Janie’s hosts ISU organics students

ASHKUM, Ill. — An Illinois State University organics class toured a farm and milling facility to see up close the field-to-bag process.

Dave Kopsell’s class visited Janie’s Mill and Janie’s Farm on Oct. 17 as part of the curriculum that includes showing the diversity in organic production. The farm and milling operation is owned by Harold Wilken and his son, Ross.

Janie’s Farm raises organic certified food-grade grains that will expand to 4,000 acres next year. The mill, packaging and retail facility is in nearby Ashkum.

Corn, soybeans, wheat, rye, oats, buckwheat and other grains are grown on the farm, and those grains move on to the milling process.

“We recently profiled one of my former students who’s growing on about three-quarters of an acre just north of Normal and marketing through a cooperative. We’ll visit Marty Travis next week by Fairbury, and today we’re visiting a farmer who does 4,000 acres,” said Kopsell, horticulture professor in ISU’s Agriculture Department.

“The whole thing is the way of farming, the approach to the health of the soils and then also the creativity you can get into with marketing your products. A tour like we’re on here brings all of that together.”

Organics Class

The class, which Kopsell started about seven years ago, typically has an enrollment of 12 to 15 students each semester.

“Because it has a laboratory component, we kind of cap it at about 15 to 20. It’s pretty popular not only with the horticulture students, but also with the crop and soil science students and ag business students,” he said.

“That was sort of the other impetus about creating a class that was attractive to a lot of our majors in the Agriculture Department.”

Both undergraduate and graduate students are enrolled in the class.

“With everything that goes into organic farming with all the knowledge you need, it works out well as what we would call a capstone class for the undergraduates, but also a class that would be rigorous enough for graduate students to be involved in,” Kopsell said.

Tour Guide

Harold Wilken said the farm and milling facility hosts numerous tours throughout the year.

“We do two a month that are scheduled, but anybody can sign up and come on their own tour. We have a lot of people from the Chicago Bread Bakers Guild, Slow Food Chicago. We also host potential customers. We’re an open book. I want people to see what we’re doing and they can judge then what we’re doing,” he said.

“I believe in transparency and I want people to feel like they can be a part of what we’re doing. Our new customers that have just tried us for the first time will come down and spend an afternoon or a couple of hours here on a lot of Mondays because that’s the day when bakers take off.”

Over the past several years, universities and community colleges have started offering organic crop production classes.

Wilken began working with the University of Illinois’ small grains breeders in 2015 looking at various cultivars in organic production.

“We started working with Fred Kolb in 2015. Fred retired and now we work with Jessica Rutkoski and Juan Arbelaez. We do oats, wheat and rye projects when them. They bring out their cultivars for us to try in organic production,” he said.

“The U of I now has its own organic farm. So, it’s no longer a fad. It’s an accepted way of farming, and the universities have caught on.”

Spanning Careers

Kopsell sees these visits as very beneficial for students, regardless if they’re going toward a career in agriculture, business or other paths.

“The uniqueness of our horticulture and landscape management sequence in our department is that when students sign up for that sequence, they’re also required to take 18 credit hours in the College of Business,” he said.

“It started out years ago when I graduated from ISU as an ag business sequence, and I think you could see today with what we’ve learned from Harold that having not only a production side to your training, but a business side to your training is really, really valuable.”

During the tour, Wilken asked how many of the students live on farm with several raising their hands.

He followed up by asking how many will go back to the farm. Most did not raise their hands.

Kopsell told AgriNews that regardless of whether a student will end up back on the family farm or not, “I know at some point in all of their careers organics is going to touch them.”

“Whether they’re a consultant or at a marketing firm or whether they get into finance, organics is growing in such a way that I think when I created this course I wanted to make sure they could speak the language of organics when they graduated and they understood what it meant to be,” he said.

“I think that really makes them marketable when they get out into the workforce.”

Students’ Views

Brady Johnson, a student in ISU’s agriscience master’s program, grew up on his family’s farm in Minnesota where his dad is a conventional producer.

Johnson enrolled in the organics class because of his interest in the topic.

“I knew there’s a lot of misconceptions about organics and I just wanted to learn more and learn more about our health system and how some of the food we eat isn’t necessarily the best for us. I wanted to learn more about how organics are grown,” he said.

