It started as a way to feed their family. Now, East Troy's Prairie Junction Farms sells pigs, chickens and award-winning toffee.
When Bill and Sarah Coulman decided to raise pigs on their land in East Troy, it was about creating food for their family. It's grown into a business with pigs, chickens, eggs, vegetables and award-winning toffee.
Every member of the family has a part, including their five kids, ranging in age from 6 to 19.
Prairie Junction Farms has three types of toffee for sale — a traditional, a bourbon made with Wisconsin’s Driftless Glen Distillery, and a dark chocolate almond — plus aronia syrup that Sarah Coulman swears by for allergies.
Look for Coulman and her family at local markets, including Burlington, East Troy (Fridays twice a month), Brookfield and Oconomowoc. Prairie Junction Farms toffee is also sold at Sendik’s, West Allis Cheese and Sausage Shoppe and Pop’s Marketplace. Additionally, the family just signed on to sell toffee in the marketplace at the Waukesha County Fair July 20 to 24.
For additional information and ordering, go to prairiejunctionfarms.com.
Becoming a farm family
We are on 5 acres and my husband was working a job where he was out of town all the time. Our 2-year-old said one day when he came home, “Oh, that guy is here.” So we said, what is our biggest expense? Food. A family like ours, with five kids ages 6 to 19, it is food. I am already doing a garden. Maybe we’ll get animals, or I’ll get a regular 9-to-5 job.
He wanted pigs. I did not want pigs that root. He found one of two kinds of pigs that graze, Idaho Pasture Pigs. They have a small snout, and the lady who has the most … is in upper Wisconsin. We didn’t get them from her, but now we know where to go. Then my son wanted to raise meat chickens, so they built chicken "tractors" on wheels. … We do about 240 chickens a year, and we do turkeys for Thanksgiving. We started that this year, and we only have four left now to sell.
Growing goals
We’re hoping to get a greenhouse this year. We have produce, our pork, our chicken and turkeys. We do sell eggs, just small-scale. We just had 11 piglets, and we have three breeding pigs. It is not like we are a big production by any means. Right now, we’re sold out of pork.
It took a lot of education when we started. Grass-fed pork is not white. We basically had to give some pork away at first. This year was our first year we had a Wisconsin inspector come out. We are now able to sell by the cut. Not everyone has the freezer space for a half pig. It was fun to deliver pork to people this year. That’s only once a season. Our chickens it is the same thing, they’re pasture-raised. I can’t do that year-round. People stock up for the year when they buy. We don’t bring any of our meats to the market, it is a whole other license.
Building their business
For the farm part, it was just word of mouth. I started a Facebook page. Family and friends would share it. Now with the toffee and small business side, we go to farmers markets to sell. Our logo is a pig. My husband with my daughter, when she was only 8, came up with the logo. When I’m selling toffee, people see the logo and wonder why it is a pig, but it is a small farm turned small business.
Take note
Chicken and turkeys, we still have available. We’re sold out of pork for this year. We’ll have more next year.
We don’t have a storefront or anything on our farm. The farm started in 2018, but the small business started last year, so we are not there yet. We do pickups and deliveries.
Sweet start
We’re in the commercial kitchen two days a week making toffee. It was fall of 2020, and I knew my husband loved the farming and always wanted to work for himself. What do we do? We have been making toffee for 20 years. Friends and family always had Christmas cookies; we had toffee. We had been encouraged so many times to sell it. We finally got licensed in December 2020, got a commercial kitchen. We were selling by Christmas.
Bring on the bourbon
We met with Driftless Glen out of Baraboo. We wanted to make a bourbon toffee, so we dropped off a bag of our toffee there. The liquor store in East Troy had helped us find a bourbon to work with. It was perfect, and the bourbon toffee took off.
Toffee tips
This is not break-your-teeth toffee. We use good Wisconsin butter. We do cook it at a higher temperature.
Someone gave me a recipe they got randomly off the internet. We started tweaking it. Seems like everybody else likes what we did. We put more butter than they recommended and made it not so hard.
Bring on the butter
Right now, we have been going through 80 pounds of butter a week. When we started a year ago, we made 50 bags of toffee a week. Now we make 500 a week.
What surprised her
We got into 50 stores in one year. I have no background in sales. I just knew I had a good product and I like people.
Finding new flavors
In March, we started dark chocolate sea salt. We’re coming out with a new one using rye whiskey. We’ll be doing that one soon after all the inspections. It takes time.
All about aronia
My husband has really bad allergies. I had elderberry syrup, and I was making that. Then a gentleman told us about aronia berry. It is a chokeberry. … It has had some great reviews, but nobody knew what aronia berry was. We get our aronia berries from Brooklyn, Wisconsin, and our raw honey comes from Delavan. It is all local. The aronia syrup has taken off. We have lots of orders out of state. The (aronia) berries, they’re really dry, but my husband eats them by the handful. I have rosehips, honey, and elderberries in the syrup.
Loving the lard
My husband, not wanting to waste any pork, started experimenting with soap and the lard. I loved it. Some people will be “lard soap, disgusting” even though it has been used for hundreds of years. We called it Sowp, in the way of the female pig.
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Fork. Spoon. Life. explores the everyday relationship that local notables (within the food community and without) have with food. To suggest future personalities to profile, email psullivan@gannett.com.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Prairie Junction Farms finds success with pigs, chickens — and toffee
