By Sandor Slomovits • Photos Provided by Kim Bayer
Sometime last year I happened to catch a radio interview on Michigan Public’s Stateside show. The show’s host, April Baer, was speaking with Warda Bougettaya, the owner of a pastry shop in Detroit called Warda Patisserie. Warda mentioned that she buys her strawberries from Slow Farm in Ann Arbor, and she spoke very highly of those strawberries. Actually, that’s a vast understatement: raved is more accurate. I was intrigued. I wanted to meet the people and see the farm where people grow such praiseworthy strawberries. So, earlier this year I emailed Slow Farm and asked if I could come visit. Owner Kim Bayer replied quickly and warmly.
In late April, on a mostly sunny, cool morning, with the temperature in the low fifties, I drove out from Ann Arbor on Whitmore Lake Road to Slow Farm. I found Bayer and co-farm manager Magda Nawrocka-Weekes standing at the edge of a large field on the west side of Whitmore Lake Road, near the farm’s gate. After we exchanged greetings, Bayer said, “This was a raspberry field, and it’s got a cover crop on it now. Magda and I were just talking about what we’re planning to do here this summer. We’re going to put some flowers at the front and then have a Three Sisters Garden.” (Three Sisters Gardens are a legacy of Native American agricultural traditions. When planted together, the Three Sisters (corn, beans, and squash) help each other thrive.)
“We’re also getting some blueberry bushes to put in the middle and chickens at the end.” I asked if they’d include eggs in their U-Pick offerings. “We’re just going to try having a little flock of chickens and see if they survive out here,” replied Kim. “Kind of a way of seeing if we should think about having a larger flock. Who doesn’t want U-pick eggs?” she added with a laugh.
Then Bayer and Nawrocka-Weekes led me on a tour. “This, the smallest part of the farm, about 15 acres, is where we do most of our work,” Bayer said. Pointing east she added, “The overall farm is about 187 acres. I also own across the road and across the freeway. The part across the freeway we don’t farm. I’ve put in a restored native prairie and restored about seven wetlands over there. There’s also a twenty-acre woods. That’s kind of its own little nature preserve. We do some cultivation across the road. We’ve got several acres of strawberries, and we usually have had a squash and pumpkin field there. We’re planning on doing both of those this year, but here is where we do most of the intensive kind of planting and harvesting. This most southerly field is a two or three-acre asparagus field.”
Then, turning and pointing north to a nearby row of small, tentlike structures, Bayer continued: “And this is where we’ve got most of our little village of shacks.” The first one, she explained, is the farmstand tent which includes a self-serve fridge where people can buy the farm’s fresh produce, pick up their weekly CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) portions, and weigh and pay for their U-Pick fruits and veggies. Stacked behind it are a couple of other tentlike structures, filled with tools and farming equipment. There are also two insulated sheds which serve as coolers for produce and seeds.
“We don’t have any permanent buildings. We’ve been working out of these temporary structures for the past eight years. (Bayer bought the property in 2015 and started farming it in 2017.) We’ve been working with the township on getting a permanent building because this way we have to wash our bins and whatever we need to clean outside, bent over with a hose. That’s not something that we can do year-round. It’d be really nice to have a permanent facility. That would help our staff a lot.”
“What’s the holdup?” I asked. “What are the concerns about a permanent structure?”
“This property has an agricultural easement on it,” replied Bayer. “That means that it has to be preserved for farming in perpetuity. The easement says that I can build any agricultural buildings up to 2% of the overall property, which would be four acres worth of impermeable building surface. I’m not asking the township to build four acres worth of buildings. I have proposed to invest in one fairly small building to be able to run my farm business in an effective and year-round way. The easement language allows for much more than the building that I’m asking for, but it has been very difficult working with the township to get even that.
The difficulty is partly because the easement language, put in place by the previous owners, was written expressly for conventional commodity farms which centralize their large operations, and it does not take into account smaller, diversified, and community-engaged farms like mine. Because I would like to have basic amenities, like a fully equipped staff bathroom and a small retail space, I have to go through a more complex process than I would if I were just putting up a pole barn. I’m not the only organic farmer in the area struggling under this situation and the way the township has chosen to interpret and enforce the easement language. “I’ve had to go through a lot to try to get them to the point of allowing this. And I’m still in the middle of it.”
I interrupted to suggest that we didn’t have to mention any of this in this article. “I don’t want to make your life more difficult by putting something out that people can get mad at you for.”
