Marty Travis can do a lot with a seed.
It’s in his blood.
The seventh generation steward of Spence Farm in Livingston County can take a seed and produce heirloom and native crops on the 160-acre farm.
It’s a process he learned from his ancestors, who purchased the land nearly 200 years ago, and one that he is passing on to his grandchildren.
On the side of producing vegetables, mixed grains, wheat, rye, different varieties of corn sorghum, flours and corn meals, Travis is also planting the seed of opportunity for 60 other Central Illinois small farms through marketing and distribution services that deliver fresh produce, dairy and meat to almost 50 restaurants in Chicago and Central Illinois.
“Last year we delivered about 120 tons of product,” Travis said.
The thriving dining economy was something that was expected to continue in 2020. But, prior to March, Travis saw that the spread of COVID-19 would likely take hold of the United States in the same way as it had in China, Italy and Spain.
The tried-and-true model of providing products to restaurants would have to shift, and it would need to be done quickly.
In a matter of days, Travis and the 60 farms he works with, went from providing food to 30 restaurants in Chicago to three. He immediately offered a solution that would benefit both restaurant owners and the public: produce deliveries to supplement grocery shopping during the stay-at-home orders.
“Many of our farmers at the very beginning said, ‘Oh, we’re going to scale back; you’re not going to be able to sell it to the restaurants so we should scale back and not plant as much or get rid of some livestock,’” Travis recalled. “And I turned around and I said ‘No, please. Just keep planting, plant as much as you need. We will find the place to make this happen.
“We were able to pivot quickly enough to offer (the product) to local families here in Central Illinois and in Chicago,” Travis said. “It exploded.”
The demand came with the help of restaurant owners like The Wheelhouse’s Ryan and Abbie Rogiers. The farm-to-table restaurant has a long-standing relationship with Travis. Much of their product comes from the farms he serves.
The Rogiers took a week off after Pritzker announced that restaurants would have to close to figure out a plan that would work for their schedules, budget and customers.
When they came back, a weekly produce menu was distributed to the public via Facebook. Customers had access to everything that chefs had access to. The orders that were placed on Sunday were delivered to the restaurant from the back of Travis’ truck by mid-week.
“(The customers) could make choices and have control over what they wanted to feed themselves and their families,” Travis said.
The St. Joseph community was not the only town served, though. Travis continued his weekly trips up I-57 to Chicago in order to deliver to a few restaurant owners and customers there. He also delivered to Peoria and several other small communities.
At the height of the pandemic, the local farmers with the help of some Chicago distributors were serving about 700 families a week.
“I’m thrilled, beyond words to be able to offer all of our farm’s products to local families,” Travis said. “The quality of what we’re offering is, I think, exceptional.”
For Travis, though, selling a product isn’t all that goes into consideration as he grows the distribution business.
First and foremost, “I’m trying to protect the emotional, physical and mental capacity of our farmers,” he said.
There are also time and packaging limitations on the Spence Farm operation.
Restaurant owners like the Rogiers help to sort and package the goods their customers order. Travis said restaurant owners in Chicago have also done the same.
“By consolidating all those orders by all in bulk, do the packaging for all the individuals and take care of the sales invoice, that will allow us to come back and do what we do best: taking care of our farmers and our customers, our restaurants and our bulk buyers,” Travis said. “That will eliminate at least 40 hours a week for me.”
Organic farmers like Thomas Harrison from Crooked Row Farm in Champaign said that having an innovative thinker like Travis was reassuring in a time when nothing seemed real.
Moving from part-time work on the farm to a full-time schedule, Harrison had planned to scale up in 2020.
“I still need to feed myself and my family and my friends; that’s that’s important to me,” Harrison said. “So I’m going to continue to do what I planned to do. I wasn’t really too worried about not selling anything.”
Instead, Harrison chose to work beside Travis.
“How do we learn more about this and adapt and move on,” Harrison said. “Yeah, it was frightening at first; this can affect everybody. And not just certain people in life. This is a pandemic, it’s widespread. And this, this could hit home. But we just need to learn about it at this point in time and then move forward. We’ll learn and adapt.”
Part of the learning and adapting process included going with Travis to Chicago and helping him deliver food.
