Green acres: How an insurance man taught himself to be a suburban farmer and store owner

Cliff McConville learned to milk cows the quintessential 21st century way: from a YouTube video.

Working from home in 2011 for a Texas-based company, the then-48-year-old looked out at his 8-acre Barrington Hills property and decided it would look better with a couple of cows in his horse barn. And a chicken or two. It would be a good way to spend the time that he had spent commuting earlier in his insurance career.

"Maybe that I was my midlife crisis. I don't know," he joked. "I needed a challenge. I wanted to do something that I had a passion for."

He started off with just a little raw milk and some fresh eggs for him and his family, maybe some neighbors. Before he knew it, well, "It sorta just started taking off," he said.

The milk and eggs became a side business.

"And then that side business just really kept growing much faster than I ever expected. There was just so much demand," he said.

His side business became his primary business, All Grass Farms. Now the former insurance man runs a farm along the Fox River in West Dundee that he leases from the Kane County Forest Preserve District and a second farm in Wisconsin. He sells products from nearby artisan food producers at the Farm Store on the West Dundee property.

Without any knowledge or experience, he went into farming. He admitted it's been a "steep learning curve."

You could say McConville, now 60, became a farmer organically.

Finding his niche

By the time McConville quit his insurance job to focus on farming, in 2017, he had six or seven employees and had opened the Farm Store the year before. He had already found his niche as a suburban farmer.

"There's not a lot of us that are operating in the suburbs," he said. "And I would say that everyone that I'm aware of, we all have a niche that allows us to have some success. It's definitely not an easy way to make a living."

So what is McConville's niche?

Raw milk. Or at least it was at first.

Along the way he added pastured, grass-fed beef, which has "taken off," about 25% of his sales now. Raw milk dipped to only about 15% of sales. Eggs, broiler chickens and pastured pork are roughly 10% each, and Thanksgiving turkeys are about 5%, he said.

Farm store products such as honey, vegetables, flour from other local farms are about 25% of his sales.

"Which kind of was unexpected. I never thought we would sell that much other stuff (at the Farm Store) that we don't produce," McConville said.

All told McConville's revenues topped $2.2 million last year, up 15% from the year before. He expects growth to slow to 10% this year, but only because he's still working to build up the production side of the business.

"Demand has always been strong," McConville said. "That's one of the things that gave me some encouragement every time we looked to expand. ... And so I've never really worried about investing in growth because we had really strong demand.

"It's different than any other business. When we were in the insurance business it was always sell, sell, sell. We had the folks in marketing and selling, and really we haven't had to do much of that. Marketing kind of keeps up with itself."

His own farmers market

The Farm Store came about as the result of a question: "What else can we sell with remaining shelf space outside of refrigerated products? Then we started just filling up the shelves with other local products. Over time we kind of evolved that."

The idea was to find healthy, often organic products that are not available in commercial grocery stores. Now he and his wife, Anna, can eat their entire diet out of the Farm Store. He wanted to sell coffee, so he found an organic roaster in Madison, Wisconsin. Wild-caught seafood comes from another place in Madison that goes fishing in Alaska every summer.

"It's not local, but at least we trust the sourcing of it, right?" McConville said.

Potatoes come from a farm in Wisconsin. Flour and other grain products come from Janie's Mill in Ashkum, Illinois, about 20 miles south of Kankakee. A lot of lettuces and produce from Broadview Farms in Marengo. Bushel and Peck, a farm and preservation kitchen in Beloit, Wisconsin, sells fermented goods like sauerkraut, kimchi, pickled items and a wide variety of hot sauces. Apple products come from a Michigan man whom McConville and his staff nicknamed "Apple Mike."

All told 40 or 50 local food vendors fill the shelves in the 400-square-foot store. It's really a converted two-car garage, though the garage doors have been replaced by French doors.

McConville is looking at expanding the store, maybe adding a commercial kitchen where he can sell bone broths, soups, salads and maybe sandwiches. That's a big investment, though, and not an easy decision to make.

The next step is the launch of a new website that will facilitate some one-day shipping of products. Home delivery in the Chicago market could happen this fall.

"I figure if we can get up where we're having 25 or 30 orders a week coming out of the Chicago metro area, then that makes sense for us to lease a delivery van and start doing those deliveries ourselves," McConville said.

Where's the beef?

When McConville ran out of space at the West Dundee farm, particularly for his growing beef business, he started looking for another farm. His search eventually took him to East Troy, Wisconsin, down the street from the Alpine Valley Music Theater and Ski Resort. Now he has a 30-year lease on a former dairy farm owned by the nonprofit Living Lands Trust.

"That farm up there was really well-suited for us," he said.

He and Anna now live on the 400 acres, where it's just them, their beef cattle and some laying hens.

"We don't have to worry about land anymore," he said.

Ideally, the business will get to the point where it runs itself. Sure there will always be something to do, equipment to fix, animals to take care of. He enjoys the variety and hands-on nature of the work. The day-to-day administrative and management work is something he'd like to farm out, so to speak.

For now, though, there's a certain amount of pride in what he has built and accomplished, and the life he and Anna have built for themselves.

"I feel totally in control of my own destiny," McConville said. "I'm not dependent on an employer or a big customer. We have thousands of customers. So I feel a lot of freedom. Hey, this is mine to be successful or screw up, but it's all on me. I kind of like that."