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

I'm your host, Dan Hoffman.

On today's episode, we head to Pine Island to meet Angie Severson, owner of Angie's Place.

We discuss the importance of community-based education, rural mental health, and Angie's passion for providing a place to grow for the next generation of rural Minnesotans, all here today on "Farm Connections."

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

- [Announcer] "Farm Connections" premier sponsor is Minnesota Corn.

- [Announcer] Programming supported by Minnesota Corn, working to identify and promote opportunities for corn growers, enhance quality of life, and help others understand the value and importance of corn production to America's economy.

(bright music) - [Announcer] Additional support from the following sponsors.

- [Announcer] Programming supported by R&S Grain Systems, a family-owned business serving its customers for 50 years with leading designs in the manufacturing of grain handling equipment and grain storage systems.

You can call them for a quote today.

(bright music) - [Announcer] Programming supported by EDP Renewables North America, owner/operator of Prairie Star and Pioneer Prairie Wind Farms in Minnesota and Iowa.

EDPR wind farms and solar parks provide income to farmers and help power rural economies across the continent.

- [Announcer] Mower County Farm Bureau Association, a KSMQ broadcast sponsor, advocates for agriculture based on the policies and beliefs of its members.

It's dedicated to making the voices of its members stronger.

You can learn more about membership benefits at fbmn.org.

- [Announcer] Program supported by employee-owned AgVantage Software, Rochester, Minnesota, celebrating their 50th year designing and developing agribusiness software for grain elevators, feed manufacturers, producers, fertilizer and chemical dealers, co-ops, seed companies, and fuel distributors.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to "Farm Connections."

I'm host Dan Hoffman and with me today is the executive director of Miss Angie's Place, Angie Severson.

Thanks for having us.

- Thanks for coming.

- Well, this is an amazing place.

What happens here?

- We do all kinds of things here.

So our four pillars, though, are art, nature, education, and wellbeing.

So everything we do here focuses on those things.

- Why is that important?

- Because those four things are what was important to me, I realized.

I did some reflecting and those are the four things that have kind of kept me going and kept me thriving and brings me joy.

And so I wanted to be able to share that with people in the community, especially in a time where people are starting to vary.

I mean, it's happened slowly where people are just getting more and more divided.

So this is a place for people to come together.

- Along with that division, are you seeing people with more anxiety than you've seen in the past?

- So very much anxiety, yes.

Technology and social media are great for a variety of things.

I think back to right out of college, I graduated and I went down to Dallas for my first job.

And I think back on that and think, I'm not a big phone talker and neither is my family, if I would've had the ability to text my family or just say quick little messages on social media or even see pictures, it would've helped me so much 'cause I was down there by myself and I was pretty lonely.

But now what I see in my teenage daughters is that they'll become upset about something, and instead of coming and talking about it, they'll just go right on their phones and they will get that reassurance and that dopamine hit just by watching Reel after Reel after Reel, and they're not connecting with anyone, so.

- How do we learn to connect?

- We learn to connect, a big part of Miss Angie's Place is mentorship.

And so we learn these things from our elders.

We learn these things from people that have walked in these paths before us.

When I lived in Dallas, I was pretty anxious, pretty depressed.

One of the places I felt the most comfortable was at church and I befriended, so when I was down there, I was 22, and I befriended an 82-year-old nun named Sister Mary Rose.

And I think part of why I felt so comfortable with her, because she was 82, I could hear the stories of the things that she went through, you know, all the different times, I realize that the world politically is very divided right now and we've had, you know, crazy things happen, but to listen to her about, you know, things like when Kennedy was assassinated or Martin Luther King, like, these were big pillars of the community, the Vietnam War, to know that she experienced those things, but she was there in front of me and I was able to talk to her about those things.

So she made it through, so I knew that I could too.

- Very comforting.

- Yep.

- You speak of your past and maybe growing up in rural Minnesota and then moving to an urban area.

Today we're in Pine Island and we're also inside of something that used to be used in a different way.

