Danelle Myer owns a small vegetable farm and like many other small farmers, she’s passionate about the kind of operation she wants to grow: a small, local business.
Myer’s farm just outside Logan, Iowa, sits in the middle of true farm country. Thousands of acres of row crops make up the landscape. Her vegetable farm is almost out of place, even though Myer is a native – she grew up on her family’s conventional farm, a quarter-acre of which she has turned into One Farm.
Hers is a less common way of doing things and it took a bit for some of the local farmers to come around.
“I think it was seen as offensive, like because I want to do something differently I think you have done something wrong,” Myer said. “And that really caught me off-guard. That was not how I saw it at all, I was just following my own heart on things.”
Even after growing up on a farm, Myer didn’t have the expertise to get her vegetable business off the ground. With encouragement from her parents, she spent six months learning the basics in an apprenticeship program at the University of California Santa Cruz. “It really was my conventional farming parents who led me to this whole situation,” Myer said.
They even let her move in with them temporarily when she first returned to Iowa. “I kind of feel like if my dad accepts me and my dad’s OK with what I’m doing and he’s a conventional farmer – he doesn’t have a problem with it – then maybe that makes me OK to other people, too,” Myers said.
Over three years, she’s put in the hours and the sweat and has found a market bigger than she expected. Her business is growing, too. By next season she will be farming a bigger plot of land she’s buying from her family.
And she’s been winning her neighbors over. Farmers, of course, respect hard work. They know what it takes to start a farm.
This is the eleventh installment of the 2013 edition of My Farm Roots, Harvest Public Media’s series chronicling Americans’ connection to the land. Explore more My Farm Roots stories or share your own.
