Floods' pain spreads from water-logged fields to cities

Jon Olsen lives in the city, works at a desk and doesn't farm, but when the floods hit southern Minnesota this past weekend, he felt it.

He learned from an e-mail that one of the farms hit by floods was Harmony Valley, near Viroqua, Wis., where his family buys vegetables.

"I actually said, 'My farm!'" Olsen said. "And I don't live on a farm. I live in north Minneapolis."

The Olsen family joined a growing number of others in the Twin Cities this year in deciding to contract directly with a local farm for their supplies of vegetables. The deal is known as a CSA, for community-supported agriculture.

CSAs in recent years have been billed as a unique way to save the family farm. Customers are called shareholders, owners or investors. Some CSAs require their customers to work occasionally. Others are host to events from planting to harvest that bring their customers to the farm.

The floods brought home a stark reminder that the customers share the risks of farming, their weekly boxes of produce swelling with the farm's fortunes. Or getting washed away.

Harmony Valley got nearly 20 inches of rain in about 10 days, owner Richard de Wilde said. A nearby creek spilled over its banks, ripping out fences and drowning vegetables. A dam on the Bad Axe River was leaking this week and threatened to burst, a potential catastrophe that would send a wall of water toward de Wilde's farm.

"They say it's going to break. The valley's evacuated. It's eerie down there," said the farmer of 34 years.

He said half of the farm, about 50 acres, was lost. The farm sent out one pallet of produce this week for its CSA customers when it normally would have sent out three, he said. Gone completely are the farm's crops of lettuce, spinach, arugula, kale and collards.

"It's my first big loss in my career of farming," said de Wilde, who started Harmony Valley in 1984. About 1,600 families that pay up to $780 per season rely on the farm for vegetables each week. They've paid in advance for their vegetables, but de Wilde is hoping he can turn around and rely on them for support this year.

"We are very good farmers. We are good at working with adversity, but this one is just out of our control," he said.

The farmer's face on food

CSAs were started in Japan more than 30 years ago as "teikei," which means "putting the farmer's face on food," according to LocalHarvest, a website dedicated to organic farming. The model arrived in the United States in the mid-1980s and has grown to more than 1,200 farms, including strong concentrations in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

For the farms that were hit, the flood was the worst disaster to befall CSAs in the southeastern Minnesota region in the past 20 years.

At Featherstone Fruits & Vegetables, based in Rushford, Minn., one of the hardest-hit towns, owner Jack Hedin lost crops, access to the fields and watched as standing water piled up in some of the work buildings. Normally this would be his bonanza month, when he would pull thousands of dollars of produce from the ground.

"We anticipate a two-week interruption while we clean up," he said.

But even finding clean water for that cleanup could pose a challenge: On Friday, Fillmore County officials declared Rushford city water unsafe because of the presence of E. coli bacteria.

At Avalanche Organics in Viola, Wis., also a CSA, rain fell continuously for two weeks before the floods came, slowing the harvest and delaying the planting of salad greens for the November harvest, said employee Craig Scott.

The farm's new owners "were counting on $90,000 in salad greens," Scott said. Most of the workers have been laid off. Normally, the farm would have 15 to 20 people on staff this time of year. Plants were under water for two or three days, Scott said. Salad mix, lettuce, spinach, cilantro, and other small plants were just washed away.

"The farm isn't looking too good," he said.

Crop damage in both Minnesota and Wisconsin still is being calculated.

"We won't know the extent of that damage until farmers get out of the fields and harvest," said Perry Aasness, executive director of the Minnesota Farm Service Agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) agency that administers disaster relief. The flood washed out crops that had largely avoided this year's drought, he added. He also predicted some shortages of fruits and vegetables because of the losses.

Still he's expecting crop damage likely will be less than 10 percent for the six Minnesota counties hit by the floods.

The only good news may be that the crops were far enough along that the roots prevented more erosion. Earlier in the year, the flood might have taken more topsoil, he said.

The insurance equation

Most farms use private insurance subsidized by the federal government to help cover losses. A survey last year found 89 percent of corn acres and 93 percent of soybean acres in Minnesota were insured, according to the Risk Management Agency of the USDA. The CSA farms have access to the same programs, Aasness said.

Yet CSA farmers say there's little for them. "There are new programs, but they're unproven," Hedin said. "It's very difficult to get federal insurance."

Some aid is available to repair the land. The farmers may get some assistance cleaning up through the USDA's Emergency Conservation Program, which pays up to 75 percent of the farmer's cost of rebuilding the land, repairing broken fences, removing debris and restoring washed-out areas, said Greg Anderson, an agricultural program specialist for the Farm Service Agency.

"It could be a year later before we get the money," he said. "Then we cost-share with the farmer. It's nothing that comes quick."

Harmony Valley has insurance, but de Wilde has no idea if it will cover losses. Customers have begun sending e-mails of support, offering jobs to the farm's 40 workers, and some offering money. "If I didn't have those hundreds of hundreds of emails coming in, I'd really be discouraged," de Wilde said.

Longtime CSA customers like to point out that they benefit in good years, making it more affordable to take the loss in a bad year. Olsen, who said the farm supplies his family of four with vegetables for the season, said he knew he was shouldering some risks with a CSA. Still he recommends it to friends.

"We won't starve," said Kristina Forest, another CSA customer of Harmony Valley. She said the investment makes sense over several years: "I know that if they had more than they knew what to do with they would give it to us."

Matt McKinney • 612-673-7329

Matt McKinney • mckinney@startribune.com