Bayer replied, “I appreciate that. And I don’t want that either, but I do want people to know that it’s happening. The building that I proposed would take all these shacks and put them under one roof and give us really beautiful [possibilities] like coolers, and storage space, and a nice big inside wash pack that we could use all year. Plus, a little retail space at the front that would replace this situation. I think the township would like it, and it would be so much better for the staff working here too.”
We began walking again, and Bayer showed me their three high tunnels—passive, solar-heated hoop houses—where they start and grow plants. Then, pointing to a large field she said, “Here we’ve got nine no-till blocks.” Seeing my puzzled look, she continued. “No-till is a sustainable farming technique: you don’t use a tractor to till up the ground. By not using a tractor you preserve the structure and some of the microbial networks of the soil. Each of these blocks is a hundred by a hundred feet. They each have twenty 100-foot-long beds that we plant into. We put down 30-inch-wide strips of compost and 30-inch-wide strips of wood chips for the whole hundred feet.
In each block we plant a family of plants. In this block, we’ll have a lot of our roots. In the block over here, we’ve got our herbs and flowers including some perennials. You can see the peonies are coming up. [There’s] Shasta daisies, thyme, sage, and daffodils. Here are French breakfast radishes, pink beauty radishes, and hacker eye turnips—a Japanese variety. We’re getting ready to plant a lot more things. In the back is our bigger field where we’ll plant our winter squash and pumpkins. Magda’s in charge. She and our other farm manager, Zach, have helped develop an intensive crop plan figuring out what we’re going to plant, when we’re going to plant it, and how we’re going to do successions.”
Nawrocka-Weekes picked up the thread. “Successions, meaning rotating, multiple plantings per year. So, these four beds here are radishes and turnips. They’re next going to be beans, and after that they’re going to be cabbage. It’s fitting all that into one year in four beds.”
Bayer continued, “It’s a very complex, logistical challenge. I think that might be something that most people who just do home gardening might not recognize. A diversified farm is a very complex organism.”
I noted the black tarps covering many of the rows. “Most of these blocks we use at least some tarps on,” Bayer said. “Tarps are a way of setting back the weeds, and it also helps the microbes and worms do their work underground. It helps warm the soil in the springtime, which means you can plant maybe a little bit earlier. That is one of the techniques that we use to avoid having to use herbicides and pesticides and to not have to do as much weeding, although we do plenty of weeding.” (Laughter)
I asked about the woods bordering the west side of the property. “Actually, we were just looking at this fence row earlier today,” Bayer said. “When I bought the property, it was pretty much just filled with buckthorn, box elder, and honeysuckle, which are all invasive and very, very difficult to get rid of. We’ve been working over the past two years at clearing them out, and we’re just starting to get to the point where we can see and walk through the whole thing. Glen is out there right now with a brush hog.” (Glen Greenlee is Kim’s partner and the farm’s comptroller.)
“We’ve planted a line of nut trees, chestnuts, walnuts, and hazelnuts. These trees are eight or nine years old. They’ve started to make a few chestnuts. Nut trees take a long time. The overall farm is an organism. A lot of the things that we do are all part of putting a system into place. There’s a huge open field, hundreds and hundreds of acres of corn and soybeans in back of us. So, the wind just whips through, and it’s important for us to have a windbreak.”
“Wind is just not great for a farm,” added Nawrocka-Weekes. “The wind even interferes with us putting down tarps.”
“We’ve had a lot of extreme wind events,” Bayer continued. “Other people have had their buildings blown over and their high tunnels blown down. Wind isn’t good for plants. It’s not good for the tunnels, and so that’s one of the long-term strategies that we’re using, to grow our own windbreak of useful non-invasive trees. It’s part of developing this overall organism. With Magda and Zach here, we’ve been able to do a lot more in terms of developing our crop plan and our overall thinking of the whole farm instead of just one bed at a time.”
I asked Nawrocka-Weekes, who uses they/them pronouns, about their background. “I read in your bio that you studied biochemistry, and that Zach has engineering experience. Those aren’t typical preparatory training for farming.”
