On the 23-hour Sunday that kicked off daylight saving time, about two dozen Chicagoans rose early and drove two hours south for the privilege of doing some old-fashioned labor. They were headed to a farm in Livingston County to dig and clean hundreds of wild onions to benefit the nonprofit organic-farming group the Land Connection.
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Kris and Marty Travis hosted Sunday’s ramp dig at Spence Farm, which has been in Marty’s family for seven generations. The ramps we dug were in woodland a mile away that belongs to an elderly cousin. The Travises’ 160-acre farm has an organic, “heirloom varieties” slant, which includes the harvesting and selling of ramps to farmers’ markets, restaurants, and national wholesalers each spring. Last year Spence Farm hosted about 1,000 visitors looking to learn more about heirloom plants and sustainable agriculture. The Travises have a $23,000 specialty growers grant from the state Department of Agriculture to expand their educational mission, a process that will be jump-started later this month with the relocation of a one-room schoolhouse from about a mile east to the farm, where it will serve as a classroom and reception area.
The Travises’ ramps were a lucky accident. A few years ago, Marty Travis’s cousin complained that the wild plants were crowding wildflowers out of his woods. Neither chemicals nor mowing fazed them. Then Marty discovered they were crops, not weeds: these days, he says, they sell for $4 a pound wholesale, $8 a pound retail. Since then the Travises have sold all they can dig every spring. They make more money from a few acres of ramps than from 100 acres of corn and soybeans. The Travises favor organic farming on principle, but they’re happy about the economic benefits; they point out that a neighbor who farms 5,000 acres of corn and soybeans conventionally is being forced to sell his house and much of his farming equipment.
The Land Connection, the Travises, and most of their Sunday visitors are dedicated to the notion that people in Illinois–and, ideally, the whole country–will one day know the pleasure and value of eating fresh, uncontaminated food produced on local farms. They’d like to turn the factory fields along I-57 into a patchwork of small farms–and to create, as Joel Smith, coleader of a group known as the Slow Food Chicago Convivium, said over lunch, a world in which that farmland would be so valued for the food it grew that it would be impossible to develop as anything else.
When: Sat 4/9, 6 PM-9 PM
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Yvette Marie Dostatni, Mari Coyne.
