Meet FARMER Bethanee
Farmer Bethanee Wright is an organic vegetable farmer at Winterfell Acres and shamanic practitioner at Earth & Cosmos Shamanic Healing. She is a lover of the Earth, enjoys yoga and functional fitness, loves to cook and is a devourer of books.
Bethanee runs her organic farm (for the last ten years), facilitates healing work for others and enjoys rural life with her husband, two daughters (a five-year old and an under one year old), three big white fluffy dogs and one tiny farm cat.
Farmer Bethanee’s Journey
My name is Bethanee (Nitz) Wright and I have been in love with growing food for as long as I can remember. My first experience with garden-fresh food was when my mother handed me a slice of tomato grown fresh from our garden when I was five years old. It was the best thing I had ever tasted.
Fast forward through my childhood gardens and cooking experiments with my ‘adopted’ grandma, I landed an internship on a whim at a two-acre farmette at a retirement home for Catholic nuns. I decided to stay in the Driftless region of Wisconsin after my freshman year of college to farm under a radical Franciscan sister with a degree in plant pathology. I learned so much: mostly how to weed effectively but also how to care for young fruit trees, dig carrots, braid garlic, discard blighted tomato plants and conduct various soil testing techniques. Simply, I was in love with it all, but at that point, I never thought about making a living farming.
Then, that winter I read ‘The Dirty Life: On Food, Farming and Love’ by Kristin Kimball and it changed my whole perception of farming. Kristin and her husband run a whole-diet CSA year-round in upstate New York by draft horse power! It was inspiring- imagine getting all your food needs from dairy to fruit to veg from one farm. At that point, I still planned on going to graduate school to become a psychotherapist. But after reading that book, I saw a way to make a modest living farming for the first time.
I finished my sophomore year of college with a major in psychology and “playing softball” when I transferred to UW-Madison to get a degree in the closest thing to sustainable agriculture that I could find at the time: Community and Environmental Sociology with an Environmental Studies certificate. There I worked my way into a long, amazing internship with FairShare CSA Coalition where I fell even more in love with direct market farming. My new plan was to work for minimum wage on a CSA farm to learn more about the art of vegetable farming and I enjoyed every challenging and rewarding second of it. For three years I did that before starting my own CSA farm in 2014. And now I am proud to say I am a FairShare-endorsed farm and recently stepped down as the president of the Board of Directors.
During my time at UW, I met Travis, who loves eating delicious food as much as I love growing it. We fell in love and climbed Mt. Rainier (twice, almost summited), where he proposed to me on our second attempt. We got married on September 12th, 2014 in the rain with our closest friends and family and celebrated under the trees with great homegrown food and a favorite string band. We make a great team and love the simple, conscious life. On any given night, you can find me cooking us a delicious meal or studying up on herbalism while he is carving his next spoon or playing with our daughter. In my spare time, I read many books, weightlift and do yoga, knit, cook and play with our daughters. I also see clients for healing work in my private shamanic practice.
My plans for the farm are simple and intentional: build a base of wonderful farm members who enjoy delicious, local, organic veggies, fruits, flowers, herbs and now, chicken and eggs. While allowing folks the opportunity to develop a relationship with the farmer who grows their food, the land that fills their dinner plates and the food that brings their family and friends together.
Travis and I have goal of fine-tuning our farm homestead in the coming years. We built our home in Summer 2017 and I gave birth to our beautiful daughter, Tillee Mae, in 2018 in our farm house. In 2020 we built our barn/pack shed and 2021 we built our geothermal, passive solar greenhouse. And in April 2023, we welcomed our second daughter, Dortheea Sage, into the world born here at the farm. We plan on continuing to raise veggies and our meat, care for our young orchard, and encourage our wild woods. I hope that you will join us on this wonderful path of life and that our farm products will nourish and sustain you and your family for years to come.
Cheers!
Farmer Bethanee