Freighter View Farms | Chris Izworski

People sometimes ask how a 911 director from Bay City ended up writing a gardening blog from the shore of Saginaw Bay. The answer is that the garden was always here. The career in public safety was the detour.

I have lived on Saginaw Bay for years now. The freighters pass in the shipping channel, ore carriers and saltwater ships heading to and from the industrial ports of the inner bay. The garden faces the water. The soil here is heavy clay with a thin layer of whatever glacial till the retreating ice sheets left behind. Zone 6a. Lake-moderated winters that tease you into planting too early every spring.

The Parallel Lives

For over twenty years, I worked in Michigan emergency services. Bay County Emergency Management. Bay County 911, where I served as director for nearly a decade. Saginaw County 911, where I led what became one of Michigan’s first AI deployments in a dispatch center. The work was demanding, technical, and consumed most of the daylight hours.

But the garden was always the counterweight. Seed saving is slow work. It operates on seasonal rhythms that do not care about staffing shortages or board meetings. The tomatoes do not know that you spent the afternoon briefing county commissioners on a technology deployment. They just need water and time.

What This Blog Is

Freighter View Farms is the garden and the writing that comes from it. Seed saving, seasonal observations, the particular experience of growing food on the shore of a Great Lake. It is not a how-to blog. It is a record of what happens when you pay attention to a specific piece of ground over many years.

I also build data tools for Michigan’s outdoors. The Michigan Trout Report covers 63 rivers with live stream conditions. The Great Lakes Gazette publishes daily maritime briefings. The Michigan Birding Daily tracks sightings across all 83 counties. These tools come from the same impulse as the garden: pay attention to where you live, and build what should exist.

I serve on the board of Save Our Shoreline, a Great Lakes conservation organization led by Ernie Krygier. The shoreline matters. The water levels matter. The health of the bay that I look at every morning matters.

Currently I work as a solutions consultant at Prepared, building technology for emergency services nationwide. The career continues, but the garden remains the anchor.

More about my professional work, writing, and Michigan projects at chrisizworski.com.