Wilson Organic Farm

Consumers increasingly want to know more about how their food is grown - and this excites us. We love talking about food and sharing our farming story. During the 1980's farm crises, Keith saw that if we wanted to keep farming, we needed to do it differently. As is often the case, being different has had it's challenges, but mostly, it has been a life-altering event for the better.

In 1996, our farm became one of the first in the nation to become organically certified, giving up synthetic chemicals and assuring that our herd had access to outdoors and fresh grass. This transition was difficult and Keith likes to tell the story of how he once ordered a dump truck of garlic to feed to the cows and boost their immune system. At that time, organic was novel and new, but as so often happens, today, the organic standard is being challenged by other, newer and higher standards.  

We believe that challenge is good. We stand strongly by organic standards as originally intended, and we continually pushed ourselves and the Organic Valley Cooperative (which Keith is a board member on) to farm better. Some of our practices that push the boundaries of organic farming and that we are particularly proud of include:

• Cover Cropping and Regenerative Practices - Keith began cover cropping before transitioning to organic production in the early 90s and today pioneers on farm techniques for no-till and reduced tillage organic cropping systems. Diversification and perennialization are two key principals of our cropping system that we hope to continue pushing the boundaries of in the years ahead. 

• Intensive or Adaptive Grazing - A rotational grazer since the late 80s, the farm transitioned to Adaptive Managed Grazing (AMG) in 2018 which has been amazing to see the explosion of plant and habitat diversity interacting with higher yielding pastures. 

• Carbon Accounting - In 2020, Chris began work with Nori, a carbon offset exchange, to rigorously analyze the farm's carbon footprint. The farm is selling it's first credits today and will soon be issued Nori Offset Tokens on the Ethereum block chain to be the first ever publicly transparent ledger for carbon offsets. 

• Animal Welfare Standards - The health and well-being of our animals has always been a top priority and is a foundation of our success as a dairy farm. With Organic Valley's strong standards, we incorporate National Dairy Farmers Assuring Responsible Management (FARM) practices into our operation. For transparency, we're inspected annually through Validus inspection services meeting their rigorous oversight. Validus is part of Where Food Comes From, a social responsibility company focused on integrity and transparency in our food system.

• Renewable Energy - In 2017, the farm invested in approximately 40 kw of solar power to offset approximately 25% of the farm's overall usage. We have three arrays that you can check out anytime one, two, & three.  Our goal is by 2025 to incorporate solar production into our adaptive grazing pastures in order to fully offset the farm's electricity use with renewable power. We're partnering with Organic Valley to study this method with the hope of modeling it for many other grazing farms.