Farming Beyond Frost: A Winter Season Education Program

Commodities

Practices

"Farming Beyond Frost" addresses the challenges facing small-scale and urban growers: the decline in production, education, and community food supply once temperatures drop. In Northern, cold regions like Michigan, frost effectively shuts down most farm operations for months, limiting farmers' income, disrupting educational programming, and reducing the availability of fresh, local produce. For beginning and even experienced farmers, the winter season often becomes a period of financial instability, skill stagnation, and disconnection from customers and collaborators.

This problem is not unique to our farm-winter downtime is a widespread barrier for growers across the Midwest and other northern states. Many farmers lack the infrastructure, training, or technical knowledge to extend their season, maintain revenue streams, or make winter a productive time for learning and planning. Without support, farmers often enter winter unprepared, missing opportunities to build skills that improve long-term viability.

"Farming Beyond Frost" aims to solve this by transforming winter into a season of structured, farmer-friendly education focused on crop planning, protected growing systems, financial stability, soil health, and on-farm infrastructure. By providing practical tools and hands-on training, the project supports our farm while creating a model other farmers can replicate: strengthening year-round capacity, sustainability, and food supply across regions.

"Farming Beyond Frost" offers an innovative, regenerative, education-centered solution to the winter shutdown that challenges small farmers across Northern, cold regions. Instead of treating winter as a period of dormancy, our project transforms it into a time of structured learning, hands-on demonstrations, and regenerative infrastructure building. The program will equip beginning and urban farmers with the knowledge and confidence to grow more during winter and throughout the full season.

Our approach is grounded in regenerative agriculture practices that rebuild soil health, increase food choices, strengthen ecological systems, and expand farmers' long-term viability. The program delivers these practices through workshops, farm-based demonstrations, peer learning circles, and a winter "learning lab" housed at Nurturing Our Seeds farm.

Key regenerative agriculture practices embedded in the program include:

• Winter Soil Protection & Cover Cropping: Participants learn to select seed, and manage winter cover crops-including oats, rye, clover, and winter peas-to prevent erosion, feed soil microbes, and build organic matter. Demonstrations will compare different mixes and termination strategies.

• Protected Growing Systems: Hands-on sessions with low tunnels, caterpillar tunnels, cold frames, and small hoop houses will show farmers how to extend the growing season regeneratively without relying on heavy energy inputs.

• Composting & Waste Reduction: Winter is ideal for building and managing compost systems. Farmers will learn how to integrate food waste, crop residues, and materials into a regenerative nutrient cycle.

• Perennial Bed and Orchard Preparation: Winter planning and dormant-season pruning demonstrations will emphasize long-term soil and plant health.

• Regenerative Crop Planning: Participants will create crop rotations that rest and heal the soil while maximizing productivity and minimizing pest pressure.

• Water Stewardship: Workshops include rainwater catchment planning, winter system protection, and water-efficient strategies for early-spring planting.

• Financial Stability Through Regenerative Models: Sessions cover budgeting, enterprise analysis, and CSA or cooperative marketing strategies that support soil-first production.

Teaching methods include interactive workshops, demonstration beds, side-by-side comparison plots, peer-to-peer learning, digital handouts, and simple replicable systems farmers can adopt on farms of any size. Each session is designed to be practical and farmer friendly-ensuring that farmers leave with tools they can immediately implement.

By integrating regenerative practices into winter education, "Farming Beyond Frost" strengthens soil health, expands farmers' skill sets, and builds a community network of growers capable of producing food more sustainably. This solution benefits Nurturing Our Seeds while offering a replicable model for farms across Michigan and the Midwest.

Objectives

1. Deliver a 10-session winter education and demonstration series focused on regenerative agriculture, season extension, and soil health.

2. Adapt temporary growing structures (row covers, low tunnels or cold frames) for hands-on learning and demonstration.

3. Establish regenerative comparison plots for crops and rotation designs-for participant observation.

4. Train at least 25 farmers in winter growing skills, regenerative planning, and financial scale.

5. Supply 20-25 farms with fall/winter transplants and cold-hardy seeds to support real-time adoption of winter production.

6. Produce a replicable Winter Regenerative Farming Toolkit.

7. Strengthen year-round production readiness for Nurturing Our Seeds and regional growers.