The Tongass Rainforest isn’t what you’d picture as a candidate for farm country. The terrain is rugged, the soil unstable, and it rains over 100 inches a year. The vast majority of Sitkans get their meat and dairy products off a barge, shipped hundreds of miles. But Bobbi Daniels of the Sawmill Farm is determined to change that. KCAW’s Emily Kwong met with this fearless island farmer who is bringing eggs to Sitka the old fashioned way.
Bobbi Daniels has struck gold, except it’s green and squishy.”
“I’m getting grapes,” Daniels said. “Everything loves grapes. The chickens, the geese. I won’t give it to the geese.”
If the Sawmill Farm is an ark, Daniels is Noah. She has 500 mouths to feed every day. But rather than order hay or grain online, Daniels collects cast off produce from the grocery store. Like these grapes.
“People just aren’t going to buy them,” Daniels said. “And so the grocery stores are really in a hard spot.”
That’s where Daniels comes to the rescue, her shopping cart a teetering cornucopia of greens that she loads into her box truck. I hop into the passenger seat and there’s a carton of quail eggs at my feet.
Daniels: Don’t smash those.
KCAW: Ooo they’re beautiful!
Daniels: I know! Quail are so cool. Quail are cool! I just love quail!
And those eggs, which are a lovely coffee colored shade with brown speckles, are a token of victory for Daniels. Just three weeks ago, Seamart began offering her eggs to customers.
“They keep selling out, so I think that’s the best response you can get,” Daniels said.
Daniels runs her errands with the focus of a honey bee, gathering nectar for the hive.
At first glance, you’d think she’s a fisherman, wearing XtraTuffs, but make no mistake, Daniels is a farmer. A farmer on a mission.
“When I was little, it was family farms and by the time I graduated from college, it was big agro-business,” Daniels said.
Daniels worked on some of those farms. And when she moved here from Indiana in 1998, she was troubled by the food cycle in Sitka.
“We’re taking thousands of tons of food that is perfectly good to feed animals and we’re barging it out of Sitka,” Daniels said. “And then we’re barging this factory farmed poor-quality meat back to Sitka. That’s insane.”
So, Daniels started the Sawmill Farm in 2001 to attempt to close that loop. Financially, the farm isn’t breaking in but they they’re making some progress.
Daniels and her business partner hope to have rabbit and chicken meat on grocery store shelves soon. But the learning curve for island farming has been pretty steep.
“There’s nobody to turn who did this first to get any advice from really,” Daniels said.
Eagle and mink predation was terrible this winter. And try as she might to get the settings right on the chicken enclosure, the chicks kept piling on top of each other, crushing the ones beneath.
“When you come in the morning and that’s the scene, it just breaks your heart on every single level,” Daniels said. “We don’t want animals living in miserable conditions. That’s not the kind of farming we don’t like.”
Even though she was counting on those broiler chickens for profit, Daniels is determined to figure out what went wrong before ordering more. She’s an animal lover first, farmer second.
It’s time to visit the farm. We turn out the ducks for the day. And then stop by the goat herd, where Missy from Wrangell is getting milked today.
Her goat herd by the way is spoiled rotten. She feeds them alfalfa that’s been misted with molasses and allowed to ferment. They’re spoiled rotten. At one point, Missy swings her face towards me and we’re snout to snout.
KCAW: Should I let her smell my breath?
Daniels: That’s how they get to know you.
KCAW: Oh I see.
Daniels: Hello Missy.
KCAW: I did brush this morning. (Daniels laughs)
Now, selling raw milk is illegal in Alaska, but Daniels gets around that by selling shares of the herd. If you buy the goat, you get the milk. And because you can’t have goat milk without bucks to start the breeding process, Daniels envisions one day loaning her bucks to other farms.
“Kind of have a buck library (chuckles), where you can check out the buck of your choice for your own goats,” Daniels said.
And that’s really the second part of Daniel’s mission: to support families and small-scale farms around Southeast who want to localize their food.
“When I eat a rabbit, when I cook a rabbit – okay, I still can’t do the killing, I’ll admit that – but I’m there and I’ll do everything else, I’ll skin and gut and all that kind of stuff, but if you waste anything, there’s this huge awareness that something died for my dinner,” Daniels said. “And you look at your plate and what you eat and how you eat differently when you are involved in making it happen. And I think it’s a really good change.”
Daniels is frank that the Sawmill Farm will never be able to keep up with the demand in Sitka. But more important to her than putting meat on the table is telling people the story of where it came from.
