The Minnesota Homegrown Cookbook by Tim King

Author:Tim King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2008-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

DANCING WINDS FARMSTAY RETREAT

Callister Farm

Mary Doerr

“When we get close to going to market, it’s like getting ready for a performance,” says Lori Callister, a farmer from the Northfield area who is a vendor at the Midtown Global Market with her husband, Allen. “I get really pumped up. Where else in the world can you get a job where people tell you they need your product so badly? If I didn’t have that customer contact, I don’t think I could continue. It’s like an elixir.”

Mary Doerr, proprietor of Dancing Winds Farmstay Retreat, is a neighbor to the Callisters. “I use to make artisan goat-cheese,” says Mary, “but cheesemaking was a little isolating for me. One of the reasons I was able to transition out of cheesemaking is because the farmstay was growing. I really enjoy the social aspect of it, and creating a safe haven for people. I also like to expose people to goats. I guess that’s ultimately my mission.”

Mary and Lori’s agricultural projects emerged from a long history of neighboring during a time of immense creativity and change in southern Minnesota’s agricultural scene. Mary’s vision, which continues to evolve, was born from the flames of tragedy.

“I started milking goats in September of 1985,” Mary recalls, “but I had a barn fire a year and a half into it and lost the barn and a lot of the goats.” But the fire sparked her inspiration for building the cheese plant, which eventually transformed into her bed and breakfast venture.

Among those who were there to provide Mary fortitude, as she gathered up the ashes of her barn and charred goats, was Ken Taylor. Mary remembers how Ken was himself a guiding light to her and so many others as he forged the now widely shared vision of an inextricable link between urban and rural people.

During the early 1980s, while Ken Taylor was creating the Minnesota Food Association, a coalition of urban and rural citizens working towards a sustainable food system, the Land Stewardship Project and Nature Conservancy were bringing together some of the best and brightest farmers of southeastern Minnesota to form the Sustainable Farming Association. It was within that farmer-driven organization that Lori and Mary first collaborated.

“We were both on the board of directors of the Sustainable Farming Association’s Cannon River Chapter,” Lori remembers. “When our family first joined, about 1990, it was because we were committed to raising crops and poultry without chemicals and antibiotics.”

“It was fun because we had creative people like Dave and Florence Minar, Dan and Muriel French, Mary Doerr, and Mike and Linda Noble,” Lori says, recalling some of the pioneers in Minnesota’s movement toward a new agriculture. “We were very active with field days and learning from each other. There were a lot of interesting things going on.”

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