(bright music) - Hello and welcome to "Farm Connections."

I'm your host, Dan Hoffman.

On today's program, we enjoy the mead in the brand new meadery room at Squash Blossom Farm.

Lisa Schutz tells us all about the Southeastern Minnesota Food Rescue and Redistribution Program, and the University of Minnesota Extension provides us a Best Practices segment, all here today on "Farm Connections."

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- Welcome to "Farm Connections."

We're lucky enough today to be at the Squash Blossom Farm, and with me is Roger Nelson.

Roger, thanks for having us here.

- Yeah, thanks, Dan.

Glad to have you.

- Well, it's a beautiful spot.

How did it start?

- Oh, man.

We've been here for 15 years.

It started maybe in second grade.

My wife Sue and I went to second grade together in Bemidji and have been together forever.

Along the way, we have just had the goal of getting out into the country, so we spent a lot of time searching for the perfect place and ended up here about 15 years ago.

- Well, it seems like your tagline is local music, food, and art.

Is that true?

- That's right.

We're really into the community aspect of things.

We have a special place and we feel like we kind of have an obligation to share it with people, and food, music and art seem to be ways to do that.

- Well, you combined it in a delightful way.

When I came off the road, I felt like I was moving into a different ecosystem and a different environment, and I felt uplifted.

What am I supposed to feel like when I come here?

- Well, we like it when people feel like it's a magic place.

That's kind of what the goal is, and we really try and keep it special, try and keep it very personal and just kind of unique aspect of it.

- Well, it's that, and I'm in a space that's different than the last time I was here.

Tell us about this space where we're standing.

- Well, we're in the meadery, the mead tasting room, which is just a portion of the barn.

The barn is 100 or so years old, and when we moved in, it was just kind of full of junk.

We put in a commercial kitchen at one point and a production room, and then this was the latest iteration of things.

We infilled this space, finished it off and got it ready to go.

- It's a neat space.

I've been here when there's chocolate.

I've heard there's pizza, but now we're talking about mead.

- We have the four basic food groups.

So there's the bread, the chocolate, the pizza and now mead, which is a honey wine.

All of those aspects have sort of a fermentation process involved in them, and so we've been just kind of interested in developing that a little bit.

- Certainly it has to start with a product or an agricultural fruit or something.

What goes into mead?

- It's pretty simple.

Mead is a honey wine, so it's kind of interesting.

If you put a little container of honey on your counter, it'll stay there for years, really.

There's something antimicrobial about it.

So you have to dilute the honey a little bit and then add yeast.

The yeast turns the sugars in the honey into alcohol, and that's the basic aspect of it, honey, water and yeast, and you've got mead.

- What kinds of ingredients besides honey?

- There's kind of an interesting thing.

You can pretty much add anything to mead.

A lot of meads have fruit involved, so we have one that has some raspberry.

We have an elderberry and aronia berry, and we have one that has cranberries in it.

There's all this kind of arcane terminology with mead.

It comes from, I don't know, Norse days and old English days, so a fruit mead is called a mellow mel.

There's other kinds of meads.

If you put any kind of a spice in a mead, it's called a metheglin, and so we have a metheglin that has a number of spices in it, and it goes on.

Acerglyn is something that has a maple syrup in it, and those same kind of things.

You can put a lot of different kinds of things in mead.

- Well, this process isn't as simple as you try and make it sound.

I know that you have to gather the fruits and the berries and the wine and do things with it, and you have to do it in a special place that's approved by people that say it's okay to do that.

What's your governing body over this?

- Well, there's actually a lot of them.

It starts with the federal government.

We needed to get our permits through the federal government.

Once that was done, then we were able to get a permit through the state, and along the way, because of the location, we also had to get permits through the county and the township, so a number of different steps along the process.

There's all sorts of recording protocol.

You need to make sure you're keeping track of everything, get all your formulas approved and that kind of stuff.

It's a bit complex just to get something as simple as honey, yeast and water into a bottle and get it approved.

- Well, you do it well, but it isn't as easy as one would think, and it takes some safety, and we appreciate that you take the precautions to make it right.

