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Tilling the Fertile Soil

April 2009

by Tony Ends

Our families and co-workers thought we were both nuts. Why in the world would we want to leave steady jobs in vocational rehabilitation and journalism for farming?

Why did we want to get our hands dirty in gardens and fields, stalls and greenhouses when we could sip gourmet coffee at a computer terminal in comfortable air-conditioned offices and collect steady paychecks with benefits?

On many levels, my wife, Dela, and I had no idea what we were getting into when we left our other jobs to establish a farmstead back in 1993. A national crisis had chopped the number of family farms from 6 million down to 3 million in just a decade. It was perhaps the most difficult time in our nation’s history to begin farming.

Yet on the most important level— the level of faith—Dela and I were answering a still small voice. It’s a voice easily drowned out in the noise and distraction of an urban world far from the land. It’s a spiritual voice, a voice that shares our earth’s only hope for restoring justice, stewardship of the earth, and community.

We believe that that still small voice is best heard in nature—that created world of living miracles. It speaks to us as we study and observe, as we listen to plant life, animal life, and especially the microbiotic life in the fertile soil that God named Adama.

I think I first began hearing this small voice clearly 16 years ago, when we founded Scotch Hill Farm in south central Wisconsin. Dela and I’d been married just four years then.

We first met in a church service a thousand miles south of Scotch Hill. From the start, I knew I was embarking on a long journey. Yet I had no idea how important and radically transforming the changes along the way would be.

I was baptized in a Lutheran church as an adult in Milwaukee just after finishing graduate school at Marquette University in that city. I was on a career path in journalism, trying to climb up the ladder from job to job and state to state. When I could not find a newspaper position near my home, I found work with papers in the Carolinas.

I was lonely in that secular world, far from my Midwestern roots. I was searching for ways to make my life meaningful and working very long hours. One Sunday, I went with a new friend to a worship service at an Episcopal church in Hendersonville, North Carolina. Across the crowded room, I saw a smile that stirred my soul. What seemed like just moments later, I stepped up to communion, and there again was that lovely face, offering me the cup of salvation.

I looked at her hand and thanked God there was no wedding ring there.

It took me a while to get that woman’s attention, but I persisted. Our first project together was to till and plant a garden in my backyard. Our friendship grew very quickly, and we were married just about a year later.

The farm

Early on, Dela told me she’d always wanted a farm. I naively thought this would be no problem. The countryside seemed a great place to raise children. I was ready for a change in location.

We bought, rehabbed, and sold two old houses in succession to accumulate enough money to purchase a farmstead. When I accepted a job in Janesville, Wisconsin, we finally bought what was left of a dairy farm. No cows had been milked here since the late 1960s.

Weathered frame buildings and wooden fences were beginning to fall into decay. We had no livestock, no equipment, no experience, not even a pickup truck.

We’d just moved and started new jobs, so we couldn’t get a working line of credit to buy the things we needed to get started. We worked two, three, even four jobs at one point to come up with money we needed to restore life to this farm.

Yet it seemed that every new life we brought to this place spoke to us with God’s voice. The first flock of baby chicks, fluttering and chirping. The first baby lamb, kicking up its heels in the pasture. The first goat kid, wagging its little tail and chugging vigorously at a bottle of its mother’s milk.

Suddenly, we were living the creation story every day. And it was very good.

We broke ground with a spade in a paddock, walking behind a mechanical tiller, back and forth until we had a smooth seedbed. We watched our own children wiggling their toes in the moist soil.

We grew and delivered more than 60 varieties of vegetables—at first for five customers, then 15, then 21, then 35, and finally some 200 households in our 14th year. We learned about community-supported agriculture at the same time as our customers did.

When we had no money to buy what we needed to build a greenhouse, we fished in dumpsters for wood scraps to frame the building. That unheated greenhouse protected our seedlings from frost and extended our growing season from 15 to 20 weeks.

We bought used greenhouse plastic from a flower grower who was going out of business. Some 10 years later we were able to buy new high-tunnel hoop houses, renovating and improving our old makeshift greenhouses.

We raised sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys, and grasped for ways of tending them profitably. We salvaged materials to build a commercial kitchen, and Dela began making goat milk soap.

Within fours years, these fragrant, moisturizing bars of soap were providing a steady third of our farm income. Dela makes and we sell at least 8,000 bars of soap every year now. We’ve taught eight other dairy-goat farms to do this, too.

Winter farmers’ markets

We learned to become self-sufficient. We began to find modest financial rewards in following good stewardship practices, being frugal, and working hard. Sadly, though, we realized that many of our rural neighbors were not enjoying the same success. Even the most innovative and conscientious of them confided in us about their hardships. Fearful friends talked about bankruptcy. We heard accounts of despair and suicide. We looked on helplessly at the forced auctions of dear friends’ farms.

In December 2003, through an ecumenical organization called Churches’ Center for Land and People, we began a project to try to address these difficulties. We organized winter farmers’ markets in church parish halls around the area, later adding a festive meal of local and regional foods.

The program partnered with an emergency fund in Wisconsin called Harvest of Hope. It had been making cash grants to farmers in crisis since the 1980s. We held the first of our winter markets and meals as a benefit for the fund in a Lutheran church in Madison. Within five years, we were holding up to 50 of these events within congregations of six denominations in 20 cities in Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin.

Our organization seeks to do a lot on a tiny budget. Sometimes we succeed, drawing as many as 200 people to a host church’s fellowship hall. Sometimes our weak resources get the better of us, and we’re unable to inspire strong attendance.

Like Scotch Hill Farm, our initiatives for others have grown very slowly. I confess that it has been hard work, hard lessons, severe difficulties. I never dreamed I had it in me to overcome what Dela and I’ve come through together. A number of times, we’ve been tempted to give up.

But our farm, our garden, our greenhouse, our fields are our solace and our reward. Here, we’re reminded of what is most important in life. Here, we’re reminded of our meaning and the meaning created from our work.

At table

When we sit down to meals, with almost every ingredient from our family’s own growing and raising—or Dela’s faithful canning, freezing, and preserving—we cannot imagine doing anything else for a living or living anyplace else on this earth.

A few years ago, I heard a Bible scholar talk about Scripture that framed for me what I’ve come to feel in my soul for farm life: Genesis 2:7–9, 15.

“Then the Lord God formed Adam [which broadly means “humankind”] of Adama [“fertile soil”] and breathed into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life; and Adam became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he placed Adam whom he had formed. Out of Adama, the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food . . . then the Lord God took Adam and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it” [may also be translated as “to serve it and protect it”]

By this biblical interpretation, I understand that my identity is from God’s fertile soil. My vocation is from this same soil. My relationship to God and creation is from this same fertile, sacred ground. We’re not getting rich at what we do on our little traditional farm, yet our souls are enriched beyond measure. Earth Day for us is every day. We wish the same for you, in Christ’s love.

Dela and Tony Ends have raised four of their five children at Scotch Hill Farm near Brodhead, Wis. You can read more about them at www.scotchhillfarm.com.