“No,” They replied. “Zach and I both separately quit our jobs mid-pandemic because we realized that we didn’t want to work behind desks anymore. Zach had been in the automotive industry for five or six years. I was working in Mexico as the sales and marketing manager for a UK-based startup that fabricated coral reefs by building up limestone rock around steel reef shapes using wave-energy technology. (The reefs were designed to prevent coastal erosion worsened by climate change.) Zach and I were working behind desks, stuck alone. We quit our jobs and moved to Colorado. That’s where we met. But, I think the skills that we had before are very helpful for this. Biochemistry is very useful for soil balancing and other things you have to know. And Zach’s amazing at systems, spreadsheets… We both love spreadsheets. There’s a lot of spreadsheets at the farm—a lot of Excel.
We’d been working on farms before this, one in Colorado and one in Virginia. We moved here to have a sort of training wheels of a farm. To manage, but also to have support while we do it. Next year, we’re hoping to start our own farm in the UK.”
“That was going to be my next question,” I said. “Yours is not a Colorado accent I’m hearing.”
“No, it is not,” Nawrocka-Weekes laughed. “I’m from London.”
“What brought you to the States?”
“My dad is from Rhode Island, so I was allowed in the country during Covid, and now I’ve stayed because I’m met a nice man, and I’ve got a good job.”
“Where do you hope to start another farm?”
“In the south of England, hopefully the Cornwall, Dorsett area. There’s a land match plan that pairs young farmers who have no land with old farmers who have land. We’re writing a business plan for that while we also do this. All we think about ever is farming.”
I turned back to Bayer. “What’s your plan for when they leave?”
“What I would like is to have an assistant manager who’s training under them, who can take over as manager next year. It’s been kind of hard to find that person. We’ve interviewed several people who haven’t worked out, but I think that training new farmers is an important aspect of having a farm. That’s something that I hope all the folks get out of the experience of working here. It’s a lot of hard physical labor, but I think people get passionate about it when they understand the systems that are involved and the vision behind it. We have a lot of volunteers who come out because they want to be a part of that as well.
We walked inside one of the high tunnels and Nawrocka-Weekes described the lush greens growing in rows and also the plants in trays on tables. “We have mostly Asian greens, a little bit of lettuce, turnips, and radishes. Right now, we are starting a lot of our own tomatoes, but we also get some starts from another local farm that has more greenhouse space. We will be planting tomatoes in here in the next two or three weeks. All of this [the greens] will come out, and this will be full of tomatoes for the whole season. We’re trying to leverage the only warm space we have right now, so you can see all of the seedlings that we have started. We grow a lot of heirlooms—a lot of things from the Slow Food Ark of Taste.”
Bayer explained, “It’s a directory, a catalog, of the world’s most endangered and most delicious foods.”
“Things that deserve to have a future,” Nawrocka-Weekes continued. “Even if they’re a little harder to cultivate. We’ve also gotten very into saving our own seeds. The German pink tomatoes here are from seeds from last year, and those are our most beautiful right now. We save the seeds of the best plants, plant them again next year and try to improve them. We’re growing a lot of distinct or interesting cultivars—lots of things that people might not be able to find anywhere else.”
Pointing to the rows of plants, Nawrocka-Weekes went on, “Many of these plants are ready to go in the ground, but we are going to have one more frost tonight, so we can’t plant them until tomorrow. I mean, we could, but they’re babies. We don’t want to shove them out in the cold. We’re going to be planting twelve rows of our long season crops tomorrow.”
I asked if they’re finding that they’re planting some things earlier because of the changing climate.
“We’re trying not to plant too early,“ Bayer said. “Last year we had a hard frost on May 27th which is almost two weeks after what’s supposed to be the last frost date. What we’ve noticed is more extremes in the weather. It gets hotter sooner, but there are freezes later. There are major wind events. We had a six-week drought last year that meant we didn’t have any strawberries or winter squash. Those kinds of extremes are something that make farming even more challenging.”
I asked about the other high tunnels.
“One is a Caesar’s palace,” said Nawrocka-Weekes with a smile. “That’s the Caesar salad house—full of salad stuff. The other is the pickle house which is full of cucumbers. Right now, they’re in arugula and spinach, because we were growing them early in the season, but those will be cleaned out in the next couple of weeks, and then lettuces and cucumbers planted. We have a whole plan.”
Bayer picked up a three-ring binder from a nearby table and opened it to show me a page. “This is a visualization of the crop plan. Each of those blocks out there has a page.”
“And this is the nice, pretty version that is readable for everyone,” Nawrocka-Weekes said. “Whereas we have ones much more in-depth with thousands of entries like seeding greenhouse date, predicted harvest, several spreadsheets all feeding into each other that actually makes this nice visualization.”