“It is the most surreal thing to have this experience in which we pull into an alley behind a restaurant and have down the block and around halfway the other side of the block people lined up,” Travis said. “And many of those people are celebrity chefs who are in a food line to get product from us out of the truck space six feet apart.”
Going to the Illinois’ epicenter for COVID-19, Travis and Harrison knew they were taking a risk.
“We talked briefly about the fear aspect in the risk ask aspect,” Travis said.
“For me, at the very beginning, there was conscious thought in, ‘Do we take this risk? Do we do this?’ ‘And what does that mean?’
We have families, we have responsibilities. But that fear went away very quickly, with more knowledge about how to keep ourselves safe with the purpose of serving people.”
The men wore masks, used hand sanitizer often and changed their gloves between every stop in Chicago.
“People were super comfortable with it,” Travis said.
“Part of it is in the messaging. Part of it is in creating the community through email. Here’s what we need. What do you need? How can we make this comfortable for you? How can we give you some sense of control back in this? How can we make you feel like, what you’re doing is being responsible toward us and we’re being responsible toward you?
“Then at the end of the day, we take the gloves off, somebody feeds us, and we go home. It’s an intense day but it is a good day.”
When Travis gets home from Chicago on Wednesdays, he does not open his computer. Instead, he regroups for the Thursday trip to St. Joseph.
Alongside offering the farm box to their customers, the Rogiers also jumped on the wagon with meal kits to be prepared at home once a week. Ryan shows home chefs how to prepare their food on a weekly video while Abbie provides comical insights and thoughts.
The process from the farm to the table is deliberate. Travis works with restaurant owners each year to get an idea of their seasonal menus so that he can provide planting feedback to the farmers.
“There’s so much education that goes on behind-the-scenes with us trying to help farmers understand what it takes to be profitable, what it takes to be productive, what it takes to be safe and provide a product called food that we all consume.
“It’s important that they learn how to be efficient, and have the highest quality crops,” Travis said.
Harrison added, “It’s a synergy. If our plants or animals are healthy and we consume those, then we’re healthy, and we stand a better chance at fighting disease and virus. If the plants and animals are healthy, they can defend themselves from these things as well.”
An added benefit is that buying produce from local farmers also stimulates the local economy.
“I’m not saying that this system is for everybody or that it replaces the grocery store; but what I’m saying is it gives people the choice,” Travis said. “It gives the opportunity for each of us to support local economies and local farms in a way that maybe we haven’t stepped up to in the past.”
For Harrison, the slower pace of Illinois during the stay-at-home order helped him reconnect with what is really important to him.
“This also gives us an opportunity to grow as people and just kind of slow down and get back to the things that are important to us: our food, our family and our friends. In that aspect, this pandemic has allowed us to reach and connect with our communities on another level than we have previously.”
Travis said that in recent years he has had to turn down a demand from restaurants for produce, meat and dairy products because while the demand is there, local farmers don’t have the capacity to do everything for everyone.
He has taken the Spence Farm model to help others, like Harrison, to start their own organic farm in hopes that more local farms will be established in Illinois and throughout the country.
“Then we don’t have to be big, we just have to be great,” Travis said. “I want more of these pods around the country, around the world, to create opportunities for local farms, local communities to rebuild and regenerate that whole economy.
“We can take back our autonomy by having this local economic development again.”
Abbie said that the changes the pandemic is bringing to small businesses could be a good thing, too. Aside from moving from dine-in to curbside to outdoor dining, the Rogiers have also been in the process of setting up a local farm-to-table delivery system.
“That’s my favorite part of this whole thing,” Abbie said. “It’s like forced innovation; you have to change some choice like you can’t just keep going.
“That’s the good thing about being a small farm or small restaurant is that we have the ability to adapt and recreate things.”
Travis agrees.
“It’s a remarkable time,” he said.
“It’s an opportunist opportunistic time.”
He also thinks it’s an intentional time.
“We’ve all had to practice social distancing, I would hope that we will be able to practice intentional compassion,” he said. “That would go a really really long way throughout society and throughout the world. And it doesn’t take that much.
“Practicing intentional compassion is really trying to take care of each other. Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes progress.
“So, we should practice more.”
