A Time to Grow

Some fragmented thoughts on the life of a young farmer and the hard labor of growing food for others, tomato season, deadlines, and harmony

Aug 24, 2023

Thursday, August 24
Grand Rapids, Mich.

We love our local farmers market. In the growing season, it’s open three days a week. It offers outstanding produce and superb people-watching.

Often, I find myself wondering about all the different stories drawn together in this one place. You find humans from so many diverse demographics, so many cultural backgrounds: Amish farmers, tattooed back-to-the-land Gen Zers, young families, retirees, a Filipina selling steamed buns stuffed with pork and jackfruit and Egyptian Americans offering falafel alongside fifth-generation vegetable growers with Dutch roots—all these walks of life intersecting, because everybody needs to eat, right?

Of course we have favorite vendors: The mushroom man. The stand where I buy eggs. The one with the best asparagus, neatly bundled with twine. (Once, I strayed and bought from a different farmer, and Tristan and I regretted it.) John Crans, whom I profiled last summer, because he’s the loveliest guy and because I tend to eschew the farmers with the fanciest branding.

Last year, I gave up on starting my tomatoes from seed and bought seedlings from Elizabeth Kempinski, whose stall is marked by a hand-painted wooden sign—“Clear Bottom Lake Farm.” I’m cheap, and I noticed that she had a “buy five, get one free” offer. Those tomatoes turned out to be the best I’ve ever grown—an excellent reminder that there’s no shame in getting help when you need it.

This year, I bought Liz’s seedlings again, and last month, Fozzie and I took a trip out to her farm just north of Grand Rapids. Sometimes, abetted by slick marketing—stylish logos, well-chosen typefaces, crates placed just so—those of us who aren’t farmers can romanticize the agrarian life. We might imagine plucking a single, unblemished, dew-kissed tomato from the vine as the sun shines down a tidy, weedless row, or wandering through the Instagram-ready fields, gathering flowers and hand-tying a bouquet. But I wanted to know what it’s really like to be a young farmer. What are the costs? Where are the opportunities? What brings stress? Where is the joy? Most of all, how does she survive?

Liz, who is 29, tends about a third of an acre, on land she rents from relatives. She was reared about 90 miles southeast of Grand Rapids, in the town of Marshall. (Marshall’s spotlight moment might have come, and passed, in 1847, when it was runner-up in a vote to be Michigan’s state capital.) Though her parents weren’t farmers, “my mom grew flowers my whole childhood. Tomatoes and strawberries occasionally, but flowers were her thing,” she told me. “I thought it was cool, but I wasn’t super into it.”

Liz left Michigan to attend college. She majored in languages and linguistics, and intended to become a translator, until she realized her Spanish and Arabic, while decent, weren’t quite fluent enough. In 2016, she began working on farms, including two seasons on one in North Carolina that dabbled in biodynamic practices. Then, contrary to plan, she came back to Michigan.

Throughout her childhood, Liz returned repeatedly to these acres, where her grandparents and other relatives had cabins tucked into the woods. Clear Bottom Lake abounds with bluegill, shiner, and the echoes of happy summer gatherings. “Some of my best memories from childhood are being up here with my extended family, cooking big dinners,” she said. On this land, various aunts and uncles tended vegetables, as did her great uncle, who especially treasured his elephant garlic. It was an uncle who said: “You know, you could start a farm here.”

In 2020, thanks to the pandemic, she lost her food-service job but gained an unexpectedly sizable unemployment check: “It felt like, Now’s the time to do this.” She took over the space where her great uncle had grown vegetables for more than thirty years. While she knew failure was possible, even probable, she didn’t have much else to do during the lockdown: “I thought, We’ll see.”

2021 was Liz’s first season bringing her own produce to the farmers market. “I was just trying to figure out what to do and what I could keep up with,” she said. At the start, she told herself that she had to do a bit of everything. She soon learned that she doesn’t: “I’ve realized that I should focus on what grows well on this land.” She inherited a healthy section of rhubarb plants “older than me,” and raspberries, which her grandmother planted years ago. Greens have thrived. Edible flowers, too—violas, bachelor’s buttons, marigold, nasturtium—which she sells not just at the farmers market but also to local bakeries and cafes.

As we strolled her plot, the violas’ wild colors and patterns caught my eye. No two were the same. Tiny yellow petals were streaked with brown and edged in purple. Others looked as if they’d emerged from an elementary-school tie-dye activity. Liz grows twelve, maybe thirteen, varieties. Many reseeded themselves from last year, producing unexpected combinations: I saw one that resembled a golden-hatted lady wearing a lavender skirt.

Another discovery: celery. “I have always hated grocery-store celery. It tastes like water with a hint of celery flavor,” she said as she stooped to cut a piece for me to taste. “This, though— this is like celery flavor times ten.” Except in chicken salad, I’ve hated celery too, since preschool, when I conscientiously objected to the regular snack of celery with peanut butter. But Liz’s celery? Bright and savory, almost salty—it was like no celery I’ve ever tasted.

Some crops have taken years to improve. Her first season, Liz found a remnant of her great uncle’s elephant garlic. “It was all deformed, so I’ve been harvesting and selecting,” she said. This season, she finally deemed it good enough to take to market.

