A nurse, whose farmer father grew concerned with GMO food and the nation’s declining health, quit her job when she lost faith in the healthcare system’s ability to help prevent illness. Raised on a dairy farm, she turned to her childhood for answers and took her family back to the farm she once helped tend to start raising healthy, organic, grass-fed beef for a better future.
Registered nurse Sarah Fischer, 34, lives with her husband, 35-year-old power lineman Tom Fischer, and their three children on a small-town farm just outside Lafayette, Minnesota. Sarah left the healthcare profession in November 2020 to become a full-time organic farmer on the land she grew up on—a farm established in the 1890s that has been in her family for six generations.
“My parents owned it for 35 years. That’s kind of where my story began,” Sarah told The Epoch Times.
Sarah said her grandparents bought the land from a railroad company and turned it into a homestead to raise their own cows, pigs, and chickens. Sarah’s father eventually took over the farm, working alongside his father for several years before buying him out in 1991.
‘Why Is Everyone So Sick?’
“Everyone was praying for people with cancer,” she said. “[My father] just took a step back and realized, what’s going on? Why is everyone so sick? We didn’t see this back when he was a kid, or when he was growing up. There’s been a drastic change in the health of our population with being overweight, diabetes, and just all the chronic disease that we have.“We started researching ... nutrition and health, which lead to finding all the chemicals that we’re spraying on our food, how we’ve destroyed soil health, and connecting the dots—how that relates to the health of our society. We were totally conventional farmers at that time, so it’s really hard to swallow that pill ... to admit that you’re doing something wrong, and to admit that you could be harming people.”
Sarah added that all food was organic until chemical insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides became widely available after World War II. These chemicals improved farming production but also brought negative health consequences.
Amid her family’s research, Sarah gave birth to her first daughter.
“I was absolutely mortified at what I was reading,” she said. “I had read a headline, ‘Roundup probable carcinogen to humans.’ Roundup is used on all of the GMO crops and sprayed everywhere, it’s so prevalent. I’m like, ‘If I know that I’m a mom, I can’t feed that to my daughter!’”
In 2011, Sarah, Tom, and their infant daughter packed up and moved back to Sarah’s parents’ farm. What started out as a plan to raise healthy, organic food for their own family gradually turned into a community project—and Nature’s Pantry Farm was born. In 2020, Sarah gave up her career at a hospital clinic in New Ulm in favor of farming full-time.
The Nature’s Pantry mission spread quickly by word of mouth. Today, Sarah and Tom farm 300 acres in partnership with Sarah’s parents. The 60-cow conventional dairy farm of Sarah’s youth has grown into a regenerative farm with 100 grass-fed beef cattle, and a popular platform providing “honestly raised food.”
A Hard Day’s Work
Sarah recalls helping her father on the farm as a child alongside her brother and sister, feeding calves, baling hay, and learning the value of hard work. Sarah left for college and left the farm behind, but when her father sustained a serious knee injury after kneeling on a concrete slab for hours and needed surgery, he was unable to continue.With no one to take over, he sold his dairy cows to lighten the load but continued farming corn and soybeans, performing maintenance work at an apartment complex managed by his wife to make ends meet. Sarah and Tom’s return heralded the revival of the farm and a return to rising before dawn for a hard day’s work.
Today, tending the farm involves milking eight resident dairy cows, feeding the 100 beef cattle and pigs, and collecting eggs from free-range chickens before moving them onto fresh green grass. Sarah’s father tends pasture and alfalfa for the grass-fed cattle in winter, and the cattle are butchered locally by butchers with whom the family has grown a strong relationship. Sarah and Tom grow non-GMO corn for their pigs and chickens.
Their three kids help after coming home from private school in New Ulm, as does Tom, who works full-time off-site. During summer, the kids’ tasks multiply; since they’re not in school, their parents want to teach them a good work ethic and to appreciate where their food comes from.
‘Local Food Movement Is on Fire’
Running the farm as a business is a challenge the family has conquered together, including keeping on top of accounts, direct marketing, and running a website and social media. Another challenge has been the Minnesota weather.“Two years ago we planted 40-acre pastures and it didn’t rain. Without proper environmental conditions, farming can be very challenging but also very rewarding,” said Sarah, adding, “I don’t want a bad picture of farming, because it’s wonderful.”
Sarah insists the “local food movement is on fire” since the pandemic encouraged people to look at their health and where their food comes from. Her wish is that we collectively regenerate and protect small farms that are “getting bought up and gobbled up by big farmers,” and like her father did, Sarah encourages veteran farmers to share their skills with the next generation.
“Tom and I could not get into this without my parents’ support. We couldn’t afford to buy the farm and to buy all the equipment, there’s just no way,” she said. “But it was them being willing to work with us, because they saw the need for such change.
“[I]n my humble opinion, the greatest threat to the way people are farming these days is that we are filling and destroying everything in our soil. Look at how sick people are. We have to be better, we have to work with Mother Nature instead of against her. ... Every community needs small farmers, and there has never been a more important time than right now to make that happen.”
