Choosing to Farm

When my father got back to Connecticut after serving in WWII, he had a good job waiting for him. But he had something else in mind. He chose to go to Maine and become a dairy farmer. Mother was willing, mainly because she had read there were no poisonous snakes in the whole state. I was only three, so I was not consulted. Anyway, by 1949, we were the proud owners of a 210 acre dairy farm in a little town called Harmony, about 30 miles south of Abbot, ancestral home of Katahdin sheep.

Meanwhile, in Moweaqua, Illinois, Orlando Bohlen, father of Greg Bohlen, now the owner of Union Grove Farm, was farming 480 acres of corn and soybeans. In addition to the crops, Orlando, his wife, Virginia, and their five kids kept a few beef cattle to provide meat for the family, and a chicken house full of layers, whose presence the children hated, but whose eggs, sold to local stores put them through college. As soon as Greg, the youngest by ten years, graduated from Illinois, the biddies all went cluck-cluck, which is Chicken for bye-bye.

Orlando and Greg Bohlen [1975]

The Bohlen farm had already been in the family for generations before Greg’s father took it over. Orlando never owned the land himself, and farmed it on behalf of his aged mother – shares of the profits also went to his two brothers, neither of whom were interested in farming. Orlando and Virginia became community leaders in Moweaqua - at the school and the Methodist church and pretty much anything else that went on in the town, which was more than you might expect.

Of the five kids, overachievers all, four scattered and wound up in non-farm careers. But Greg chose to stay on the farm. When Orlando retired, and Greg’s own family got started, he remodeled the house, upgraded the farm equipment and worked the black dirt fields day after day.

Never satisfied with only one job, he also went into finance, working his way up from a trust officer to become  president of a tiny bank in the nearby town of Findlay, then moved on to become an investment banker.  In those days, banks used to give away premiums to customers who bought things like certificates of deposit, a popular investment at the time. The premiums were usually small appliances, like toasters, but Greg made national news by offering Bank of Findlay CD purchasers a handsome boxed set of matched dueling pistols. “ILLINOIS BANK GIVING AWAY GUNS!” screamed the headlines. “How would you feel if someone used one of your guns to rob your bank?” a clueless Diane Sawyer asked him when he went on Good Morning America.

“I don’t think anybody’s going to rob a bank with those guns, “ Greg chuckled in reply. “They’re collector pieces. In a velvet-lined box. You can’t even buy ammunition for them. You’d be better off using a water pistol.” Bank of Findley CD’s sold like hotcakes.

With that kind of flair, it’s no wonder Greg’s career in finance eventually took off, and he moved his young family to the booming North Carolina Triangle (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill). He credits the values he learned on the farm for his success. After years of hard work as a fund manager, he reached the point where he could choose to do pretty much whatever he wanted.

He chose farming.

“While growing up on the farm I used to look up at the jet contrails and say, "I'd do anything to be up there," he says. “Later, as I spent years accumulating my 3 million travel miles, I would look down at the farmers working in the field and say "I'd do anything to be down there.

“What I chose to do was honor my early learning and make life better for those generations that followed me. So I am a farmer.”

The other members of the Union Grove Farm team also chose to farm. Martin Crompton was a successful business consultant with a passion for healthy food, who was renting one of the homes on the Union Grove property. When Greg asked him to change careers and help manage his plan to turn the property into a vineyard based on regenerative farming principles, Martin chose to make the career change. Dr. Laura Kavanaugh was a former space program engineer, who gave up that to study plant genetics. She is now in charge of the Union Grove soil restoration and enhancement program.

Dane Jensen was winemaker who chose to leave the cellars and go out into the fields. Collin Mallett was a suburban kid who actually studied agriculture at NC State where he got hooked on pre-industrial farming and chose to follow his star at Union Grove. “I am learning just how hard farming is,” he says, but “there is a unique biological gratification one receives from tending the land and serving a community.”

In the 20th century, very few people chose to farm. My father was a rare specimen, and so was Greg. Even though Greg was born and raised on a farm, there was only a 20% chance that 1960’s farm kids would be farming today, even among Bohlens.

In 1776, when the Hessians, King George’s mercenaries, sailed past Staten Island on their way to driving George Washington out of New York, they were amazed to see farm after farm, with well-tended fields and impressive barns and farmhouses. In the German lands they came from, there was no such rural prosperity, and never had been.

By 1820, there were about 1.5 million farmers in the U.S., which, remember, was almost entirely east of the Mississippi River then. In 1865, there was a sea change when, in the middle of the Civil War no less, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Acts, under which, for a mere eighteen bucks and a promise to live on and farm the property, a person could buy 160 acres of surveyed government land.

The American people, always good at spotting a bargain and never afraid of hard work, chose to farm in droves. You’ve seen the movies, the covered wagons, sturdy bonneted women and sunburned men. Most of them didn’t even have to fight any Indians. By 1920, there were 6.5 million farm families and the number peaked at 6.8 in 1935. From there, there began a steep decline through the 1970’s, as growing productivity and increased non-farm opportunities brought people back to the cities and towns.

In the 21st century, total farm numbers have stabilized at just over 2 million, and it appears that the long-term attrition is being balanced by the new interest in regenerative farming, a quasi-ideological factor that motivates people like Martin Crompton, Laura Kavanaugh and Collin Mallett to choose farming.

Union Grove farm is at the vanguard of this movement, and you can come and watch us grow – grow our wonderful health-enhancing seedless thin-skinned Muscadine grapes and other crops – and as a regenerative agriculture project, responsibly serving the land and, as Greg Bohlen says, the generations that follow.