This is a rural community.

You are a community at Miss Angie's Place inside of a larger community.

Tell us a little bit about the very building we're in.

- So this building was built as an Episcopal church back in 1874.

When I saw it come up for sale, I was at a building just down the street, a beautiful three-story building that is totally out of place.

You would think you would see it in New York.

That one was built in 1894, I think.

It was a great space.

I loved it.

It was beautiful, but it was too small for us.

And so when I heard rumors of this church going to be for sale, at that time, it was the Good News Evangelical Free congregation had it.

They needed something that was more, their congregation was getting older.

They needed more accessibility.

This structure was too hard to do that to, so they were putting this up for sale and then they were gonna move down the street, which is what they did.

And there were lots of other places I could get, you know, that were just kind of like old warehouse, old manufacturing places.

And I thought, "Nope."

This church has these, the buildings I've been in had big, beautiful ceilings and I wanted to fill those with noise, like, fill 'em with kids laughing, fill 'em with... This big building, you can see... our other building had 14-foot ceilings, these ones are even higher because of the peaked roof.

So one of the first things I wanted to get accomplished was I put up supports in the middle of the building so we could put a volleyball net across.

So that's what we do.

We hit a beach ball and the kids play volleyball, and that's why this kind of space was so important.

I also wanted to repurpose this building.

I have fond memories growing up in our little church in Brownsdale, Minnesota, Our Lady of Loretto.

That church has been sold quite a while back when the Diocese of Winona took a lot of churches and had to get rid of 'em just to pay, you know, bills for other things.

And I didn't want to see, that church became a private residence, and I didn't want that to happen to this one in our community.

I wanted people to come in and be able to use it.

So that's what we're doing.

- Fantastic mission.

But speaking of the specific mission, what is that?

- So our mission is a safe, fun, nurturing place to gather and grow for people of all ages through art, nature, education, and wellbeing.

- [Dan] You mentioned sometimes filling this space with many people.

What's that sound and look like when that happens?

- We have a woodworking camp here in the summertime.

And so a noise that would drive other people crazy, I would tell the kids, "This is music to my ears," 'cause you can hear all these little kids pounding on nails, they're laughing, giggling.

I don't walk around and hear saws because if I did, I would not be doing my job.

I can't have kids just playing with saws.

So it wasn't necessarily that noise.

But yeah, just hearing kids doing things that they're not on their phones.

You know, they're actively, I know one little guy, well, a lot of 'em, they had never used a hammer before.

And so you can tell, too, by the noise if they're doing it right, 'cause he's holding this hammer and he's holding it right by the head and so he's going tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

And it's kind of like, "No, buddy, you gotta hold on to the end of it and you gotta make some noise and you gotta hit that pretty hard."

So to watch how he initially was almost terrified of the hammer to a day later was actually pounding nails into these projects, so.

- You also do a lot of things with nature.

In fact, that's where we first met you, was a program that was about nature.

Can you tell us your journey with nature and how you use that in your programming?

- Yeah, nature is a giant component of who I am, and I thank my parents for that.

So Rita and Terry Nelson.

They're in Brownsdale, Minnesota.

That's where I grew up.

Growing up, we were a blue-collar family.

My mom is a registered nurse.

My dad had started at Hormel and then became a guard at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester.

And so we did not, I think the first time I ever went on an airplane was when I was in college.

So we did not take family vacations, you know, traveling to these big destinations.

We went to Whitewater State Park was my favorite place as a kid.

Lake Carlos.

Those were the two big ones that we went to, those two state parks.

But we also took road trips.

We went out to Colorado.

We went to Steamboat Springs.

We went to Montana.

We went to Ohio.

One of my favorite memories is walking up a river in Colorado.

Like, that just blows my mind.

It was like a natural escalator because you're on these giant boulders and you're just stair stepping, walking up this big rolling river.

So it's things like that.

