Vermont
Flack Family Farm in Vermont Changes Hands | Seven Days
- Barbara Flack
- Zach Brandau, a seasonal farmhand and Doug Flack during a previous harvest
Two rocking chairs rest angled toward each other on an east-facing porch, burnt sienna-colored sheepskins making their wooden slats inviting. A potted geranium sits below. A wind chime clinks gently overhead, and a patterned blanket draped over a cotton rope adds folk-art charm.
Flack Family Farm in Fairfield evokes a scene from a Wendell Berry novel — a portrait of pastoral bliss. The Berry vibes will deepen come September, when community volunteers arrive for the cabbage-chopping chaos of annual sauerkraut production.
I encountered this snapshot of rural life on a tour of the farm’s lacto-fermentation facility. Incidentally, it was also a tour of Doug and Barbara “Bobbie” Flack’s home, where the product is still made, though the business changed hands last October.
Doug, 82, started the organic, biodynamic farm in 1978, raising sheep and later adding raw milk and grass-fed beef. In the 1990s, he married Bobbie, now 74, and learned lactic acid fermentation techniques; he began selling cultured raw vegetables, sauerkraut and kimchi while she taught media arts at a local technical school and worked on the farm’s marketing. Now, after a 30-year run and a five-year transfer process, the Flacks have passed the baton to employees Zach Brandau, 47, and Julie Matranga, 44.
Currently, Flack Family Farm’s fermented products — sauerkraut, kimchi and a mix called the Pink Lady — are on shelves in 36 stores and served in three restaurants. Production has increased from 22 barrels annually in the 2000s to 100 barrels, or about 20 tons, today.
- Rachel Stearns
- The crew planting cabbage
Cabbage, garlic, daikon radish and carrot crops spread across the farm’s 170 certified-organic acres, planted in small plots that rotate on a seven-year schedule to avoid overtaxing the soil and prevent pest and disease buildup. (This year’s cabbage patch, which contains 7,000 heads, is less than three-quarters of an acre.) Sheep and cows graze the fallow land, adding fertilizer and aeration, and the farm sells pasture-raised beef and lamb. Other areas are used to make organic hay for the animals.
Like most small farmers, Flack Family Farm’s new owners are juggling weighty and sometimes competing interests — including new requirements from the Vermont Department of Health, which reviewed their operation on the occasion of the business transfer. They also have to worry about being underfoot, literally: Their sauerkraut ferments in the basement of Doug and Bobbie’s farmhouse.
Still, Brandau and Matranga are determined to keep the business going. Fermenters gonna ferment.
The couple’s history with the Flacks began when they signed on separately as unpaid interns in the early 2000s. The two met and fell in love at the farm in 2005, when Brandau got Matranga’s attention by showing off an electric apple press. After a decade of pursuing other farm ventures and moving west to Bend, Ore., they returned in 2014 for the “pace of rural life” and a “connection to a food system,” Matranga said, adding, “I thought a lot about this farm and the dreams that got started back then.”
When Doug Flack suffered a stroke in 2019, Brandau became invaluable, leading both the vegetable and animal operations. (Matranga grazed the sheep and cows before leaving for a position at High Mowing Organic Seeds in Wolcott.) Doug recovered well and made it through another season, but a second stroke left him permanently unable to work.
“I think we always thought we would have more working-together time,” Matranga said.
Since then, Brandau and Matranga have embraced life in rural Vermont. They bought a house two miles from the Flacks’ and wove themselves into the fabric of the farm, taking on more responsibility and increasing production. They have contracted with distributor Pumpkin Village Foods to expand their reach into Chittenden, Addison and Lamoille counties and even to New York City.
- Courtesy
- Zach Brandau and Karl Lucas tossing cabbages during a harvest
An artist-activist with a theater background, Brandau finds satisfaction in drawing up intensive grazing plans and in the rhythm of the seasons. He compared the short window of sauerkraut production to putting on a show, with a team of paid seasonal workers and rotating volunteers filling out the cast.
“You get this tight-knit crew. And it’s two months of that intense flow of energy and life. Then it’s over, and you take it all down — set over; run is over,” he said. “All the barrels are in the basement, and you finally get that breather.”
While Doug’s production-season ensemble was entirely friends and community volunteers, Brandau and Matranga employ one year-round and one extended-season farmhand, plus a handful of temporary workers in September and October. Volunteers are still important to the farm’s ethos, the new owners said, and all are welcome to help with tasks such as cleaning and shredding vegetables while learning about the fermentation process and sharing meals.
