Involving Mother Nature to provide organic produce

ROCHESTER — Carolyn Calvo returned to her Minnesota roots in 2018 to take on a new challenge. University of Minnesota-backed research and partial funding were the pushes Calvo needed that year to pursue a lifestyle shift after working for the federal government for 10 years. First, however, she needed to call her mother, who lives in Rochester.

“(I asked my mother), ‘I think I’m going to quit my job and buy a farm; can you go look at it?’” Calvo said.

Calvo and her husband, Charles, had both spent the last decade working for the U.S. Department of State, first in Washington, D.C., and then overseas, but Calvo said she had been growing tired of spending all day in an office and was looking for an opportunity to be near family once again.

The entire last year while living overseas, she spent her evenings after work researching greenhouse growing, doing market research, actively searching for a startup farm, and weighing the possibility of whether it made sense to uproot their current lives and try to pull this off.

“We had seen the deep-winter greenhouses online, and we were interested for their efficiency,” Calvo said. “I had always been interested in growing things and had this idea in the back of my mind that it would be so cool to do something like this. I read a ton about it, watched a lot of YouTube videos about small farms and listened to a lot of podcasts.”

A deep-winter greenhouse is built so that the glazing wall is at the optimal angle. When the sun hits it at a 90-degree angle in the winter, it takes in the maximum solar energy it can, while the other three walls are insulated to hold onto that energy. A duct system then takes the heat from the top of the greenhouse and disperses it underground in a layer of thermal mass, storing it for later when the temperature starts to drop. It is then released back up.

When Calvo came across an 1880s farmhouse with 20 acres on Craigslist, she saw potential. Next, an opportunity came for her husband to take a new position working remotely from home. All her planning and effort had just aligned.

“I convinced Charles this was a good idea, to switch careers and move closer to home,” Calvo said. “It all ended up working out. My mother is really handy, loves doing renovation stuff, and now, she has endless projects to do.”

That is how Owl Bluff Farm launched. Today, Calvo and her husband live in the renovated farmhouse, building a produce business that has taken off.

While growing up, Calvo enjoyed being outside, attending summer camps and visiting the Boundary Waters, but it was her grandmother, Carolyn, who was the avid gardener. Calvo said she did some light gardening while living in Washington, D.C., and abroad, but nothing remotely close to Owl Bluff Farm’s operations.

Calvo, along with a handful of full and part-time employees, farms intensively on less than one acre of vegetable plots, with three high tunnels, two more on the way.

Active involvement in native pollinator conservation programs and increasing the use of cover crops each year are important aspects of farming for Calvo.

“We’re always learning about the newest research and development with market gardening and soil biology,” Calvo said. “We try to demonstrate that you don’t need to pull out the tiller every season.”

With plantings such as peas and oats, radishes, lacy phacelia, buckwheat, and winter rye, which is then crimped in the summer and left to plant into the next season, Calvo shows an invested interest in native land management and restoration. Originally, the farm was used for raising pigs and feeder calves, and much of the acreage was used as hay ground. Securing two grants, one from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and another from The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, allowed Calvo to focus on native bee habitat as well as rarer insects.

“It gives us diversity; we don’t have need for all the hay ground anymore and thought it would be better used for a really diverse pollinator planting,” Calvo said. “It’s fun to go walk out there now and check on how things are doing. It takes a long time to establish something like that, keeping invasives out of it, and every year, you get to see something new pop up out of the mix.”

The UMN offered grants to five farms throughout the state to build this deep-winter greenhouse as a cost-shared project. Calvo was one of the five selected. The UMN came out and did a survey of the land to determine if Calvo’s farm location among the bluffs provided enough solar energy, which it did.

“This gives us the opportunity to keep going throughout the winter,” Calvo said.

Calvo said she knew from the very beginning that she would farm organically using natural pest management over chemical and synthetic inputs. Strategic planting of plants that attract predatory insects, torching and physical barriers like insect netting on plants known to be big targets are very effective. Calvo and her team of employees help her operate, offering a vast variety of greens, summer crops, pole beans, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, radishes, beets, herbs, scallions, edible flowers, strawberries and raspberries.

“We chose to be USDA organic certified to set ourselves apart in the market and give us some legitimacy, especially as a new business,” Calvo said. “We get a lot of comments about how much more flavorful our products are than something you would buy in the grocery store, how much fresher, and how much longer it will last.”

Calvo said their business has grown steadily by word of mouth, selling to local grocery stores and restaurants, and she has also been approached at the farmers market by clients looking to serve her organic products directly to their customers. She has an online store and offers on-farm pickup options for local customers.

“It can be tiring,” Calvo said. “Harvesting doesn’t wait, even if it’s wildfire smoke and 95 degrees outside, freezing cold or raining sometimes. It’s not always as picturesque as some people think, but most of the time, it is pretty great.”