Slack Farms Members

Slack Farms is launching its 2024 Slack Farms Membership in conjunction with SlackWorks and Walk The Farms. Members enjoy time at the farms to hone their farm skills, advance their technical skills in fields and woods, and participate in conversations about stewardship, conservation, and the broader world of the times we live in with guests who are farmers, poets, writers, editors and public servants.

We have spent a decade developing the SlackWorks program of farm skills training, which is the hallmark of our Members programs. In January 2024 we will launch the SlackWorks Workshops and in July we will hold our first SlackWorks Youth Programs.

Walk the farms with us in the spring or fall, at dawn or dusk, in the early fog, across red bridges and by water’s edge, in and out of woodlands. Both Woodlawn and Jubilee Farms offer 5k trails soon to be marked with poems on plaques to read along the way. Poet Carl Dennis just agreed for us to use several of his poems. Cattywampus Bridge? Underway! Flapdoodle Trail? We’ve got one. Red Bridges? More than one. Walk the trails! Join the workshops! Get in the mood by stopping in to join a bi-weekly workshop.

From the Slack Farms Interns who have helped developed these programs, we’ve asked: What is your favorite workshop? Answer: From Garden to Sushi! 2023 Slack Farms Interns (l to r) Toby Sonnleitner, Mathias Scheibl and Eva Königseder and others perfecting their sushi.

As a Slack Farms Member, you can learn to kayak, tend a chick, become a flower gardener, prune grapevines, and harvest bountiful vegetables for the kitchen. Bike the trails, hold a chicken, crab and fly fish, spot a big fat muskrat and find a baby terrapin, too.

“I used to go to the gym three times a week to jump on a stationary bike. Now I go to Slack Farms and walk the trails and meet fascinating people. I hope this year to learn more about gardening, so I have fresh basil and parsley and know how to split my daffodils. I know folks did this kind of stuff in the Great Depression out on the Prairie. I never thought I’d get a chance to learn much related to growing and producing food and thinking about it so intimately, but in the full circle of life, I’m here with Slack.”

— Devin McMannis, Slack Farms Member