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Terra's father Herman on Brockman family farm history
My grandparents, Herman Brockman and Maria Zachgo-Brockman, bought the farm (then 160 acres) and the house (only the small south section existed then) and farm buildings in 1898. My father, Fred Brockman, was born here in 1905. In 1912, Herman Brockman had the big red barn, with the then unheard-of concrete floor, built. From this and other evidence we have, I judge him to have been an industrious and progressive farmer. He died in 1917, when my father was only 12, suddenly and painfully, perhaps of a ruptured appendix. Dad’s mother died five years later.
The farm was rented until Dad and Mother (Henrietta Zeedyk-Brockman), who were married in 1927, started farming in 1930—just in time for the real tough times of the Great Depression and the dust-bowl drought. Dad was a man of few words, but Mother told me how Dad worked to build up the soil fertility. He pitched manure into a hayrack (they couldn’t afford to buy a manure spreader), and then pitched it off “at the back 40.” He raised sweet clover and plowed it under to feed the soil. He grew timothy for the horses and red clover for the cows and sheep.
In retrospect, Dad, and his father before him, were organic farmers, as were all farmers at that time. Dad, and especially Mother, never embraced enthusiastically the new ways of farming that came to be after World War II. Mainly, they continued to rely on a crop rotation that included legumes for pasture and hay, and lots of manure from the horses (in the early years), cows, sheep, hogs, and chickens. They also applied limestone, rock phosphate, and potash as needed. It was highly diversified and sustainable farming, with cream and eggs sent to Chicago by train.
Unfortunately, Dad had to stop doing the fieldwork and having farm animals after he crushed his leg while harvesting corn in 1963. He was in the hospital for seven months, and didn’t get rid of the bone infection for another three years after that. But Mother and Dad continued to live on the farm, to act as landlords, to have enough hens for their own eggs, and to grow their own vegetables and fruit for about another 30 years.
During those decades when Mother and Dad rented the farm, the tenants insisted on mainly a corn-soybean rotation and high inputs of commercial fertilizers and pesticides. The folks were never happy with that kind of farming. Mother often railed against “all of those darn chemicals.”
I know that Mother and Dad, and my grandparents, would be very happy to know that 4th and 5th generations now live in the farm house, that the barn and chicken shed are once again a home for farm animals, and that Harold and Ross Wilken are farming their beloved land organically – for the benefit of the environment and for the future of all of us.
“I became a farmer,” Henry states, “because it was the only thing that made sense. I feed my family and other families without hurting the environment; I grow delicious and healthy food for people, and my kids know that when it’s hot, you sweat and when it rains, you get wet.”
From the time she was a child, Teresa had the greenest thumb in the Brockman family. The plants in her bedroom would thrive while the same plants in the rest of the house would wither and die. And she was the fondest of our elderly neighbor Miss Kraft, who had a fabulous formal garden, including a lily pond, as well as a huge vegetable garden and fruit orchard. When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, Teresa would answer, “a Miss Kraft.”
After many years teaching school in Albuquerque, Jill and her husband Will and their two small girls moved to Illinois, back to the family farm that our great-grandparents settled on in 1898. At that time, the farm (like all farms) was biodiverse and organic. Over the next century it (like most Illinois farms) gradually became a chemically mono-cropped farm
I have had many strong environmental influences, but all of my genome came, of course, from my father and mother, German and Dutch gene pools, respectively. From them I received my great love of nature, especially of the farm – of the soil and all that it nurtures. They seemed to have known instinctively that which I later learned from Aldo Leopold in his A Sand County Almanac, which is his famous ‘land ethic.’ which, as he defines it, "simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land."
Marlene Castiglia was born on the south side of Chicago to a family of immigrants from southern Italy. She was a serious student, and the only one of her siblings to go to college. It was in a biology class at Blackburn College, where the teacher had the students sit alphabetically, that Brockman sat next to Castiglia, and the beginning of another clan began. 