I realize now, I used to think I was the most comfortable, like, on a basketball court or a volleyball court because that was also, that was kinda, I joke that's our love language in my family is sports.

But then the other place that I feel totally at ease is just sitting out in the woods.

All of a sudden you just notice all these things.

And so trying to share that with kids, and it's been really cool.

- Angie, what are your suggestions for balancing nature and technology?

- We're just doing a great job of finding more research for these things.

Just with working with Sarah for the Master Naturalists, she was saying that kids spend an average of eight to 12 hours a day in front of a screen.

A lot of that time is at school because we do have those one-to-one things, but programs like Sarah's too and our program with the afterschool, we give kids, they get 30 minutes on their technology, which in Pine Island schools would be a Chromebook.

So we get here at about 3, 3:20.

The kids have time to get a snack.

Then we have our technology and our homework from 3:30 to four o'clock.

At four o'clock, all technology goes in their backpacks.

And everything else we do is stuff that I guess I used do when I was a kid.

The hardest part of my job sometimes is convincing these 12-year-olds that me being a 46-year-old knows what I'm talking about.

And that's when those college students really come in handy because they can definitely bridge the gap.

And so once those Chromebooks are put away, I have a couple rotary phones that are hanging on the wall.

The kids pretend to make calls with those.

We have a big aquarium sitting over in the corner.

That's all stuff that we caught from the Zumbro River during our summer camps.

And so the kids love to see how things are changing.

We have rabbits and chickens outside.

The chickens, those are agricultural purpose, partly just to watch the stages of life, but it's also, we gather eggs from those chickens.

Because we have those chickens in town and because we were, you know, able to purchase those chickens through a grant through the Liz Quackenbush Foundation, we don't sell any of those eggs.

We give those away.

As people come in, as different people enter, we give the eggs to our yoga ladies who come on Monday nights.

We give the eggs to, you know, one of the parents we have of a couple of our kids who are on scholarship for after school.

I know with these SNAP benefits and the government shutdown, they're not doing well financially.

So giving them a carton of eggs every week, just to see the smile that comes on the mom's face.

Like, "What?

We can have these?

What do I owe you?"

You don't owe me anything.

You can come clean the chicken coop once in a while if you want.

And then those rabbits too, I've heard once that one of the best cures of loneliness is just to have another soul to take care of.

So to have these rabbits, at one point, I do say I am a crazy rabbit lady now, so I do realize that, you know, there has to be some limit.

But we have a rabbit right over there.

His name is Cappuccino and he hops around after school.

Whenever we're here, he's just hopping around the building.

So the kids love to figure out, okay, where's Cappuccino?

But to be able to teach the kids how to interact with those things too.

Like, you know what?

A rabbit is terrified of everything, so he doesn't necessarily wanna be held all the time.

You can love him from a distance.

You can try to love him, but he'll let you know when he's overstimulated.

And I can relate that back to the kids too.

Like, you know, when you're overstimulated and you just want to be alone?

We need to give him some alone time too.

- So those animals, the chickens and the rabbits, would you call them therapy animals?

- Definitely, yep (chuckles).

And we'll have, you know, new summer camp kids come or kids that have chickens and they'll say, "Oh, my chickens are not this friendly.

We can't hold our chickens like this."

And I say, "These chickens don't really have a choice."

So, yeah, they're used to kids.

And same thing, just being able to, like, interact with that chicken, you know, really see, you know, the feet.

The feet on chickens are huge and that's a very good, you know, indicator of how closely they're related to dinosaurs.

But they've got these long, beautiful toenails.

So I didn't ask the chickens, but we did paint their toenails the other day, you know, just for the kids to kind of to see, you know, like, yeah, that chicken doesn't really like that.

Maybe we should leave that one alone.

Or I've got one student who has chickens and her big thing has been hypnotizing them, which I give her a hard time.

I don't know how much I care for it.

She, like, flips the chicken over on the back and then just kind of, and then the chicken will lay there for 20 minutes.

- So it must work.

- Yep.

