Jordan Clasen and his Grade A Gardens harvest yield of dreams

If you look south across Jordan Clasen's newly planted field, you see five acres of little plants lying in their nursery, lined up in neat, weed-free rows, snuggled into scooped-out bassinets of soil. Beyond, a dense copse of trees borders the tilled land, unweeded, untrimmed, untamed. This is Grade A Gardens, which doubles as Paul and Lori Rottenberg's 5½ acre backyard.

Turn in any other direction and you will see John Deere Credit and Iowa Bankers and Pioneer. Parking lots and waves upon waves of suburban housing developments.

The field's happy younglings couldn't care less about their commercial neighbors; they're fed and watered and admired every day. And soon, the kids — eventually about 5 tons of them — will hit the road to the Downtown Farmers Market or to some of Des Moines' finest restaurants or be bundled into boxes for the 30 or so members of Grade A Gardens' inaugural year of a community supported agriculture (CSA) program.

At 25, Clasen is young to have so many hungry mouths to feed — on both ends of the cycle — but he carries the burden enthusiastically on his narrow shoulders. He's a workhorse, skinny but strong, and is committed to coaxing a living from the fickle (and lately, fierce) Ms. Nature.

Clasen's master plan, he says, is rooted in words offered by his friend, Des Moines chef George Formaro: "The key to success is to never stop moving."

For him, success is also stepping back from the pervasive industrial, chemical model of pest and weed control. "I want to take farming back to, well, farming." Renting the restaurateur Rottenberg's land at a very reasonable price is one of the factors that makes it all possible.

Getting from there to here

Clasen was born in Council Bluffs to a father who was a "Hy-Vee lifer." The family bounced around, moving to follow Craig Clasen's various jobs with the store, and finally landed in Johnston when Jordan was a high school sophomore. He was, he says, "a good kid, a hard worker," though he admits to being a "social butterfly" who ended up face to face with the principal fairly regularly for talking too much. Rottenberg, whose son Daniel was a high-school buddy of Clasen, says Clasen "was always a really nice kid. In some ways, he was a lot like me — he liked working a lot more than he liked school."

After high school, Jordan moved in with Thomas Burkhead, a friend who now works with him at Grade A. They started a garden in what they call their "crack apartment" in a less-than-spiffy area of town.

Son was set to follow father, and Jordan started at Hy-Vee when he was 14, working mostly in the produce department. Then, at age 20, he got fired for underage gambling (for scratching lottery tickets that were given to him by a customer).

"It's the best thing that ever happened to me," he says without reserve. Within five days, Rottenberg hired Clasen as the produce manager at the newly opened Gateway Market.

"The first thing I did at Gateway," Clasen says, "was change everything over to organic."

Financially, the decision was a poor one. So he fiddled with the equation, stocking some organic produce and some conventional, but always with an eye on moving back to fully organic.

"My approach was be nice, keep a good-looking product on the shelf and people will come back," Clasen says. By the time he left Gateway early this year to farm full-time, all the produce there was organic and much was locally produced.

In the summer of 2010, while still working at Gate­way, Clasen began growing flats of wheatgrass and selling it at the Downtown Farmers Market as Grade A Grass. The next year he added 5,000 garlic plants to his business plan. Lori Rottenberg had always had a garden and was game when the idea of using some of the couple's land for garlic came up. So they rented Clasen half an acre.

"We're big supporters of bringing in local produce, and the stars just aligned — we had the interest and the land," Paul Rottenberg says.

Burkhead has a moment

About the time Clasen started working for Gateway, Burkhead, still Clasen's roommate at the time, says he got a wake-up call.

"It sounds so cliche, but it's really the way it happened. My cousin sent me a copy of the "Omnivore's Dilemma" (by Michael Pollan) and it changed my life." He went on to a job at Drake University's Buy Fresh Buy Local chapter and helped out at Coyote Run Farm in Lacona, getting hands-on experience. He now works with Clasen full time.

