Press Archive
A pair of seriously organic farmers
Sunday, August 12, 2007
By Terri Finch Hamilton
The Grand Rapids Press
A big black rooster crows as Anja Mast offers a thick slab of chocolate cake so rich it's black.
"It's chocolate beet cake," she says cheerfully.
It's really chocolately. With a slight aftertaste of ... beets.
She dashes off to make a copy of the recipe. Anja being Anja, she assumes everybody wants a recipe for chocolate beet cake.
"Everybody loves beets," she says.
Right.
"No, really," she insists. "We sell a ton of beets."
Meet Anja Mast. Cheerleader for beets.
And meet her husband, Michael VanderBrug. He'd shake your hand, but his are covered with fish emulsion. Good fertilizer for the Brussels sprouts he just planted.
Mast and VanderBrug, married for nine years, are organic farmers. They farm 50 acres in an odd slice of Jenison tucked in a tidy neighborhood of 1950s houses. You have to check your map to make sure you're really on the right track to Trillium Haven Farm.
Organic farming is a hip, trendy thing to do these days, with everybody thinking green. But these two started for an old-fashioned reason.
They love the land. They call themselves "earthkeepers" and quote Job when they say "speak to the earth and it will teach you."
"If you stay in one place for a long time, you can care for it," says Mast, 39. "Our job is to connect people who don't have land to this place, so they can learn how to care for it.
"If you take care of things," she says, "you don't have to get new things."
They run a community supported agriculture (CSA) farm. That means you can buy a "share" of their harvest. This year, shareholders paid $415 to $430 to support running the farm. In return, the farm supplies each shareholder with a weekly supply of organic produce, grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers.
It's Tuesday, produce pick-up day, when the farm's members come to get the stuff they paid for in advance.
The chalkboard tells how much of each thing members can take this day: one bunch of scallions, a head of broccoli, 15 stems of kale, two eggplant. And much more. People leave with baskets and bags brimming.
"Harvested today," VanderBrug, 33, says, walking up in his knee-high rubber boots. The Swiss chard still is covered with water droplets from having the field dirt washed off.
Peaceful?
He can tell you what each variety is: Napoli carrots, Red Ace beets, Ping Tung Long Japanese eggplant.
Mast holds up the Bright Lights Swiss Chard that has amazing pink, orange and yellow stems and veins.
"People are growing this as an ornamental," she says. "It looks great with dahlias."
VanderBrug munches handfuls of peppery arugula the way some guys crunch potato chips. He washes it down with swigs of San Pellegrino water from the pretty green bottle.
He works as long as there's light, keeping three tractors in working order, supervising a group of paid interns who help him farm, racing constant planting deadlines that fuel his family's livelihood. Praying for rain.
People always are telling him how cool it must be to be a farmer, how peaceful.
He smiles.
"People think it's this bucolic existence," he says, but before you can ponder how many farmers use the word "bucolic," he adds, "but it's a lot of hard work."
He stares out over the field he just planted with Brussels sprouts.
"But I can pause and watch a blue heron fly over the field," he says. "I'm in the middle of nature all the time."
They talk about this place as if it's all they've ever known. But when they took it over seven years ago, they were ...
"Clueless," Anja says.
Neither ever had seen a broccoli plant. They were Calvin College graduates with plans to teach or go into psychology.
"It was sort of scary at first," VanderBrug says. He grins. "It's still sort of scary."
They're still working to make the place profitable, he says.
Their families knew each other when they were kids, but they reunited in 1998, right after Mast's first marriage ended. They were married a year later. They're business partners and best friends.
Mast lived all over the world before coming to Grand Rapids to attend Calvin. Her dad, Charles, was in the foreign service.
She was born in Curacao, an island in the Caribbean off the west coast of Venezuela. After that she lived in Iran, Turkey, Indonesia. Her childhood photos are of her at the Great Wall of China, the Egyptian pyramids.
VanderBrug grew up in Lexington, Mass., steeped in the history of Paul Revere. He lived near a nature preserve.
"I had about 14 aquariums in my bedroom," he says. "I was always catching turtles and snakes and frogs."
Each floundered at Calvin, not sure what they wanted to do.
She taught briefly at a charter school. He was working at Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services, trying to decide if he wanted to pursue a career in counseling or psychology.
A trip to Guatemala changed everything.
"It was so real," Mast says. "There was no television, no cell phones, no billboards, no skyscrapers. We thought, 'These people are so poor, and look how happy they are.'"