“It’s very important to keep track,” Bayer said. “What worked and what didn’t work from year to year.”
Even though Bayer, now 60, has only been farming since 2017, her involvement with different aspects of food production and community building goes back many years. (To learn more about Bayer’s work, I recommend Rochel Urist’s fine profile in the January,April 2016 issue of The Crazy Wisdom Community Journal.) When we talked in April, she briefly summarized her career in her typical modest and self-effacing way.
“I don’t have a farming background. My grandparents grew up in farming families, but that was as close as I got. My background is in information and library science. I worked at U of M for a long time and, I think kind of similarly to Magda and Zach, I felt like the academic industrial complex was crushing my soul a bit.”
“Okay!” I said, “Be honest now, don’t hold back!” (Laughter)
“I had also been working in food system nonprofits at the same time I was at the university. I also quit my job and decided to focus more on the food system aspect. I did a lot of community organizing around food and did food writing for a while. I was one of the people that started our Local Food Summit and our HomeGrown Festival that happened for a long time before Covid. And I helped start the Washtenaw Food Hub. I have been part of the slow food movement for a long time. I felt like that was a better match for my values. I think a lot of people come to the farm for that reason.
“But,” she continued, “It’s not the usual kind of background that people have or should have when they start a farm. Most people don’t start a farm when they’re in their fifties. They should do what Magda and Zach have done and get some experience at other farms first and learn what they’re doing and how to do it.”
“The pandemic clearly had a significant effect on your lives,” I said, “But the farm also had to have been impacted.”
“I wouldn’t say that it was a good thing for us,” Bayer replied, “But I think the farm helped us get through the pandemic in ways that other occupations might not have. It was a safer place to be because we were always outside. For two years we were outside wearing masks! [Laughter] It was one of the few places where people felt like they could come with their families. It was an opportunity to work together with other farms to have an online farmer’s market that we did collaboratively. People came and drove through, and we put their groceries in the trunk of their car. There was a lot of adaptability developed. I don’t think we’ve gotten over the trauma of it yet. That’s definitely still in the background, but it feels a little bit in the rear-view mirror. It changed some things. I think it made people a lot more aware of their local food system.”
I wanted to experience the U-Pick aspect of Slow Farm; so, a few days after my first visit, I visited the farm again. On my earlier visit Bayer had said, “We’re going into our eighth season of doing U-Pick. It’s not very common to have U-pick vegetables…especially the kinds that we grow.”
“It’s great showing people stuff,” Nawrocka-Weekes added, “But you’ve got to keep an eye on people harvesting who are maybe looking completely lost.”
I thought that might be an accurate description of me harvesting vegetables. Most of my previous experience with harvesting has been from grocery shelves.
I arrived at about nine on a beautiful Saturday morning in May and at the farmstand tent told Alex Solum, one of Slow Farm’s newest employees, that I’d come to harvest asparagus. (Bayer had mentioned that her friend, Warda Bougettaya , who had raved about Slow Farm’s strawberries, calls their asparagus “Gucci asparagus.”) Alex asked if I had ever harvested asparagus. When I said no, she handed me a large white bucket, showed me the asparagus field, and cautioned me to walk only in the rows and not across them. Then she instructed me to simply snap off asparagus stalks close to the ground and to only pick spears that were at least as long as her hand, showing the distance from her wrist to her fingertips. Finally, she pointed to an orange cone in the middle of the field and asked me to avoid that area as there was a killdeer’s nest on the ground.
There were a handful of people already in the field, including families with young children. I felt like I was on a treasure hunt, finding asparagus spears between the weeds, and I soon had the amount I wanted. I headed back to the farmstand, where tables displayed some of the farm’s spring produce for sale: spinach, bok choy, mustard greens, green garlic, turnips, and radishes, as well as small tomato and pepper plants. Solum weighed my harvest. I paid, and before I left, I talked with Zach Goodman, the farm’s co-manager and Nawrocka-Weekes partner. He gave me a short tour and concluded by saying, “I’ve been farming for about four years. I hope to do this for the rest of my life.”
Back home, I found Bougettaya’s praise of Slow Farm’s “Gucci asparagus” to be, if anything, understated. For lunch, my family and I enjoyed the freshest, most delicious asparagus we’ve ever had. Slow Farm is, by its own description, “a biodiverse and USDA certified organic U-Pick farm and farmstand devoted to the principles of Slow Food, agroecology, and justice in the food system.” I asked Bayer and Nawrocka-Weekes about the emphasis on “justice in the food system.”
