A group of small farmers and ranchers in south central Montana are planning to kick off the Yellowstone Valley Food Hub early next year. The 11 producers hope to collaborate to find new customers and better market their products.
YPR tagged along on a farm tour put together by Northern Plains Resource Council, the guiding organization behind the food hub. We dropped by Nash Farms, just outside of Bridger.
Slightly more than a dozen people waited while Tom Tschida and his mother, Carol Nash, untied a cow and her bull calf from where they’d been roped to a fence and brought them out to meet the visitors.
The cattle were only one stop in their farm tour. The Nash family also keeps sheep and ducks and grows fruit like apples in an orchard on the property.
Their primary focus, though, is a herd of 46 Dexter cattle for meat and breeding stock.
Nash said the animals pretty much feed themselves.
“They go up on the dry land and they come back fat as little ticks,” she said.
Their cattle are grassfed, and they avoid using pesticides or herbicides on their property. Nash said they started the ranch in the late ‘90s as a way to grow healthy food for themselves and as a retirement plan.
“We love the lifestyle,” said Nash. “It’s wonderful to live out here. You have all the good food you can eat. I mean, we live pretty well on tenderloins and fresh apples and fresh vegetables and pretty much fresh everything. Eggs. So, it’s a nice life. You just have to not be too hung up on the money part.”
Right now, they sell at farmer’s markets and through word-of-mouth. They also run a motel in Bridger to supplement their income
But they hope to expand their small operation into more than a lifestyle choice or a passion project.
According to Tschida, scale is an issue. He said they don’t have enough product to secure contracts with restaurants or larger individual orders.
“Delivering, distributing, and marketing and dealing with restaurants and supply chains is a lot of work,” said Tschida. “It takes a lot of time out of every operation, but if we can all get together and combine our forces for that kind of thing, it helps us out and it helps out the consumer on the other end.”
Three years ago, Tschida left a photography career in California to join his family on the ranch.
“As my folks got older, I thought I’d come back and help out,” he said. “My sister lives in Billings and has three little kids now, and I wanted to be back around family more, and I wanted to come back Montana and be involved in [agriculture].”
Tschida’s mother, Carol Nash, has high hopes for the Food Hub’s potential. She sees it as a way to make her operation sustainable for her son and any of her grandkids who may be interested in going into the business.
“The young kids don’t want to farm or they can’t make a living at it,” said Nash. “And so the farms get broken up into houses. And I think you need to keep that farmland intact, and so it’d be nice if you could find some way to get the young people able to afford to go out there and farm.”
Tschida said the planning stages for the food hub started off in 2016, and they’ll be sending out their first, preview community supported agriculture box, commonly known as CSA box, on December 1.
He said they hope to open a subscription service in February.
