We all have million-dollar ideas; my husband swears he has one a week, but we’re still living on a tight budget, driving a five-year-old truck, and paying a mortgage.

For more than 20 years on her little farm on the Idaho-Washington border, Mary Jane Butters was just like the rest of us – long on great ideas, short on execution.

Then one day she looked around at the golden wheat fields, free-range chickens, and rambling roses and saw her future: an evangelizing farm girl spreading the gospel of organic food, self-reliance, and simple solutions to our earth’s increasingly complex problems.

Realizing that the lifestyle she’d spent decades creating is the dream millions of women carry in their hearts as they drive a freeway or nurture a pot of basil on an apartment windowsill, MaryJane had at last found a million-dollar needle in her very own haystack.

But Whoa! Pardn’er, if you think this 55-year-old blonde is just a pony-tailed Martha Stewart wannabe, stop right there! MaryJane – the space between the y and j vanished a while back – is the real deal, not a Janie-come-lately airy-fairie back-to-the-lander who decided on a recent whim to ride the crest of the “go green” movement sweeping America in the wake of contaminated food scares, global warming and spiraling energy costs.

When I visited her at MaryJanesFarm just south of Moscow, Idaho, she was rushing rush off to judge a pie-baking contest in a neighboring town.

Dressed in a cowgirl skirt with a lace petticoat peeking out below the hem, the pretty blonde grandmother thrust a cup of steaming coffee in my hand and offered me breakfast (“No, thanks”); introduced me to a steady flow of family, friends, and the farm’s bed & breakfast guests; loaded me down with her self-published magazines; showed me the cover of her forthcoming book; proudly took note of an egg just laid by one of her free-range chickens, and then POOF! This self-propelled whirlwind of energy and enthusiasm was off to spend the afternoon eating pie!

After decades of hardscrabble times, MaryJane is reaping the rewards of a life consistently lived in harmony with the landscape around her. It all began with a Mormon childhood in Ogden, Utah, that taught her early to value hard work, home-grown food, and “making do.”

“Old-fashioned common sense and gumption can solve most any problem, fill any void,” MaryJane writes in her glossy, advertising-free magazine (www.maryjanesfarm.org) created with the help of family, neighbors and friends who work with her on Wild Iris Lane.

The fourth of five kids, she hung out with her father in his tool shed and learned scratch cooking in her mother’s kitchen, and “nobody ever told me I couldn’t do something,” she said. “I always knew I wanted to live on a farm, be a woman who could make and fix anything.”

The five-acre farm founded in 1905 that she bought from “two old bachelor brothers” in 1986 is now the core of her entrepreneurial success, but in the beginning it was her shelter from the storms of hard times

“A single mom living the homestead life, without indoor plumbing, without money, I drove a car so old we wore masks in it because it sucked dust in through the rusty floorboards (my son remembers getting his leg stuck in one of the holes),” she recalls.

One year she was so poor she gave her kids flashlights for Christmas. In warm weather, they lived off the garden and spent weekends peddling their produce to every small town farmer’s market in western Idaho and eastern Washington. During the long winters, MaryJane worked many jobs for cash and bartered with neighbors to get them through to spring.

One of those neighbors was Nick Ogle, whom she married in 1993 after “spending far too long just waving at him as we passed each other on the road,”

The genius of her “everybody’s a farm girl at heart” marketing approach is to soft-sell the dream without the drudgery, downplaying farming’s dirty fingernails and before-sunup-till-after-sundown reality.

Using her now picture-perfect homestead of herb gardens, dinner-plate sunflowers, and weed-free lettuce rows as the backdrop for her multi-media message, she assures readers of her publications and website that “if I can do it, you can too.” Then she walks us through whatever “it” is, one lively step at a time.

Her growing mail-order food business began with a surplus of garbanzo beans that became the inspiration for camping food that catapulted her into mass-marketing of her multiple products under several of her own brands.

More than two-dozen friends and family members, including MaryJane’s daughter Megan, 27, and son Emil, 25, are now employed at her farm. Husband Nick is the ever-present can-do crisis manager, digging the basement for the new “headquarters” on the site of their burned-down house, then fixing the balky old delivery truck’s engine, then configuring a better shipping container.

As family farmers throughout the country struggle to make ends meet with traditional agrarian ways, MaryJane is a self-made agri-entrepreneur selling mail-order meals for home, office, and backpacking; bed linens and bath products; quilting, embroidery and doll kits; all-organic garden seeds, both flowers and vegetables; kitchen accessories such as skillets, shelving, and canning aids, and books, books, books.

Fulfilling her $1.35 million contract with Clarkson Potter Publishers, a division of Random House, she’s produced several volumes of her MaryJanesFarm’s “simple solutions for everyday organic.” A new book, MaryJane’s Outpost Guidebook for Cultivating Your Inner Wild, will be published next spring.

Few of us grow up to live out our childhood passions, but MaryJane has stayed true to two of hers: sleeping outdoors and selling stuff.

Among her best memories are the many summer nights she and her siblings and parents spent camping out under the stars in sleeping bags. From spring’s last frost to autumn’s first, MaryJane and Nick sleep in a big canopy bed under a makeshift tin roof (“we got tired of getting bombed by falling plums”) in their orchard behind the new three-story house-office.

The bed with its lace-trimmed spread and embroidered pillowcases is the centerpiece of an Idaho-style safari camp in a clearing that also contains a wood-fired cook stove, a harvest table always overflowing with fresh-picked edibles, and a smoldering campfire where friends and strangers are invited to sit awhile and visit.

Chances are the visit will include MaryJane’s enthusiastic description of her latest “simple solution” for cooking, sewing, growing, or making something she’s in the process of marketing.

“When I was a kid I’d get a brainstorm about something and always say ‘let’s sell this,’ but we never did,” she said. “Now we do.”

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