Feel Good Farm has visions of reaping organic bounty

The founder of the largest organic produce farm in Indiana is talking about how tough it is to grow organic veggies in Indiana.

Mother Nature decides to make the point for him. To the west, gathering slate-gray clouds let loose.

Matt Ewer hoofs it to his equipment shed. His beekeeper flees for a car. Two workers duck into a greenhouse (the one without the wind-shredded plastic roof).

Ah, laboris interruptus down on the farm.

"Farming's not for sissies," Ewer sums up, as a driving rain drums on the shed roof.

Ewer, 37, is the latest generation of agriculturalists to tackle organic farming in Indiana. He's picked a challenging line of work, all right. I've covered agriculture on and off for 20 years in Indiana and seen organic operations come and go. Mostly go.

Indiana doesn't exactly have the mild climate that favors organic farming. It's often too hot or too cold, with subtropic-like humidity in the growing season. There are fierce and frequent storms and lots of insects and disease. Plus, the state's ag culture caters to row-crop farmers, who stick to corn and soybeans and want little to do with lettuce and the like.

But Ewer has clearly tapped into something: a fast-growing consumer appetite for organic, locally grown eats. And a willingness to pay for it.

The man has a determination and calculated recklessness about him, as well. And he's doing what few organic produce farms in the state have pulled off: Achieving scale, so that his farm pumps out produce by the pallet load and he can compete in price with big out-of-state growers.

The model for what Ewer is doing is a thriving, well-known organic produce grower near Seattle called Full Circle Farm. Ewer was manager there for five years before returning to his native Indiana to raise a family.

David King, program manager for local foods at the Indiana State Department of Agriculture, calls Ewer "a leader in the growth of the buy-local movement in Indiana."

"I'm sure he has the largest farming operation producing diversified (organic) products" in Indiana, King says.

Ewer opened his organic farm just five years ago in Hamilton County, with an initial 15 acres. He needed to grow organic veggies to reliably supply the 15,000 or so customers of his Green BEAN produce delivery company in Indianapolis. Yes, he's the guy behind Green BEAN (along with wife Beth) and its 50 logoed delivery trucks that are becoming regular sights on city streets.

The farm now spreads over 60 leased acres and bears the quaint name Feel Good Farm.

The place doesn't exactly impress you as a showcase when you pull in off two-lane Lamong Road, near Sheridan. You see the old shed, then the greenhouses with the partly torn roof, then the fields.

There is no sign, just Ewer. He greets his visitors by the shed and within minutes is out in his fields, showing off his first spring crop, 4-inch-high lettuce. It's emerging from strips of black plastic laid down to try to keep the weeds at bay.

"This whole field out here is full of lettuce," 150,000 head of it, he says. "Green leaf, romaine, kale." He gestures to the other side of the road. "We've got about 30,000 red cabbage."

Ewer's silver F-150 pickup is a constant at the farm. He spends multiple hours there every week during the growing season, says Ewer's farm manager and landlord, Steve Spencer.

"He thinks about stuff constantly. He knows every aspect of his business," Spencer says.

Spencer was out once cutting lettuce at 3 a.m. in a thunderstorm. His cellphone rang. It was Ewer. Get out of the field, he told his farmer. We don't need the lettuce that bad.

"I was just a farmer selling stuff. He was awake worrying about me. That's Matt Ewer," Spencer says.

The Spencer family has owned their 100 acres near Sheridan since 1838 and decided to lease a big chunk of it to Ewer because they were getting into produce-growing, too, and they hit it off with him.

Spencer, a decade older than Ewer, took over management in late 2013 after what Ewer called "growing pains" the first few years.

Pressed about what those pains were, he lists a few: buying the wrong equipment, letting weeds get out of hand, not handling harvests efficiently.

"Basically it comes down to the usage of your land and how many sales you can gain off of your crops," Ewer says.

He also fiddled with his crop lineup. He stopped growing slicer tomatoes, cucumbers and summer squash because they're Midwest staples that he could buy from others, cheap. He focused instead on less available stuff: leafy greens, cabbage, cherry tomatoes, mini watermelons, mini sweet peppers, winter squash and broccoli.

