Gainsville, Florida
Rose Koenig grew up in the Garden State back when an expansive patchwork of market gardens made New Jersey’s moniker ring true. Her dad and grandfather before him raised vegetables and layer hens, and trucked the goods into farmers’ markets, small grocery stores and restaurants in town and New York City. Now the family farm is gone, sold to housing developers when her parents retired and moved to North Carolina.
A thousand miles south, however, Rose is keeping the family tradition alive on 17 acres of land in the urban fringe of north central Florida. All but the endless packing of eggs, Rose loved farm life as a kid and knew she wanted to be a farmer from the beginning. She likes raising her own children on the land and tries to keep their noses further from the grindstone of daily chores than her own was as a child. Right away, she nixed the idea of running poultry outfit like her parents had, focusing instead solely on organic veggies.
“In order to have a somewhat real life, i.e. going on vacation, you can’t have animals. My childhood was full of one-day getaways and even that was very rare,” she said. Indeed, Rose, her husband and their kids take time off in the hot months between the prime spring and fall growing seasons to visit the Carolina grandparents.
A doctorate in plant pathology with a master’s degree in international agriculture development under her belt, Rose runs Rosie’s Organic Farm. She markets her produce through a 91-member Community Supported Agriculture program, at three Gainesville Farmers’ Markets, a regional wholesaler and an upscale restaurant. Her husband works off the farm full time as a hydrologist, lending a hand in vegetable production on the weekends, and her two young children help out at the farmers market.
Rose’s diversified vegetable and cut flower operation is based on years of observing what crops both sell and grow well in her sandy soils. She plants strawberries for the CSA because the members demand a sweet treat in their boxes; she plants flowers for the farmers’ market because bouquets are the most lucrative product.
Rather than being bound to her farm by livestock, Rose’s commitment is to her dearly cultivated customer base. Rain or shine, exhausted or well-rested, Rose never misses a day at the farmers’ market as long as she has product to take, which, barring a frost kill, is most of the year. She takes pride that her CSA deliveries are as reliable as the mail. The CSA members, a group of people paid up front each year for weekly produce deliveries are themselves, in turn, deeply committed to the success of Rosie’s farm.
“A CSA by nature is a different kind of marketing system,” she explains. “If you’ve done it long enough to retain customers, those customers… become part of your life.”
When Rose started the CSA in 1996, it was because the residents in her college town pleaded for it. Over the years, she developed a matching program through which paying members can buy a half subscription for a needy family and Rose will contribute the other half. The CSA supplies about a half dozen low-income families in the community with fresh fruits and vegetables.
For many reasons, the CSA has become not just a living for Rose, but a civic responsibility she’s not willing to abandon–not even if she takes a full time job as an extension specialist and researcher in sustainable/organic agriculture for University of Florida’s Horticultural Sciences Department. Currently she serves as a volunteer Co-Director of University of Florida’s Center for Organic Agriculture.
With her multiple degrees, lifelong experience in agriculture and enduring passion for expanding the reaches of organic farming, Rose has more than produce to offer the world. She helped establish the center because she believes society should have an ongoing commitment to research in sustainable agriculture. Now that the university is looking for a person to specialize in Sustainable and Organic Agriculture, Rose wants to be sure the opportunity to make a difference falls into competent hands. It would mean taking her own out of the soil for a spell.
“Do I have a bigger impact as a producer doing what I’ve been doing,” Rose asks herself, “or would working for a larger institution perhaps allow me to do even more on a larger scale?”
Rose sees herself doing both. She hopes to find the right person to manage her farm while she excuses herself to work on bigger picture goals. She’s already been doing that on the side for awhile.
Besides writing various sustainable agriculture grants, she serves on board of the national Scientific Congress on Organic Agriculture Research, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Standards. Informally, she mentors aspiring farmers who call her at random seeking advice on starting an organic operation.
“The more farms we can get to transition to sustainable practices, the greater a net benefit to society,” Rose says, explaining her motivating philosophy. Some will transition because they believe in protecting natural resources while others will switch to organic for economic reasons. In either case, someone must lead the way.