Hidden Stream Farm
Hidden Stream chickens with their caravans.
Supplier to PFC La Crosse and Rochester since 2023
19 miles from PFC—Rochester
People’s Food Co-op is happy to announce that we are now selling products from Elgin, Minnesota’s Hidden Stream Farm. Hidden Stream is owned by Lisa and Eric Klein. Lisa’s father, Everett Koenig, the previous owner of the farm, began to take the farm off the conventional path back in the 1970s. Everett was also one of the first members of Minnesota’s Land Stewardship Project, a group that seeks to ensure the continuity of small family farms in the Upper Midwest.
Among the many difficulties facing the future of agriculture in the United States has been the problem of farm succession. According to the 2017 Census, the average age of the American farmer is 57.5 years. The Land Stewardship Project seeks to keep the land and the people together, ensuring that family farms stay in the family and that young farmers have a path to farm ownership.
Lisa and Eric trained with Everett and eventually inherited the farm. They, in turn, are proud to be working with their children to grow the farm and their business for the next generation. All six of the Klein’s children are involved with the farm. On the day we visited with Eric, he was excited that their two oldest boys, Andy and Ben, had bought 120 acres of adjoining farmland to add to the farm.
PFC visited with Eric Klein of Hidden Stream Farm in August. Hidden Stream supplies People’s with pork. The farm also raises chicken and beef cattle. Eric explains that most of their sales are direct. They sell online and to area restaurants.
Eric Klein of Hidden Stream has some eggs.
They grow organic row crops, but the animals they raise for food are not certified organic. “If we raised the animals on organic grain, we wouldn’t make our money back. Customers wouldn’t pay what we’d have to charge,” Eric says.
Stewardship is a commitment to caring for the land to pass it along to the next generation. It is an acknowledgement that the farmer is a caretaker of the land and not just a manager put in place to extract short-term profit from the available resources. To that end, Hidden Stream follows regenerative practices. They grow organic crops, and the animals are pasture-raised with rotational grazing. Such farming practices have allowed them to build up better soil quality over the years. Better soil means that the soil is more resilient, and the farm can weather drought years or extreme rainfall events. A farm that doesn’t till up the topsoil every year holds moisture better and decreases erosion.
It had been a dry summer, and the grass had been poor quality, Eric reported. The farm had had to feed its cattle hay and alfalfa to make up for the lack of grass. “We need more rain,” Eric says, though he notes that the soil health of the farm is good. “The soil is paying me back this year. The corn is looking pretty green, so far.”
A tale of generations
Eric and Lisa are continuing the practices that Lisa’s father pioneered. For instance, Eric points out the grazing pen that the chickens are using out in the field. The pens were designed and built by Everett. They’re small, lightweight enclosures that can be shifted about the field, so the chickens have safety and access to fresh grazing, sunlight, and air, and the field won’t suffer from over-grazing.
Besides the birds out in the grazing pens, another flock of chickens is milling about the mobile chicken shacks. They’re inquisitive and gather around us to see if we have any snacks to share. The farm’s cattle follow similar rotational grazing practices and seem to have the run of the place. This is as far from a confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) as you could wish for. “There are no manure lagoons here,” Eric says. “We use manure for composting. We put it back into the soil. All of it. Big farms just go looking for a place to throw that away.”
“We’re trying to think ahead,” Eric says. “What are the next generation of farmers going to do? We put a lot of work into fertility of the soil and soil balancing. I can grow as good a crop as the conventional guys and it’s better quality. You can see the results.”
Some of Hidden Stream’s residents.