Nawrocka-Weekes began their reply with a question. “How much do you know about farm apprenticeships? People do not get paid very much to learn how to be farmers. The last two farms we were on, we made $400 to $800 a month and got room and board and education. That’s not enough to make savings or live on. This place—actually paying people a living wage—is pretty uncommon.”
Bayer continued, “I don’t think it would make sense to try to have a sustainable farm and treat the employees like they were disposable. The thing that I really enjoy is being part of a high functioning team and feeling like we’re working together on the same thing—working together on a higher purpose. I think that’s part of what makes this kind of work valuable and really compelling. I feel sad for people that don’t feel like that. Because having a farm, this is not something anybody can do by themselves. You have to have the expertise, the help, the effort, and the heart of lots of people. You can’t wheel, hoe, broad fork, dig, and weed all day for just money. You can’t pay people enough money, I don’t think, to do this. They have to value it. So, having colleagues and a team that shares the same values and sense of purpose is really crucial.
I just feel like it’s the right thing to do. And why would you not do the right thing if you have a choice? I want to get to the point where the farm can hire people year-round with full benefits. It’s sad to me that we’re not able to do that yet. I think that’s the way we’re going to have skilled farmers in the future, when young people see this as a viable career path. Right now, I don’t think it is, and I don’t think young people see it that way unless they’re crazy, like Magda and Zach. [Laughter] There is a way, but it’s very, very hard. And that is unfair for something as crucial as healthy food.
Learning how to farm is experiential knowledge. It’s not like other kinds of things, I think. It’s more like music. You can’t practice for a hundred hours and be an expert violinist. You have to do it over a period of years and build up your experience. There’s no shortcut. It should be motivating people a lot if we don’t have enough farmers.
One thing that I was hoping for on this farm is to develop a model that could point to a better future. I think that you have to take care of the people that you work with, as well as the people that you serve, to have something that’s going to last into the future.”
I asked about the balance between making a farm work financially and staying true to one’s values.
“That’s one of the biggest challenges for farms in general, especially small, diversified farms,” said Bayer. “I think when you have values like paying your staff a living wage and not spraying poisons, working toward the health of individuals as well as the community, it’s a lot more expensive than not doing those things. It’s strange to me that the food system that we have is so backward. One thing that we often talk about is that I pay about $1,300 a year for my organic certification for the privilege of not spraying poisons. And everybody who’s doing conventional farming around me sprays poisons for free and gets our tax subsidies for doing it.”
Nawrocka-Weekes cut in, “And they’re growing stuff that isn’t even for people.”
“Right” said Bayer. “It’s commodities for export or grain for animals, which isn’t healthy for them. It’s an ongoing challenge. It’s another reason that I think people should have experience on a farm before owning a farm.”
“I like the U-Pick community involvement element,” Nawrocka-Weekes continued. “I think everyone has a right to see where their food comes from and should have some chance to get involved with it. We’re going to have signs here on exactly how to pick something and when and why and where it comes from. A lot of people have never picked a carrot before. A lot of people tried their first turnip in front of us a few days ago at the CSA fair. It was great. Seeing people try vegetables for the first time, building community resilience, giving people the chance to do something—that is what really is mattering here.
We have some people who volunteer here, and they have parents back in India who own a farm. They Skype their parents and show them what we are doing here, and they compare notes, which is just amazing. The reconnection to the land that you are on, I think a lot of people are seeking that. I like having that opportunity and trying to get it to as many people as possible.”
“Building on that,” said Bayer, “One of the things that’s important to me about this farm is that people have a direct experience of their food system when they come here. We don’t go to any farmer’s markets. We really want people to come here to the farm and see what a real, working, organic farm looks like, feels like, tastes like. I think a lot of people don’t have that opportunity. They see pictures in the grocery store of some kind of fairytale farm. But, I want people to have that direct experience. I think when people have that they care in a different way. Even people that have been here once remember it for a long time. A lot of people who come here talk about how magical it is. That’s really encouraging.”
At the time of this writing the farmstand was open and staffed on Wednesday through Sunday from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Hours change as fall descends, so check the website for updated hours. Slow Farm is located at 4700 Whitmore Lake Road in Ann Arbor. Discover more online at slowfarmandfriends.com.
