Dinner spotlights farming in the Valley

PALMER — While eating many of the things on The Kenley Vegetable and Flower Farm is encouraged, one exception stands out.

“We’re not going to eat Prancer,” Carol Kenley told a crowd of about 50 people who carefully stepped over rows of cilantro and kale in the vegetable garden, while sipping wine and chatting. “At least, not yet.”

Prancer is the family reindeer. He’s a pet, not food, Kenley said.

The farm has been in the Kenley family since the Kenleys purchased it from a homesteader in 1952. They’ve lived on the property since 1953. The farm, which was then 150 acres, originally focused on cows, but as the six children came of age and left, the cows were sold off and the land divided. Today, the Kenleys own 12 acres of the original spread. Their daughter owns another nearby parcel.

Kenley was in full-on tour mode Saturday to raise awareness about the trials and tribulations of local farmers.

Only 4 percent of Alaska’s farmland is available for farming, and less than 10 percent of food eaten in Alaska is locally grown, according to figures provided by the Alaska Farmland Trust, which organized the event.

The Kenley family’s story is common, especially in the Valley, with its legacy of the Matanuska Colony days, according to Trust executive director Louisa Yanes.

“A lot of people that have farms here, they got handed down from their parents,” she said.

The event — a farm tour paired with an elegant locally grown dinner under a white canopy — was organized to celebrate the harvest, and showcase Mat-Su agriculture’s quality as well as prominence, Yanes added.

“We really just wanted to celebrate the season and highlight how amazing the food that we grow here is,” she said. “Pretty much everything but the limes is grown here in the Valley.”

The family garden

In the early days, vegetables weren’t seen as financial moneymaker so much as a source of family nutrition, Kenley said.

“I had seven children, and we always had a nice large garden,” she said. “None of them really enjoyed it very much, the weeding and stuff, except my fourth daughter. She did kind of like it. She kind of got into it and she liked growing things. She was always very like ‘How can we make some money off of this?’”

Amy Kenley, the daughter, discovered a way after reading an agriculture magazine provided by a neighbor.

The magazine “described what we know now as a CSA, community-supported agriculture, but back then it didn’t have that name,” she said. “We just called it subscription vegetables.”

As the name suggests, community-supported agriculture is a method for nearby residents to pay a subscription fee at the beginning of the growing system. The Kenley children, lead at first by Amy, would provide fresh vegetables weekly.

The early going was rough. They didn’t want for customers, who more-than doubled, in the first week, but for land.

They started out with four customers, Carol Kenley said.

“I happened to be doing Cub Scout camp with my little boys the week that this started,” she said. “When I came home, Amy said ‘I have 10 customers now, mom.’ They (customers) had showed their friends what they were doing, and I went ‘Stop! The garden isn’t that big!’”

Reliable labor also proved to be difficult to obtain, Carol Kenley said.

“I made her hire her two younger brothers, and they both still say that she paid them a $1 an hour, and it was $2 an hour more than they were worth, and it was true,” she said. “My son Keith swore he could weed lying down.”

The CSA business model also had issues, Carol Kenley said.

“It was still a very hard model,” she said. “When you have 30 customers, it means you have to have 30 cauliflower ready at the same time.”

Despite the trials and tribulations of a horizontal labor force and uncooperative cauliflower, the business eventually blossomed to 32 customers, and pulled in enough revenue to send Amy Kenley to college.

Market discovery

When the youngest daughter, Rachel, assumed the reins of the family business, they had more vegetables than customers, and they began selling their excess at farmers markets. That proved to be a better option, since it eliminated some of the timing issues inherent in CSA-style farming. Rachel, too, provided for her college, and eventually went into agriculture as a business.

“We found out the markets were really, really good and you only had to sell what you had,” Carol said. “You didn’t have to try to juggle the vegetables.”

The business originally started as an opportunity (if sometimes begrudged) for her children, but when her youngest daughter moved away, Carol saw an opportunity for herself and for her younger nieces. She now grows as many different types of vegetables on the farm as she can safely fit, and recently added peonies to capitalize on the wedding industry’s demand for off-season flowers, though she admits some hesitancy about the flowers’ moneymaking prospects. The cilantro is another recent addition, driven in part by the restaurant industry’s taste for the trendy, smoky herb. Farmers have also begun to focus on onions, and added another health-craze vegetable, Carol said.

“Kale is the perfect Alaskan vegetable,” she said.

Farmers markets, initially a way to sell off excess inventory, have evolved to become the largest customers, Carol said.

“I grow mostly for the South Anchorage Wednesday farmer’s market, and then I sell some to some restaurants in town, and to Bushes Bunches,” she said. “I supplement what they don’t grow.”

The farm has expanded to a small business from a family vegetable patch, but retains some of the character that makes it unique, Carol said.

“We don’t specialize in any one thing,” she said. “We try to grow, I say, from artichokes to zucchini.”

“If it can be grown I like to do it because we eat all of it,” Carol added.

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269 or brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com.