So many experiments have failed. Cauliflower and broccoli—“so many cabbage worms, and not space-efficient.” Eggplant. She still grows peppers, but it’s a struggle, maybe because the surrounding woods cast too much shade in the late afternoons. Grasshoppers, squash borers, tomato hornworm: the class Insecta has plagued her.

This work often humbles Liz, reminding her of all that’s beyond her control. One day, she was attacked by wasps. (She’s allergic.) Another, her car broke down, stranding her at the roadside when so much remained to be done on the farm. Then there’s the weather: “No matter how much you plan or try, you can’t control if there’s a drought or a super-late frost.”

Being a young, single, female farmer adds particular challenges. While the vast majority of farmers at the market have been supportive and encouraging, a couple have asked about “your little garden” or called her venture “your little hobby farm,” she said. “I’ve had to learn to trust myself a little more. Being a younger farmer—and being a young woman—you don’t hear that much respect from others. But I’ve worked in male-dominated fields before. I’ve just have had to refuse to let it get to me.”

Sometimes customers ask uncomfortable questions too—for instance, is her husband is the “real” farmer? There is no husband. “Being a queer woman, that feels strange,” Liz said. “It’s a different way of saying, There must be a man in this. But also, the part that feels the most lonely is when things go wrong, and I think, I just wish I had a partner to problem-solve with.”

My uncomfortable question: Was she making a living? “I’m scraping by.” She can’t afford any employees. She’s on food stamps. “It’s hard. I’ve eased into this with side jobs and by doing it little by little. But eventually, I’d like not to have to work in the winters, doing random jobs. I worked for a bakery; that’s closed now. I worked for a seed company. I worked for another farm. I’ve worked at a clothing store. I’ve worked at a bagel shop.”

Liz knows that she’s fortunate to have access to land. According to a 2022 survey of 10,000 young farmers by the National Young Farmers Coalition, access to affordable land was the No. 1 challenge facing growers. “If I wasn’t able to rent family land, I would never have been able to start this,” she said. Other relatively new farmers at the market traded lucrative white-collar careers for agriculture, and she admitted envy at the speed with which they’ve scaled up. “Sometimes I compare myself: They have a crew of 15 people! They have 12 acres! Their tomatoes look so great! If you have a bigger space and the capital, you can go all-in. But if you have no capital? It’s tricky.”

“Going into this with a community has helped,” Liz said. Her mom and her aunt sometimes pitch in, and throughout her extended family, “there were all these little bits of knowledge around, and I never realized.” Other young farmers provide support and solidarity; Mikayla Rowden started Stillwind Farm in Belding, Mich., around the same time as Liz began farming. They often trade notes on the things nobody taught them, like how to calculate wholesale prices. And she has found kinfolk in the West Michigan Growers Group, a like-minded collective of sustainable farmers who share advice—“this leaf looks funny, so what do you think it might be?“—as well as pool orders for soil or seed to get volume discounts.

Farming’s economic aspects remain vexing. Nearly 60% of American farms tally under $10,000 a year in revenue, and even as production costs have risen, sales have declined. Liz wrestles constantly with the reality that charging more for her produce would mean reducing accessibility for shoppers who might also be struggling financially. In years past, those receiving public assistance could buy $40 of produce at the farmers market for $20; this year, the subsidy cap was cut, to $20 of produce for $10. “I think a lot about food justice and food access. I want to grow things and sell them for what they’re worth, but others aren’t making what they should be either. I don’t want my only demographic to be upper-middle-class people,” Liz said. “Working within this whole system can be so frustrating.”

The intangibles remind her why she persists. “Every day I come out here and things are a little bigger and things are blooming, and it makes me so happy,” she said. “I can’t really see myself doing anything else.”

She has come to love market days. “I get my socializing in for the week,” she said. (Introvert alert.) “And every time someone says, Let me tell you what I made with what I bought, or shows me a picture, it feels really fulfilling. Growing food for people at the most basic level means I’m feeding people. I’ve worked in other jobs and wondered, What am I even doing? What did I even accomplish? So many of our memories are wrapped up in food and care. Sharing that with people—and having people share it back—that feels good and purposeful. I’m feeding people.”

She is. As Fozzie and I got ready to leave Liz’s farm, she said, “Wait!” She grabbed a cardboard carton, filled it with freshly picked peas, and pushed it into my hands—a sign, I think, of her heart for hospitality, her passion for food, and the love that food can express. Like so many farmers throughout this country and all over this world, Liz is doing beautiful work. I only hope she’ll be duly rewarded for it.

Liz Kempinski is no fan of social media. Still, you can follow Clear Bottom Lake Farm on Instagram and if you’re in West Michigan, look for her at the Fulton Street Farmers Market.

What I’m Cooking: We’re in the midst of a homegrown tomato festival in our house, thanks largely to Liz Kempinski’s seedlings. I bought so many varieties from her this year, including the Sun Golds I’ve long loved but also new-to-me types such as Rose de Berne and Sunrise Bumblebee (pictured above). We’ve had caprese salads, bruschetta, bucatini with slow-roasted tomatoes, BLTs, pizzas, egg and tomato over rice, and fresh salsa on our eggs. What else? What are your favorite ways to use the best summer tomatoes?

Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer

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