Foggy River Farm makes it work

A great story (by, ahem, a wonderful local writer) in Sunday’s edition of The (Santa Rosa) Press-Democrat highlighted a trend of new farmers in the area: “Agri-curious” twenty- and thirty-somethings who have turned to farming to help improve the way food is grown and to make their respective communities more self-sustaining.

One of the farmers in the piece: Emmett Hopkins, who runs Foggy River Farm in Healdsburg.

Hopkins and his wife, Lynda, sell produce at farmers’ markets around the county. They also run a small-but-healthy Community Supported Agriculture program, through which they sell fresh fruits and veggies to certain customers every week.

Foggy River isn’t big—Hopkins and his wife currently are farming about three acres of vegetables and one acre of pasture for animals. All told, the land has been in Hopkins’ family for three generations: his grandparents farmed prunes and pears and his parents farmed grapes before he took over about last decade.

Still, the farming is hard work.

“Although I grew up here, the type of farming that we’re doing was actually pretty new to us when we started,” Hopkins wrote in a recent email. “As a kid I was around vineyard a lot, but never vegetable farms.”

Average days begin at 6 a.m. After a morning cup of coffee, the duo spends 30 minutes on animal chores such as letting the chickens out, feeding and milking the goats and doing a general check-up on everyone’s health. Next it’s on to vegetable chores, which range from weeding and thinning seedlings to rotating crops in and out of the greenhouse.

Some days, however, are busier than others. On Tuesday and Friday evenings, Hopkins harvests produce, which takes a couple of hours with the help of a small crew.

Saturdays are spent at the Healdsburg farmers’ market, and Wednesdays are spent washing and sorting vegetables for the big CSA pick-up, which takes place on the farm on Wednesday afternoon.

While Foggy River Farm isn’t raking in big bucks, Hopkins and his wife have managed to find a strategy that works, and they plan to stick with it.

“We’re in this for the long-term,” he says. “I believe that some years down the road, as fuel costs rise, more and more of our food will need to come from very nearby, so the more we can help to develop farming resources in Sonoma County the more self-sufficient the region will be in the future.”