Makes sense. Ewer also planted blueberries, his first perennial crop. The 6 or so acres of plants, which cost $50,000 to put in, will produce their first significant crop of berries this summer.

Is Feel Good Farm profitable? Ewer puts it this way: "We're on the verge of finding profit on the farm."

One reason Ewer can't boast of profits yet: The capital investment required to create the farm has been high, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Takes a lot of lettuce sales to offset the cost of five tractors, two big walk-in coolers, a packing shed, trucks and all sorts of mowing, spraying and tilling attachments.

Spencer also notes the high expense of fertilizer and pesticides that qualify as organic.

PyGanic, a popular natural pesticide derived from the chrysanthemum flower, sets you back nearly $800 a gallon, Spencer says. The sterilized chicken manure pellets used as fertilizer by many organic farmers cost 42 cents a pound. It's cheaper, Spencer says, to simply idle your field every third year or so and plant a cover crop such as rye that leaves nutrients in the soil.

I'd say that's enough to make even an organic farmer put the local Monsanto sales rep on speed dial.

The hard rain has slacked off. Ewer walks to the greenhouse (the one with the intact roof) where his operations manager, Mitch Behrends, is putting pepper plants in trays. They will plant thousands of sweet peppers this year.

To cope with all the perils, Ewer and his staff have learned to overplant, knowing they'll lose 20 percent or more of their produce to pests or the weather.

"You're learning on the fly," says Behrends, a former schoolteacher who was hired two years ago. He sums up organic produce farming this way: "It's nothing short of a technical process."

Ewer seems confident that he and his managers are getting the technical details down. Which means he's angling for big growth on the farm.

The rain has stopped now, and Ewer walks through the wet grass toward the shed, sharing his dreams for the place.

"I like to press the boundaries," he says. "We're not trying to go small. We're trying to go big. I'd like to see this farm be 500 acres."

He goes on. "I do think there needs to be a several-hundred-acre organic farm that is really pumping out pallets (of produce). That's the way you change the game. We're all about taking trucks out of here. Trucks, not pickup trucks. Fill 'em up and have 'em peel out of here."

Ewer says Green BEAN will need all the produce it can get from its Hamilton County farm and a second farm it operates near Cincinnati. Much of what Green BEAN delivers now is produce it orders from other growers.

Membership and sales (which Ewer won't divulge, but are in the millions of dollars a year) are growing about 20 percent a year, with almost no advertising, he says. His regular customers typically buy $35 to $50 worth of produce every week or two, delivered to their door in a cooled bin.

They're people such as Patty Locke, who gets a $35 order weekly to keep her Lawrence Township family of four supplied with fresh greens and fruit.

"I pay a small premium for the convenience of having it delivered," she says. "But it's well worth what I'm paying."

Her two children crave the raspberries, she says. Less so the kale. "I sneak it into a lot of what I cook. They don't know," she says.

Green BEAN (it stands for Biodynamic, Education, Agriculture and Nutrition) also serves Cincinnati; Louisville, Ky.; St. Louis; Columbus, Ohio; and Nashville, Tenn. It recently moved into Bloomington.

Ewer also drops this hint about future growth. He would like Feel Good Farm to become a big player supplying organic produce to supermarkets.

"I wouldn't be surprised to see Feel Good Farm certified organic product inside a Kroger store in the near future," he says.

Here's something surprising for a dirt farm. Ewer relies a lot on technology. Software programs he customized handle sales, customer orders and other things.

Ewer appreciates the difficulty of what he's doing.

"It's a very different business, a business a lot of people have failed at," Ewer says. "We're trying to build a premier organic brand. That's what we're trying to do."

He just has to avoid becoming another victim of those age-old farming foes: merciless weather, diseases that come out of nowhere and bugs that wipe out the most carefully tended crops.

Call Star reporter Jeff Swiatek at (317) 444-6483. Follow him on Twitter: @JeffSwiatek.

BEAN LLC

Business: Organic farming and farm product sales through Green BEAN Delivery.

Headquarters: Indianapolis.

Founded: 2007.

Owners: Matt Ewer and Beth Blessing.

CEO: Matt Ewer.

Employees: More than 200.

Farms: Sheridan, Ind., and Mason, Ohio.