ABOVE: Kevin and Mary Donner, Mshko’Ode Farm

This article is part of the Ice Storm Farm Relief Fund series, in which we share the first-person stories of farmers affected by northern Michigan’s historic ice storm of late March 2025. The ice storm was devastating for the forests and farms of the region, but the story quickly faded from the public eye. Farmers are still fighting to cover their losses—lost income from weeks of lost production, destroyed fences and greenhouses, thousands of seedlings wiped out when power failed and greenhouse heat was lost. Today we hear from Kevin Donner of Mshko’ode Farm.

Kevin Donner I was not always a farmer. I actually spent a lot of time in aquatic ecology and in fisheries, and had a sizable enough career in that I started turning my focus toward the local food system, to farming about 10 or so years ago. I joined as a board member of Ziibimijwang [a farm owned by the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians] and served a four year term. I also got involved in the Northern Michigan Local Food Alliance, and just generally took an interest in facilitating and supporting a local food system.

As I got along, I started to recognize just how dismantled local food systems are relative to at any point in history. And that is true even in cases like northern Michigan, where we actually have a fair amount of excitement and enthusiasm for local food. The state of the local food system is still extremely depleted relative to the amount of industrial food that is imported into our economies and lunch rooms and refrigerators. Unfortunately, that was put to the test and put on large-scale display when COVID hit. 

I’ve always found that when you’re trying to work a problem or address an issue, doing so with an academic understanding only gets you so far. So actually living it, being on the ground, interacting with it, touching, feeling, experiencing, sometimes sobbing uncontrollably when things go wrong like that. That is what actually brings true understanding and allows for effective solutions to be created. So my wife, Mary,  and I both had that kind of feeling that we wanted to make that jump, grow more food for our family, for our community, serve our community in that way, and understand the system better. We launched Mshko’Ode Farm in 2019 and after several years of trial and error,  I fully transitioned full time over to farming in 2023.

We do a variety of market farming. So pretty much all the kinds of fresh vegetables that you would expect to see in a grocery—tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, carrots, lots of greens, lots of lettuce, microgreens, the list goes on. We pasture-raise chicken, and they also happen to be incredibly great for the soil in northern Michigan.

So just before the storm hit, we were launching into our spring plant starts, especially tomatoes and peppers and things that need a little time to get established in our cold northern climate. We had thousands of those starts. We were also doing a lot of repairs on the farm and just getting things ready.

Then a typical spring storm turned into a nearly 36-hour ice storm. The first day we heard and saw many trees starting to lose limbs, and then that transitioned into explosions in our forest as whole trees came down or split in half. It was just a lot. 

The wildest thing was for about 24 hours, it almost sounded like Fourth of July, when after the big fireworks displays quiet down and everybody in the neighborhood is lighting random stuff. It sounded like that, and it was coming from the woods, and each of those explosions and crashes represented a pretty serious disruption.

We lost power after our first day, and weren’t really sure how long it would take to get it back, but as the damage increased around us, we started recognizing that it might be a while. So we scrambled to get heat established in our greenhouse. After a couple of days, we realized that water was becoming an issue. So we started heading down to the river and filling up 55 gallon drums to water plants.

All of this is, of course, happening at the same time that we’re trying to take care of our own children, cooking on camp stoves in the kitchen, and occasionally outside, and keeping daily life going, keeping the house from freezing, running the wood stove continuously, that sort of stuff. We were fortunate that after about five days, we got our power back at our house.

Many folks were still without electricity for another week and a half or almost a month. So after we got our power back, we switched into community health mode. I started cooking meals for some of the warming shelters and delivering food to individuals at their homes where we knew they were without power, especially some of the elders in the community. And then just generally trying to help out—help remove brush from people’s yards and limbs off of their houses. We’re still pretty much doing that. I still have plenty of limbs in the yard that we haven’t gotten to, and we really haven’t even started to deal with what’s going on out back in the woods.

That’s gonna take multiple years, I think. But compared to some, we got lucky here. We scraped by with just some greatly increased workload. Though we certainly lost some of the microgreens and starts. Like basil and tomatoes, that are more cold sensitive. They were just toast.

The main and probably lasting impact is the extra hours a week that we devote to addressing the carnage.That’s not an insignificant thing for us—a big family with a lot going on. And I don’t know if or when that’s going to end. 

My wife Mary manages Ziibimijwang INC AND THE FARM ASSOCIATED WITH IT, and they had a substantial amount of fence down. You know, they’re dealing with pulling trees off of there first before they can get the fence back up. That fence is absolutely critical to preventing deer from destroying every last thing they plant.

I’ve talked with folks who have more than a quarter mile of fence that they were having to put back up. Other folks incurred a substantial amount of expense trying to keep their seedlings or flower bulbs alive. We heard stories from our maple producers that were just devastating. We also have some orchards up here and a couple individuals that I spoke with said they are dealing with substantial damage to their trees.

We haven’t even had time to assess the amount of risk out there in the forest, let alone begin to address anything. We know we have hanging trees that are giving way. They’ve snapped at the bottom or halfway up, and they’re just kind of hanging out in the branches of some other tree that didn’t fall. They call them widow makers. You know, my approach right now is just wait for a few wind storms and hope for the best and then kind of go back in.

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