“Why Burger Night?” (A Long Answer for the Curious, the Hungry, and the Miracle-Seekers)

“Why Burger Night?” (A Long Answer for the Curious, the Hungry, and the Miracle-Seekers)

If you’ve ever sat on our farm with a burger in one hand and a beer in the other, gazing at the cows on the hill and wondered: “What made them decide to do this?" well, friend, settle in. The short answer is: we wanted to bring people to the farm and pizza was already taken.

But the long answer?

The long answer involves 60 acres of overgrown dreams, a barn on the brink of collapse, a freezer full of lard and the sort of miracles you only recognize in hindsight.

It All Started With a (Totally Normal) Idea…

Back in 2009, when we bought this place, we had no intention of selling meat, inviting strangers over or running a seasonal restaurant. Heck, we didn’t even have farming experience. The idea was simple: raise our kids in the country, grow some of our own food, and enjoy a little space.

That’s it.

We bought the property when Mady was three and Adeyle was six months old. If you had told me then that someday we’d be hosting live music, running a bar and serving 300+ burgers on a Saturday night… I’d have assumed you were drunk. And then I’d have laughed until I couldn’t breathe and pointed out that neither Andy nor I had ever farmed a day in our lives and we knew even less about running a restaurant.

But life’s funny like that.

The Dilapidated Farm

This farm hadn’t been used for animals in ages. It was more of a rural junkyard with a leaky house, decaying buildings and enough broken stuff to fill a dozen dumpsters. It took us a full year just to clean things up and find our starting point.

But then came the animals.

We started with a couple pigs and cows for ourselves. Then came chickens. A few geese. Some ducks. A pair of goats that may or may not have been invited. A sheep. A milk cow. Turkeys. More pigs. (You get the idea.)

And then we reasoned amongst ourselves: “Well, if we’re already feeding a couple pigs, what’s a couple more? We can sell the extras and get our own meat for free!”

HAHAHAHAHAHA.

That was cute.

Because spoiler alert: there's no such thing as "free" meat when you have now created an entirely new division called SALES. (And, pro tip: marketing and sales is way harder than production. By a lot. Sigh, what young, naive fools we were.)

But we had convinced ourselves it was a great idea (another pro-tip: always run your ideas past people smarter than you and with no skin in the game).

So we expanded. More pigs. More cows. And just when we were starting to feel like maybe we were getting the hang of it, corn prices shot through the roof and feeder pigs became impossible to find. Which meant: time to make our own piglets.

But you can’t just have one sow. The efficient number is closer to six. So… guess who’s now drowning in pork?

You're a good guesser! It was us.

The Farmer's Market Fizzle

At this point we needed storage, so we added a walk-in freezer. Then we needed to sell all that meat, so we hit up every farmer’s market we could get into.

Which was exhausting (remember, we both had day jobs during all of this too). And limited. And frustratingly political. (If you think farmer’s markets are all kumbaya and holding hands, think again.) This meant we couldn’t get into the big downtown market or winter market, so we did 3-5 small ones every week, and we couldn’t go to the nearby Twin Cities markets because our beloved butcher is only WI-inspected and using them is a non-negotiable (truly uncured meats (no celery either!) and no weird stuff is nearly impossible to find).

We knew farmer’s markets weren’t going to be a long-term plan anyway. I had quite the knack for bringing the exact wrong products on any given day and hated how weather-dependent they were, not to mention seasonal (This was 10+ years ago before social media was the force it is today and before winter markets were much of an option around here.)

So the wheels started turning…What if, instead of us chasing people down in hot parking lots, we could get people to come to us (and yes, this is also when we started the online store)?

The Farm as a Destination?

Our friends and family had started commenting on how beautiful the farm was. And once we looked up from our grindstones long enough, we saw it too. The view. The peace. The potential.

Meanwhile, farm-to-table restaurants started popping up in Eau Claire and we started supplying a few. This gave us hope and contacts. But while other farms were doing pizza nights, I couldn’t make that fit for us.

