Photo courtesy Heart’s Pasture 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, 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, Amanda Wolter, of Heart’s Pasture Farm, tells of how the ice storm affected her family and farm income. As told to Jeff Smith.

AMANDA WOLTER: My husband, Todd, and I own Heart’s Pasture Farm, in Alanson. It’s in an area hit pretty hard by the ice storm.

Nine years ago, he and I were both teaching in Indianapolis. We were weekend warriors, getting outside a lot and camping, and we’d talk about retiring to a beautiful place some day. One day, we decided to live our lives in a beautiful place instead of waiting for retirement. That place was Michigan. So, we both got teaching jobs in Alanson, a little up north village we’d never heard of.

Then seven years ago we bought a lovely 15-acre wooded lot to turn into a farm. When we started out, we decided not to clear-cut for monocrops. Instead, we set out to create a silvopasture. It’s a forested pasture for animals. So, the trees are very important to our farm, and we are very intentional about which trees to remove and which to keep. In addition, we have a half-acre garden where we grow 30 varieties of potatoes. People can order a CSA box of specialty potatoes. We’ve had people order from as far away as Florida and California.

We’re really focusing on bringing unique, flavorful produce to people who are interested in it. And we do everything biodynamically. There are no synthetic inputs or pesticides of any type. We have goats and pigs and chickens, and we use their manure and compost as well. So the way that we farm is, I’m going to say, a little bit different, but it is very much working with nature. We believe that the food we make tastes better because of that, and for the consumer it’s food that’s delicious, but also that’s going to be healthy for your body.

So when the ice storm first began, we lost power for a couple hours. At first I thought, oh, you know, there’s a bit of a storm coming, not a big deal. But after we went to bed it really picked up. And we are surrounded by trees, which was perfect, until a massive ice storm hit. We just heard, as my five year old put it, “Crick, crack, crash,” as branches and trees came down. And it was three or four days straight of that. The ice just kept coming and kept coming. We have spent seven years hand picking which trees should stay as we slowly have cultivated the forest. Then in a matter of four days, all of that, and then more, was totally destroyed.

During the storm, one of the hardest parts was keeping the generator running. We had no power, and we were running the generator that came with the house, which is, I think, from the ’60s. The problem was the generator was surrounded by trees. And anywhere you stepped outside, a limb could fall on you at any moment. My husband was going out to refill this old, old generator like every hour-and-a-half because the tank was so tiny, and honestly, it was a life and death situation. Eventually we were able to get a new generator, which we kept in a safer place.

We were stuck at our place for a week because we have a long wooded driveway, and we couldn’t clear until the ice melted because it wasn’t safe. We had neighbors who wanted to help us, but it wasn’t safe for them either, of course. We weren’t gonna have them come to use their chainsaw and then if a tree starts to come down … we were afraid that they would not be able to run away in time. When my husband and I went through the forest, we never walked close together, so in case a tree fell it wouldn’t hit both of us. We didn’t have water for our family or our animals for a week, so we’d go to Alanson, which has a great artesian well, and there were lots of folks going there. We filled up five-gallon buckets for ourselves and all the animals.

For so many people, even if you didn’t sustain damage to buildings, the impact has been lost income. At this point, between getting through the first two weeks and then all the cleanup, we are a month behind on the season, and for us that means a month of lost income. And the cleanup is so hard to explain because in a photo, it just looks like sticks. You can’t really understand until you’re standing right there, and then you realize, oh, you’re supposed to walk forward like there used to be a path in the woods here, but now there’s just a log jam. We also had several sales of goat kids fall through because people who had ordered called to say, “Our farm is so damaged we just can’t take animals right now.” So that is lost income too.

For many people, the storm caused them to lose the start of the next phase of their farm. And now they have to wait another year to take that step, and that’s if they can recover well enough from this year to be able to hang on and bounce back.

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