July 1, 2010 - For Kevin Wayne Lundgren, a fifth-generation Texas farmer who works the family farm outside of Elgin, a moment of revelation occurred 18 years ago when he was a 22-year-old farmer learning the hard way about the uncertain economics of his vocation.
He was working about 2,000 acres of grain and 4,000 acres of cotton in a year when everything that could go wrong from an economic standpoint did. Lundgren, the youngest of the family working a portion of the land, got the smallest piece of an already small pie. As a result, he couldn't afford to buy pie, or anything else to eat.
"I remember as clear as a bell going to the refrigerator, and there was no food. Nothing in the pantry. And I had no money," he recalled. "I got a job in town and made it through to the next season, but I guess that was what you would call a paradigm switch in the way I looked at farming. I just thought it was ridiculous to be a farmer and not have anything to eat."
That moment of revelation led to Lundgren's current business model, which includes cash crops like corn -- food grade corn -- hay and sunflowers with a certified organic vegetable operation that does business as Lund Produce. He doesn't know if the model will work from a financial standpoint, but he's determined to find out.
"The last 10 years I've been transitioning to direct food sales as opposed to strictly a commodities market," he said. "We don't have any bio-tech crops now. In some ways, it's an experiment to see if a model like this will work. The vegetables do well in the soil we have here, but the issue is labor, as it is for a lot of people in agriculture. We sold vegetables this week, but the cost of labor ate it all up."
Most of his sales are to the Wheatsville Food Co-op and Greenling, an organic food delivery service in Austin, though he is experimenting with a small CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) service that currently serves three families.
Lundgren's crops include several heirloom varieties of vegetables, including shallots. Shallots are like a cross between sweet onions and garlic. They are used like onions but peel away in cloves like garlic and carry a slight garlic flavor. The shallots were originally grown by a neighbor of Lundgren named Selma Eklund (now deceased) of the Lund community. Her parents brought the shallots with them when they moved to Texas from Germany in the late 1800s. As Eklund got older, she gave away some of her prized plant and vegetable varieties to people she trusted to perpetuate them. Lundgren got the shallots.
"Her mom was from the old country and she brought them with her to this country," Lundgren said. "She kept it going, and now I have them sprouting all over this place. They spend 180 days in the ground before they're ready to be harvested. They like a drier year. You have more trouble with them in a wet year. They've been naturalized to this environment."
Though there is a demand for shallots from chefs and a certain portion of the consumer market, Lundgren plans to sell the shallots as seed stock to gardeners.
"I think there would be a demand for this kind of seed stock," he said. "I'd like to sell it nationally, if the demand is there."
Another niche that Lundgren has discovered is in mulch hay for the gardening market. Individual buyers of the hay usually show up on weekends to buy directly from Lundgren because they want hay that has not been treated. He grows and sells oat hay, a clover and rye combination and a blend of hairy vetch, clover and rye as well as standard round bales for cattle and horses.
"Different markets create different demands on your time," Lundgren said. "If you want to do something like this, you need to plan on giving up your weekends. A lot of my clients work five days a week, which means my busiest days are on the weekend."
Lundgren restored 11 acres of depleted clay soils by using primarily legumes like clover to restore the soil's vitality over the course of several years. He has a couple of acres devoted to growing organic vegetables practically year-round, along with some peaches and melons. He said he will continue with this model as long as he can afford it.
For Lundgren, the bottom line is the bottom line, except for one thing -- he and his family always have food to eat now.
"The number one reason I grow organic vegetables at all is to have good food to eat," he said. "It's not like it was when I started. We always have good, fresh, organic food to eat."
Even though the pantry isn't bare like it was that evening 18 years ago, he said the future of Lund Produce will depend on what kind of living he makes from doing it.
"If you're a farmer and you're not making a living with something that you're spending a lot of money and time doing it, you have to change what you're doing. I did that, and we'll see how it works out. We charge a premium for our vegetables, and what it's going to come down to, I think, is how willing people are to pay for local and organic produce."
More information is available at http://www.lundproduce.com.
