Certified organic, and a few things the certificate doesn't cover.
We've been USDA certified organic since 2017, which means an inspector walks the farm every summer and reads our records. That's the floor. Below is what we actually do, in plain terms, so you can decide whether it's worth the price difference to you.
Everything starts with 14 acres of silt loam and what we put back into it.
The ridge soil here is good but shallow, and it washes if you leave it bare. So we don't. Every bed that isn't in a crop is in a cover crop: oats and peas in spring, buckwheat in summer gaps, cereal rye and vetch over winter. About a third of the farm is resting under cover at any time, and every field gets a full year out of vegetables every four.
We make about 120 yards of compost a year from crop residue, the hen house bedding and wood chips from the county, and spread it on the heaviest-feeding crops (brassicas, alliums, tomatoes) at 10 tons an acre. We soil-test every field every other year and only add what the test says is short, which lately has been nothing but a little boron.
Tillage is the thing we've changed most. We went from a moldboard plow to a chisel and a power harrow in 2019, and since 2023 about four acres are in permanent raised beds that get a broadfork and a tarp instead of a tractor pass. Organic matter in those beds has gone from 3.1% to 4.4%.
No synthetic sprays. Not much organic spray either.
Organic certification allows a list of approved sprays. We use two of them, rarely. Here's the full accounting for 2025, because "no-spray" means different things to different people.
| Problem | What we do | What we used in 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Cabbage worms, flea beetles | Floating row cover from transplant until harvest on all brassicas and arugula. Hand-picking on the uncovered crops. | Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), twice, on the fall broccoli in a bad week. |
| Cucumber beetles, squash bugs | Row cover until flowering, then trap crops (Blue Hubbard at the row ends) and a vacuum, honestly. | Nothing. |
| Colorado potato beetle | Rotate potatoes as far from last year's as the farm allows. Hand-pick adults and egg masses, twice a week in June. | Nothing. |
| Weeds | Stale seedbed (prep, let weeds sprout, flame or shallow-hoe them before planting), tarping, landscape fabric on the long-season crops, and a crew with wheel hoes. | Nothing. No herbicides of any kind are allowed under certification. |
| Tomato blight, downy mildew | Resistant varieties, wide spacing, pruning, drip irrigation only, and pulling a planting early when it goes. | Copper, once, on the field tomatoes in a wet July. We'd rather not. |
| Deer | An eight-foot woven-wire fence around all 14 acres, finished 2021. Best money we ever spent. | n/a |
The rest of it
Water
All irrigation is drip tape from our own well, on a timer, metered. We used about 1.1 million gallons in 2025, which sounds like a lot and is about what a golf course uses in a week. Overhead sprinklers only to germinate carrots.
Seed
Certified organic seed where it exists, which is most of it. We save our own garlic (14 years), a few tomato lines and the dry beans. No treated seed, no GMO varieties, which certification prohibits anyway.
The hens
240 laying hens in a mobile coop that moves to fresh pasture every three days, following the vegetable rotation a year behind. They eat certified organic feed from a mill in Cashton plus whatever they find. The eggs are not certified organic because the feed cost would put them at $9 a dozen; they are $6.
Plastic
We use drip tape, landscape fabric, row cover and silage tarps, all of it plastic. The fabric and tarps last eight to ten years; the drip tape goes back to a recycler in Minnesota. We've tried paper mulch and it isn't there yet for a farm our size. We'd rather say this than pretend.
Certifications & audits
- USDA OrganicSince 2017, annual inspection
- GAP food safety auditPassed 2024, 2025
- Wisconsin Produce SafetyRegistered
- Soil testsEvery field, every 2 yrs
- Water testsWell, annually
Our organic certificate, the latest inspection summary and the GAP report are on a clipboard at the stand and we'll email them to anyone who asks.
Five people, paid properly.
Two of us own the farm. Three people work for us April through November, and one of them, Teo, has been here six seasons and runs the wash-pack. Everyone starts at $18 an hour, gets a share, lunch on harvest days, and a Friday afternoon off every other week in August. We pay into a simple retirement plan after a second season.
We don't use the H-2A program and we don't take unpaid interns. Worker-share members do a four-hour shift a week for a full share, alongside the crew, at the crew's pace. Six spots, and most of them come back year after year.