business

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.