GREEN COUNTY — A group of Green County area women farmers that won a lawsuit allowing home bakers to sell their goods in 2017 has teamed up again with a few others to conquer another project. 

Soil Sisters member Lisa Kivirist said the group has been working for two years on a free resource “Launch a Farmstead Bakery: Recipes and Resources.” The online toolkit supports home baking entrepreneurs to use more local, farm-raised produce in their products. 

Kivirist owns and operates Inn Serendipity Farm and B&B in Browntown and is the lead farmer on the project. She also co-authored the book “Homemade for Sale.”

The toolkit offers more than 30 recipes that showcase seasonal vegetables and fruit along with ideas on how to creatively package and display items to help increase sales. 

Farmers who might want to sell baked goods using ingredients grown or produced on their farm isn’t as easy as it seems. Adding ingredients like zucchini, apples, pumpkin and other produce can cause the water content in the baked good to be too high, which doesn’t allow it to be out and sold at a market. The water activity level needs to be at .85 or less to meet non-hazardous cottage food criteria to sell the product safely from a home kitchen.

And seemingly coming to the rescue yet again is Kivirist and her fellow women farmers, who have worked for the last two years developing recipes that not only include ingredients, but also allow the treats to be safe and have been tested and certified to be non-hazardous. 

“There is no question they’re safe to sell,” Kivirist said.

Those recipes are now available on their website, www.cottagefoodhomebakery.com, which was made available in early March. They hope that some already selling other items at the farmer’s market might find something to add value to their farm as an add-on sale. For example, maybe someone selling meat could also now offer buns or someone selling salad greens could now offer croutons, she said. 

“In many ways, it’s making what you’re selling very user friendly for your customers,” Kivirist said. 

Recipes can use a range of local produce, Kivirist said, and bakers might be surprised to see recipes on the site, like beet brownies. 

Two years ago, the women started as a team, but each took their own direction of expertise and focused on specific kinds of recipes, like crackers, breads, muffins and cookies. From there, the recipes were developed and tested. Blackhawk Technical College in Monroe played a big role in helping, Kivirist said, because they allowed them use their equipment to do initial testing before it was sent to a certified lab.

“It really became a community collaboration,” Kivirist said.

Several cracker recipes on the page were developed by LindaDee Derrickson, of Monticello. 

Derrickson, age 72, leads classes and workshops, has a home economics degree and ran a successful restaurant in Madison, Sun Porch Café, for 20 years that also served as an art gallery. She said she took on crackers thinking it would be a crunchy offering, could lend itself the option of sweet or savory and would be a nice side item for dips and cheeses. She offers a “Going Crackers” workshop out of her home that fills up quickly.

She enjoys offering alternative options to white flour and sugar, she said, and has done the same when it comes to most of her cracker recipes. She even offers a graham cracker options that are sweetened with maple syrup and honey, as well as biscotti and scones.

Lending her longtime experience to the group was fun, she said. 

“I really appreciated this partnership and that it spanned all generations,” Derrickson said. “It’s been a really exciting project to help these young farmers.”

Also in the process have been developments to display baked goods in more appealing ways and to market products differently. Those skills and tips can also be found on the website.

Small tips became important, like sprinkling salt on shredded zucchini to reduce the water content, for example. Elements were tweaked along the way for flavor. 

Feedback so far has been positive, Kivirist said. Managers of local farmers markets love the additional products to market and although the process took more time and testing than planned, she feels it’s been a success. 

She said bakers are also committed to using other local products in recipes that they’re not raising, like local grains and butter, as much as possible. The real success will be whether there is more variety at farmer’s markets this year.

They hope to add recipes into the portal crated and there is also a database to plug in ingredients for recipes. A webinar has been the most recent development there and right now is the best way to interact after a planned workshop was cancelled because of the COVID-19 virus. The webinar provides an overview of the project and best practices.

“This is our oldest form of local commerce,” Kivirist said. “Now you can go from a hobbyist to a food entrepreneur.”

The team of women farmers brings diverse farming lives, experiences and ages. 

The project was made possible by funding from the North Central Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) Farmer Rancher Grant to help support farmers interested in adding a successful and strategic value-added baking component to their farm businesses.

“This project, ‘Launch a Farmstead Bakery: Recipes and Resources,’ is a great example of farmers coming together to creatively and collaboratively solve a problem and share information which adds up to a stronger future for sustainable agriculture,” Joan Benjamin, associate regional coordinator for North Central SARE said. “SARE Farmer Rancher grants provide opportunities for farmers to research challenging issues and find solutions that can then be helpful to other farmers.”