Meet Your Farmer - Kate Potter
Meet Your Good Earth Food Alliance Farmer - Kate Potter
The first in a series of questions and answers highlighting
the GEFA growers and producers.
Kate Potter of Cramer, IL grows laying hens and goats on her farmette. She and her son moved back to central IL a year ago after many years on the East Coast, where she studied German literature, worked as a natural foods chef, was a secretary in the Empire State Building and a caretaker of a colonial mansion, all the while learning about grass farming. Kate lets her broody hens hatch their own chicks, but there are plenty of extra eggs from her bug-eating, no-soy-consuming, pasture-roaming mixed flock of old-fashioned breeds for the Good Earth Food Alliance CSA. Kate's other passions include traditional foods and dairying.
1. How did you choose the name Kate’s Cottage Farm? I love the phrase “cottage industry”, the idea of people living and working at home, intensively caring for a little piece of land that feeds both family and customers. I wanted people to know it’s a small farm with a lot of diversity. I also do live in a very little house. And I’m a hopeless anglophile; someday my cottage will be rose-covered!
2. Where is your business located? In Cramer, a tiny place between Trivoli and Farmington in Peoria County.
3. How long has Kate’s Cottage Farm been in business? One year.
4. What products do you grow? Eggs, chickens, goats, cows, raw milk, onions, potatoes, kale, beans, tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers, peppers, corn, peas…
5. Do you have a signature product? Mostly I sell eggs to the Good Earth Food Alliance. I love my chickens, but my passion is dairying. Right now I milk one jersey cow and make lots and lots of butter as well as every other dairy product you can imagine. I also milk goats and make chevre. Some day the dairy here will be a commercial enterprise.
7. What do you enjoy most about running Kate’s Cottage Farm? Well, it’s thrilling to be making some money at farming! And I like doing a lot of different things every day. I love animal husbandry. My farm is grass-based, meaning my goats, my dairy cow, the steers I raise with my dad, eat only grass, no grain. So I have to think a lot about our pastures, how much forage is available, how long the grass needs to rest before I put stock on it again; that’s mentally challenging and really fun for me. I get an immense amount of satisfaction when I sit down to a great dinner and realize that every single thing on the table, from the milk to the meat to the vegetables - everything except the salt - was grown right here.
8. What do you find most challenging about your work? Just the amount of work there is. It’s truly never-ending, and it’s hard to stop thinking about it. If I’m playing with my son, I’ve always got one ear cocked for the sound of a chick in distress; if a storm blows up in the middle of the night, I awake and go down the list of who might be in danger: Are the goats in? Will the cow be struck by lightning? Are the broilers in their pasture pen sleeping under the roof of their pen, or are they getting rained on?
9. What is your philosophy/perspective on farming, agriculture, and sustainability Well, I think sustainable agriculture is the future. We just can’t keep going with the big industrial farms, and I think they are on their way out. I actually think the future of the human race depends on small farms. We have to take care of our soil; that’s what sustains us. Farms that depend on a lot of inputs and can’t produce their own fertility can’t make it in the long run. Small and local is where it’s at.
10. Is there anything else you'd like others to know about Kate’s Cottage Farm? Just a recent joy I’d like to share: my 3-year-old son is getting into milking. Because I’m a single mom, he’d go out with me to the goat barn, of necessity, when he was only two months old. For a couple of years I think he’s resented the attention I have to pay to the animals. But now he wants to milk with me! Sometimes he sits on a bucket in the corner of the cow shed and talks about whatever (there’s a great spider web on the gate that we observe and discuss every day), but more often than not lately he’ll stand between my knees and milk one teat, while I milk another. That’s bliss for me.
to Good Earth Food Alliance CSA members:
- for those of you wondering how to use those fresh aronia berries - try adding them in small amounts to existing recipes. Freeze them and add a tablespoon of berries and a few drops of lemon juice to your next fruit smoothie. Add a cupful of berries and a few tablespoons of lemon juice to your next berry cobbler. Add 1/4 cup to your next loaf of sweet bread. The aronias are naturally tanic so adding lemon juice will help to counteract this. Try them in pancakes, muffins, or as additions to your grape jelly and let us know how it goes.
- Linda passed along two recipes for lemon balm. Try some new lemon-y beverages!