I wouldn't be surprised if my electric cooperative put us on some kind of watch list last month when our electrical needs leaped abruptly to the level required to air-condition a McMansion.....in Death Valley.

Cooperative employees (many of whom are neighbors) know full well that our barn/house is hardly a McMansion (we live in about 1,800 square feet on the second floor), and we're not really air-conditioned people anyway, having driven cars with six digits on the odometer and lacking freon all our adult lives.

And, of course, there's the matter of our being sort of crunchy certified organic types, out here at the end of a road, more than two miles from a highway. It's no big secret that we have no conventional farming experience, and we have a few friends with dreadlocks and eclectic taste in music and philosophy.

The rumor does make sense, I'll admit.

But no.

The jump in kilowattage marked the installation of our pallet-ready walk-in cooler, which hums along at 36 degrees. Our state-inspected on-farm warehouse facility houses the refrigerator and a smaller walk-in freezer. We bring our USDA-inspected meats back from the butcher and house them for USDA-specified lengths of time in refrigeration; product not sold in those windows of time gets frozen.

I think the disconnect occurs not because folks assume we're growing pot. I think it's still just fundamentally inconceivable to many people that we even try to do what we do: raise, process, transport, market and distribute the products of our farm -- and the farms of our two additional member/owners and a handful of other small, sustainable family farms in our corner of Iowa.

"But," I can almost hear folks wondering as they pass our Grass Run Farm mailbox just off the highway, "how do they make money?"

It's true there isn't much of a margin, and we're certainly not making minimum wage for the numbers of hours worked. The learning curve remains steep as we build a respected brand for our faithfully local, grass-fed, family-farmed products.

But we're making it happen, however slowly and painfully. We knew we were getting something right when a group of local Amishmen, represented by one member who took it upon himself to commute to a telephone, called us to see if we were interested in marketing their grass-fed cattle. And two weeks ago a contributing reporter for CNN spent three hours at our dinner table (grass-fed ribeye roast, homemade bread and garden-fresh salad) encouraging us to foretell the future of local foods in our corner of the world.

It was an unexpected but refreshing opportunity to recognize that we've come from somewhere and that we're going someplace real -- no "enhancers" required.