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Liz Dwyer

@dancingtheland

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Farmer of a diversified, small-scale, family farm in Central Minnesota organically raising beautiful produce, fancy flowers, and heritage meats.

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by @dancingtheland

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2 months ago

I think a lot about what it is we do here at Dancing the Land Farm, and why. I think about the good, necessary, and beautiful work of growing food for my community, how physical it is, and how close to the margin we live. I think about how many people in my community are hungry. And I think about how many can afford the food we grow, despite all we do to increase access. I think about how hard we work for every bite of food we grow, and I think about how much is wasted--mostly for just not being pretty enough for retail. And I think about all the other little farms around us, how we all struggle, some of us fold every year, and how we can't afford to lose any more small farms--and how to support new farmers? I think about how each season we face the certainty that people need food, and the uncertainty of the climate crisis, of energy costs, and our lack of safety nets, despite the essential nature of what we do. And, because of the brevity of our northern growing season, I think about the vulnerability intrinsic to our local and regional food systems that depend on shipping and stable weather patterns.

We're hatching a plan to address all of that: to feed people who are hungry, to offer meaningful support for small farms, and to bring real resiliency to food systems--at least for our local community. But, with any luck, we'll create a model that could be repeatable in any area with a handful of small farms.

We're just waiting to hear back about the grant funding to do it... Impatiently.

It's really a pretty simple idea: a commercial preservation kitchen with some key pieces of equipment (a flash freezer, canning equipment, big dehydrators, a freeze drier, packaging and labeling equipment), and a food truck that would act as a soup kitchen on wheels as well as switch-hit into event work. Then we would have local produce available year-round at our farm store and at all the grocery stores and restaurants we supply. We would offer meaningful, reliable revenue for other local, regenerative farms by buying ingredients that would otherwise be wasted and making them into good, shelf-stable food. And, we could just feed the most vulnerable among us, for free. by @dancingtheland

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5 days ago

I just need to post a record of the week we harvested over 300 pounds of peppers! 🌶️🫑🌶️🫑🌶️🫑🤩

And they're still coming! by @dancingtheland

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16 days ago

Oh beautiful corn. I love this plant. This is a very old and very special variety that is precious to me. However, it's more accurate to say they are precious to me, because there are about six different varieties here that I've grown for years and years that all seem to be represented, despite the fact that I only planted one cob.

Well, actually, I planted about 15 different cobs, all in different flats, hoping some of my seed was still viable after quite a few seasons where I either didn't get my corn planted in time or they didn't survive or someone ate them or early frost took them or drought or floods.

Only one red cob sprouted this season, out of all those.

Goodness, I was so happy to see their beautiful sprouts reaching up out of the soil like they hadn't been waiting for a decade to see the sun.

I was sad to think I might've lost all the other varieties I keep, but I was so happy to see that red chinstripe!

I planted them in our high tunnel with the tomatoes thinking I might be able to protect them a little better there. Sure enough, though, the ground squirrels knew just how precious these seeds are. But they enough for me.

When I started opening the husks, and saw not just that beautiful red chinstripe shining there, but also the blue and white, the dark blue, the dark red, the white concho, and the blue robin's egg, and a whole bunch of mixes between them all, all beaming and bright, my heart about broke for joy and gratitude. Such a wild gift.

Corn is magic. Corn is beauty. Corn is belonging.

And those silks! I've heard authors use the phrase "cornsilk hair" and I always thought they were talking about blond people. This corn is for us proud redheaded mutts who carry the stories of many continents in our bones. One of the cobs even had curly silk. I braided up a few of the different colors I found today as we were bringing them all home, because they were so beautiful. Then I stuffed them in my bandana with my real rattail because for all that I can drop to my knees and weep for things like this, I'm also very silly--and it's likely our senses of humor and holiness that keep the stars burning through the night, and the spark warm in the soil. by @dancingtheland

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24 days ago

Hey, just because I don’t think I’ve ever actually said this before: I believe this work of farming IS revolutionary activism. And I believe all small, regenerative farmers doing the work to feed our local communities and tend to soil and water are activists, closing loops that industry and greed broke. Yes, it is capitalism, but none of us make enough money to believe that’s why we're here working this hard for the future we dream of (but I wish it were a more viable way to make a living). It’s an immense amount of care, it’s awe and wonder, it’s love–for our communities; for our Places; for the immense, intricate, and irreplaceable Earth; for all the wild ones; the plants and animals we tend; for all our ancestors; and the future to whom we dedicate our decisions now. It is in their name we feed the soil instead of stripmine it. It is for them we return the carbon once lost to the sky and protect the waters that give us all life.

