Trail's End Organic Farm

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Trail’s End - The Beginning

Trail’s End Organic Farm became home to the Morse family in 1921. John Morse bought the land and moved his wife Cora and their children to the farm just after the birth of their seventh child. Growing a huge garden to feed his family was a passion, one he continued even after he retired and moved into town. John farmed before synthetic fertilizers and pesticides were a readily available option. Instead of tractors he used real horsepower. He kept milk cows whose manure, along with that of the draft horses, replenished the soil where he planted cash crops like wheat, oats and corn. These practical uses of nutrients (that we now call sustainable farming) were habits eventually passed on to John’s grandson Greg.

When it came time for John to retire, his sons were grown and already established elsewhere. It wasn’t John’s third son’s passion to be farming, but more his wife Dorothy’s keenness that brought Horace back to the land. Dorothy, a farm girl herself, was enthusiastic to return after her marriage to the way of life she had known as a girl. She christened her new home Trail’s End. She continued the tradition of growing a large garden to feed her growing family. Dorothy regularly made pies from anything that could be gathered around the farm including fruit from the orchard and timber. She was even known to make a squab pie. It wasn’t unusual for her to send her sons out hunting for game for dinner, or go herself to the chicken yard on Saturday evenings to procure a Sunday meal.

Horace, while not as enthralled by farming as his wife, made great improvements to the farm. He added forty acres to the westernmost part of the farm – land which contains a little creek where the cattle herd can find shelter in the winter and shade in the summer, and where gooseberries are picked. He also had a large pond built in the center of the farm which became a great place for his family to gather and socialize. While Horace was the farmer, the registered Aberdeen Angus beef cattle herd was his focus. He chose from his own herd the calves his children fed and groomed as their 4H projects. Our herd descends from these same cattle. After Horace retired from farming it was he that suggested to Greg to add Scottish Highland cattle to the herd to reduce invasive brush in the pastures and timber, add great mothering traits, and create a leaner and more flavorful beef.

As Horace’s son Greg came of age the two shared the farming responsibilities, and Greg began to want to take the farm in a new (or rather, old) direction. One day Greg was planting corn in the south field using a planter that applied pesticide to the field as it sowed the corn. He stopped to eat the lunch his wife brought out to him and while he at his wife put their baby daughter down in the dirt to play. Greg felt uneasy letting the child play in treated soil and asked his wife to pick her back up. It didn’t seem to Greg that growing food in dirt you couldn’t let your kid play in made much sense. For years, Greg and Horace struggled with each other over the spraying of fields. While Greg was skeptical about chemical use, Horace, like his farmer neighbors, was inclined to listen to the “get big or get out” line of thinking which was prevalent at the time and which did not include returning to the way his father had farmed. Greg, however, having discovered Rodale’s NEW FARM Magazine, wanted to do just that. He saw how the field east of the house didn’t recover for years after being sprayed for alfalfa weevil. He saw that the field lost its earthworm population and didn’t make another crop of hay that year. He compared it to another unsprayed alfalfa field where he removed the weevil problem simply by bailing the hay as usual. The next stand of alfalfa was not defoliated by the weevil. With the addition of Janet to his life, Greg finally had the support he needed to quit spraying for good. He began to care for the crops and livestock with sustainable methods similar to those his grandfather used. In the early nineties Greg and Janet saw a long-cherished wish fulfilled. As Greg took over the farm from his father, the crop spraying ended, and in 1992 Trail’s End became Trail’s End Organic Farm – certified organic by the Organic Crop Improvement Association.

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