Currently in their 26th season of farming together, Bruce Hennessey and Beth Whiting are still recalibrating Maple Wind Farm’s business model. Their commitment to their mission has remained steadfast – to deliver nutrient-dense food to their community by regenerating soil and water resources – but achieving this goal has been a constant challenge to change systems for efficiency and profitability. They discussed their journey in an interview with the Northeast Pasture Consortium.
The pair purchased a house in Huntington, VT, about 20 miles southwest of Burlington, in 1998. A year later, they purchased the defunct dairy farm at the end of their road with views of the Green Mountains. They dabbled in livestock, raising broilers, sheep and Devon x Angus beef, and boarding horses and agritourism. Within a few years, they were looking for hayfields to lease.
The property is gorgeous, Whiting said, but “the farm was not appropriate for chicken tractors or haying.”
In 2005, they started leasing the Andrews Farm in Richmond, seven miles north. The farm has over 30 acres of bottomland pastures next to the Winooski River.
“Then it felt like we could get a farm manager because we were now in multiple locations. We were expanding our beef herd, which was our centerpiece operation at that time, but then we also wanted to be more diversified. We increased our production of broilers and layer hens, added pigs and sheep and a little bit of maple production,” said Hennessey.
One farm manager came to them with a background in vegetable production, and they decided to add vegetables to the enterprise, eventually leasing another farm in nearby Bolton. The pace was hectic; farming between three properties had many challenges. Days spent delivering to their wholesale accounts, trailering livestock between pastures, growing vegetables for a wholesale market and CSA, grazing and haying across many properties and running a farm crew with upwards of 20 employees (mostly seasonal) took a toll.
In 2013, they purchased the Andrews Farm, but months later a fire destroyed the 8,000- square-foot barn – the heart of their poultry processing and vegetable storage and distribution. Their recently purchased USDA-certified poultry processing facility, constructed in a shipping container, was not damaged, however. They still use this facility for poultry processing today.
“We had some soul searching to do, and we almost quit,” Whiting said.
They made the decision to rebuild, borrowing a significant sum of money and obligating them to increase their revenues. While it had been their plan to slowly increase poultry sales, they jumped from 1,000 broilers to 20,000 within a few years.
“In 2012, our gross revenue was in the $250,000 range to over a million dollars in three years,” Hennessey said.
In addition to processing their own poultry, Maple Wind provides custom poultry processing services to about 15 New England farms, enabling them to sell USDA-inspected products; 15,000 custom birds are scheduled for 2024.
During this period of intense growth and diversification, Hennessey and Whiting, with prior careers in outdoor experiential learning, felt Maple Wind was missing some of the culture they had tried so hard to cultivate in their outdoor recreation pursuits. Their crews – vegetable, haying, poultry processing, etc. – were operating in silos with little interaction. They made the choice to begin training people across the breadth of their business. Crew members get to learn all aspects of the farm both from the production side and processing side and often take part in the customer-facing aspects of agritourism and farmers markets.
Beth Whiting and Bruce Hennessey use on-farm experiences to better connect with their customers. Photo courtesy of Bruce Hennessey/Beth Whiting
Around the same time, Hennessey and Whiting invested in a class with Ranching for Profit. The class pushed them to develop a vision and plan, which they’d never had before.
“We had this broad feeling about how we wanted to operate, but we never had a concrete mission and vision. When we finally developed a vision and a roadmap for getting there, that’s when we really started to say ‘Okay, we’ve got concrete goals and we have to remove the things that are distractions to those goals,’” Hennessey said.
While the vegetables were profitable, they were a distraction and contrary to their mission of building soil through the managed grazing of multiple species across the landscape. The decision to eliminate sheep from the operation and purchase all of their calves and piglets rather than birthing on the farm were a direct result of their learning at Ranching for Profit. They can now concretely say “we are a diversified pasture-based livestock operation. We have the 100% grass-fed and finished beef, pastured pork, turkey, chickens, layer hens and the poultry processing facility,” Whiting said.
One of their current goals is to gain greater value from the products they’re raising, and this is accomplished by direct marketing as much of their product as they are able through farmers markets, a farm store and by shipping meat directly, which they added in 2022. These efforts were bolstered in 2021 by a $250,000 USDA Rural Development Value-Added Producer Grant.
On any given day, Whiting, Hennessey and their crew can be found grilling their hamburgers and hot dogs at the Burlington Farmers Market, packing orders for an online customer, delivering orders directly to peoples’ homes or greeting locals at their farm store.
Twice a month on Fridays during the growing season, they offer on-farm experiences – burgers and bluegrass nights and a fried chicken dinner/pasture walk evenings. It’s in part these face-to-face relationships that help keep the farm going as they close in on three decades of farming.
It’s not just the relationships though. It’s also about seeing soil organic matter grow from 1% to 3% and forage quantities growing from 1 ton/acre to 3.5 tons/acre. And it’s the challenge to be economically viable and provide a living wage to their employees that keeps driving them to make changes.
They recently launched Pasture Pet, offering nutrient-dense pet treats produced exclusively from animals raised on the farm. Products include chicken and turkey jerky, chicken feet and dehydrated organs. They have just begun offering these products to other retail locations in the area and are looking to expand regionally. Pasture Pet products can be shipped anywhere in the U.S. through the Pasture Pet website.
Hennessey and Whiting believe that the only way they can be competitive as a small farm without compromising their ideals – such as paying a living wage and improving the soil and ecosystem of their small part of Vermont – is through marketing innovations and direct connection with their customers.
Whiting said, “It’s not easy, but it’s rewarding. We realize, too, that honestly when you look at the numbers without our overhead costs that’s the only way that we’re going to be a viable business. We are very successful in so many ways. You can define success from your heart or monetarily. We love what we do, but we also have to think of the future and pay all the bills and pay our hard-working folks good wages. Direct-to-consumer prices are going to allow us to provide for our community in that way.”
by Sonja Heyck-Merlin
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