Hare and Tortoise Farm

The Orton family of Hare and Tortoise Farm.

Supplier to PFC since 2015

“[Farming] is a practical art. But it is also a practical religion, a practice of religion, a rite. By farming we enact our fundamental connection with energy and matter, light and darkness. In the cycles of farming, which carry the elemental energy again and again through the seasons and the bodies of all living things, we recognize the only infinitude within reach of the imagination.” —Wendell Berry, farmer and author, from The Unsettling of America

In May, People’s Food Co-op had the opportunity to visit Hare and Tortoise Farm, a produce supplier to the Rochester store. The Orton family farms 14 acres just outside of Millville, Minnesota. They grow carrots, cilantro, dill, beets, eggplants, spinach, and other vegetables for PFC.

Bill Orton and his wife Ellen have three children—Molly, Isaac, and Mary – all under 10 years-old, with another baby on the way. Hare and Tortoise works with the folks at Easy Yoke – another PFC supplier – and Heartbeat Farms. The three farms also help each other with distribution and marketing. For instance, Easy Yoke Farm delivered Hare and Tortoise’s produce to PFC for years. “It’s been wonderful,” Bill says, “it’s like a small farming cooperative.”  

The farms help each other out in big ways and small. Bill recalls the fire at Easy Yoke a few years back. The fire burned Easy Yoke’s packing shed to the ground. “People really came together to help them re-build,” Bill says. And when a flood tore through the Orton’s fields in 2017, the community showed up to help repair the damage in return.

Why organic

Bill has taken an unusual path to organic farming. His farming career didn’t begin until he was 27. “If you’d asked me in high school what I was going to be doing for a living, I would have said, ‘never a farmer.’” But one fateful day, in a college course on political philosophy, he found himself reading the poet/farmer Wendell Berry for a class assignment. Bill was attracted to Berry’s approach to farming as an engagement with the natural world—and with one’s place in the world. “It was a life changer for me,” Bill says. “I didn’t know what to do after college. After reading Berry I decided that I wanted to work on the land. I had an acquaintance who was working on an organic farm, and I started out there. So, I’ve always been an organic farmer. It’s the only kind of farming I’ve done.”

Wendell Berry describes a style of farming that is the antithesis to the modern American business of farming. Rather than killing everything in the soil and then adding nutrients to grow a crop—which is the modern corporate model—a follower of Wendell Berry nurtures the soil as a vital part of the organic whole. Bill sums it up, “if you have healthy soil, you will grow healthy vegetables, which will give you a healthy community.”

In many ways, this is how American farmers approached their work up until the end of the Second World War, when the big chemical firms had all this excess capacity from the war and the factories of DuPont started churning out fertilizers and pesticides instead of bombs and flamethrowers. We’ve replaced the local microbiome with imported chemical processes. In many ways, farmers such as Bill Orton are having to re-invent the wheel of a rural economy and approach to life that has been all but lost in the last half century. Like many of the local farmers and organic producers that supply People’s Food Co-op, Hare and Tortoise has found that not only do they need to re-build the barn, they also have to re-build the microbiology of their soil, figure out their crop rotations, negotiate outside labor when necessary, and find a market for their products.  

Growing Pains

It's no surprise then, when Bill cautions that his career choice has not been an easy one. “It’s uglier than people want it to be,” he says. “When high ideals meet the road, it’s certainly jarring. But what’s amazing is that I get to be surrounded by metaphor constantly. You can see why ancient writers talk about planting and harvesting all the time. We’re transplanting out of the greenhouse, and you can tell the plants are angry and they look like they want to die. Well, that’s true for me as well. When I first started farming—with no experience—everyone thought I was going to die. I didn’t know if I was going to make it. But since 2020, it’s rebounded. I’ve learned how to farm. I’ve learned about tractors, planting, employees. It feels like I’m conducting a symphony, there’s so much going on at once.”

As we sit under the carport with the fields stretching away from the house. An oriole flashes orange at the bird feeder by the drive. The place used to be a retired person’s hobby farm, Bill tells me. He has no intention to grow the farm any bigger than it already is. “I’d like to make more money off the work, but I like farming too much to become a manager of other people.”

Bill is proud of his work. He keeps pests and weeds down with manual labor. “I’m told I have really clean fields,” he says. “There are imperfections, you live with them. People start farms thinking they’ll be perfect right away. It’s not like that. This is why I’m not on social media. I don’t want to see other farmers’ best days.” Bill recommends the book, The Lean Farm, by Ben Hartman, which recommends the application of Japanese manufacturing principles to farming to reduce waste and increase the farmers’ production. It’s fixing the little, simple things first. “The Japanese call it kaizen: make something a little bit better every day,” Bill says, “for instance, my goal this year is to have no leaky hoses.”

Toads

It's late May, and while the grass has greened up, not too many crops are apparent. Ellen and the children have joined us for a walk in the field.

Bill points out the berm they’ve put in to ward off future flooding. The farm has had good luck growing spinach. Greens are Bill’s favorite plants to grow, “lettuce, cilantro…”

“Cilantro?” His six-year-old daughter Molly says. “I thought it gives you a rash.”

I didn’t know that PFC’s visit would coincide with Toad Day, but the toads have arrived, and the kids have each gathered one or two and take turns telling me about them and showing what their toads can do. Healthy soil, healthy toads. They are really good-looking critters; PFC is lucky to work with a farm with toads like these.

Toad.