- Hello, and welcome to Farm Connections.

I'm your host, Dan Hoffman.

On today's program, we visit Bleed Heart Floral in Mazeppa and discuss their blossoming floral CSA and their sustainable practices.

Jim Koelsch offers up insights into food science and preparation, and the University of Minnesota Extension brings us a new best practices segment, all today on Farm Connections.

(upbeat banjo music) - [Male Announcer] Welcome to Farm Connections with your host, Dan Hoffman.

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- Welcome back to Farm Connections.

I'm so delighted to have our guest Allie Kuppenbender with us today.

Hello Allie.

- Hi.

- So the name of your business is Bleed Heart Floral Farm & Design.

So how did you come up with that name?

- Yeah, so bleeding hearts have been my favorite flower since I was, I can remember.

Yeah, I've always been really drawn to flowers and specifically bleeding hearts.

I have very significant memories of being a kid and just seeing them every spring.

And I also really liked the idea of the fact that they are only a spring flower, so it's very seasonal and tied to a specific time and place of the year.

- Well, your flower farm is near Mazeppa.

And what areas do you sell or service?

- I sell to Rochester.

And then I also make a CSA run to Eagan in the cities.

- And your website's beautiful and the flowers are just amazing on there, but it talks about Mississippi River Valley, the Twin Cities and Rochester as your primary markets?

- Yep, yeah, so I'll do some weddings out on the Mississippi River Valley, like Red Wing and then Lake City.

- Awesome.

What caused you to start the business?

- Yeah, I have been farming for about four to five years, just working on different flower farms.

And then I also went to school out in Washington State for sustainable agriculture.

So just kind of getting a lot of experience under my belt for those past few seasons.

And then I really wanted to, if I'm gonna be working so hard, I really wanted to be working for myself.

So I decided to start this business last, this time last year.

- You mentioned CSA.

Can you talk a little bit about what that acronym means and what it means to the customer?

- Yeah, so it stands for community supported agriculture or community sourced agriculture.

And the idea is that you pay upfront for weekly or biweekly subscription of, generally it's vegetables.

So usually you'll see it with vegetable farmers.

They'll send you a box every week that you pick up, but for us, it's bouquet CSA.

So every week people pick up a bouquet.

- Where can they pick it up?

- Yeah, so I had two locations that were just bouquet CSA.

One was at Dunn Brothers Coffee in Eagan and then the other was at Forager Brewery in Rochester.

And then I also partnered with a vegetable farm based out of Lake City, Pearson Organics.

And so every other week I'd also do a bouquet add on for her vegetable CSA.

- So you're adding beauty to homes, to weddings, to other office buildings and things like that.

How has your business changed in the current COVID-19 issue?

- Well, I wasn't planning on doing a CSA this year.

Yeah, I was planning on selling predominantly at Thursdays Downtown Rochester, and then also predominantly weddings, both full service and then a la cart weddings.

And yeah, obviously with COVID, Thursdays Downtown got completely canceled in person.

Pretty much all of my weddings got either way, way downsized or shifted to next year.

So I was looking at a lot of flowers with not really a lot of outlets to sell them.

It had been my plan to, in a couple of years, start a CSA once I had built up a customer base, but I decided to just go for it on year one, I guess.

Yeah, yeah.

- And how's that going for you?

- It actually went really well.

I was very pleasantly surprised by how many people were really excited and signed up and signed up for the entire season.

So I actually, my CSA is a little bit different in that it was monthly.

So you signed up for like either the month of June, the month of July, the month of August, or I had three weeks in September, but then you could sign up for any combination of those months.

And I had a lot of people that actually ended up signing up for all four or would sign up for two and then come back and be like, oh, I actually want August now or I want September now.

So yeah, it was a really positive response.

I got a lot of really good feedback.

A lot of people saying that they were excited every week.

They really liked having something to look forward to, something that would brighten up their space, especially with a lot of people staying home a lot more or working from home.

It was nice to have something to look forward to or something to brighten their space.

- Allie, where we find out more about getting into your CSA or samples?

- Yeah, it's all, all the information about the CSA is on my website, bleedheartfloral.com.

And then I also do grab-and-go bouquets.

So you can do one-time bouquet purchases and I sell those at Dwell Local in Zumbrota, the People's Food Co-op in Rochester and then Fiddlehead Coffee in Rochester.