A college buddy of Matranga’s, Jessica Smith, 44, recalled by phone what the volunteer experience meant to her. Now a program coordinator at the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation, Smith was a “burnt-out social worker” in 2016, when she first found herself prepping veggies at Flack. “What I really like about volunteering, maybe also after being in a pretty overwhelming professional setting, was, I just get to focus on one thing at a time,” she said. “My job is cleaning these carrots or this daikon — I’m not thinking about anything else.”
Smith also found the farm-fresh food and communal lunches “very impactful.” “When I spent that first fall on production, I was like, ‘I want this to be my home; this is the community I want to be a part of.’ And the farm really feels like it’s a hub, it’s the center point,” she said.
The past and present farmers think of each other as family. “They’re the elder part of our family structure,” Brandau said of Doug and Bobbie. “We love each other like family,” Matranga added, “and we also have our differences that we’re trying to communicate and work through and still share space.”
Those differences account for the protracted nature of the business transfer, for which the parties enlisted the help of Burlington’s Intervale Center and its partner, the Vermont Forest & Farm Viability Program.
Perhaps the least troubling issue was the physical space. The Intervale Center helped split the assets so that Brandau and Matranga could buy the business and a small portion of land that contains barns for the animals, while the Flacks retain the home they built. A stone’s throw from the main barnyard, it contains the farm’s production facility (a tented patio used as an outdoor kitchen) and a basement room for fermenting, storage and packaging.
- Rachel Stearns
- Julie Matranga and Zach Brandau in the cabbage patch
The Flacks enjoy their proximity to the action. “It’s great for food, camaraderie, friendships, stimulation — and it’s fun,” Doug said.
But bucolic farmland is expensive. The difficulty of the transition lay in distributing the financial burden fairly between the founders with a vision and the successors with a dream.
“We had so many conversations, and people wanted so many different things,” Matranga said, adding that it was clear “that this business could not continue to support multiple households. It was a really hard process for the four of us to come to consensus, but we did, I think because we all want to see this land continue to be in farming.”
Matranga declined to give the purchase price but noted that she and Brandau “paid as much as we could pay” for the business and 36 acres of land, financed with a bank loan and a personal loan from the Flacks. Bobbie said her teacher’s pension allowed them to arrive at a number that was affordable for the new owners.
These days, Bobbie has art in a gallery in St. Albans and is developing new business ventures: selling medicinal plants from her garden, such as Solomon’s seal and echinacea, and launching a camping/farm stay experience, complete with farm tours. She said Doug is doing all the reading he never had time for while farming.
On the farm, Brandau still heads the vegetable and animal programs. Besides being the primary caregiver for their 6-year-old daughter, Simone, Matranga deals with the administration and accounting. “I can handle looking at the finances without going into a tailspin,” she said lightly. She also helps Brandau with the grazing strategy, leads the packaging team, makes deliveries within northern Vermont and prepares meals for the crew. She teased the future possibilities of an on-farm store, farm dinners and bringing “really good coffee” to rural Vermont.
- Rachel Stearns
- Flack Family Farm products at City Market
After touring the farm, the basement fermentation facility and the sauerkraut-prep space, I headed out to the cabbage patch. The only volunteer for the day, I worked alongside Brandau, Matranga and their two hired farmhands, Brian Doucette and Nate Brigham.
Before we could plant, we used our fingers to make holes in the six- to eight-inch-thick hay mulch, clearing six-inch circles and putting large rocks aside in neat piles, like eggs in a nest. The hay mulch prickled my bare knees, and the sun heated my skin, but clouds drifting lazily across the azure sky provided some respite. Tucking the baby cabbages in their craters was immensely satisfying, and the afternoon passed pleasantly in the patch, but I was happy enough to head home when the day’s 600 plants were securely in the dirt.
I was free to go, but the work of a true farmer is never done. Brandau and Matranga’s first season as owners has been as rocky as that mountain soil. The Department of Health is requiring changes to the outdoor space where the farmers have prepared their ferments for the past 30 years.
Less than a month from go-time, the couple have been granted approval to use the space once they enclose it with mesh screens and obtain a wastewater permit. (The latter is still pending a visit from an engineer.) Matranga said they plan to make their ferments as usual, even if it means renting a commercial kitchen.
Wendell Berry would be disappointed. But the sheepskin-laden rocking chairs will be waiting on the Flacks’ porch, come what may.