KIRSTEN OWEN’S conversion from high-fashion model to organic blueberry farmer had everything from blind luck to sheer happenstance behind it. “I had a fantasy about having a blueberry farm after I moved here, in 2002,” she says of her 56-acre patch of land in northern Vermont, from which she speaks via landline. “And then some land right next to me, which already had 250 young blueberry plants, came up for sale. I couldn’t resist.”
This sylvan setup, a mere hour or so south of Canada, where she was born and raised, is a far cry from the life Owen led in her 20s and 30s, crisscrossing the Atlantic for runway shows and shoots and as a muse to Helmut Lang, Melanie Ward, and other creators of 1990s grunge looks. These days, Owen, now 50, is mostly in the country with her children, Billie Rose, 25 (pictured here), and Maël, 28, and her energies are reserved for her blueberry bushes. “I’d never worked so hard in my life before taking on this farm,” she says. “It forces you to stay strong physically.”
But come spring of 2020, when Owen would normally have been pruning, weeding, and mulching (with organic pine mulch: “It offers the soil acidity,” she explains), she and her family needed to be in Toronto with Owen’s mother. In her absence, neighbors and locals looked after the harvest, undertaking the spring work Owen couldn’t. “And,” to her surprise, “they were all happy to do it—in trade for blueberries.”
Upon Owen’s return to the farm in early July, she realized she had more blueberries than she knew what to do with. While her crop normally supplies both local farmers markets and day-trippers out picking berries just for the fun of it, she enlisted Salvation Farms—an organization that provides for those with food insecurity—to help take a bit of the bumper crop off her hands. It all made for a heartwarming homecoming—except for the mice that squatted in her kitchen while she was away. “That part wasn’t great,” she says, “but what felt really good was to be back in nature.”