- Angie, we're right smack in the middle of farm country.

And if we go back in time, our farmers were very connected to the soil.

They walked on it sometimes in bare feet and sometimes in work shoes following a plow that was pulled by an animal.

So we were integrating lots of touch, lots of animals into the practice of agriculture.

What's changed in that world?

- Just in the Master Naturalist class, that was all of October and the amount of things I learned in that, but just talking with how in this area specifically, we've really gone away from having animals pasture out in the field and how difficult that's been on our land usage and just on our erosion.

We don't have that same connection to animals.

You know, we'll hear one thing and kind of generalize it.

Like, you know, cattle farming and the amount of, you know, fumes that equal bad things for our climate.

It's not always the case.

Everything needs to be done in modification.

And so we're seeing these animals as something that's very negative to our climate when that's not necessarily the case.

It all needs to be done in moderation.

So that's what we see in our farming now is that, well, especially in Minnesota too, a lot of this area were wetlands and forests.

We've taken the tile and drained all of those things, which makes it difficult for our watersheds to kind of stay productive.

And so there has been a big movement now to kind of repurpose soil, but also how people are going back to doing things the way we used to, you know, back in our parents' and our grandparents' generation.

We had a summer camp this summer called Pioneer Arts.

And so that's what we did.

Here, we try to keep as many things in-house as we can.

I'm trying to make that backyard become its own little ecosystem.

So we have a rain barrel that's attached to our downspout so we can use that water to water our plants.

We have a mud kitchen back there, which is the kids' favorite.

So we've got our rain barrel and then it has a trough going down that goes into a kiddy pool.

The kids use that water to make mud.

All summer long, they'll say, "Can I turn the hose on?"

"No, you can't turn on the hose."

"Well, why not?"

"Because this water is not free.

It's going to eventually run out," explaining that to them, so then they have to get their own water.

A lot of times they just don't know what a rain barrel is.

Then we have our garden.

So we are sponsored by the Garden In A Box program.

We did a grant for that, received that.

So all of that produce that we get too also goes to the community.

That's all free.

We give it to summer camp kids.

The only negative with that was we had some peppers that were extremely hot (chuckles) and we didn't realize it at the time and one of our volunteers ate one.

Oh, that poor guy was in tears for about 20 minutes.

So the kids take vegetables home.

With our chickens, they create compost, or they create fertilizer for the compost.

So we also have our own compost thing.

We talk to the kids about that.

Like, we have, you know, three bins.

We have a recycling bin, we have a garbage bin, and then we also have a compost.

Kids learn very quickly what can go in there and what can't.

It becomes a favorite thing during summer camp for one kid to grab that compost bin right after snack.

"Can I take the compost?"

And they'll run it back there, throw it on there.

We have a big pitchfork back there, which many times I question, "Should I have a pitchfork?"

As long as I let them know only I am using it to turn the compost.

You'll see when we go outside, we had a plethora of pumpkins this year.

So we're taking those pumpkins, we're putting those in the compost as well.

The chickens love to dig through that.

So everything back there is related.

- In addition to the youth programming, is there more?

- Yes, when we first opened, so our intention when we opened was to be for people of all ages.

So what I like to say is that our programming is for ages zero to 115.

The reason I say 115 is because I've met a hundred-year-old, but I've never met 116-year-old, and when I do, then we will have to change and maybe go up to 120.

But what we found, and talking with another person in the area that is in a similar program or business, people in the Midwest will pay gobs of money for activities for their children, but not for themselves.

I don't know if just a Midwest, like, "I'm gonna work hard and I'm gonna provide for my kids," but it is very rare that an adult or a mom would pay $55 for a wellness retreat, but instead pay quite a bit for their, you know, child to do baseball or volleyball or basketball.

And so it was difficult to get going at first.

So most of our programming was for children.

Well, now that we have come to a point where we're more established, this year, I'm really focusing on getting that adult programming back because this building needs the balance.

It needs the yin and the yang.

