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Joe Wanda's Journey, In His Own Words
The better-for-people, better-for-the-planet farming practices embodied in the term "regenerative agriculture" have gained traction in recent years. But we still have a long way to go in moving our food system from the dominant paradigm of conventional agriculture.
If this movement is going to gain further momentum, it is going to need more young farmers like Joe Wanda, who recognized that there is a growing consumer demand for locally and sustainably produced food and went all in with the growing Wanda Farms business that he runs with his wife Hannah.
I visited the Wandas with friends Dan Arnett and Grant Kessler of the Chicago Market co-op grocery project recently, and was inspired as we observed cattle and chickens — a lot of chickens — on pasture. (I also learned that if you walk among chickens, they will gather around you and peck at your shoes.)
When Joe was a child, his parents bought what he describes as a hobby farm in the small north-central Illinois city of Harvard. One of six children, Joe was the only one who took to farming.
Harvard is very dairy-centric — it is located just a couple of miles from Wisconsin, aka America's Dairyland — and Joe, after receiving a degree in Dairy Science at University of Wisconsin River Falls in 2013, worked for four years at a large dairy farm in that state.
While Joe said he has respect for the farmers for whom he worked, he "just came to recognize that it was a broken system." He left that farm; took a day job working for Master's Touch Interior Specialists, his family's business that reconditions car interiors; and he and Hannah bought their 77-acre farm in Harvard, near his parents' 27 acres.
They originally saw themselves as homesteaders, producing food for their own consumption. But the huge spike in demand for local food during the COVID pandemic came as an epiphany that "we’ve got to do this for the community, we have to keep growing, because people want this and they need it."
The following is Joe's journey, in his own words. Wanda Farm also asked me to share that they are staging a contest that will provide the winner with $160 worth of grass-fed meats with free delivery. Click the button below for the simple form to enter, but do it soon: Registration closes end of day this Sunday (June 30).
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My dad made it possible, he bought 27 acres. After a few years on the property, they started putting in some infrastructure, and then my mom bought a milking cow, and then it turned into a couple of pigs, a steer, and then my sister got a horse. It just turned into a hobby farm. We had everything. And so that was my start.
And I came from a family of six kids... I had three older ones. And the two older ones are like city slickers, they saw too much of the city. I was the only one to fall in love with the farm lifestyle. And so I was up every morning at 5:30, 6 a.m. to go out with my mom to help her and milk the cow and do all the chores. And so it was pretty early on that I just had this burning desire and passion for agriculture.
And when I was a teenager, I still wanted to do something in farming. And so I got a job at the local dairy farm about five miles from here, and milked cows for them every day when I was in high school, and still enjoyed the lifestyle working on a farm. And so I went off, got my degree in Dairy Science at the University of Wisconsin River Falls and started learning more about agriculture. And I still felt like a newbie to all of it because my parents were just city slickers trying to understand what agriculture and grazing animals is all about. But I still got my feet wet a little bit.
My mom came from more of a local food, organic-type mindset. That's why she wanted to farm, so she had that control, and she knew what she was doing.
When I went to college, all reality, they were teaching me industrial agriculture. And, you know, as a young adult, I didn't know, I was naive. It was good to get exposed to all of it and learn. And so when I graduated, employment opportunities out there with the dairy degree was to work on these large dairies in Wisconsin. And so I worked on a 1,400-cow dairy in Wisconsin for about four years. It was a great experience, I learned a lot, wonderful family that I worked for, and I highly respect them for who they are.
But the industry as a whole, I just came to recognizing that it was a broken system. And the way we were going about it did not sit well with me. And near the end of my employment there, I got exposed to Joel Salatin and so started watching some of his YouTube videos, and then I got some of those books. And it just kind of clicked in my mind. I'm like, What are we doing? Why are we putting all these animals inside this barn? No wonder why we got disease and they're fighting, and all of these problems. Because they’re not meant to be in here.
Just a lot of things started clicking and making sense to me. And I was realizing it was a big ship that would have to be turned around where I was at, and it was going to be quite a challenge to get everybody on board with that. And so we realized it just wasn't the right fit long-term. And we realized we really want to do something more in local food and producing food and regenerative farming practices.
Hannah and I had just purchased this farm about two years before that. We had originally just purchased it as a place to raise the family, have some acreage, and we just wanted to be in the country with our kids. And it made sense. My parents were next door. But then in 2018, we said, we got to start doing more with this regenerative farming and direct marketing, so we got into doing all of that.
At the time, we were like homesteaders wanting to produce enough for ourselves and then make a little bit of income, maybe to pay for the mortgage on the farm. And then 2020 happens, and we sold everything we had in, like, two weeks. And we realized, holy cow, people really want to know where their food comes from if the grocery store can’t provide them with food when you're in times of crisis.
It was a year of us just really like, okay, we weren't really planning on this. I was working an off-farm job. I was actually working in the family business, an auto business. And so we had really no intents to necessarily turn this into a full-time business at that time. And after a year of just like seeing the way it was going, we’ve got to do this for the community, we have to keep growing, because people want this and they need it.
If we can do this and make this mindset change in farming, and I can after having all this experience and education in industrial ag and I can make this change, hopefully I can inspire other local farmers in our community to make the same change. We can all produce food in regenerative farming practices.
So we got behind that mission and here we are now. We're proud. We're feeding like twice as many families every single year. So we're feeding, I think, almost 800 families right now, we figure. And I'm sure it's more than that, because now we're starting to go into in the wholesale, but just on our direct marketing side of our business. And so we set a goal a year ago that we would like to grow our farm to feed 10,000 families here, local Midwest. We're aiming for 2030. I don't know if it's possible, but we're going to try.
We've grown a lot. We have five full-time employees now and a few part-time people. And it's been awesome. It's fun as everybody's coming together. And the great part is everybody we've hired has pretty much been a customer or a friend of a customer. So it's been really cool as the community is all coming together to produce better quality food for the Chicagoland area.
Right now we operate on 77 acres here. My parents are just down the road on 27 acres. And exciting news, we went under contract [in early June] on 42 acres, and we just got the loan approval literally 40 minutes ago. And so July 1, we'll be closing on another 42 acres that will connect my parents 27 to our 77, almost 150 continuous acres. So yeah, so we're excited about that.
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