When Small, Local Businesses Thrive, Families and Communities Thrive, Too
This past weekend, Jenni and I attended the annual field day at Featherstone Farm — as guests this time, not as hosts (I retired from the general manager role at the farm in 2025). I was surprised how emotional the event left me then and even now, several days later.
A Featherstone employee demonstrates a machine that inserts seeds into seed trays.
As we followed the field and facility tours led by Abby, Nathan, and James — the team that runs Featherstone Farm now — they described everything that goes into growing, picking, washing, packing, and shipping fresh produce. Hearing them describe their roles in all of it with such clarity, confidence, and purpose is what hit home for me.
Owning and operating a small business for 30 years gives you an awesome opportunity to contribute meaningfully to the community, and to individual people's lives, especially the people who work alongside you. A fellow farmer I know in Pennsylvania — Mike Brownback, who operates Spiral Path Farm — once told me about the pride he felt when the first of his farmworkers bought a house and settled in the community on the basis of their work there, and I've never forgotten it. I've now seen at least four Featherstone employees buy homes in and around Rushford, most recently Ofelia earlier this year, and Mike was right: it is a powerful feeling of validation, seeing young people put down roots in this area, at least in part because of their commitment to Featherstone Farm.
There have been multiple marriages among employees over the years, and families started here, and the first of those children — Noah — turns ten years old this week. (I got to piggyback him around the farm a bit on Saturday.) Later this summer, Abby is expecting her first child. Featherstone Farm is a living, dynamic, community-based institution that reflects the combined minds, bodies and souls of so many people. It is humbling, and it is inspirational.
Jack giving a piggyback ride to Noah.
I’ve been talking about my personal experience at Featherstone, but my campaign is about (in part) strengthening this same connection between locally owned small businesses and thriving families. A healthy small business isn’t just “providing jobs” — it also provides the conditions for people to build a life in a place, to buy a house in Rushford or settle their family in a community they've come to love, and that kind of rootedness is what holds rural communities together. As I campaign across SD-26, what I see over and over is that communities are strong when the businesses in them are strong, not chain stores or distant corporate operations, but local employers who know their workers by name, who notice when someone buys a house, who celebrate that person’s child growing up in the community where his parents work. These connections are an answer to anyone who says our world is broken, that we cannot find common cause to live and work together.
That's what I want to work for in the Minnesota Senate —policies that give local small businesses and farms a real chance to grow, to hire, to pay decent wages, and to stay, so that a young person can build a life in Rushford or Houston or Spring Grove rather than feeling they have to leave for somewhere else.