Our little farm feeds hundreds of people in our community with the most beautiful, flavorful, and vital organic produce we can coax from these soils. Soils that, fourteen years ago, when we first started Dancing the Land, were more depleted and bereft of life than any place I’ve ever seen. No worms, no fireflies, no organic matter, nor bacteria to break it down. We did not cause the damage that we encountered when we started. But, because of love, we chose to marry our fates to this Place and repair the damage. And now, our soils have capacity again to give life to this side of the horizon. Abundant life. Beautiful life.

Small farmers are repositories of skill and knowledge and Stories that are essential for ALL of us to meet our most essential needs, to bring needed resilience to meet the uncertainties of the climate crisis, and to offer a map to the living magic at the heart of what we do–where belonging roots. We stand at the edge of the wild and human worlds and try our damndest to make peace there.

We spend our time and our bodies in labor for the service of life–all Life. Not just life that looks like us, or has the cash, or an easy story. Not just human life. Not just “nature” without humans. All Life. All of us. Together. by @dancingtheland

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2 months ago

This is just a flower appreciation post. My tiny-to-me flower patch is a place that keeps calling me back into my body. These days can be so very full of bad and worse news, so many things are on fire, there is so much hurt and harm that needs healing, and heartbreaks that need grieving but grieving needs time and more and more keep coming, and money is hard, and every day demands so much, and we're all in it up to our eyeballs and it can feel so desperate and overwhelming. But I come out here and walk these rows and the noise stops, and my body calms, and then the solutions and strategies show up and hope returns. Not the kind of hope that keeps me showing up shiny to the grindstone everyday just to fall into bed dull and worn, but the kind that makes underdogs win. The kind that brings rain when the forecast is all dry heat for weeks. The kind that reminds you of who you are at the last minute and only then does a deep, old strength rise up inside you. The kind that is maybe more luck and longshot than reason, but if you don't try it'll never happen, and sometimes when you shoot for the moon, you make it.

It's so easy to say a little flower garden is silly and superficial while so much pain is everywhere we look. But we all need rest, we need places to let our armor down, to digest, reflect, and consolidate before we can respond with any kind of sense.

We all need moments to remember who we are and why it matters that we stay in the fight, or we'll surely lose ourselves, and the fight.

All those folks saying we're not mad enough and then listing yet another atrocity--no, we're plenty mad, but we can't get soft enough. We're too full. We're not able to be quiet enough to hear the wisdom we need to meet the moment, because wisdom isn't going to yell like anxiety does to demand our attention. We're not calm enough to let the solutions emerge from that place good ideas come from. We're not grounded enough to be strategic, and clever.

But here, I can be. Here it happens. My bare feet on the pathways, my shoulders remembering every staple in the landscape fabric, every seed sown, and every plug planted now blooming. And I wanted to share that with all of you. by @dancingtheland

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2 months ago

She'd made a little leaf pad for him to sit on because weeks ago I explained that the salts on our hands can burn their porous skin. But he was so tiny and sweet she just had to show him to me, so she had found a solution in that little burdock leaf. She'd run over with her hands curled around a hollow space between her palms. When she opened them, he was sitting there right in the middle of the leaf like a miniature statue of a toad. He leapt right as I tried to snap the photo. by @dancingtheland

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2 months ago

Oh hi! It's been a full but very sweet start to the growing season here at Dancing the Land. We just opened our CSA this week and our farm store is now open to the public!

So🌿🌱🍃 many🍀🥬🥦GREENS!
But warm-season things are just around the corner! I've never seen our high tunnel look so dang good! 🍅 🥒 🌶️

I gotta say, if any of my farmer friends are debating whether or not taking time off is worth it or possible: DO IT. If you feel like you need it, just do it. I wish I could accurately describe the contrast between farming through exhaustion year after year vs. starting a season without the spectre of burnout still rooted in from the season prior, and the one before that. It's wildly different.