For one, I have a terrible relationship with dough and baking (just ask my mother). And two, we’re not a dairy, wheat, or veggie farm, we’re a meat farm. Pizza just didn’t check enough boxes for the ingredients we had and wanted to keep having.

But burgers? Burgers are just as versatile as pizza, the focus is MEAT, specifically BEEF. And, BONUS: they go really well with fries and cheese curds.

Which brings us to what I'll lovingly call my "lard problem".

A Fat Problem (and a Deep-Fried Solution)

We had rendered all this gorgeous lard from our pastured pigs and were using some in soaps and balms (shoutout to Good Fat Skincare, formerly Stephanie’s Super Swine Soap), but it was piling up. And while tallow is currently having quite the moment in the spotlight, lard is still a four-letter word to many people (but pro-tip: it's even better for you in lotions!).

So I was venting to a chef friend about my lard conundrum when he casually mentioned, “You know, you could use it in the fryer.”

EUREKA. That was it. The vision was born: Burgers and fries. Made with our beef. Fried in our fat.

Done.

Now we just had to figure out literally everything else. 😂 

No Experience? No Problem! (Kinda.)

We didn’t have restaurant experience or restaurant-investor money. So we did what we always do: figured it out one painful, hilarious, miracle-at-a-time step after another.

We leaned on our restaurant friends to help us figure out menus, sourcing, kitchen layout, vent hoods, fryer safety, grease disposal....the million things you don't even know are a thing until you start planning and talking it through. We also knew we wanted everything made fresh to order, not precooked or being held. (Again, there’s a reason you don’t see many burger farms. It’s a trickier & more expensive setup than pizza....especially when you have no idea what you are doing.) 

So we did pop-ups to test this little theory of mine that if people would drive out to veggie farms for pizza, maybe they'll drive out to a meat farm for burgers??

And lo and behold…during one of those pop-ups, who should show up but PBS’s Wisconsin Foodie, a show that had rarely (never?) come this far west and didn’t waste airtime on dumb ideas. They liked what they saw. The wind was now in our sails.

Lightning Strikes (Literally)

So we got to work. We worked with our health inspector to find the best way to use our existing farm spaces safely. Since banks are pretty well-known for not funding build-it-and-they-will come types of operations we had to get creative with funding and are grateful to have received a loan through our county’s Revolving Loan Fund (because we were creating jobs) and a USDA grant that helped with marketing and startup costs.

But the real turning point? That WI Foodie episode that made us believe it really was a good idea and gave us a platform before we really even opened! How crazy is that?!? I'm not sure we would've been able to financially survive those first few years of start-up expenses without it. And the only reason I even saw the post from WI Foodie looking for new farms?

I woke up in the middle of the night to a thunderstorm and started scrolling Facebook.

I woke up in the middle of the night to a thunderstorm and started scrolling Facebook.

Lightning. Literally. ⚡

Burgers, Fries, and Big Dreams

So that’s how Burger Night started: A daunting pile of lard, a string of well-timed miracles and the belief that people might just come to the middle of nowhere for something delicious, meaty and fun.

Today, Burger Night is burgers, fries, beer, music, bingo, trivia, community and the most magical little farm in the hills of Mondovi.

Has everything gone according to plan? Absolutely not.

We thought we’d be building a permanent restaurant building “in a few years”. That was many years ago. Reality (and weather) had other plans. And covid struck when we were just two years old so we had quite a baptism-by-fire for those first couple of years (if you came out during 2020-2021 you should give us another try, pretty sure more than a few wrote us off during those crazy years). But now we have our legs somewhat under us.

I also loved the idea of turning the used fryer oil into biodiesel for the tractor to really complete the circle but that hasn't made it to reality yet. But there's a million other ideas cooking.

The next BIG goal is to build a new building for farm operations so we can convert the barn into a bar with indoor seating. (We’re just waiting on a cool $200K to fall from the sky. Lightning, take the hint.)

From Lard to Legacy

So why burgers?

Because they made sense for our farm, our products, our weird little challenges, our personalities and our beautiful patch of land. Because we wanted something fun & creative. Because fries and cheese curds. But ultimately, because we wanted to share the farm with you.

And somehow it all just came together.