Why Wisconsin pizza farm movement’s time has come

Chicago, in all its outsized hubris and self-consciousness, likes to believe it knows everything there is to know about the only perfect food ever created — the pizza. It knows deep dish and thin, cracker and caramelized-cheese crust, wedge cut and tavern cut, St. Louis Style, New York Style, New Haven Style and Detroit Style, Neapolitan and Roman and Sicilian, stuffed crust and whatever those pizza pot pies think they’re doing.

But does Chicago know the pizza farm?

Whenever I have mentioned to friends that I am headed to, or returning from, a Wisconsin pizza farm — Wisconsin being the epicenter of the pizza farm universe — I am met with blank stares and the same dumb joke: What, is that where they grow pizza?

As a matter of fact, yes.

Get this, but most of the ingredients that make up your favorite pizzas likely originated on a farm. I mean, who would have thought? Like most great ideas, the concept is so obvious you wonder why it didn’t take off sooner. Wisconsin pizza farms just cut out the middlemen. At Grassways Organics in East Troy, most of the meats and some of the cheeses on its pizzas come from animals on its farm. (You can meet the grandchildren of your sausage topping.) Some pizza farms only grow the vegetables, herbs or wheat. Mapleton Barn pizza farm in Oconomowoc, northwest of Milwaukee — owned by a Chicago-area couple who bought the century-old family farm for its event space — doesn’t grow or raise anything, but rather partners each week with the excellent Milwaukee pizza joint Flour Girl & Flame, which gathers its ingredients from Wisconsin farmers then tows in a mobile oven.

Like other pizza farm experiences, Mapleton can feel at times as if it were more about its idyllic Insta-friendly vibes than a genuine farm-to-picnic-table meal. And yet, the pies are chewy, sweet and distinctive — Flour Girl finishes each with a drizzle of honey on the crust — and for the hours you’re there, it is possible to think all is copacetic in the world.

“Parents here let their kid run wild while they sit outside, they drink beer, they eat pizza, they talk and laugh, and what parent doesn’t want that?” asked Jason Darby, who owns Mapleton with his wife, Sasha. She’s from Lombard, he’s from St. Charles, and though a pizza farm might sound sort of bougie — the Darbys have no agricultural background and primarily bought the place to host weddings — there’s nothing trendy about pastoral.

The Stone Barn pizza farm in Nelson, about 90 minutes from the Twin Cities, had no cell service for a while. “We don’t get many complaints but we’d hear from customers who wanted to use their phones, regardless of all this scenery,” said co-owner Marcy Smith. Stone Barn is tucked inside the rolling, curling green expanse of the Norwegian Valley, part of the Driftless Area, so named because it’s that rare Midwestern region that was not flattened during the last ice age. It still has cliffs and bluffs and towering forest lines.

Picture yourself drinking beer and eating pizza at a picnic table while looking out on a slice of Vermont, only in the Midwest. “Because we didn’t have cell service, we would remind people: ‘Maybe it’s your chance to relax and talk,’” Smith said. But now, she said with a sigh, they have added cellphone service. Also, a Thai pizza with a peanut base.

There are at least a dozen pizza farms in Wisconsin, many not far from Stone Barn, grouped near the Wisconsin-Iowa-Minnesota border, winding alongside the Mississippi River. Most are working farms that, just one or two nights a week, open for pizza. Think couples curled up, families towing excited kids. You park on grass, bring a blanket, grab a spot at a picnic table or on the ground; you listen to a local singer strum “Wish You Were Here” on an acoustic guitar; you order beer or wine (most pizza farms do not allow you to bring your own); you wait for your pizza; and you relish, ideally, your perfect summer evening. At Suncrest Gardens pizza farm, which is also in the Driftless Hills, we killed time waiting for our pizzas by snacking on pretty great cheese curds made with chives and watching a flock of restless sheep, running in lines.

Pizza farm customers, depending on the remoteness of the farm, can be more tourists than locals. “People are so removed from agriculture, we see a learning curve when people visit,” said Heather Secrist, owner of Suncrest. “We sometimes get people ordering asparagus pizza in August, but the way I see it, that’s an opportunity to learn about seasonality in the Midwest.” The staff T-shirts read: “Pizza Grows On Farms.”

She’s been making pizza here for 19 years. After she bought Suncrest, she looked for new ways to diversify the production of its 16 acres. She added a kitchen to cook the food she grew and raised. She was butchering her meat; she was also growing tomatoes, onion, garlic. The farm next door had an organic mill. Pizza just made sense. “Yet when I grew up near here, on a dairy farm, there were no Wisconsin pizza farms.”

She likes to think of pizza farms as Wisconsin’s answer to California vineyards.

The state, of course, has long embraced homegrown food traditions. Door County has fish boils, and Friday fish fries remain so popular that Mapleton Barn only makes pizza on Thursday nights, to avoid getting in the way. There’s cheese curds, butter burgers and booyah stew. The pizza farm, however, has been slowly replicating across the country; indeed, during the pandemic, some farms began throwing outdoor pizza nights to keep the lights on when they could no longer sell their produce, dairy, meat and wheat to the shuttered restaurant industry.

Many pizza farmers insist the pizza farm concept started with A to Z Produce and Bakery in Stockholm, Wisc., on the Minnesota border. Ted Fisher said he and Robbi Bannen were not making a lot of money. “We built a brick oven but didn’t even intend to use it for what it became.” He was a skilled baker who admired Alice Waters’ classic cookbook “Chez Panisse Pizza, Pasta and Calzone,” and serving pizzas solved problems: It brought people to the farm, and it used up their produce.

Last year, after a couple of decades of this, they ended pizza nights and put up a sign: “25 Years is Enough.”

Megan and husband Chaz Self of Grassways Organics have been doing it for about 10 years. She said between tending crops and handling animals and making pizza on Fridays and Saturdays — they serve 400 pies a night at the summer peak — “you tend to wake up one day and it’s already fall.” They have 380 acres they acquired through a long-term lease and land trust that preserves historic farms. Neither had a farming background, and now they have Jersey cows and a bull and chickens. One night I was there, a neighbor’s peacock wandered onto the farm and mingled with the diners. “We hoped for the farm to support itself one day,” Megan said, “and the reality is there are a lot of subsidies to get you there. Having a pizza farm was just one way to make it work.”

They’re still in their 30s. Marcy and Matt Smith of Stone Barn are in their early 40s. Like the Selfs, they didn’t come to this with much of a farming or restaurant background. Matt was a social studies teacher, Marcy was a guidance counselor, and they liked to cook. They worked summers at Stone Barn, and when the previous owners decided to sell, they bought the place. Now they live on the grounds in a restored Victorian home, surrounded by old red barns and the centerpiece stone barn, which collapsed in 1986, leaving only its stone walls and foundation. The kitchen, and many of the picnic tables, are now set alongside the evocative shell of that old barn, built in the late 1800s.

Almost no one who does this advertises. Pizza nights spread through word of mouth, and while I have had better pizzas, not one of the pizzas at any of the farms was less than very good. Many were swoon-worthy, leaning into their brick ovens for sooty, fragrantly soft blacked-pocked crusts. Many of the sausage toppings had the singularness you associate with a homemade meal, and many of the tomatoes were so fresh the smells lingered on my fingers in the car.

That said, like other destination meals, the setting is not an insignificant part of the appeal. Most are open late spring through early fall, and other than Mapleton, weekends only. Lines get long on nice days — but the upside is you’re there longer. So chill.