White Lotus farm manager Byron Johnson, baker and project manager Trinle Tsomo, and front of house manager Kat Tsomo at the community’s new store and café on Zeeb Rd. | J. Adrian Wylie
The collaborative enterprise of the local Tsogyelgar Buddhist community is expanding into a new multifaceted storefront on Zeeb Rd., White Lotus Farms Café.
The farm was established in 2011 west of Ann Arbor, just past the point where Liberty becomes a dirt road, at the home of the spiritual community founded two decades prior. It’s become a popular destination on Saturdays and spring and summer Wednesdays, not only for the farm stand featuring the microgreens, pizzas, baked goods, pasta, cheeses, and botanical skin-care products produced there, but for its bucolic beauty.
“It’s really a place where people come to relax and enjoy just having kind of a peaceful experience away from their busy lives,” says Kat Tsomo, whose mother began taking her there at age three. She’s lived on-site since graduating high school, along with about a dozen others, and now runs the creamery and makes an array of cheeses from goat and cow milk.
Their goods continue to be available at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market, Argus Farm Stop, and Eastern Market in Detroit, but adding a permanent off-site café, bakery, and grocery outlet fulfills a long-term goal to “offer our full line of products in the way that we want to display it and sell it ourselves,” she says.
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Expected to open in early October, it combines the Scio Village suites last occupied by Mancino’s Pizza & Grinders and a Hotworx fitness studio. Trinle Tsomo, whose baking prowess helped drive the demand to expand, has been managing the project. He’s looking forward to adding the second bakery to offer their stone-milled loaves, croissants, and pastries baked fresh five days a week.
Farm manager Byron Johnson expects those loaves to be a major draw. “The bread is phenomenal and irreplaceable, and there’s nothing else that you can get like it around here,” he says.
Johnson entered Bowdoin College in Maine as an atheist from Mississippi, but eventually he followed the referral of a professor of Chinese philosophy and found a home in the community here. He compares White Lotus Farms to a European monastery. “They would have monks working on a farm, they’d have a creamery, they had various things that would help them to earn a good livelihood, and practice it, and basically pray,” he says. “That’s what was developed here, and it worked out better than was initially intended. What we do on the religious or spiritual side, we also try to bring into the businesses. So that’s itself a form of practice.”
Collaboration comes from both within the community and from relationships with volunteers and partner producers. They source milk from Amish family operations, Kat Tsomo notes. And while each worker has a specialty, when it’s time to harvest the spinach, “you actually happen to know and live around a whole bunch of people who are willing to help!” Johnson says.
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Interconnectness is reflected in the food itself. “If you have bread, you want cheese, and then you want greens to go with it,” Kat Tsomo says. “And then to have pasta and then make a pasta salad—it all goes really well together, which is nice.”
The farm manages pests with netting, trap crops, and good timing rather than chemicals, but doesn’t pay for organic certifications. “I just save the money and buy better amendments for the soil,” Johnson says. “I’m actually at the point now where I don’t really think much about organic things. I wouldn’t think to do anything inorganic. I don’t need to.”
Extending into a year-round establishment with mezzanine seating will let them better merchandise their many offerings, whether it’s a made-to-order sandwich, a pound of pimento cheese spread, or a skin-rescue potion of sea buckthorn and farm-grown calendula—along with “really fresh greens” and “a really good cup of coffee,” Johnson says from a picnic table at the farm. “We’re gonna have a space like this where you can go out five days a week to feel the same kind of energy you feel here.”
White Lotus Farms Café, 355 S. Zeeb. Tues.–Sat. 7 a.m.–7 p.m. Closed Sun. & Mon. whitelotusfarms.com
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