Ostrowski Family Farms Cooperative Bets Big on Regenerative Agriculture

Grant Ostrowski still farms the same 240 acres west of Waukesha that his grandfather cleared in the 1940s, but the fields look different than they did when he took over full-time management a decade ago. Cover crops now hold the soil through the winter months where bare ground once sat exposed to erosion, and Ostrowski has stopped tilling several of his fields entirely, a practice he was skeptical of when a neighboring farmer first suggested it. Today, Ostrowski is not just managing his own land differently, he is the founder and president of a cooperative of eighteen Waukesha County farms organized around regenerative agriculture practices and shared equipment and marketing resources.

Ostrowski's path toward regenerative farming began less as an environmental conviction than a financial one. Facing rising input costs for fertilizer and pesticides in the early 2010s, and watching commodity crop prices stay flat, he started experimenting with reduced tillage and cover cropping on a handful of acres, hoping to cut costs without sacrificing yield. The early results were mixed, but by the third growing season his soil organic matter had measurably improved, and his fertilizer costs had dropped by nearly a third.

From One Farm to a Cooperative

Word of Ostrowski's results spread through informal channels common in Wisconsin's farming communities, at implement dealers, county fair booths, and after-church conversations. By 2019, enough neighboring farmers had expressed interest that Ostrowski helped formalize Ostrowski Family Farms Cooperative, a structure that lets member farms share the cost of specialized no-till equipment, cover crop seed purchasing, and soil testing services that would be prohibitively expensive for any single small operation to acquire alone.

The cooperative now represents roughly 6,000 combined acres across Waukesha and neighboring counties, and has begun marketing a portion of its grain and produce under a shared regional brand aimed at buyers specifically seeking regeneratively grown products. Ostrowski negotiated the cooperative's first direct supply agreement with a Milwaukee-area grocery co-op in 2022, cutting out a layer of commodity brokers and allowing member farms to capture a larger share of the final sale price.

Convincing a Skeptical Farming Community

Not every farmer in the region has been receptive. Ostrowski has spoken candidly about the resistance he encountered early on, particularly from older farmers wary of practices that diverged from methods passed down over generations. He has tried to address that skepticism by keeping detailed yield and cost data from his own transition, sharing it openly at cooperative meetings and county extension events rather than making broad claims about regenerative agriculture's benefits.

Navigating Land Pressure Near a Growing Suburb

Waukesha County's proximity to the Milwaukee metro area brings a complication most rural cooperatives do not face: steady pressure from residential and commercial development pushing up land values and land taxes. Ostrowski has become an advocate for county-level farmland preservation programs and has worked with a land trust to place a conservation easement on a portion of his own acreage, ensuring it cannot be developed even after he eventually passes the farm to the next generation.

Building Toward Succession

Ostrowski's two adult children have both expressed interest in continuing the farm, a fact he says influenced his decision to build the cooperative rather than simply expand his own operation. "A cooperative model means the next generation isn't inheriting all the risk by themselves," he said, standing at the edge of a cover-cropped field in early summer. "It spreads the weight around, the same way it always should have."