We know that a lot of people in the Western Upper Peninsula want to see more local food options and more successful small farms in this region.

In fact, we want to see those things too.

So, we’re opening a vegetable processing facility in Ontonagon County, called Wintergreen Foods.

Wintergreen Foods will provide products like bagged salad mixes, carrot sticks, and squash puree for sale to local school cafeterias. We are developing these products in partnership with cafeteria staff to ensure that they are easy to incorporate into school menus and profitable for everyone involved.

We’ll also market these products to stores and restaurants, and produce items specifically for sale in area stores, such as dried tomatoes, zucchini chips, precut pasty mix, and more.

Everything made at Wintergreen Foods will be made from local produce. Some grown by us, on site or at Wintergreen Farm, but much grown by other area farmers.

             Like this guy.

We plan to sell more than we can possibly grow ourselves and we want Wintergreen Foods to benefit the entire agricultural community in the Western Upper Peninsula.

We're already underway. We’ve purchased the location, the old Candlelight Restaurant. It has much of the equipment we’ll need to get our facility started – including some cold storage space to allow us to keep locally grown produce fresh beyond our limited growing season.

    Soon to be Wintergreen Foods

But we need a few more things. That’s where you, and your money, come in.

We know we’re asking for community support from a cash strapped community, so we are keeping our request modest. We'll also spend a significant amount of the money we receive at other local businesses, namely Peninsula Graphics, Burke Design and Baron Services.

With the $8350 we’re asking for, we’ll purchase a small commercial dehydrator, packaging materials and labels, an impulse sealer (for sealing packages), a high capacity legal for trade scale, a six foot tiller, a row cultivator, a potato hiller, and a flail chopper. And we'll pay our neighbor the rest of the money we owe him for our "new" tractor as well as get a web site started.

The dehydrator and packing equipment will allow us to begin producing specialty dried items before the end of the 2013 growing season. Dehydrated products have a relatively long shelf life (compared to fresh salad greens), so they’re the perfect place to start as we expand our relationships with area grocery stores, restaurants, and institutional kitchens.

We even have an agreement in place to sell dehydrated fruits and vegetables in the Ontonagon school vending machine this fall.

The field equipment will help us make the jump from our current two acres of vegetables to our goal of growing about five acres of vegetables next year. Even with the employees we intend to hire in the spring of 2014, we'll need to increase our mechanization to properly manage that much land.

We'll use the flail chopper to cut mountains of grass for composting. We love compost.

Of course, this campaign can raise more than $8350. It’s up to you. Every extra dollar will help us grow this new facet of our agricultural business that much faster.

We will put any funds over $8350 towards these costs:

• We'll need some cash to remove this rotten section of flooring above the crawlspace along the southeast side of the building. Once we get it out, we'll level out the ground and pour a concrete pad - future flooring for about 400 square feet of additional cold storage space we plan to build as soon as practical. The rest of the building is sound.

                                Ick.

• Additional funds will help us immensely by allowing us to purchase the many "little things" (like gloves, hairnets, business cards, parchment paper...) we'll need and cover the on-going expenses involved in a food processing business, such as licensing and certification fees, water testing, utilities, and payroll as we get things rolling.

We understand that not everyone has money to spare. If you can't contribute funds, please contribute a tiny bit of your time and energy by sharing this campaign with absolutely everyone you know.