- Sure, yeah.

Any time you have an alcohol that's involved in something, you want to be careful that you do it the right way, of course.

- Do you have a favorite?

- You know, we made one last year that had cranberries, rosemary, and hibiscus in it, and when we first made it, it was like, ooh, that's kind of a lot of rosemary in that.

But after, especially after a year now that all of that flavor components have changed quite a bit, and so it's mellowed out, and I think that's my current favorite.

- How old is it when you serve it?

- The ones that we have been serving, we start in January, and so we start and we go through that whole process and start serving in May, so that's about as young as I think you would want to, and as much of it as we can save for the next year.

Then after about a year, then you really get that aging process, has developed it.

- Well, if I understand the situation right, you have a challenge of getting stuff to last long enough without being consumed to be aged.

- Yeah, we have had that problem I guess, if you want to call it that.

Good problem to have.

- Great problem to have.

So your product is is well received.

- It has been, yeah.

We are open on Saturdays now for just the mead room, and then we also serve the mead during our pizza nights on Sunday afternoons.

- You talked about the honey and the yeast.

When do you interject the flavors of berries and other things?

- You can do it at a variety of points.

Some of the berries, for instance, this year we made an aronia berry mead, and aronia berries are very, they're kind of astringent and very strong.

I put them right in at the very beginning of the process, so they fermented along with the process, along with the fermentation of the honey.

Sometimes that fermentation process will change the character of the fruit, and so some people feel, and this is the way I've been doing most of them, is I wait until after the bulk fermentation has happened, and then in the secondary process is when I add the fruit.

But you can also wait.

We do something that we call session meads.

These are ones that are lower in alcohol content and we ferment it all the way totally dry and we leave it dry, with the exception of some additional flavors that we put after the whole process is done, so they stay fairly dry, but then you just get the flavor of, in our case, the metheglin that has some spices.

We have one that has hops in it, we have some cherry June berry and we have one with chocolate, so we've got a variety of different kind of things that happen.

You can add the add those flavorings kind of anywhere along in the process.

- [Dan] Delightful.

- Yeah.

- When someone leaves your space, consumes your products, the love of your work, what do you hope they take away besides just being satisfied?

- Oh, we joke that we have kind of a secrecy marketing plan.

We don't really do a lot of marketing outside of just word of mouth kind of things.

What we hope happens then is that people will discover us either through conversation with their friends or just happening along it on the side of the road.

Because I think that when you come here, I think it's a special place, and we just really like that experience for people, is to come and just have, we really love it when people say, "Oh, that's just a magical place."

That's kind of what we're after.

- Wonderful.

Thank you, Roger.

- Yeah, thanks, Dan.

- Stay tuned for more on "Farm Connections."

Farm Connections Best Practices brought to you by Absolute Energy.

(energetic music) - Hi, I'm Ryan Miller, Crops Extension Educator, and this is today's Best Practices segment.

We've gotten to the point of the season where we really need to get out in the fields and kind of evaluate how well our herbicides worked as far as weed control, and determine where any misses might have occurred and why we might be seeing those misses.

There's a couple things we need to look for.

It could be some kind of mechanical issue.

Maybe we had a plugged tip, or with today's GPS technology, maybe something shut off that shouldn't have shut off, and so there could be a mechanical or sort of application factor that's responsible for the miss that we're seeing in the field, but oftentimes we'll get out there and we'll see weed escapes, and so it's important to determine whether those are just things that are chemistry that we're using didn't work or wasn't robust enough to manage the weeds for the full season, or have we developed some kind of herbicide resistance.

When we look at the first case of herbicide resistance, oftentimes when we're out looking at the field, we'll get a dead plant here and a live plant there, and you'll start to see this kind of mix match approach of some dead, some alive plants and maybe even some injured plants.

When we get in that scenario, we need to do some kind of evaluation, so there are places we can send plant tissue to be tested.

Our University of Minnesota team in the lab or the Weeds Group on campus does some screening in the greenhouse.

They'll grow seeds and then actually do some screening of the weed populations right in the greenhouse with different herbicides, and so they can provide some information.

