Local cooperative helping plain communities to preserve agricultural heritage
Farmers transition their land for three years to qualify under the organic standards. Once that three-year transition period is over, farmers are able to become USDA organic certified.
Founded in 2003, Green Field Farms, located between Fredericksburg and Wooster, is a local farming cooperative that is doing much to help preserve the farming lifestyle for plain communities in Wayne and Holmes counties as well as elsewhere in Ohio.
What makes this cooperative unique is in order to become a member, one must belong to a church that relies on the horse and buggy as the primary source of transportation. One of the reasons for this, according to Aden Yoder, director of operation for Green Field Farms, is because among plain communities everywhere, there is concern about the loss of agricultural work, particularly with technology and factory farming on the rise.
“There’s a lot of pressure out there for people to just find jobs outside the home,” Yoder said. “If you go back 40-50 years ago, the plain people and the English community farmed a lot closer to the same level. Of course with modern equipment, the [farmers not belonging to the Amish and Mennonite community] were able to do more acres, bigger farms, and so we started competing with that level of farming, and we could no longer do that with horses.”
The solution, according to Yoder, was to not only form a cooperative to help these communities, but also to create a unique, highly desirable product that could produce more dollars per acre than factory-farmed foods.
To accomplish this, the cooperative came to the conclusion they’d need to produce USDA-certified organic products. Today when consumers purchase Green Field Farms products, whether those products are vegetables, maple products or something else, the products come with two seals: the USDA-certified organic seal and Green Field Farm’s own logo, which guarantees the products were produced by members of the plain community who still rely on horse and buggy transportation.
As far as products go, Green Field Farms markets mainly vegetables along with a line of maple products that includes syrup, maple sugar and maple cream. In the past the cooperative has marketed cheese, though cheese is currently in a re-evaluation phase.
“Right now vegetables are about close to 70 percent of all our sales, so that is a huge piece of the pie,” Yoder said.
In the future Green Field also will sell milk. The cooperative has built a large milk-processing facility, and they are just starting to move the processing equipment into this facility. Milk will be brought in from farms in the Wayne/Holmes area, and production is expected to start in May of 2018. As to the processing of the milk, Yoder said a special processing method will be employed.
“We will be doing vat, low-temp, pasteurized, nonhomogenized. The milk will be put in glass bottles, so it’s a unique process, and it is certified organic of course.”
Plus, for those who would like to recycle, the bottles will be returnable.
Speaking of the future, Yoder expects Green Field Farms has a bright one. Business is booming currently.
“A lot of our products, produce specifically, a lot of our produce ends up going to Kroger stores. We also market to a chain down in Florida and the southern part of the United States called Publix. And then, of course, Meijer has Green Field Farms produce in, so a lot of the major retailers are starting to get our vegetables. And the co-op is growing at a rapid pace. Produce over the last five years has grown at the rate of 40 percent, and overall, we’re growing at the rate of 20 percent. That is year over year.”
With this kind of growth, there are plans for expansion in the works. “What we’ve done with the past year is we’ve built this warehouse out here this spring for produce,” Yoder said. “And we’re building the milk-dairy plant. Strategically looking ahead, we have put a three-phase plan together on the warehouse, so my guess is by 2020 we’ll probably be doing phase two on that.”
Yoder said they may even look at opening another location in 2019.
Farmers who are interested in joining the cooperative should contact Green Field Farms directly. “We can only take on so many people at a time, but we try to work with farmers to get them on board,” Yoder said.
In order to join, farmers need to belong to a church that uses horse and buggy as the primary mode of transportation, and they also must transition their farms to organic practices.
“Certification is through a third party, so they have to transition their land for three years,” Yoder said. “They have to keep records for every input that goes on, so it has to qualify under the organic standards.”
Once that three-year transition period is over, farmers are able to become USDA organic certified.
In the short term Green Field Farms is working to provide plain communities with a competitive market for agricultural goods, but in the long term this cooperative hopes to preserve agricultural roots that stem back to the Amish and Mennonite community’s European heritage.
“We’ve got something that is rapidly growing for our generation now,” Yoder said. “But the hope is that this is something that will be here for not just this generation of farmers, but for many generations to come.”