So if you wanted to just grab one bouquet.

I think this is probably my last week.

It's looking like tomorrow night, Friday night is gonna be a hard frost.

So this was probably the last week of them.

But yeah.

- How about dried flowers, since frost, I think you're alluding to frost coming.

Can you tell us about what products we might look forward to in the future?

Yeah, I have a ton of stuff drying in the garage right now.

I'm planning on selling dried flower bundles, kind of have to work some of the logistics out of that.

And then I did do holiday wreaths last year and kind of like autumn, autumn wreaths, garlands, that type of stuff for around the holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

But yeah, I am not sure at what capacity I'm gonna be doing those this year.

I'm actually eight months pregnant right now.

So I might not be doing those as much as I was planning, as I have done in the past, but yeah, hopefully at some capacity.

We'll have to see.

- [Dan] And do you have a greenhouse at the farm?

- We are all field-grown as of right now.

So no greenhouses or hoops or high tunnels.

I'm hoping to write some grants over the winter and get working on those things.

But as of right now, everything is field-grown.

- Well, you certainly have some interesting weather and things to work with in Minnesota.

And you probably could have picked anywhere in the world to start your farm.

And you have some experience and training in Washington State.

What brings you to Minnesota?

- Yeah, my husband and I are both originally from here.

We moved out to Washington State so I could finish my bachelor's degree, again, in sustainable agriculture at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

So I have a lot of experience out in Western Washington, and yeah, just when we were thinking about buying land, what we could afford, where we wanted to be.

Yeah, we couldn't afford to live on the West Coast, even if we wanted to stay out there.

And then both of our families are from the Midwest, so it just made more sense to be closer to family and friends.

And yeah, find something that was a little bit more in our price range.

- Well, I'm glad you came back to Minnesota for whatever the reason, but those are good reasons.

Two families.

- Yeah.

Yeah, and I do like the very defined seasons of Minnesota and farming in Minnesota.

It definitely has its challenges.

And like, when it's 100 degrees and super humid, I'm like, oh, why am I here?

I should be in Washington.

But it's nice to have like that hard frost, everything freezes, you can't work in like, it's very hard to work in the winter without like a true heated greenhouse.

And so, yeah, farming and especially the way that we're farming is very physically demanding.

And so it's really nice to be able to work really hard in the summer, put everything to bed in the fall, take a break in the winter.

- Well, you spent some time studying sustainable and also organic agriculture, correct?

- Yeah.

- So what advice do you have to the audience about why sustainable and organic are important to you and perhaps to them?

- Yeah, so sustainable and organically grown, well just in general, locally grown is a lot better.

Better for the environment, better for the farmer and the farm workers, better for the end consumer.

Yeah, you can just know exactly where your flowers or your vegetables are coming from and what chemicals or lack thereof they came into contact with.

It's a lot smaller loop system.

So yeah.

So like 80, about 80% of flowers from the traditional floral trade are actually imported from around the globe.

And a lot of them have to sit in chemical quarantines to kind of ensure that no foreign pests or diseases come into contact.

So they're actually kind of toxic to the workers and then the people that they come in contact.

I don't use any chemicals on my flowers.

I use a little bit of holding solutions, but yeah, no pesticides that are not organic.

So you can just know that they're really fresh.

They're probably picked a day or two before you're getting them.

And that the pollinators are working really hard.

- So think about some things that drive you, Allie.

I mean, this is hard work.

You need to be planful.

You need to work on economics, taxes, agronomy, soils.

It's a lot of work having your own business.

What drives you to do that?

- So being able to work outside every day, being able to kind of set my own schedule, and yeah.

Be able to be outside and working with my hands.

I find that it's very therapeutic to kind of work with my hands.

Flowers are so beautiful.

So just to be able to be surrounded by a field of flowers every day and design them by hand.

Yeah, pretty much everything's done by hand.

There's no machines that are making bouquets.

It's all me.

I made every single one of the CSA bouquets.

Yeah, just, it is really hard work.

And it sometimes is very frustrating.

There's days where it's really hard when it hails or storms or you get straight-line winds.

Definitely those days are not fun, but overall it's very rewarding.

And being able to see, in real time, your hard work pay off is really rewarding.

