Henry (brother)

“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.”

After many years living in other cultures (Israel, Japan, Nepal, and Japan again), Henry realized that what was important was a simple, honest living that respected the earth and contributed to the health and well-being of others, “be they humans or rabbits, earthworms or soil microbes, oak trees or algae.”

Henry made the decision to make organic farming his life’s work while still in Japan. That’s where he met his wife, Hiroko, where they were married, and where, in 1990, their first child was born.

When they came back to the U.S. they lived for a year in New York State where they apprenticed with John Gorzynski, who grows organic vegetables for New York City’s flagship Green Market in Union Square.

Henry was uncertain as to where his farming future would be. Then one day, on a trip to visit the family back in Congerville, Henry had an epiphany. He stuck a shovel into the earth, just as he had been doing in New York, and turned it over. For a long moment, he stared at the incredibly rich, black, loamy earth. That was it. He knew that this was where he had to be; this was the land he would farm.

And that’s what Henry has been doing since 1993, building the soil, planting hundreds of kinds of vegetables, and enriching the lives of every person who eats them.

Teresa (sister)

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.”

Like Henry, Teresa lived abroad for many years, starting with a year in the Philippines when she was in high school, and ending in Yokohama, Japan a decade later. When she was in the Philippines, she learned Ilongo, including the word for the dark crud that you scrape off of your sweaty skin after you’ve been working in the dirt.  At that point, no one knew just how intimate Teresa would become with sweat and dirt!

When Teresa started her farm in the spring of 2001, her goal was to have an extremely diverse and sustainable farm, and to grow a little bit of every type of fruit that our Zone 5 climate could support. On only 3 acres in Eureka, IL, she grows over 30 distinct kinds of fruit that total more than 80 specific varieties. From an additional 2 acres on her father’s land, she is growing aronia bushes and producing aronia juice, jam, and jelly. The first aronia harvest yielded 900 pounds of berries in August, 2008. In 2009, she harvested over 3000 pounds of aronia and began selling fresh pressed aronia juice, as well as working with an organic processer (Food For Thought in Honor, MI) to produce certified organic aronia jam and jelly.

”One reason I always wanted an orchard,” Teresa muses, “is for it to be here after I die.  Somehow it will let me live for at least another generation when my grandchildren tell their children that Great Grandma Teresa planted the tree that the apple they are eating came from.  It is a comfort.”

Jill (sister)

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. But once Jill and her family moved there, and had two more daughters, the farm began its transition back to diverse organic production.

During that transition time, nearly a century after the sod was first broken and the wetlands drained, Jill’s family and Henry’s family planted an organic pear and apple orchard where the old Keiffer pears once stood east of the farmhouse. The delicious new pears and apples – some old varieties like Nutting Bumpus and Black Oxford, some new pest-resistant varieties such as Freedom and Liberty – make all the hard work of organic fruit production worthwhile.

When Jill and the family are not busy in the orchard they look after their menagerie: goats (meat and dairy), chickens, ducks, guinea fowl, rabbits, and dogs. The huge hayloft of the hip-roofed barn that our great-grandfather built in 1912 is now used to store organic hay and straw, while the goats, four friendly farm cats, and a horse named Cowboy call the lower level home.

Herman (father)

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."

Herman Brockman was born in 1934 in the same room of the same farmhouse where his own father Fred had been born. Although he loved the farm life, he was also intelligent and studious, and his family and teacher encouraged him to go to college and get “a good job.” And so Herman got his PhD and taught genetics at Illinois State University for 35 years. When he retired, he started working on Henry’s Farm, and continues to do so.

When Jill moved back to the family farm, Herman enlisted neighbors Harold and Ross Wilken  to transition the century old farm to certified organic production. Now that the farm is no longer doused in chemicals, Herman is proud that Leopold’s land ethic has taken root.

Marlene (mother)

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.

Although Marlene’s parents and all of her relatives had been farmers in Calabria, “with a smidgeon of land for chickens and a garden, and maybe a goat or a sheep,” this

was not what Marlene anticipated for her future. Yet when Henry made his decision to return home and raise vegetables for a living, Marlene was on the front lines, working longer and harder than anyone (except Henry, of course). And when Henry had to quickly form a CSA after the co-op group he’d been supplying went out of business, it was Marlene who made a list of prospective customers and called over 100 of them to get the business rolling. From the first CSA pickup (6 families) to today (over 200 families), and from her work as chief tomato sorter to her willingness to always do “one more row” of planting or harvesting, Marlene is the glue that holds the family together.

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.