Johnson was asked what he hopes to see going forward in the food system.

“I’d like to see better representation for organics, more organics in stores. You walk into a store and you see the conventional grown apples first and you don’t see organic apples right away. I just feel like if we walk into a grocery store and see organics you’re more likely to buy those right away. Just making it easier for people,” he said.

“Organics are also a little bit more pricey, but I think if people understand the benefits of eating organic food they would tend to buy the more expensive option.”

Johnson enjoyed the farm and mill tour.

“I want to see more from him. I hope that someday he can expand his mill. I know I’m going to buy all of my flour and products through him from now on. It’s really cool to see a peek behind the door. I’ve never been to a flour mill before and it’s really cool to see how they operate. They’re normal people, too. It’s not like they’re a big corporation,” he said. “It’s normal people doing good things for the community.”

Kathryn Stahl of Normal, a senior horticulture student who also works as ISU’s Horticulture Center, said Wilken has a lot of opportunities going forward with his farm and milling operation.

“There’s a lot of things that he could do, especially like storefront-wise. I really like the way that he said he doesn’t really have a ‘no’ person anymore. He’s open to branching out and changing things and doing what he wants to keep afloat and have new ideas,” Stahl said.

“I thought that was really refreshing to hear, especially from an older farmer, because I feel like you don’t hear that a lot.”

Stahl is not a farmer, but looks toward taking the concepts of organic farming to organic growing in general.

“So, just trying to take these concepts on that broader scale and applying them to my gardening. I want to do more like floriculture and ornamental production,” she said.

“Of course, seeing this from food scale to ornamental production is very different, but taking those concepts and learning how good it is for the environment. That’s what I’m mainly going to be taking out of this class.”

In looking ahead, Stahl would like to see organic farms reach out to more shops in cities.

“In Bloomington, we have a couple different bakeries and stuff like that. I would think it would be fun if some organic growers like this could sell to their products and our local businesses could support our local growers. That would be really nice,” she said.

Sophia Reavley, of Havana, is a second-year master’s student in the agriscience program studying under Kopsell.

She grew up in town where the family had a small garden and became interested in agriculture when she join FFA in high school.

“I work for the ISU Biology Department and a lot of the plants that I grow in my greenhouse aren’t technically organic, but we don’t use any pesticides, we don’t use any fertilizers. So, we have a lot of similar concepts,” she said.

“Since I’m studying with Dr. Kopsell for my master’s, I’m trying to take as many of his classes as I can just to learn as much from him because he has so much knowledge. That’s what led me to the organics class.”

The Janie’s tour opened her eyes as to how organics can be grown in such a large farm operation and all of the processing that’s involved.

“I also didn’t realize what specialty markets he went into, things like the soybeans going to tofu was something I didn’t consider until he was talking about it today,” Reavley said.

“I would hope that more organic practices made their way into conventional farms. Not that every conventional farm became organic, because I don’t think that’s sustainable as a whole, either. I don’t think we can feed the population with those models.

“But a lot of the things that organic farmers do either for soil purposes, but also sell to consumer-wise, if we could implement just a little bit of that, so that when we do have some of those big food system shutdowns like during COVID, it’s less of, ‘Oh, no, what do we do,’ and more of ‘I can just put more things towards this other outlet that already works for me.’ So, it’s less of a shock when things like COVID happen or any other major environmental disaster happens.

“A little bit more kind of taking out the middle man in some cases. If more farmers could instead of selling to the one person they always sell to, kind of diversify who they’re selling to in those markets, I think that could help out in the long run.”

Brendan Fandl, of Orland Park, is a junior majoring in horticulture.

“I’m not really too sure what I want to do right now, and I think organics seemed really interesting and a good way of broadening my horizon to see what the possibilities are,” he said.

Being from the Chicago suburbs, agriculture is new to Fandl.

“I just started getting into ag when I got here at ISU. I’ve never seen a lot of this before,” he said.

Looking ahead to what he’d like to see in the food supply system, Fandl spoke of the importance of sustainable production.

“Sustainability is an important thing because a lot of my classes have been talking about how the population is growing, but the amount of land we have available for food production isn’t,” he said.

“So, I think it’s really important to take care of that land so we can continue using it in the future.”