On September 1, 1987, God spoke to Renee Randall. She was watching her farm, which had been foreclosed, go up for auction at the Crawford County courthouse in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.
Actually, she’s not sure if the command to buy came from a higher power or her own subconscious. But she’s glad she obeyed. She got the money–how much she won’t say–in the form of private loans from family and friends. “I felt the farm had been given back to me,” she says, “and I’ve held it in trust ever since.”
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Shareholders are asked to take some of the risk along with the rewards. If the harvest is good, a shareholder might get extra corn or watermelon. If the weather is bad, the growing season might be shorter, or a shareholder might get different produce or a leaner share than expected. “A CSA is not for someone who counts how many tomatoes they receive each week,” Randall says. “It’s for people who want to keep chemicals off the land while preserving local economies, family farms, and wildlife habitat.” (The 35 acres of woodland on Randall’s farm support meadowlarks, bobolinks, chickadees, woodpeckers, red-winged blackbirds, robins, red-tailed hawks, turkey vultures, and bald eagles. There are also white-tailed deer, red and gray foxes, opossums, raccoons, skunks, bobcats, and coyotes.)
Thirty years ago Randall herself had never set foot on a farm, much less considered running one. Separated from her husband, with three kids under ten, she was attending Wright Junior College, studying chemistry and hoping to create a major in therapeutic nutrition in line with the teachings of popular nutritionist Adelle Davis. Exhausted by juggling school and child care, she took a trip to Crawford County, in southwestern Wisconsin near the Iowa border, to recoup.
Waves of hippies, doctors, and trust-fund babies were returning to the land at the time, but Randall was one of the first outsiders in her area. The locals called her the “hippie on the hill.” By 1974, her farm was certified organic–it was easy, she says, since the land had always been chemical free. Today, the organic market is growing at least 20 percent a year, according to Barbara Haumann, a senior writer with the Organic Trade Association in Greenfield, Massachusetts. But in the 70s in her area, Randall says, organics were a very small niche market promoted largely by grain farmers. “In the midwest, people identified organic produce by how bad it looked,” she says. “If insects chewed on it, you knew it was organic.”
She likes heirloom varieties, grown from seeds saved by farmers as far back as colonial days. Randall sees herself as part of this tradition. Long ago, she says, a woman in France might have saved seeds from the best flavored, sweetest round pink tomato she’d raised. Through that process, repeated over and over, that sweet pink tomato has survived–and evolved. “Now, I’m that woman in France, in spirit at least,” says Randall. Since her predecessors already selected for taste, now she’s selecting for disease resistance.
Randall delivers her produce in a 1989 Hino FB turbo diesel refrigerated truck, purchased in 1999 from an eccentric millionaire who sold it “cheap enough.” It broke down within the year. After she had the engine rebuilt, she named it Frodo, “after the character in Lord of the Rings who appears to die but comes back to life in the next book.
