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Cheryl's Story

 

NORTHERN HARVEST: TWENTY MICHIGAN WOMEN IN FOOD AND FARMING

https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/northern-harvest



 CHERYL KOBERNIK’S STORY

Her German heritage looms large in Cheryl’s tale.  You never give up, go backwards, or go around obstacles, but face them head on until the solution pops up.  A house inhabited by raccoons, black with smoke and the furnace not working?  “Perfect. Exactly what we were looking for.” Cherries grown without chemicals to help them abscise. How then to get them off the trees?  “Step back, think. . . . You don’t pick fruit until it’s ripe. . . We are just going to have to let it get ripe.”

Growing up in a suburb of Detroit, Cheryl was lucky in that her parents owned ninety acres of pine woods in Boyne City, northern Michigan, her dad’s “place of solace,” where they spent not only summer vacation time but many weekends during the winter months.

Planning to be a nurse, she enrolled at Wayne State, switched to counseling, and finished with a degree in social work. She moved to the cabin in Boyne City and worked as the director of a hospice before meeting her future husband. Geography and a match-making aunt brought them together, and together they purchased that “deplorable” house, decided to start a cherry farm, and later decided to transition to organic farming, a major challenge and not one widely encouraged at the time, but the right decision for them. North Star Organic cherries are renowned throughout the region. 

Cheryl told me: “Not growing up in agriculture, it’s an honor to be accepted into the agrarian life. . . . I have never met people with such integrity in my life.”

To read more of Cheryl’s story—including her struggles with second-hand tractors and sprayers—and to read the stories of  nineteen other amazing women in food and farming, you can now order Northern Harvest from Amazon or from your favorite independent bookstore.

 

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