There's space in my thoughts to access the fullness of my experience and wisdom. There's foresight and energy to tend to things before they're on fire (metaphorically, mostly). There's room to rethink patterns and systems that felt immovable. There's something crucial in the re-choosing. Physical, emotional, and familial boundaries feel stronger and like we're so much better at not mining the future for energy to get through the day.

Did money get scary-tight during our sabbatical? Yes. But it was still worth it--not enough space here to talk about it well.

We're happier. We're physically and mentally healthier. And it's so different and so good to be back at it, by choice.

I've lived by my own terms for so long now it's hard to imagine otherwise, however, now that we took necessary time to tend what was raw and ragged, I can see that when I was exhausted and running and grieving (still grieving, will always be, not a problem to fix 💚) and trying to do everything regardless, I wasn't actually living. I was just caught in endless loops of reaction and collapse carried forward by crisis. I had to stop, digest, and become. I had to become the story I'd lived. Not just remember it, not just carry it, but become the person my life determined me to be.

Because when we become, we don't have to laboriously carry it all around any more. We just are. All those stories alive in me, giving the spark to my motion, my choices, touching the world around me. by @dancingtheland

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3 months ago

✨✨Proud to say this is the beauty we see when we open our deliveries- thank you to @dancingtheland for promising freshness & quality for our communities.
#nofilter #forkyeah #fieldandfork taken in The House Food and Tap by @dancingtheland

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3 months ago

by @dancingtheland

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4 months ago

There was a Redwing at the feeder in the front garden today, several maybe. They came in close, while I was in the yard, and made a ruckus. Not their usual trill, though that, too, but mostly a high pitched keening--at once joyful and grieving.

The day was grey, but it didn't matter because right now we live by the light of this glorious crabapple tree--the one my father gave to my mother as an anniversary gift before I was born. She is incandescent. She soaks the air in softness and shines in the windows like any celestial body. The Rains have come, thank goodness, and they've been soft, gentle. They soak the earth but do not shred the petals. So I still had light to see the Redwings. They woke early, and were the last to leave the feeders at sundown. Calling, calling, flitting from flower-laden branches to the feeder and back again, tossing seeds to the chickens below and laughing, calling, calling.

A year ago today, the Rains came and they stayed for three days and held us as my womb bore soil. Such a holy thing. Such a bright, brief, unbearable, beautiful thing.

As we get older the anniversaries pile up, don't they? The year becomes littered with notations: comings, goings, and coming-goings. I suppose I don't really mind it, not that it's a worthwhile thing to form an opinion about inevitables, but nonetheless--it feels like a room with pictures on the walls. Warm. Home.

Earlier, I was singing to the seedings and slipping shells off of sunflower and squash sprouts, when I looked up and saw an elm tree on the north side of the greenhouse, pressing up against the plastic layers, coming in and out of focus. A self-portrait of my inner world today. Lulu's been sick and we've been busy with the spring on the farm. Sometimes we really have to take time to let our hearts speak. Some things speak softly, and slowly. And sometimes we haven't got the time, except now, late at night when we should be sleeping.

By her due date, Eartha Redwing would have been about seven months old today.

I can hardly imagine.

I can hardly not imagine. by @dancingtheland

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4 months ago

There's been a wild plum thicket along our driveway my whole life, and their scent when they bloom in the early spring is among my very favorites--along with my mom's old buffalo currant, and then, just a little later, lilacs. It roots me into time like any holiday (holy day)--like the return of the redwings and cranes in March, like first night I sleep with the windows open, like the first day we plant seeds in the greenhouse. This smell says it's time to plant hardy things outside. The smell sounds like peepers in the marsh and courting, nest-building songbirds. This smell is the bright, tender green of new leaves. The scent wafts on soft breezes, especially in the evening.

The thicket had been getting old. The trees were gnarled and thinning out, and grapevines were taking over. I was watching my old friends slowly live their lives to the end. But then, a couple years ago, in the thick of one tragedy or another, our lawnmower broke. And because of said tragedy or another, fixing it was not a priority. I think the mower was broken for two years maybe (honestly it still is), before we got one at a garage sale? And in that time, while the hungry jaws of conformity lay dismantled, a whole new generation of young plums grew up in the lee of my dear thicket!

A few old ones are still there, but these ones are flowering in the grandeur of their first big bloom! They are glorious! by @dancingtheland

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5 months ago