Hickory Grove Farm

Today there has been a rebirth of the idea of knowing where your food comes from and having other factors drive food choices instead of simply price. Most people who get into farming talk about how they feel connected to the land and wanting to get back to a more traditional way of life. When we talk about being connected to the land and being good stewards of the land it means a lot more to us. O

ur family began farming our current farm in the 1786. Through the centuries we have grown about everything on the farm. Recently, for us 50 years or so, we were a large dairy. In the 1970's the farm transitioned away from that and was mainly growing hay and to***co. In the early 2000's we bought into the idea of big corn and soybeans. While this was profitable it never felt right. As we were growing all of these acres of soybean or corn every year we were starting to see that it was changing the land. With over two centuries of farming the same land we felt like in a little over ten years we were running the farm into the ground. The farm was making as much money if not more as it always had but we were starting to see changes that we didn't like. The land was becoming barren and it was taking more inputs to achieve the same yields. The first few years the soils fertility was enough to grow the corn or soybeans with very little inputs. This began to change and were adding more and more chemical fertilizers and having to spray more and more pesticides for weeds that were never on the farm when we were growing up. There was no longer a diversity of wildlife and fauna like there used to be when we were children. One telling change was the pollinators on the farm. Growing up summer days could be spent outside catching monarch and swallow tail butterflies. At one point you were lucky to see a handful of these butterflies the entire summer. In 2014 we decided to make a change. We started down the long road to growing products for people to eat instead of for big corn and big soybean. Growing up there was always a large garden behind the house, usually about an acre. It was always a treat to go out into the garden when visiting our grandparents and pick out what we were going to eat that day. In the winter it meant going to the basement in the cannery and pick out the vegetables for dinner. Nothing was better than homemade preserverves on one of my grandmothers yeast rolls for desert. You knew exactly where your food was coming from and it always tasted better, and was more satisfying than the store bought version. As we got older we were even allowed to have our own little spot in the garden and plant what we wanted planting the seeds of our current venture. Now instead of only growing one type of plant we are growing hundreds. We have also added animals back onto the farm. While we have embraced technology in how we grow and manage the land we have made a decision to use many older breads of animals and plants. While they do not grow as fast the modern equivalents they taste far better.