How about when that customer's face lights up with your beautiful bouquet.

A bride or somebody that's purchased from you?

What does that do for you?

Yeah, that is also an amazing experience, especially the weddings and especially this year weddings 'cause a lot, both of the, I only ended up doing two full-service weddings this year.

Both of them had to move their dates to accommodate for COVID and being able to celebrate the way that they wanted to celebrate.

So just kind of getting to see the end result really make a space truly unique and beautiful for them, set in like a very specific time and place.

I try to use only local flowers as much as possible for weddings.

I will buy from other local farms in the area, local flower farms in the area to kind of supplement what I have.

But yeah, just being able to see that end result, that beautiful space and how excited they are on their special day is really, really rewarding.

- Allie, thanks for joining us on Farm Connections.

So interesting to hear about your farm and your floral design.

Thanks again.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- You're welcome.

Stay tuned for more on Farm Connections.

- [Male Announcer] Farm Connections Best Practices brought to you by.

(upbeat music) - Hello, my name is Angie Peltier and I work for the University of Minnesota Extension up in Crookston.

Soybean cyst nematode or SCN is the top yield limiting pathogen of soybeans in the US, including in Minnesota.

It's responsible for an estimated $1 billion in yield loss each year.

SCN can also cause yield loss, up to 30% in fact, without causing any above ground symptoms.

SCN is a worm, microscopic roundworm that lives in the soil.

It moves any way that infested soil moves, on wind and water, on equipment, on humans and animals.

SCN was found for the first time in the late 1970s in Southern Minnesota.

It has since been found after infested soil is moved over the years as far north as a couple of the counties that border Canada, like Roseau and Lake of the Woods Counties.

SCN is managed by planting resistant soybean varieties and planting non-host crops or crops that SCN is unable to infect.

Some of these include corn, any of the small grains, sugar beets, potatoes, sunflower, and canola.

The first step to managing SCN is to know whether or not a field is infested.

The best way to do this is to collect and send soil samples to a lab for analysis to determine how many eggs are in your sample.

The more SCN eggs in a given volume of soil, the greater the potential for yield loss.

The presence of eggs can tell you whether your field is infested and periodically then sampling known SCN-positive fields can tell you how well your management practices have worked to keep SCN population densities in check.

To find SCN in a field for the first time, focus on collecting soil cores from those areas of the field where infested soil is likely to be introduced or settle out, like field entrances, lower areas where water pools or floods, and along shelter belts and fence lines.

To best monitor known SCN populations and track population trends, and so that you compare apples to apples, collect samples from the same areas of each field at the same time of the year and at the same point in the crop rotation to compare from sampling time to sampling time your egg counts.

As with any soil borne plant pathogen, there are going to be areas of the field with higher and lower population densities, and soil sampling just gives us an estimate and a snapshot in time.

But the more soil cores you collect from an area, the better the estimate will be.

Collect six to eight-inch soil cores from within the soybean row and put them in a bucket.

When you have 15 to 20 cores, gently mix them together and put about two cups in a labeled soil bin.

Remember that nematodes are living things, and so it's important not to store them, even temporarily, in the sun.

Ship samples so that they'll arrive to the lab alive and don't sit in a hot delivery truck over a weekend.

For more information, visit the University of Minnesota Extension website or the SCN Coalition website.

- We're thrilled to have Jim Koelsch with us on Farm Connections today.

Welcome Jim.

- Thank you - Jim, you're the owner entrepreneur behind BTYR Country Market.

Back to Your Roots Country Market.

There must be a story behind a name like that.

- Well, our goal is to go back to when the food was healthier, without preservatives, things like that.

We want to help people be able to have a healthier food at home when they're cooking.

I like to have my food healthy.

So we worked on this and decided to work with spices and other things like our pancake mix to provide those or offer them to the public for people to purchase.

- Well, I know you have facilities in both Oronoco and Grand Meadow.

Any ties to either one of those communities in your family?

- Actually have ties in both.

My family's up here.

My wife's family is in the Grand Meadow area.

Our uncle that actually created the Uncle Buster's Barbecue Sauce had a butcher shop in Ostrander.

And after he retired, I was able to work with him to carry on the tradition of making the barbecue sauce.

And so we've been very lucky or blessed with that.

And it is, we have been, it is going well for us.

