ABOVE: Becca and Andrew LaFountain, of Alpine Forest Farm

A dozen counties in northern Lower Michigan experienced a disastrous ice storm that lasted from March 28 through 30, 2025. The storm is long gone but the damage remains and farmers need the help of all of us to repair extensive fence damage, pay for debris removal, replace lost seedlings, and fill the gap from weeks of lost income. Groundwork teamed with Crosshatch, Northern Michigan Local Food Alliance, and NE MI Healthy Food Initiative to create the Ice Storm Farm Relief Fund to raise dollars for farmers in need this season. Donate here. Farmers can apply for relief funds here. In this article, we hear from Andrew LaFountain, of Alpine Forest Farm. [As told to Jeff Smith]

So I was actually downstate on March 29 for a family Easter get together, and drove back into the storm that night. The roads were starting to get a little slick, but they weren’t absolutely horrible yet. When I got home about 6pm, the power was already out. The ice was already forming on the trees, and we were starting to get branches falling. I went for a walk to check on my animals and see what was going on, and it was like walking through a minefield. I felt like every 30 seconds a branch was snapping off a tree and crashing.

Our chickens were in their winter coop up by the house, but the pigs were out in the winter paddock. They had a couple of trees fall over in the pasture and a bunch of big limbs fall down, but other than one pig that is limping, no pigs got hurt. So, that was lucky.

I went to bed that night with no power on. I woke up Sunday morning, and the storm was still going in terms of the drizzle coming down and freezing. I went to church without power in Gaylord, and then I came home and just listened to branches and trees snap all day long. I’d send photo updates to my family downstate. We have six kids. They were supposed to come home with me, but we kept them downstate because of all the weather advisories that were coming. They ended up staying at my sister-in-law’s for 13 extra days.

Going out to check on the animals that night, I was just in awe of the amount of damage and just super jumpy because it wasn’t safe to walk around. But I couldn’t resist knowing what was going on. You know, it’s different owning property when you farm it, versus just kind of owning it to own it. You get very intimately connected to the way you’ve been working on shaping the land and forest.

Walking through the woods that night, I was just trying to stay on the trail. You didn’t want to get too close to any of the trees. That’s for sure. 

For myself and a lot of other people I know who have animals, one of the biggest struggles with the power off was maintaining water. But the first couple of days I was just collecting water runoff from the roofs, until I got my generator fully set up. I go through about 40 gallons a day. Thankfully I don’t have any cows, because if I had cows, they drink 40 gallons a day each.

During those 13 days when my family was downstate, I was impressed that the cell service, while it did degrade significantly, was still allowing a fair bit of communication to go through. Part of that might be because I’m in the Air National Guard, and I was using my work phone, which is set up on the emergency responder network. So not, I don’t think everybody had the same coverage that I did, but yeah, just a lot of trying to update my wife on what was going on.

Just trying to send a text to say hi in the morning and let her know that I made it through another day … that I did in fact feed myself. It was like camping in your own house with no electricity. So thankfully we had a decent stockpile of batteries for flashlights. But I did have to make a couple of supply runs for fuel for generators, driving over the down power lines everywhere. And the first couple of days, there weren’t any gas stations open in Otsego County, so you’re having to drive either south into Roscommon County or over toward Traverse City. In Gaylord, it was just the Meijer gas station that had a generator, and the line was over an hour long. 

As for costs, we had to spend money for the cleanup that was supposedly for future projects, so we’ll have to rebuild the savings for that, and it’s probably going to take two or three years to actually clean up the mess. I still work full time, so as a part time farmer, yeah, it’s going to take a while. And I’ll buy some attachments for my tractor to be able to handle the amount of brush that there was to clean up. 

So I’m just cutting it up for firewood, or chipping it or stockpiling brush piles to burn later for biochar. Overall, I got super lucky because I’m pasture-based and all my pasture-based chicken shelters survived. One got hit by a big branch and dented a little bit, but none of them got crushed. But, you know, like my neighbor across the street, a tree took out the roof, a brand new metal roof on his garage right by the road. So he’s got to have that repaired, and took out the power line connecting his house to the main line at the same time. So we were just very fortunate to get everything missed. For the most part, I had some minor damage to my chicken brooder, but I’m still able to use it, so that’s not too bad. And then minor damage to fences that I’m repairing, but I can’t put animals where those fences are at until they are repaired. So like in terms of scope of operation, just one out of 15 paddocks for my pigs is available at the moment until I can get cleaned up. So I’m in the middle of trying to move my pigs from their winter setup to where they should have been a month ago, and I have to clean up along the way as I move them out there. So it’s delayed me by two months at this point. 

As for other farmers I’ve heard about, a lot of the maple syrup producers that I know lost all their lines out in their sugar bushes, and they missed several weeks of production because of the ice storm. I’ve heard that some people lost their sugar shacks that were out in the woods. But the amount of cleanup you still see going on at Gaylord is really impressive, with people hauling brush, still all day, every day, dump trailers full of brush going up to the dump site, and lots of tree companies moving in to help with cleanup. Depending on what kind of woods you’ve got, it changes how much damage you had. People who had red pine plantations, like 90% it’s all gone. It’s all snapped off. Maples and the oaks, it just gets ugly because they lots tree-sized limbs from some of those big trees. And you’re like, I don’t know if the canopy is going to regenerate or not. You’re just waiting to see what’s going to happen with those trees.

So I consider myself kind of lucky even though I did have a lot of tree damage, and years of cleanup left. I guess that’s the resilience, the resilient attitude of the farmer. Nobody got hurt. It’s a lot of work, but well, as long as people keep buying at the farmers market and supporting local farmers and stuff we’ll get through. 

We’re primarily farmers markets and we have an online presence, a website, alpineforest.com, with a store where you can order for pickup at the farm. We do eggs, pork and poultry, everything’s pasture based with organic feed. We’ve owned the farm for seven years and farmed for five. I’m at alpineforest farm.com.

Jeff Smith is Groundwork’s Communications Director. jeff.smith@groundworkcenter.org