Look for opportunities to where you can really definitively say that I've developed a herbicide resistance problem.

Then once you've determined that you in fact do have some herbicide resistance issues, you can focus on selecting a herbicide program that might work better in future years, or try different tactics, as far as different things for weed management.

Those are some things to do.

The thing that we want to talk about, either with herbicide resistance or with regular weed management, is selecting products that have multiple effective sites of action.

We can reference research materials, like we've got at the University of Minnesota here, some of the plot work that we do some evaluations with.

We can talk to our Ag professional consultants, those sort of folks, and then we can also refer to different publications.

We've got this publication from the USB.

It's kind of a roadmap to herbicides.

We've got our common trade names we can look up alphabetically, and then see what the active ingredients are and what sites of action we're using for our weed management.

You can look things up.

It's kind of a reference material.

On this side, we've got the different sites and modes of action so we can see what process we're affecting when we're controlling weeds in our field.

It can be a handy tool, because keeping all these things straight and what's in what can be a little bit challenging, and oftentimes we'll find if we use a product, there might be another product we pick and it could have the same sites of action, so in an effort to kind of diversify our approach, we can use a reference material like this too to see how diverse we're getting.

I'm Ryan Miller, Crops Extension Educator, and that was today's Best Practices segment.

- Welcome to "Farm Connections."

We're in rural Olmsted County, visiting with a very interesting person named Lisa Schutz.

Welcome to "Farm Connections," Lisa.

- Thank you, Dan.

Pleasure to be here with you today.

- Not only are you an interesting person, you have an interesting life.

What is it that you do?

- I am Founder and Director of a program called Southeast Minnesota Food Rescue and Redistribution, and I'm also an Indigenous food grower and processor.

- That's an awful lot.

You're gonna have to help us with little tidbits at a time.

What exactly does that mean?

- Well, I am a fourth generation Cherokee from Paint Clan, and my farming is focused on regenerative farming, stewardship of the land, seed collection and growing organic foods.

I have traded and sold at Rochester Farmer's Market for many years, also other markets in southeast Minnesota.

We provide fresh food and value added products out into our community.

- Why is that important?

- It's important because we see health declines in our communities, especially if we go back to 2020.

It was very stark examples of how diet impacts people's ability to fight disease.

We're very much about offering food grown locally and making that accessible to everyone in every community.

- I'm being a little cynical, but Lisa, you mean food's not available everywhere for everyone?

- Actually, no, it is not.

Our food system is constructed in such a way to be efficient and to serve a broad expanse of people.

They are limited in their resources, as any good agency is, and so there is always a challenge to get fresh food, especially out to satellite pantries serving rural communities, so our regional food banks do a great job with shelf stable foods often, but they don't often have the local food included in what they're offering in community.

- I'm envisioning as you speak maybe things in packages that aren't the best for us.

- That's correct.

You know, when you start looking at shelf stability, then you're adding salts, you're adding sugars, you're probably adding artificial flavoring as the flavor of that product declines.

But most of all, the overprocessing diminishes the nutritional value of those foods, so we really are very much encouraging folks to eat locally grown and made dairy, meats, eggs.

All of this is made right in your own community with your small to medium size farmers.

We're really about rescuing crop overages, helping farmers increase their economy and also allowing them to, giving them the opportunity to serve their community food that is nutritious and healthy without diminishing the profitability in their bottom line.

- Well, you talked about the pandemic a little bit, but you also talked about foods high in salt and high in fat, and I'm thinking about another epidemic, not a pandemic, but an epidemic of diabetes.

- Absolutely.

Many people in our Indigenous tribes and in our Black communities have high blood pressure, sugar diabetes.

One of my own family members passed recently from complications from diabetes, so it's a very big health epidemic.

It's directly related to high fructose corn syrup, refined sugar, and just things that Indigenous and people of color, we're not good at processing those foods, which leads to our health disparities.

- I'm pretty certain it's populations beyond those that you mentioned that have that challenge.

- Oh, absolutely.

This is affecting our country as a whole.