- Well, you're the lucky one.

You've got the family recipe.

Wow.

- Yup, I'm very lucky.

And we've had a lot of fun with it.

A lot of people do enjoy it and it's becoming very popular.

- As you know Jim, I'm a farm youth.

Grew up in the rural area as well.

Not that far, actually, from Ostrander.

But I do remember the country or the rural being and revolving all around food, not only producing it, but around the kitchen table, the dining room table.

And how do you embrace that concept with the people that enjoy food?

- Well, I was raised on a farm too, so that's where the food kind of came from, but we have a lot of friends, guests, and we share the food and like to see people enjoy it.

When we've done cookouts with some of our friends, like up when we're camping or even down here at home, it's fun to watch the people smile and know that they're enjoying the food.

And to see that, and it helps bring on the conversations, and I think it lets the families enjoy their time together more.

- Well, I can't disagree with you a bit there.

You're a food entrepreneur and it's a lot of work taking a business from really ground zero to something.

What drives you, Jim?

What makes you really get up in the morning and do this?

- Number one is I want to provide a quality product and our motto is providing quality products and services at a fair price.

So we want to make sure the products are good.

They're healthy.

I guess, for an example, one of the good examples that I have is we're working with a store up in Wisconsin.

And when the gentlemen was looking at our products, he was taking the bottle and spinning it and goes, I can't believe the bright colors and how fresh these look.

And that's what we're trying to provide.

- Well, you mentioned Wisconsin, so you're in more than just Minnesota?

- Yes, we are in several different states.

We do have stores in Wisconsin that are putting our products on their shelves.

We have several in Minnesota.

We have people that have purchased from different states around the United States that, and we've got it as far as Texas and Louisiana, East and West Coast.

So we are growing.

- Very exciting.

Well, with that kind of distribution pattern, you must maybe ship some in a way different than just hand delivery?

- Correct.

We ship it out through different carriers that help us with that, and it's working very well.

And we've learned a few obstacles have came in the way of making sure that our product arrives safely and intact, and we've learned better packaging to accommodate that.

And it's helped us.

And fortunately the people are understanding on the other end.

If something did get damaged, we will replace it.

There's no question about that.

We want to make sure that what they ordered, they get, and it's for them to enjoy.

- Jim, you did mention a whole host of products.

So what happens in middle of the night or in the morning, you wake up and say, aha, I'm going to mix up something new?

- Well kind of, I've played around a lot, like our fish batter mix, actually, when we go camping, that's where I created that was we didn't have any fish batter, so I started throwing ingredients together and fortunately it turned out really well.

And the only problem is I had to remember to write down the recipe so we could copy it when we got home.

But yeah, we've done that.

Our pancake mix is one that my mom passed down to us and we've been using that for many, many years.

And actually it was my son that goes, dad, why don't you package that, because we know it will sell?

And we've been very lucky.

It has sold and it's taken off really well.

- Jim, you just transitioned into talking about generation.

We talked about your Uncle Buster in Ostrander.

You talked about that being on your wife's side.

You talked about pancakes coming from really your mother.

So now we've got multiple generations when you started talking about your sons.

How about this business and how it will involve your sons and maybe even grandchildren?

Well, it will be up to them if they want to continue on with it, but that's my hope.

And they are excited about it.

They do enjoy working with it.

I have one that does, when he's out and gone, he does stop a lot of places and give them samples.

And so he's picked up a couple, three restaurants for us already in different states and they've had very good luck.

My oldest son works with us in blending process already, and he actually helps with some of our accounting and calculations for the product, 'cause he's very good at working spreadsheets.

So we can calculate out different sized portions of blending for our products when we need bigger amounts or large amounts of the product to be ready to package.

So yeah, it's a full-family involvement and it's exciting.

We have fun working together and we do enjoy that.

- Jim, thanks for the interview today.

Can you give us your website please?

- Yes, our website is www.btyrcountrymarket.com.

- Jim, thanks again.

- And thank you Dan.

- You're so welcome, and thank you audience for joining us today.

Stay tuned for more on Farm Connections.

Starting a business is a daunting task.

It takes a positive attitude, determination and grit, but success doesn't come from those things alone.

It also comes from the community support and the connections we make.

I'm Dan Hoffman.

Thanks for watching Farm Connections.

(upbeat music)