How far do you have to travel to buy your own groceries? “A mile and a half to Jewel” is one answer, but if you really want to do your own shopping, you’ll have to set aside a full day of road time and almost a hundred fifty dollars of gas money. That’s what it takes to cover the 1,500 miles that the average meal travels from a farm, orchard or fishery to an American table. It’s a change in the most fundamental relationship of human society – us and our food – a separation that for almost all of our history never went beyond a few miles to a market or hunting ground, or a few feet to a household farm or garden. And like any change of that speed and scale, there have been consequences, stretching from nutrition to animal welfare, from the health of small business to the very existence of the natural system that feeds us. With that in mind, a small handful of restaurants, grocers, and farms in McHenry County have started turning back the clock – and the odometer – on how we can get our food.
A mile north from Route 120’s east turn, at 2719 Greenwood Road, a dedicated family of farmers is combining old-fashioned philosophy with modern know-how to take “sustainable” farming to the next step. Run by Kevin and Katie Kelley, son-in-law Mike Biver, and intern Jen Andrysczyk, Terra Vitae Farms is an ongoing experiment, in Biver’s words, “to produce the healthiest food conceivably possible.” Their farm, which raises an ever-increasing variety of livestock, is based on the concept of permaculture, a system that tries to increase the quality and longevity of human farming by merging it as much as possible with nature. Grazing animals, for instance, have more room to range in nature than a farm can reasonably provide, and the typical setup of one species of cow, pig, sheep or goat set out on a single pasture will quickly lead to overgrazing. But by rotating different animals between paddocks, much like how medieval farmers would rotate their crops, Terra Vitae allows the healthiest and most nutritious forage for each species to regrow, all without sacrificing their herd’s numbers.
Traveling back down 120 and switching off to Route 14, you can quickly find their main customers – 1776 Restaurant in Crystal Lake, a three-decade institution of McHenry County whose new owner, Rhienna Trevino, has kicked a longstanding focus on local food into overdrive. Part of the “farm-to-table” movement, 1776 commits as much as possible to serve only food raised within 150 miles of its address, giving it a regional authenticity that would be more common in its namesake year than in 2018. But just like farmers in the 18th century, Trevino’s business is both closer to nature, and more at its mercy. Apart from a menu that has to constantly adapt to the short Great Lakes growing season, a shift in the weather can be all it takes to wipe a side dish or two out completely. Trevino said, “I get emails every Sunday from four different growers letting me know what’s happened on their farms. I might get a message like, ‘alright, the rains took out all our broccolini, so we can’t provide that this week – here’s what we have instead.’”
Another problem, she said, was simple quantity. McHenry County has a huge agricultural output, but almost all of it comes in the form of corn or soybeans, used to make the animal feed and high-fructose corn syrup that could supply grocery shelves anywhere from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon. Local farmers, by comparison, are lost in the lurch – the Woodstock Public House taps the downtown Farmers Market for ginger beer and lettuce, but as Trevino put it, “if you’re serving so-many cocktails and salads a week, can a local farmer produce that much at a market price?”
Without more people willing to actually farm – a sustainability solution that’s less chic to practice in Wicker Park or the Near North Side – the next best thing is to improve distribution. Travel back up Route 14, possibly by McHenry County College, and you’ll find the future site of McHenry County’s first community-owned food cooperative, the Food Shed Co-Op. Board president Scott Brix has led the way with a slow but steady build-up of momentum for the project, which has been in the works since 2013. Co-ops, he said, can take eight or ten years to get up and running – unlike grocery chains which can rely on deep-pocketed Wall Street investors, food cooperatives are strictly limited to local ownership, in this case by residents of Illinois or Wisconsin.
But local support has been strong enough that over 600 owners have already signed on, with only a few hundred more needed to get a brick-and-mortar store set up. Once that happens, ideally by 2020, the familiar faces at the Woodstock Farmers Market will have a place to sell their wares year-round, seven days a week. Terra Vitae will have a consistent buyer, 1776 will have a consistent supplier, the sustainable agriculture program at MCC will have a new hands-on classroom and recruiting center, and just like Biver and the Kelley’s multi-crop farm, the entire system will gain resiliency.
More cash-conscious residents, of course, might ask why all of this is being bothered with in the first place. There are the obvious advantages – the food tastes better, it has more nutritional value than produce shipped from an ocean away or meat raised from stressed and ill-fed animals, and the lack of unnatural inputs make it much less of a health risk – but does this really justify the price tag for restaurants without national suppliers, grocery stores without national investors, and farms which by their own description “intentionally lose efficiencies?” The answer is what drives Terra Vitae, the Food Shed, and 1776 in what they do, regardless of profit: a belief that local food really does make a difference.
Biver describes how McHenry County’s current food system, despite creating a massive agricultural surplus, has also led to absentee landlords owning most of its farms, leasing them out to tenants for a year or six months at a stretch. Farmers who in another time might have cared for the health and viability of soil that had been passed down to them from generations past are now paid to extract as much dollar value from it as possible within a year, and if they have other ideas, they can easily find their lease canceled. This means vast monocultures of corn and heavy, machine-driven tilling, both of which ensure that topsoil – the semisolid, nutrient-rich earth that plants need to grow – is too loose to hold together in wind or rain.
The earlier-mentioned road trip to find the average farm supplying a chain grocery store could take you along I-80 in Iowa, where an Adair County rest stop documents the loss of the richest and most productive soils in the country: from fifteen inches in Iowa in the mid-1800s, to around seven today. Only a few more inches need to be lost to drastically harm root growth, and at current rates alone, that limit will be hit across America’s farming heartland sometime in the mid-21st century. As Katie Kelley puts it, “you’re taking deposits out of the bank and you’re not putting it back, and at a certain point you can’t keep writing checks.”
But for Biver and the Kellys, as well as Brix and Trevino, the solution is simple: get Americans back on the farm. Damaged and dying soil can be brought back to life with the right techniques, and a human being will always treat and understand the land better than a combine harvester – even if they have to make a career out of it. It’s part of a referendum in McHenry County, and every other county, whose ballot box counts in hours worked learning and cultivating the land, and dollars spent into the community instead of out of it. A vote for global is a vote for now, but a vote for local is a vote for the future.
More information can be found at terravitaefarms.com, 1776restaurant.com, and foodshed.coop.
Willcockson Wordsmithing 