When a family with a love of food and hospitality reimagined the vacant land adjacent a corporate office, an unusual little farm named NanBop was born. The resounding question: can you grow a legacy of connection?

Inside the cellar of NanBop Farm’s processing building in Cadillac, Michigan, it’s warm and dry and quiet. Rows of grow lights shine close on a tiny sprouting regiment of greens. Even though snow is swirling outside, seeds have already been planted for spring starts to sell at local markets—the first of the season so far are artichokes and eggplants. Soon will come tomatoes, cucumbers and squash.

But there’s no farmhouse on a hill nearby, no stone barn with its creaking boards and field mice nests in the walls. In the distance, a steady hum—not birdsong or crickets or farming machinery, but the drone of traffic just a few hundred yards away on Highway 115.

This unlikely farm sits on 60 acres of commercial property that just a few years ago was an empty lawn flanking a large white building, the former home of 9&10 News operations (910 Media Group is the parent company of MyNorth.com and Traverse Northern Michigan magazine). To any passerby, it could be just … land. Open space, a buffer between a building and a road. But there’s no such thing as viewing land as “just land” in Northern Michigan anymore. It may be wild. It may be a refuge. A playground. A home. A vacation property. It may lure development. Or it may be something else entirely, something uniquely precious here: It could grow things. Lots of things.

Michigan is one of the most diverse agricultural regions in the country, second only to California in the sheer variety of crops this soil and our coastal microclimates can yield. Cherries, yes, but also cucumbers, dry beans, squash, asparagus, sugar beets and dairy cows and hogs—more than 47,000 farms and 10 million acres of farmland. And while not all of its soil is good for growing, the glacial till left behind from the massive bodies of ice gave birth to a loamy mix of sand, silt and clay that, when managed properly, can coax all manner of things to life.

Including, it seems, a community.

At least that is the hope of farm owners Pete and Jolie Iacobelli. Pete’s family motto—passed on by his parents, Mario and Jane Iacobelli, a.k.a. Nana and Boppy—has always been that any conversation that takes place over food is always better. It wasn’t long after 910 Media Group purchased the building and property, 13 years ago, that Pete began thinking of growing more than the broadcast business. “I started asking myself, ‘What if this empty land could become something more?’” That “more” took shape in his mind: A community hub. A portal for education. A spot to share joy, with live music and weddings and children chasing chickens and tasting carrots out of the garden. The challenge of course, as with any farm, is not the dream. It’s growing and nurturing the vision into reality—and inviting other growers and families and locals and foodies along for the ride.

Imagine a memory that smells of the sweetness of strawberries, that tastes like the sour punch of rhubarb. This is what Iacobelli remembers from his mother’s garden—a classic kitchen plot, brimming with herbs and tomatoes and zucchini that seemed to reproduce themselves almost overnight in the heat of late summer.

“I saw these things transform into the foods we loved as a family—strawberry rhubarb pie, zucchini bread, spaghetti sauce,” he says. “It gave me a reason to spend time in the kitchen with my mom and grandma.” It taught him something no storebought food could do: To savor.

It’s a lesson he passes on without words; through, of all things, the perfect simplicity of an egg.
NanBop is a nascent farm—woven from part memory, part vision, part idealism and part pure, human hunger. The name is an homage to Iacobelli’s parents. On the farm’s logo stands a lone proud hen. “I want us to be known for eggs,” Iacobelli explains. “Because they mean so much to me as a dad, to us as a family.”

It happens now less than it used to, as Iacobelli’s kids grow and leave the nest; but one thing he knows for sure is that he can pull them in close with the sizzle of a frying egg, the scent of toasted homemade sourdough. “I’m not a great cook, but I make a great egg sandwich,” he laughs.

Whenever they had a cold ski practice looming, a tough day, or just needed the comfort that kids and teens crave but can’t always ask for, the Iacobelli children could always count on the soul nourishment of a simple egg sandwich with their dad.

It’s this notion of not only warmth, but also the conversation, “the civility,” Iacobelli says, that he finds beautifully compelling about creating and sharing simple, wholesome food.

“Gardens give you perspective,” he adds. “You work so hard to pull something out of the ground that you really give thought to what you’ll do with it. You plan for it. And I think that’s a pretty cool way to live.”

But it’s a far cry from a kitchen garden to a fully operational farm. “Oh, we went into it pretty naïve, I know that now,” he admits.

The team started from zero, with soil that had never been farmed. For founding farmer Andrea Bushre, that was part of the excitement.

Those first two years were a flurry of initiation. Planting the fruit trees. Welcoming the first flock of baby chicks. Constructing hoop houses to grow flowers and vegetables. “The beauty of this property was that there was nothing here to fix. There were no prior farming practice mistakes to undo,” she says.

Not that it was all smooth sailing. Weather is unpredictable. Drought or extreme rain can weaken plants and bring to life molds and fungus and send micro-organisms out of whack. And the chickens? As we’ve all come to learn this year, a flock can be a vulnerable thing.

“Failure is part of it,” Bushre says. “That’s how you learn. [Farmers] fail all the time and have to pivot to do something different. People think if one thing fails that means they can’t do it; it doesn’t work for them. But that’s not true, and that’s not gardening or farming in general—things will fail. You just try something different. Farming means keeping an eye on the long term.”

For its first two years, the farm was in experimental mode, finding not only what the ground would yield, but also what the community needed.

As soon as outbuildings were completed, NanBop began processing herbs, flowers and veggies to create Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) shares, where locals could buy in for weekly bags of produce as well as loaves of local bread baked nearby in Cadillac.

With those first early yields, Iacobelli and the farm team started putting out feelers as to how NanBop would fit in with the community. The answers weren’t obvious at first. “We’re the new kids here,” Iacobelli says.