It is full of all kinds of crazy kid energy, but I need the energy of, for example, we have a yoga class on Monday nights that's just for adults and it's just a calming, soothing... So being able to balance.

We also have a art class coming up for adults December 11th, and that is my baby Pearl's birthday.

That's an art class just for adults.

And so we have a variety of programs.

People can do open studio or they can do, we have glass lanterns, beading, they can do embroidery.

And a lot of the supplies that we have are all things that have been donated by our community.

- Well, you mentioned baby Pearl and you also have a nice design on your shirt, and you are a graphic artist.

Is there any correlation?

- Yes.

When you set out to have children, you think everything is gonna go perfectly, which then you find out that the actual, like, that so many of us are here and we're made the way we're supposed to be is absolutely amazing just for the number of things that can go wrong when all those little eggs are dividing.

So our baby Pearl, I found out I was pregnant in 2009, went in for my 20-week ultrasound.

The doctor said, "Well, there are some abnormalities."

And it turned out, after doing an amnio, it turned out that we found out that Pearl had a chromosome abnormality.

It was not one that was fatal, but we didn't know how she was going to do once she was born.

In utero, she was doing okay, but we didn't know how she would do when she was born.

So Pearl started out doing great, then she had some breathing difficulties and we learned that her brainstem was not controlling her breathing.

So after two weeks in the hospital, we took her home on hospice.

The doctors did not know if she would survive the car ride home.

Instead, she lived at home for two weeks.

I'm surrounded by nurses in my family.

My mom was a hospice nurse at the time.

My sister-in-law is a nurse.

My sister is a nurse.

So baby Pearl was home for two weeks and she was never put down.

She was always held.

And at her funeral, at our wedding, we had 300 people at our wedding, and when Pearl passed away, there was 350 people at her funeral, and she brought so many families together.

I learned later, it kind of felt like she tore our family apart, and like many couples who have lost a child, ours did end up in divorce, but I'm happy to say we get along beautifully now.

And, you know, Pearl's dad, he helped us build Miss Angie's Place.

So, you know, Nick Severson Construction, he is very much, you know, just as much responsible for this place as I am.

Nick and I both grew up by Hayfield.

We're both good rural stock.

You know, we both worked for many farmers, and it's because of that love of people and our daughters and baby Pearl that this place exists.

So, yeah, the logo that I have is Pearl, and so I'm like kind of the mama oyster.

And so this place is meant to be a safe space to nurture anybody who walks through the door.

- Your future is bright.

You have a lot to do.

Thanks for what you've already done.

- Thank you very much.

- That does it for now.

I'm Dan Hoffman.

Thanks for joining us here on "Farm Connections."

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] "Farm Connections" premier sponsor is Minnesota Corn.

- [Announcer] Programming supported by Minnesota Corn, working to identify and promote opportunities for corn growers, enhance quality of life, and help others understand the value and importance of corn production to America's economy.

(bright music) - [Announcer] Additional support from the following sponsors.

- [Announcer] Programming supported by R&S Grain Systems, a family-owned business serving its customers for 50 years with leading designs in the manufacturing of grain handling equipment and grain storage systems.

You can call them for a quote today.

(bright music) - [Announcer] Programming supported by EDP Renewables North America, owner/operator of Prairie Star and Pioneer Prairie Wind Farms in Minnesota and Iowa.

EDPR wind farms and solar parks provide income to farmers and help power rural economies across the continent.

- [Announcer] Mower County Farm Bureau Association, a KSMQ broadcast sponsor, advocates for agriculture based on the policies and beliefs of its members.

It's dedicated to making the voices of its members stronger.

You can learn more about membership benefits at fbmn.org.

- [Announcer] Program supported by employee-owned AgVantage Software, Rochester, Minnesota, celebrating their 50th year designing and developing agribusiness software for grain elevators, feed manufacturers, producers, fertilizer and chemical dealers, co-ops, seed companies, and fuel distributors.

(bright music) (bright music)