“Buy
beans!”
If Sadie Elliott had it her way, everyone would buy beans from her
mother, Shelly Elliott. At one of the many farmers’ markets
the Elliott family attended last year, the 2-year-old stood on a cooler
telling customers at the Laramie, Wyo., farmers’ market to buy
her mom’s beans. And buy them they did.
In fact, Shelly’s children are very involved on her Carpenter,
Wyo., farm – Idle Thyme Farm. Shelly’s 8-year-old daughter
helps Shelly teach gardening classes and is also in charge of the
children’s activities on the farm. Shelly’s 6-year-old
son is the farm’s resident entomologist.
“He keeps a journal of all the bugs we find here and whether
they’re beneficial or harmful,” Shelly said. “He
knows more about bugs than most adults.”
Shelly home schools her children, and she said that having a farm
plays right into that. Without even trying, the kids learn math, science
and a work ethic – something most schools can’t even teach.
Shelly’s own farming experience started out with education for
herself – and Wyoming. As the only small-acreage vegetable farmer
in southeast Wyoming, Shelly often met with disbelief and misconceptions
about growing vegetables in that area when she bought the farm in
2002.
“The hard thing about Wyoming is that it’s a real ranching
mentality kind of state,” Shelly said. “They don’t
believe you can legitimately farm with less than 100 acres –
that just doesn’t work here in big ranching Wyoming where people
have owned thousands of acres for generations.”
The absence of small-scale vegetable farming is also evident when
visiting Web sites where growers can list their farms. Shelly said
many of them didn’t even have Wyoming as an option to select
when listing a CSA.
Another hurdle Shelly said she had to overcome is being a woman in
an agricultural business.
“Being a woman in a woman-run agricultural business has been
challenging because there’s not a lot of that going on here,”
she said. “There are a few women doing things in this state,
but it’s not many.”
So Shelly had to look elsewhere for her education and for her mentors.
And she found them all over the United States from people doing a
variety of different farming practices.
“It’s a challenge being the only one, and I needed to
know that there’s other people out there,” Shelly said.
“It’s really my mentors who have gotten me to where I
am today – not because they’ve done anything really, but
for being the inspiration and the encouragement.”
To return the mentoring gift and share her knowledge with other, Shelly
has taught a couple of classes and hosted some educational workshops
on her farm.
“The best thanks I can give to those mentors is to be in the
same positions for those who come behind me,” Shelly said. “The
thing that makes it so easy to fight those battle is that the people
who come next year won’t have to fight those battles –
the lines of communication are open.”
Shelly put up her first big high tunnel in early May – something
that she needed to learn about first. Idle Thyme Farm does have one
small hoop house used for very small-scale growing and a greenhouse
for vegetable transplant production, and to learn about growing in
high tunnels on a larger scale, Shelly attended a couple of high tunnels
workshops as well as the Great Plains Vegetable Growers Conference.
Her high tunnel is the first one in Wyoming for commercial production.
“We have extremely challenging growing conditions out here,
and I really feel this has the potential to change the fate of vegetable
production in southeast Wyoming,” Shelly said.
Putting up a hoop house was Shelly’s second goal for her business
– the first was being certified organic. Shelly said sometimes
it amazes her that she’s met those goals.
“I knew that (hoop house) was my goal, but I wasn’t sure
it was going to be achieved,” Shelly said. “That’s
what goals are all about – reaching a little bit further than
you think you can go.”
The winds in Shelly’s area can get pretty high. One night in
late April, they had sustained winds of 50 miles per hour. And those
kept her up worrying all night about her smaller hoop house and greenhouse.
“I sat up all night waiting for my greenhouse to launch, and
it didn’t,” she said. “When your house is shaking,
you’re wondering how the greenhouse is holding up. I have over
50 CSA members, so everything (was) right at a crucial stage, and
if I lose it right now, I have to regroup really quickly.”
Shelly’s CSA is the first of its kind in Wyoming, but that doesn’t
mean there wasn’t a market in her area.
“When you look a market of 100,000 people, that’s a huge
market,” she said. “When you have people driving over
an hour to Whole Foods or Wild Oats in Colorado to get good produce,
there was really a niche that needed to be filled. And that’s
one of the reasons we’re doing what we’re doing.”
Idle Thyme Farm has three pricing levels for CSA shares: family, couple
and individual. Each is based on the amount of produce per week. For
$500, a family gets $25 worth of produce per week; for $250, a couple
gets $12.50 of produce each week; and for $125, a member gets $6.25
of produce per week. Shelly also offers add-ins of her farm-fresh
eggs and pasture-raised chickens, turkeys or geese.
Each week, Shelly’s produce drop-offs coincide with the Laramie
and Cheyenne farmers’ markets. Because CSA is new to Wyoming,
she does not require on-farm pick up like other CSA’s do.
And the biggest way Shelly said she ensures success is to rely on
crop diversity. Idle Thyme Farm has 140 different varieties of vegetables
and herbs, and she’s putting in 40 grape vines for CSA members
and the farmers’ market.
“I’m a huge advocate of local food systems and trying
to promote getting more people involved in local food systems,”
Shelly said.
Another draw to Shelly’s operation – for consumers and
producers – is that it is certified organic.
“One of my big goals is really trying to make as sustainable
operation as I possibly can,” Shelly said.
One of the most daunting parts of becoming certified organic was the
paperwork, Shelly said. And to overcome that, she developed an Excel-based
tracking system where each plot of vegetables is its own worksheet,
making it easier to track the history of each field. Over the last
winter, she worked it so the system could be run by PDA in the field.
Her goal for next winter is to “tweak” the system so it
can be marketable for other growers.
“I don’t think organics is the only way to go, but I do
think people are starting to look at it as they look at diversifying
their operations and looking at where niche marketing is.”
Shelly said she was surprised at a recent Ag Marketing conference
in Wyoming when she saw how many conventional growers were interested
in organics and other niche marketing opportunities.
“It was neat to see the conversion of people with that ranch
mindset or mono-cropping mindset and the amount of people interested
in organics and CSA’s – it was really overwhelming,”
she said. “People you wouldn’t think of being interested
were. Traditional farmers said, ‘well, it’s the only thing
I know.’ Because they just don’t know any other way, getting
the education out there is a big part of it.”
But making that transition, or even starting farming in the first
place, don’t take as much as some people would think. Growers
don’t have to have the most fancy equipment or the most expensive
technology to be successful.
“I might not have much, but I’m still proof that seat-of-the-pants
family farming can still work,” Shelly said. “I don’t
have an ag degree, and I don’t think you need to have one to
grow vegetables for a living – I think it’s a lot of trial
and error and being able to put in a lot of hard, long hours.”
Shelly said farming, with its hard work, long hours and possible disappointments,
is worth it several times over.
“Besides being a mother, I’ve never done anything more
rewarding in my life,” she said. “It’s still a miracle
every day when you walk out there and new things are blooming and
baby chicks are being born – it’s just a miracle.”
For more information, visit www.idlethymefarms.com
