Feeding Community and Growing Opportunities in the Boreal Forest

Calypso Farm, Fairbanks, Alaska

Harvest at the Community Roots garden, an urban agriculture training program for young adults in South Fairbanks. All photos courtesy of Calypso Farms.

On a mid-February day, Susan Willsrud, co-director and farm manager of the 30-acre Calypso Farm and Ecology Center in Fairbanks, Alaska sits in her sun-filled textile workroom. Behind her are work tables, the tools of her trade, and diamond-shaped cubbies filled with brightly dyed yarn that she’s spun by hand.

As she moves her laptop camera around the room to give me a tour, I catch a glimpse of the Shetland sheep that have provided her wool, grazing peacefully outside her window. We’re on a pandemic-era video call, naturally, and although the sun is nearly at its zenith, the light is thin and wintry, the trees bare. In a state where the shortest day of the year is only four hours long, Willsrud revels in the season’s lengthening days: “Seven more minutes of daylight every day” she tells me exultingly.

Upper field and greenhouse.

Along with her husband, Tom Zimmer, Willsrud established Calypso in 2000. They made it a non-profit so that they could devote equal time to hands-on education as well as farming. In over two decades of operation, they’ve developed a dizzying range of products and services: close to 500 different varieties of vegetables, herbs and flowers to promote diversity and resilience; farmer and community garden leader training programs; and elementary school farm classes, and curriculum materials. All serve their goal of promoting food justice and food sovereignty, and their efforts have made them a trusted member of the Fairbanks food system.

During their time here, Willsrud and Zimmer have established a comforting rhythm. They stretch their three-acre production farm’s growing season from mid-March to early October with the aid of a seed-starting house, two greenhouses, and the farm’s ideal siting in the circumpolar northern boreal forest—1,400 feet above sea level on a south-facing slope overlooking the Tanana Valley. Unlike north-facing slopes and low-lying areas, Calypso does not have to contend with permafrost, allowing them to begin farming a month earlier than most. “One of the most notable things about this location is that it’s really impacted by slope and aspect,” Willsrud explains. “Even from a great distance, you can tell where there’s a dip that gives the land more light exposure.

South-facing view of Calypso's lower field.

You’ll see different tree species on the south face and you can watch the tree composition change in a matter of footsteps.” While most of Fairbanks is in deep frost by September, she notes, Calypso can extend the season by weeks: “We’re really taking advantage of the microclimate.”

Calypso’s flock of Shetland sheep.

Root cellar storage allows the farmers to provide for the local soup kitchen all winter, while they devote their energies to farm planning for the coming season. It’s also the time to work on value-added products: wool spinning and designing knitting patterns for Willsrud, and for Zimmer, an iron workshop and livestock care. In addition to 16 sheep, the farm’s five acres of rotationally grazed pastures  are home to several dairy goats, chickens and bees. “In this kind of deep winter, we can really take a breath,” says Willsrud. “We never have a sense of burnout, and the arrival of every spring is exciting.” The farm maintains a staff of five including Willsrud and Zimmer, and brings on as many as 20 more part-time workers during the peak growing season.

Beet harvest at the farm.

In the spring, they’ll revive their three-quarter-acre seed field with a view toward increasing resilience and preserving open-pollinated seed stock, including a number of Indigenous varieties.

Willsrud and Zimmer met in 1988 on Isle Royale National Park in Michigan, where she was volunteering for a wolf and moose study and he was on a backpacking trip. They kept in touch, and reunited in 1992 after Zimmer returned from a three-years with the Peace Corps in West Africa. They headed to Fairbanks in 1994, where Willsrud earned her master’s degree in plant ecology at the University of Alaska and Zimmer—who holds degrees in geological engineering and soil science—conducted field surveys for an  environmental consulting company. “We both cared a lot about community, were interested in growing food, and we didn’t want to pursue a traditional academic career,” says Willsrud. Starting Calypso—which is named for the magical, lone Calypso bulbosa (fairy slipper) orchid Willsrud spied while doing field work in the area—was a project “where all the pieces came together.”

Garden leaders at the Community Roots garden.

From the outset, inclusion and diversity were integral to their non-profit. “Small farm culture tends to cater to higher-income people, and it tends to be a White-dominated ecosystem,” Willsrud says. One effort to counter this imbalance came in the early 2000s, when persistent calls to the USDA won their CSA  the ability to accept food stamps as payment. Willsrud and Zimmer also address the problem of poverty by focusing on the racially diverse and economically disadvantaged south side of Fairbanks, where they’ve established a thriving school garden and a community farmer’s market. “This is where we started learning that in order for us to be successful we couldn’t be in the lead,” says Willsrud, a lesson that seems obvious today but at one time was not.

While they serve as an anchor vendor at the market and help raise money for it, a  community-based steering committee runs the organization. These initiatives, along with Calypso’s Indigenous agriculture program, are “the things that I’m most proud of,” Willsrud says. For the latter project, Calypso teamed up with Indigenous Athabascan Eva Burk, a grad student at the University of Alaska, and other indigenous leaders throughout the state.

A foggy June morning in the field.

This summer they will host an Indigenous-taught farmer training program. While many think of Indigenous foodways as being rooted in foraging and hunting, an overlooked part of Aboriginal wisdom, Willsrud notes, is post-contact gardening mastery, which tribes have developed as salmon and other traditional wildlife food sources have dwindled.

As part of Calypso’s food justice-centered Community Roots garden training program for young adults, one member introduced her Indigenous grandmother, who passed on gardening lore from her own grandmother. What she taught “would be considered on the cutting edge of regenerative agriculture,” recalls Willsrud, ranging from interplanting, crop diversity, and a deep understanding of microclimates and beneficial crops.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit Fairbanks, putting its food insecure community even more at risk, Calypso adopted a pay-what-you-can-model at the Southside Community Market—up to a 50 percent discount, no questions asked. Although Willsrud and Zimmer worried they would not be able to afford this radical program, the farm’s position as “a non-profit really rooted in the community” carried it to success. Willsrud estimates that three-quarters of the pay-what-you-can program was underwritten by customers willing to gift more than their share; the remaining quarter came from social media promotion and email blasts. The program has been so successful, says Willsrud, that even after the pandemic food emergency ends, Calypso will keep it up.

A July peak season day in the lower field.

Over more than two decades, Calypso built up sizeable accounts with local restaurants. Willsrud enjoyed “visiting chefs each spring and talking through the crops and what they wanted for the season.” Much of that disappeared during the pandemic. Yet for Calypso, the arrival of the Corona virus also marked the opening of a door, proving that they could succeed by focusing on the farm’s original goal of feeding the community.

Even after restaurants return to business as usual, says Willsrud, she and Zimmer will not pick up those accounts again, a true sign of how far they have come in growing a local food system over the past 22 years. “I think a better role for Calypso to play is to connect other growers to those restaurants,” says Willsrud. “I really like the idea of helping beginning farms, making those introductions, or supporting an existing farm looking to diversify its marketing.

As a non-profit, we have visibility, people know our name. That comes with the responsibility to support and lift up other growers. It feels good to be able to do this.”