertilizer. Okay. But it’s the soil organic matter that people don’t often think about, but that’s really what’s the primary food source for all the microbes that are in the soil, which are doing all the work to take care of your plants for you. So, this idea of feed the soil and the soil takes care of the plants, in effect it’s really the microbes that are in the soil, bacteria and fungus and everything, that they build upon. So, a no till system doesn’t undermine that each year. It lets that community of workers in the soil build over time and become more resilient. And then they lend that resilience to the system above ground.

San: Say more about that.

Dan: In essence the idea is not to disturb the soil community. A lot of people talk about a community of the wildlife and the native plants and other things above ground. But, in any given system, the majority of the biomass is microbial, we don’t see them. They have this really large influence on all the life that we do see. So, if you can keep them intact, they’re like the world’s best little chemists. They multiply so fast that they adapt really quickly and the waste of one is food for the next. It’s this really tight knit community. There’s no waste. That means that nutrients get cycled right there in the root zone rather than getting washed away or lost to the atmosphere. And disease suppression; there’s no room for disease to come in because there’s so much tight-knit life there.

This farm is a biodynamic farm, and the ideal of a biodynamic farm is to treat the farm itself as a living organism. If you have to bring in fertility from offsite, it should be considered as a temporary situation, like a medicine, or a remedy for something that’s missing. The ideal is to balance the resources that you have onsite to be able to provide the fertility to the fields. Historically, of the ten acres of land, they’ve farmed close to four or even five acres. This year we’re down to an acre and a half and the rest of that space supports the fields.

San: How do the other eight plus acres do that?

Dan: A lot of it is integrating animals into the system. Then you are producing the right amount of manure onsite yourself, rather than getting manure from the dairy down the road and making compost from plants. Then also, a third of our land is really kind of just wild. Again, here’s this resiliency that comes from having a connection to some wild spaces. Over time people have come to recognize that, ‘oh yeah, we really benefit from having this order that we need from our cultivated areas being at the edge of where there’s the strength and resilience of wild nature. That’s it in a nutshell, the idea is to slightly lower productivity in terms of the productive space.

San: What does that mean in terms of work? How much more or less people hours will it take to farm this way? And is that even a good question to ask?

Dan: The kind of work is different, it’s not so much that it’s more or less work. My introduction to growing food was in that community garden when I was in school. I changed my major from molecular environmental biology to an interdisciplinary major that I made up called agroecology or agricultural ecology. I was getting a variety of alternative forms of farming through my academic studies, and I was practicing very small-scale farming. Coming out of that, my intention was to identify what’s the smallest scale that we can farm in order to be responsible about every decision that we’re making: what’s good for humanity on the earth in general, not just what’s good for me in the pocketbook this year. It means less land, essentially. In order to be that careful, you can’t really be so widespread.

San: I drove by some big corn fields on my way here.

Dan: Yeah. That was my intention, to say, ‘Okay, we need this balance between making a living—obviously we all live in this economic system—and yet, if that’s the sole determinant, then you’re never really making decisions about what’s best. You’re always settling for whatever you can do to pay the bills.

I think it’s mostly a question of identifying that [profit] is not really the primary criteria. Even though this farm was biodynamic and organic, they were still conventionally tilling. And that’s typical for most farms that are trying to do it at some scale. They’ve identified what they need in order to be profitable. This is an inconvenient way of farming for sure. And it’s not even just the no till part, because that could be done on a large scale, you could still do it where you’re just importing truckloads of manure or compost. It’s instead inconvenient because we’re trying to make use of these really intimate relationships between the land itself, the animals that are here, the plants that are here, and the microbes that are here, these really rich relationships. To me, that fits really well with the community supported model, because that’s all about rich relationships, getting to know each other over time, and working through good and bad years together. I think it’s kind of the only natural way.

I was invited here with the committee already recognizing that they were asking for no till and recognizing that they had been the pioneers of CSA thirty years ago and that there was a need again to take a new look and see what’s the leading edge. What is it that we can keep doing to go forward rather than just settling into this system that started 30 years ago?

San: You mentioned more animals…

Dan: What’s here now is not what I would like to have, that’s for sure. We’re about to buy cows, we’ll have four cows to start. I’ve got seven goats and sheep now and chickens. We’ll need a fair amount more, but it’s not so much about the numbers. What I’m aiming for is to have as many animals as we can feed ourselves on the land.

The animals do a lot of the land management, in a way they’re the workers that are clearing the land. We get the benefit of their manure, but also their activity itself on the land opens up the opportunities for something new, things don’t get too thick and established. I think that it’s really critical to bring animal husbandry and crop farming back together again. Out of convenience, the organic farmers I know that started 30, 40 years ago, they right away said, ‘We can’t do both because it’s just too difficult, so we’re going to eliminate the animals.’ Here in the spring, I brought them [the animals] through, and they ate down our cover crop in each of the fields. We’ve got a few beds where the goats and the sheep are right now that we prepped in the spring but never planted. So, the weeds are this tall by now, and I can just turn them [the goats] into a few beds at a time. It’s more about the work [the animals] do and managing their activity so that it fits into the system and relieves us of some labor. I have to spend a little extra time with the animals, moving their temporary fencing and things like that, but they do better work at weeding and clearing a space than what I could do. Plus, they do it just for room and board. (Laughter) The animals get to be animals, they get to move around, they get to exhibit all their instinctive activity. And we get the benefit of their work.

San: If you don’t till, how do you plant?

Dan: A lot of folks still want the convenience of a clean bed on the surface. So, some of the implements came to use what’s called vertical tillage rather than turning the soil up. Think of the implement just being turned 90 degrees and the tips of it are all that ever enters the soil. There’s a history here of some innovative practices, making and adapting tools. We’ve been doing the same. We’ve made a thing that’s a bunch of disks that basically just cuts into the surface of the soil shallowly without turning the soil. Then that little bit of disturbance gives us the chance to clean up the surface of the soil enough that we can still use push seeders, or any of the convenient types of seeding.

San: Is this about the size of the farm that you want it to be?

Dan: That’s a good question. I think that the better model going forward is not limited to a vegetable CSA. I think that part of it becomes limiting where then there’s this pressure to grow more vegetables because that’s what we’re selling. The kind of activity that I’ve been describing, it’s not exactly even accurate to say there’s less productivity. There’s less vegetable field space, but there’s an abundance of activity of all kinds. It’s more a question of diversification in terms of the products. There are animal products, there’s plenty of vegetables coming out of the fields, but there’s also a variety of medicinal plants and other kinds of plants that are going on all around.

What we’re looking at now is not just what does it take to get produce out of the fields, but instead, what does it take to take care of a piece of land in such a way that we get something in return in the form of produce? In this case we’re saying, we value taking care of the land and each other in a different way.

Karen Chalmer offered a summation of the Farm’s history, present, and future when she said, “We’ve had our chrysalis year, and this is the learning-how-to-fly year. There’s going to be a lot of learning. Thirty years of Annie and Paul was pretty darn wonderful. And yet we know things now that they didn’t know. I learned this great song just the week before all of this came down, (Sings) “You do the best you can until you know, better. And when you know better, do better.” So, we’re trying to learn to do better.