Couple enjoys trying new things on CSA farm | Farm Progress
Shane and Kenna Kanneberg gave up city jobs to farm and raise a family near Green Bay, Wis.
They’ve only been in business for two years, but Kenna and Shane Kanneberg’s Vine and Virtue Farm is already expanding and trying new things.
“I think it’s really fun to look through seed catalogs and find new things,” Kenna says. “We often try new varieties and experiment for our customers.” They choose organic and mostly heirloom varieties. On the farm website, vineandvirtuefarm.com, she says: “Around the end of December, seed catalogs begin to fill our mailboxes. … We have since forgotten that we planted far too many cucumber plants and begin to read again about fun plants like tatsoi (a Chinese salad cabbage) and mizuna (a Japanese mustard green).”
In person, Kenna and Shane are just as cheerful and enthusiastic as their website depicts them. “Vine-ripened and virtue-raised” is their slogan.
Kenna gave up teaching. Shane had hoped to go into city government. Instead, they bought a 9-acre farm near Green Bay, Wis., and began raising vegetables — the “vine” part of their farm’s name. Plus, Shane says with conviction, “We have a strong faith background” — hence the “virtue” in the name.
Shane says their vegetable and poultry farm keeps them “cheerful and happy most of the time.”
Kenna adds, “I think we have fun. It’s great to be together on the farm.”
The couple already had a plot in a community garden and were Community Supported Agriculture members before buying their farm. They were looking for housing, Kenna says, when the idea came up that, as farm owners, they could both be home with their kids. They have a daughter, Eden, and another child is due in November.
“We talked it over for six months, and in 2022, Shane left his full-time job,” Kenna says. He does work off the farm for a local chamber of commerce.
The time they can spend together is a major reason why they decided to become farmers. Their 7 productive acres and greenhouses grow a variety of vegetables, and their 27 laying hens and six laying ducks, plus 200 meat birds — 50 already butchered, with the rest to be done in September — produce eggs and meat for the food boxes they supply to 25 families who are their CSA members. They also have drive-up customers.
All crops are grown with permaculture in mind, using hand tillage and composting with no chemicals.
“It opened up the sustainable world for me,” Shane says. “I found a video about permaculture and healing the land while producing food. It just made sense.”
Always trying new things
With their experience in a community garden and CSA, the Kannebergs have learned to raise a wide variety of vegetables and are quick to experiment with new varieties, says Kenna, who was raised on a dairy farm. Their June-to-October CSA boxes are very customizable.
“They are all online, and people can pick what they want,” she explains. “They seem to enjoy that, so we have no prepacked boxes.”
Continuing their expansion, this year they planted 160 apple trees, half for hard cider production, and 20 each of cherry, pear, peach and plum trees. Shane has more plans for the future: cut-your-own Christmas trees, a farm store, a backyard beer garden, a silo Airbnb “and much, much more.”
Their crop-raising education, he says, comes “from talking to other growers, a lot of research online and from books.”
Shane and Kenna are central Wisconsin natives and graduates of the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, she in education and he in public administration. They found their farm just west of Green Bay but with a Seymour address. The property included a large barn and several outbuildings. Large greenhouses were bought and installed, and Shane built chicken coops that are movable to new grazing areas.
About 50 meat-type chickens are butchered each year, and 40 laying hens come as chicks from stock that is researched to find breeds that are “hardy and good layers,” Kenna says.
She says it was their own pivot toward whole foods that started them on the path to producing those same crops, eggs and meats to share with others.
“The first year, our garden produced a lot of weeds,” Kenna acknowledges. But they’ve stuck with it, and the weeds are disappearing.
