Parenting Made Me a Better Farmer
Farmer Sandi Osterkatz chose the name Footnote Farm for its dual meaning. She’s a self-described “nerdy person” with a PhD in Political Science from the University of North Carolina. Sandi’s first child was born halfway through earning her degree and she decided academia was not the right career fit.
Apart from the nod to her academic origins, “footnote” also symbolizes the farm as an addition to her already busy life as a full-time parent of her three homeschooled children, who are currently 4, 7 and 12 years old. As Sandi describes, “The farm is a vocation and a career, but if my kids are sick, the farm isn’t happening.”
Sandi had community in mind when she chose to pursue farming. While she was homesteading and gardening, she found that the people she enjoyed spending time with the most were farmers. “The nicest people I knew, who were the most generous and doing the most for their communities, were farmers,” she explains. She saw farmers supporting each other and sending each other customers. “I’ve never seen a community that is so generous,” Sandi says.
She connected with the farming community and felt that it would be a healthy and supportive place to start a business. Sandi waited until the youngest of her three children was 18 months old before starting Footnote Farm, which is on an 8-acre property in Carrboro, NC, with around one-third of an acre in production.
By necessity, Sandi is intentional and efficient with her farm schedule. In fact, she believes parenting made her a much better farmer. She has taken the lessons she learned from completing graduate school while caring for a baby—what could be accomplished while she was nursing, what needed to be accomplished while she had childcare—and applied them to farming.
She maximizes time across a diverse set of tasks, using daylight and childcare hours for jobs that she could not accomplish otherwise. She saves computer work for nighttime and does many tasks with her kids underfoot at home. She structures her farm system around working alone, for instance, using ground cover that can be rolled up instead of tarps, which are inefficient for one person to move.
Sandi does have occasional help from a little pair of hands: her four-year-old son is a natural on the farm. At home, he even has his own strawberry patch that he tends and weeds.
Sandi chose to offer a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model with a weekly share of produce--rather than selling to restaurants or at a farmer’s market--because the weekends, when her husband can be the primary parent, are an important time for her to accomplish farm work. While originally a structural choice, Sandi has become very attached to her 51 CSA members. She likes knowing the people who are eating the food that she grows. The farm updates she sends are personal and invite people to feel connected to the farm.
Sandi also provides thoughtful additions for her CSA members. She grows mullein, an herb that benefits respiratory health, and shares fresh tea bundles with members when they are sick.
Sandi’s care and generosity extends further, to her solidarity program, for which she accepts and matches donations, providing discounted CSA shares for people in need. She provides seven solidarity shares of her own and more in collaboration with another farm. She uses her connections in social justice activism to find local recipients in need.
Three years in, Footnote Farm is breaking even financially, though Sandi points out her farm set-up would not be possible for most farmers starting out. Sandi and her husband are able to rent out a house on the farm property to cover the mortgage, so that the farm income can cover farm expenses. Sandi is thrifty—she farms simply and creatively—without big investments in equipment. Though she has a waiting list, Sandi has made an intentional decision not to grow. She doesn’t want to be a “big small farm,” she likes her system and she feels content with her farm designed for one.