By Caitlin Bergman and Dan McLeod
on November 18, 2014
We are Copia Farm, a 40-acre regenerative farm near Columbus, Ohio. We work off a permaculture design growing vegetables, cut flowers, log grown shiitake mushrooms, fruit, laying hens and hogs. We work to integrate the plant and animal system on the farm. This week, as we get ready for the quickly approaching winter, we are taking over the Modern Farmer Instagram.
We only started Copia farm last year, but this isn’t our first foray into agriculture. Before coming back to Ohio, where Dan grew up, we were both sustainable agriculture consultants for three years. Caitlin has a degree in botany and worked at the L.A. botanical gardens. Through horticulture, we became interested in the permaculture design.
We really wanted to get back to the land and start producing ourselves, so after moving to Ohio from the Bay Area, and two years of searching and running the numbers, we finally started our own farm. Of course, it has been a struggle; we want to build an accessible and realistic farming system all while being young broke farmers. We had never run a farm before this, to say it has been a learning curve would be an understatement.
You really need to make money the first year as a farmer. You can do a good job forecasting your numbers, but you can’t always know how your customers may ask for or how markets will change. You have to be ready to adapt and to see how far costumers will go for local food.
The problem is that people want to focus on things they can showcase, like tomatoes and squash. What people don’t understand is that these vegetables play into a larger system that all needs to be supported. You want to run a balanced system, but people don’t want it. Just like it is a great idea for restaurants to only source from local farms, but just as the farmers need to make money, so do the restauranteurs.
We joined Instagram a couple months ago and have been really happy with it. It offers us an opportunity to spotlight our farm without taking a lot of time out of our day. Our followers want a window into our daily farm life. Farmers lead solitary lives, but there is just so much to do all the time. Instagram allows us to show a window into our existence. There is a real desire out there to reconnect with the land, even on Instagram. We are just really excited to showcase what we have been able to accomplish over the past year.
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