Our focus is really managing communities that are not being served and where we're seeing higher incidents of these diseases that you've mentioned.

Sometimes it's a disadvantaged rural community of multiple ethnic background, but they all have the same issues, mobility of food, foods that are healthy, what's being served in their community.

It's a really big problem that we're utilizing every local resource we have to work on solving.

- Well, certainly the pandemic gave a shock to the health system, and we saw what that shock did in terms of stress on people, stress on the healthcare system, and also the inability sometimes to meet everybody's needs.

If we have not good food, not good nutrition, not good diets, not good health, does that lead to maybe some of those things being another shock?

- Absolutely, and what is so important at this time is to provide education and also to provide community outreach.

So important.

Folks should know where to find their fresh, healthy foods.

It should be at an affordable cost.

We can do this.

Minnesota has some of the greatest collaborative communities that I've had the honor and privilege to work with, and really, we have the power within our local food system to increase our local economies, to reduce food waste and to reduce food insecurity, and that's our core mission with Southeast Minnesota Food Rescue and Redistribution.

We want to work with education.

We want to empower communities to own their own health.

- What successes have you seen thus far?

- Thus far, we did a micro-study in 2019 of this work.

We saw that we could rescue food.

We worked with an apple orchard, Cedar Grove apple orchard.

We've been working with them since 2019 to rescue some crop overages and get those apples redistributed into places where people didn't have access to those apples.

In 2020, we did a proof of concept between 2020 and 2021.

In 2022, we launched a pilot program in Olmsted County.

We were able to rescue 18,000 pounds of food from local farmers.

Some of those guys we were able to pay, some of those farmers just wanted to donate, and they wanted to donate to the health of their community, so we were able to rescue that food and get that food redistributed, both in food insecure communities with pop-up food events in satellite pantries, as I mentioned before, places like Chatfield, Pine Island.

Rural communities we go into, and we just move that food right from farm once it's inspected and processed right into hungry mouths.

- Amazing, really.

And when you say 18 tons, let's put that in perspective.

That is 36 pickups loaded full of food, really from front to back and heaping probably above the cab, because some of it's bulky.

It might even be more than 36 pickup loads.

- Yes, and what we found is that we provided our growers with just the simple crates that you would find in produce operations and helped with logistics of actually moving all that food in an efficient manner.

- It sounds like you're not trying to totally change.

You're trying to use what we have and make it better and elevated, is that a fair assessment?

- Absolutely.

We do not wish to reinvent any wheels.

We know that our job is to connect communities and empower them to collaborate, assess their Ag resources, their food resources, and help them broaden distribution channels.

If we didn't have our farmers growing our food for us, how would we eat?

In a very simplistic way of looking at it is this, we shore up our local farmers.

We utilize that resource, which they're happy to provide.

We can help with assisting them to determine what crops are needed in certain communities.

We're looking at growing Minnesota culturally relevant products that will be recognized and trusted in communities.

You know, one of our most famous recipes that we've come up with is a three sisters corn salsa, 100% locally grown in Olmsted and Mower County, and absolutely culturally relevant both to Minnesotans.

Who doesn't like a corn salsa?

And also Indigenous people, because we use those old recipes.

- Let's fast forward a long ways from today and look back over the career and what you were able to accomplish with your programming and your interaction with communities and interaction with farmers.

What would make you feel best looking at that?

- To see connected communities where everyone works and collaborates together, to see children with fresh food in their hand and to teach children about agriculture and nurture our future farmers.

I think that is the most important work that I will find to be the most important that I've done.

- Thank you so much for sharing today, Lisa.

- Thank you, Dan.

- Stay tuned for more on "Farm Connections."

Today we talked a lot about words that start with the letter R, renewal, redistribution, rescue.

I think we should add a few other words to that list, words like reciprocate and revitalize.

Remember, when we work together, when we offer a helping hand, when we take the time to learn from others, we enjoy and enhance our community and more often than not, find common ground.

And oh yeah, one more R word, respect.

I'm Dan Hoffman.

Thanks for joining us on "Farm Connections."

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