Burkhead was also around in those beginning garlic days. "When we first tilled up that half-acre plot, we looked at it and were thinking it was so big," Burkhead says. Clasen laughs and says, "Everything we get done, we say, OK, now the hardest thing we have to do is done; it's going to get easier. But it never does. When we put up the high tunnels we thought that. And then we put up The Fence."

"The Fence" is an 8-foot-high deer barrier that encircles a 4½-acre field that the Rottenbergs rented to Grade A this season. It was painstakingly (and painfully) installed, by hand, by Clasen and Burkhead. The 115 wooden uprights, each 12 feet long, were buried, one by miserable one, 4 feet deep into the ground.

"That fence is my greatest life achievement," Clasen says. Even with this massive oeuvre under their belts, though, Clasen and Burkhead know the work never ends; it expands infinitely to fill every minute. Still, they keep working and have given themselves over to this new rhythm, as have their girlfriends who pitch in at the farm as their schedules allow.

Moving on up

For three years, both Clasen and Burkhead worked full time and farmed as a side business. "I would work until 6 at the store, then plant until it was dark — or after dark with a headlamp," Clasen says.

It was an exhausting grind, and their girlfriends weren't too excited about the hours, which left little time for anything else. Something had to give.

Clasen's longtime partner, Rebekah Huff, says the decision to turn Grade A Gardens into a full-time job was a little nerve-racking. Farming isn't the kind of job where the office stays at the office. Huff knew it meant changes for her, too.

"At one time, I was planning to go into interior design," she says. "And now there's mud in my dryer."

But she signed on wholeheartedly. She takes the long view about following a passion, whether it's your own or belongs to someone you love: "I have my moments, but I know he's doing something good for people. It's not about me or us. It's about something bigger."

Some help along the way

Clasen and Burkhead say there's no way they could have accomplished what they have so far without lots of help — from brain power to leftover building materials. There's that pristine backyard of course, gladly shared by the Rottenbergs. There's also a good measure of business savvy thrown in the deal by Rottenberg, the president of Orchestrate Hospitality, responsible for such restaurants as Centro, Django, Zombie Burger and more.

And there's John Whitsun, 58, a self-trained plant whisperer, small farmer and contractor for Grade A (starting their plants from seeds for them), whom Clasen calls his mentor and "one of the modern wonders of the world."

Whitsun met the young farmer when Clasen bought microgreens from him for Gateway Market. The admiration is mutual.

"He supported local producers so well at Gateway," Whitsun says. "He's got this amazing 25-year-old energy and optimism — he and Thomas both. They're, like, bullet-proof. It's so inspirational to see young people so focused on doing it right, so smart about it. Jordan's a fast learner, he knows what questions to ask and pays attention to the answers."

"This is a trial year," Rottenberg, who helped Clasen put together his business plan, says. "But I'm pretty confident they'll do well, if only because they work so hard."

Next for Grade A

Grade A Gardens is hoping to expand its CSA program next year, and has rented and planted 4 acres of the Rottenbergs' neighbors' land with an alfalfa cover crop in order to prepare the soil for cultivation next year. Also, Grade A will soon be able to complete the paperwork to certify its produce as organic.

At the top of the wish list is a tractor. "So far," Clasen says, remarkably cheerfully, "It's just been us and a tiller."

Eventually, Clasen says, he'd like to devise a better distribution system, not just for him, but for all the farmers like him. "It's one kind of challenge to grow the stuff. But then you have to figure out how to sell it." Their income this year, Clasen says with a wry smile, is "yet to be determined. But we just got our first check of the season — from Centro."

He starts to grin, giving away the punch line. "It was for $14!"

Both farmers say that whatever its hardships, farming has claimed them.

"I love it. Absolutely love it," Clasen says, as Burkhead sits across the outdoor table and nods, turning his face up to the scudding gray clouds and the sprinkles that have begun — again. "We must be the luckiest guys around."