The obvious first focus was sharing those early yields. In 2024, the team hit the farmers market circuit in earnest, offering eggs, tomatoes, squash, bundles of fresh herbs and a bucket of abundant sunflowers. Their CSA offerings also took off, bringing farm fresh produce options to both the Cadillac and Traverse City areas.

NanBop also partnered last summer with the Northwest Food Coalition’s Farm2Neighbor program to provide fresh eggs and produce at fair market wholesale prices to area food banks. The farm has a point of purchase onsite in Cadillac, too, where customers can pick up produce and eggs. There’s hope that the farm and others like it can help soften the impact of food insecurity and food deserts—regions with a lack of easy access to healthy, affordable food—which affect rural areas in Northern Michigan.

Last year, the farm also hosted visits of hundreds of area school children, as well as family events and seasonal festivals, and educational workshops like wreath-building and creating planters of cocktail herbs or salad greens.

Where once grass just rolled to a distant highway, there’s delicious diversity being coaxed from the ground. But last year’s veggies and flowers are just the beginning of a farm journey that’s unique—and one where good company will be welcomed along the road.

Outside the two modern-looking farm buildings, two lone goats swagger in the driveway. Peg (because she’s white with one brown leg) and Amelia (because she’s “flighty”) roam around, sussing out visitors and looking for head scratches. The two are, at the moment, some of the only signs of farm life on the property.

NanBop doesn’t feel like a farm in the traditional sense, because it isn’t. A feeling compounded by the chill in the air and banks of snow left from a once-in-a-decade winter. But inside the farm ops building—a sort of multi-purpose space for planting and picking and washing and packaging—there is already an air of awakening energy.

Buckets are gathered for tapping the stand of maple trees that blanket the property. Down in the cellar, grow lights glow over soil-filled trays as the first seedlings of the season uncurl. The new farm director, Jason Abraham, who took over after Bushre, uncurls paper plans on a long white folding table. Aerial photographs of the farm are unrolled and stacked, marked with lines and circles showing where the pasture is thriving and where it’s not. Where there will be lavender and bees. Where a field of wildflowers will provide color and pollination.

The distance from idea to fruition feels shorter, now.

“Those chickens hanging out in the coop?” he says. “They are going to go to work. We want them out in the pasture.” The big project, he says, will be the addition of a flock of Suffolk lambs, a breed known for its meat yield. Abraham explains the lambs will graze in temporary fencing that moves around the pasture; once the lambs graze and move on, the chickens will arrive to forage for worms and bugs in the manure. Eventually, there will be pigs, who use their snouts as natural tillers to aerate and loosen the soil and uproot unwanted vegetation.

“I don’t necessarily believe that you have to be an organic farm to be a good farm,” Iacobelli says. “I don’t want to use pesticides and herbicides, but I don’t think organic certification should be the only or the ultimate goal, because being organic does not necessarily equate to good soil. Our question is, how are we going to have the tastiest, healthiest vegetables and food?” The answer is to follow some organic guidelines, but focus on regenerative practices, which incorporate two-legged and four-legged animals in the process.

According to current estimates, fewer than 2 percent of U.S. farms are considered regenerative. The beauty of regenerative farming—the flowers and pigs and lambs and maple trees and mushrooms and chickens—is that farm life takes on a seasonal rhythm, a symphonic hum. As the plots, pastures and crops are planned, what’s taking shape is a polyculture farm that is more traditional in scope, with simultaneous production of multiple crops that benefit each other and the land. To wit: the orchard will be flanked by rows of lavender, to draw pollinators and repel pests like flies, moths and woolly aphids. The lavender will be offered as U-pick, harvested eventually for products—not just soap and lotion, but also for teas, salves and culinary use.

But the longing right now, simmering under the excitement, is for NanBop to find community. Not just with neighbors and customers and school kids and food pantries, but with other like-minded farmers looking to lean on each other—for ideas, events, a shared audience, even just a shared meal.

“We’re in our infancy, and we’ve opened up the door a little bit to other farmers,” Iacobelli explains. “We have so much to learn and so many relationships to build.” But anyone who’s ever grown something knows: many, if not most, feel like they are inventing it all as they go. But there’s nothing more soul-affirming than the shared wisdom, hopes and victories, gardener to gardener. Farmer to farmer.

This, new lambs aside, is one of the most exciting adventures Iacobelli hopes to embark on with the farm team this year. “I’m hopeful to find ten, twelve other small farmers to share resources, where they could be comfortable on the farm,” he says, adding that in an ideal world, he’d find like-minded, community-forward farm folk who could come together and use the space to offer education and classes, to process and package, and engage with a shared customer base—hopefully over a farm-to-table meal or just a really good beer.

Farming is about making a living in one of the most primal and grueling and beautiful ways, but it’s also, as Iacobelli says, a mission. “I love being excited about what we all do; about being so good at producing certain things, and being able to share that with the world. That to me is just so freakin’ cool.”

He envisions community farm dinners and weddings, tucked in the birch and maple grove. Sure, egg sandwiches. And grab-and-go salads. Maybe vintage campers, where folks can have an immersive farm stay or just host their guests for a really kicked-back, kick-ass event. Local music. The clink of glasses. Laughter. The bleat of a faraway lamb. The contented chortle of chickens settling in for the night. One long ongoing conversational hum lasting deep into the night, as the sound of passing cars falls to the background and the headlights fade, summer stars washing over the Northern night sky.

Photos by Leah Renee Photography.

This story by Cara McDonald originally appeared in the April issue of Traverse Northern Michigan magazine, and digitally on MyNorth.com.

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