Personalities of the Peninsula: Angela Macke, Tea Farmer

Jul 11, 2023

Growing up, Angela Macke saw how much time her mom put into her nursing career. She also observed how much dedication her father’s extensive garden took, so she vowed she’d never take on either of those roles.

“My mom was a nurse. My dad was a science teacher and had a giant garden. They were both too much work,” says Macke.

So of course she took after her mom, though in her case it meant hop-scotching around the country as a traveling nurse. In 1996, she took a position at Munson in the cardio-thoracic unit, intending to follow that up with grad school and becoming a nurse practitioner.

Then life happened. Macke fell in love with a coworker and they got married, settling in the area. And sure enough, she soon turned their three-and-a-half acres into a large garden. She had worked for an M.D. naturopath in Hawaii, where she began utilizing a number of herbal supplements and mixing teas that helped her overcome her own health issues. “I was diagnosed with a handful of auto-immune diseases: Crohn’s, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis,” Macke says.

So into the garden went some of the same plants she used in her combinations. “The first one I blended was Leelanau Licorice (a combination of licorice root and peppermint leaves). Within four months I was off all my meds.”

Other blends followed, and in 2003 she opened Light of Day tea farm on M-72. Four years later, she bought the sheep pasture across the road from their Partridge Run subdivision. The 13-plus acres now contains hoop houses, buildings for retail, processing and packing, and there’s even a yurt for tea classes. Macke still maintains her nursing degree and uses it to inform her work on the state’s only biodynamic organic tea farm (actually it’s the only tea farm in Michigan period).

Macke has seen business rebound as COVID retreated. Initially reluctant to embrace the prospect of a roomful of people sniffing the tins of tea, she says she compromised, putting the tea in screw top jars so people can see the loose leaf tea, then unscrew the lid if they want to take a whiff. That also helps keep the tea’s essential oils from evaporating. “It’s gross, but if I’m picking out candles or soap I do it,” she says.

She says customers have been friendly and understanding. “Everybody is just so happy. The staff has remarked on how kind the customers are.”

They’ve kept the business steady even though she’s reduced her hours to two days a week, Friday and Saturday. “We were closed three and a half years. I’m so glad we reopened,” Macke says.

She says the trend toward agritourism has helped spur interest in her farm. “The Tea 101/Wellness classes in the yurt have sold out. Farm tours are new, taking people behind the ropes, into the hoop houses. They’ve been a huge hit.”

After she and her husband divorced, Macke considered selling the farm, especially with the pandemic forcing her to close up her shop and farm to the public, transitioning entirely to web sales. But Macke says her sons Peter and Leland told her they wanted to continue what’s become the family business. “Peter was a packaging major and is in Denver now. Leland is graduating in December in supply chain,” both of which she says will dovetail nicely into the next phase of the business, including bagging the teas and getting them into retail outlets such as Meijer. “We’re planning the succession in the next five years,” Macke says.

What will she do then? She’s not sure, but in the meantime Macke says she is enjoying the life on the farm. “It gets me outside every day,” she says. She credits it for her continued good health. Not only is she off the medications, “I grow and eat all my own greens. My bone density is better than it was 20 years ago.”

Her passion for her teas is obvious, and her enthusiasm for the farm and life in general is palpable. Between that and the fact she’s doing almost the same amount of business in two days a week as she was when she was open six or seven days, she couldn’t be happier. “It feels like before COVID,” she says.

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