When they returned to the U.S., they visited a community supported agriculture farm outside Boston.
"There were all these young people harvesting vegetables and all these families picking up their produce," Mast says. "We stood in the middle of it, looked at each other and said, 'This is it.' It was a total 'aha' moment."
Meanwhile, VanderBrug's grandfather, Jake Nyenhuis, was trying to sell his farm in Jenison.
The flounderers had found their future. They spent a year reading up on how to run an organic farm.
Now, they have 250 members, a booming booth at the Fulton Street Farmers Market, an heirloom tomato festival that got so big they had to move it to Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park and a contract with a distributor to sell organic vegetable plants to garden centers throughout the Midwest. Trendy restaurants Marie Catrib's and Tuscan Express use their produce.
"You have to be open to all life's possibilities," Mast says. "I swore I wouldn't live in the U.S., and here I am in a 1950s house with white carpet in Jenison." She laughs.
Mast taught a class at Calvin College last January called "Earth Keeping," about food and sustainability and living in harmony with nature. She was teaching about her life.
"What we're trying to live is an integrated life, an intentional life," she says. "Trying to live a life where you're paying attention. To everything. To the seasons. To your breath."
"She inspires you to think about alternate ways of doing things," says Amy Sherman, a close friend of the couple and member of the farm. "Sometimes I have to say, 'Stop -- don't tell me any more! I'm not going to wear only clothes made from organic cotton.'"
Mast e-mails earth-saving tips to friends, and if she sees a great quote from George Bernard Shaw about life being "no brief candle," she'll copy it and hand it to you. She talks to strangers. If they look at her as if she's weird, she shrugs it off.
"You are part of my community -- we should be having a conversation," she says.
While other parents play alphabet games in the car using billboards, Mast asks her kids, "What is that billboard trying to sell you? Do you need it?"
"I want to teach them not to buy things they don't need," she says.
"Anja can be intense about things, but she's also a regular girl," Sherman says. "She can tell you all about this ancient Indian way of eating, but she also wakes up in the middle of the night thinking, 'What am I gonna wear to my 40th birthday party?'"
Mast tells how her mom, Margaret, sprinkled grated carrots on pizza, trying to pass it off as orange cheese.
"She made chocolate chip cookies with exactly one chocolate chip buried in the middle of each oatmeal cookie, and the rest were raisins," she says with a laugh.
"We nibbled and nibbled around the whole cookie, looking for the one chocolate chip," Mast says.
This apple didn't fall far from the tree.
"Mom, can I have a snack?" 7-year-old Zoe asks, as Mast supervises produce pick-up day at the farm.
"How about a crunchy carrot?" Mast offers cheerfully.
Zoe frowns.
"No, not a carrot," she grumbles. But she settles for some blueberries.
Mast cooks like an artist, blending freshly harvested vegetables with herbs and wild rice and chicken that came from a local farm.
She sneaks greens into everything. She chops mustard greens and tucks them into meat loaf. There's kale in her egg frittata.
She tosses salads with her hands because she read that's what celebrated chef Alice Waters does. She daydreams about opening a little cafe in the barn.
This is a woman who actually is looking forward to her 40th birthday, in an oddly giddy way.
"I look at people who are 40 and they seem to have it all together," she says. "By then, you finally figured out what you want to do with your life."
Mast is intense and curious, with strong opinions. You should have seen her before life on the farm, she says with a laugh.
"I'm much calmer than I used to be," she says. "I was so intense -- I knew exactly how everything should be."
VanderBrug is calm and intuitive. When he looks at you with his bright blue eyes, you feel as if he knows you.
"He looks into the heart of a person," Mast says. "And he can truly see them.
"He has calmed me down so I can be the person I should be." She smiles. "And what I've been for him is a huge kick in the butt."
Mast revels in churning out info-packed newsletters for the farm's members and hosting canning workshops, cooking classes and a big fall festival she proudly notes "is very Martha Stewart."
"My role is cheerleader," she says. "You can eat those vegetables! You can learn new ways to cook them! You can do anything!"
As she talks, VanderBrug rumbles past on an orange tractor and waves. Their daughter, Zoe, and, son, Pieter, 5, play with sticks and a sandbox and a couple of slingshots.
"I want people to realize there are other ways of being," Mast says, as a flock of black-and-white speckled chickens coo and cluck nearby. "Something besides the frantic, anxious pace that everybody is on. People are just zooming."
Don't ask her what time it is. She rarely knows.
"Nobody wears a watch on a farm," Mast says.