I grew up near Hamilton, Michigan. My father grew up in that area. He grew up on an industrial pickle farm. We had, when I was growing up, just under 400 acres that was mostly to pickles. So I grew up witnessing the farm because my dad was farming part-time. Both my parents were anesthesiologists.
Abra Berens, 31, divides her time between professional Chicago kitchens like those at Floriole Cafe & Bakery and her Bare Knuckle Farm, 350 miles away on Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula. —Mike Sula
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I went to the University of Michigan, and I started working at Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor my sophomore year. It was there I started being more exposed to the local food culture. I saw there was this other way of farming that sort of walked the line between the cutesy farms and also a real farm that can be sustainable and growing a lot of different things.
It’s worked entirely [because of] the support that I’ve found in the Chicago food community. People are willing to buy our produce and support us, and then support me personally when I come back and am able to kind of cobble together several jobs working a couple days a week. That’s how my last several winters have been, and it’s been good. I would leave again in the spring, and everybody sort of knew that that was the deal.
Index: 2012 People Issue
