From the front, Juan Camacho’s house and yard looks like most others along the city parkway on which he lives in Minnesota’s St. Paul-Minneapolis urban sprawl. But hidden behind the gray-sided Cape Cod house is “Esperanza Farm,” complete with chickens, goats, honeybees, and a garden.
Adapt and Overcome
A bout of terrible allergies was the first thing that set the course for Esperanza Farm. Camacho was knocked down with them for weeks as a transplant to the area roughly a dozen years ago, so his mother suggested he find a little local honey to fix the problem. “You take in a little bit of poison at a time” with the honey made from local pollen, Camacho said, and “your body gets used to it and it doesn’t bother you anymore.”But he was clueless about how to find that magic cure. “Back then, the only kind you could get was the bear honey from Walmart or Target,” he said. Fortunately, he happened to know a beekeeper at the time, who kindly gave Camacho a hive and a bee suit, leaving him to figure the rest out by watching videos online.
“The first years I was donating my money to the bee community,” Camacho joked. Now, however, he has five hives and produces between 300 and 500 pounds of honey annually via his Italian bees, a friendlier breed, which relieves him of worry that they will bother or attack neighbors and visitors.
His farming enterprise expanded beyond bees, however, when he was asked whether he’d like to live in the house his boss’s parents had vacated. The house was old and in decline, but the rent was cheap, so Camacho readily agreed. Over time, he fixed it up on his own dime and time.
This work ethic impressed the owners, and when it came time for the family to sell it, they worked out a contract-for-deed sale with Camacho. Almost overnight, Camacho found himself the owner of a house—and a bank account with only $80 in it after making a large down payment. As he was just in the process of starting his own business, Camacho knew he had to make his money stretch, so he bought $60 worth of Ramen noodles, prepared to live on them for the next two months.
And then the furnace broke. In January. In Minnesota.
Wearing everything he owned, Camacho said he “couldn’t stop laughing” over the absurdity of the situation. Thankfully, it only took a 99-cent part he found on eBay to fix the furnace, and he managed to eke out the next few months by taking jobs of all kinds in his fledgling construction business, making his newly acquired house payments in time.
Building an Urban Farm
Then Camacho got another surprise. When he finally received the house deed, he was shocked to find that his new home sat on 1.5 acres of land. Excitedly, he began hacking down the scrub brush that had worked its way up the hill from the train tracks below, hauling up to 16 loads of brush to the city dump on weekends. He soon realized, however, that the brush grew back almost as fast as he could chop it down.On the suggestion of a friend, Camacho looked into renting goats, but soon found out the price was too steep for his budget. Instead, he decided to buy some, finally finding a couple for $50 apiece. To his horror, he found they were baby goats. “These are tiny!” he exclaimed. “They’re not going to do anything to my backyard!”
Nevertheless, Camacho took them home, eventually harnessing their appetites to act as his personal gardeners, whipping his property into livable shape. He soon added to his herd when the lady from whom he bought his goat kids moved and offered him two more goats and 15 chickens. Today, Camacho daily gathers a haul of farm-fresh eggs on a bluff overlooking the state’s Capitol building.
Those eggs—along with other products from Camacho’s city farm—are often shared with friends and neighbors, the latter of whom are quite open to his little enterprise. “My neighbors bring people over a lot of times,” Camacho said, noting that they think it’s “kind of weird, but it’s cool!”
And when it comes to city permits and inspectors, Camacho really hasn’t had any problems. “Actually, they were kind of in shock, like, ‘You have goats?! You have chickens?!’”
But such city farming isn’t without its difficulties. Just last fall, Camacho was out working with his bees when a man with “huge eyes that never blinked” suddenly showed up behind him. “Hey, this is private property, man!” Camacho told him, suspecting his visitor was on drugs. “He gets super close to me and pulls a gun,” Camacho said.
“Give me your wallet!” he demanded, proceeding to grab Camacho’s iPhone and watch, as well as the chain around his neck.
It was a frightening experience, Camacho admitted, and he was ready to do whatever the man wanted. “Take whatever you want—take the bees! I don’t care!” he said, joking that he should have trained his bees to attack such intruders.
All in all, however, Camacho’s city farming experience has been positive. He said he plans to pay off his house in three more years, and then he can pull back on his construction work a bit and focus more on making a profit from his farm. Renting out his goats to others needing some major weed reduction is one possibility, as is selling honey, eggs, and other products from his yard at a roadside stand or on Craigslist.
For now, however, Camacho’s main profit is the joy he gets in sharing his little city retreat with others. “My wife works with the Hispanic community,” he said, “and people sometimes cry when they’re here because they see all this and they think like, ‘We’re in the city but it actually doesn’t feel like the city, it feels like my dad’s town where I grew up’ ... kind of nostalgia.”
He also said he enjoys introducing little kids to his farm. “They never see a chicken ... a lot of kids, they haven’t seen where the honey comes from,” he said, noting that many visitors stay a lot longer than they planned and leave with a smile.
“It feels like everything I’m doing, I was doing it for myself, and now I’m finding out it’s actually [other] people enjoying it. It feels good to me to share this space.”
