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“The farm is the best place to grow up. You get to understand the connection between work and life. You get to understand death. Not a lot of people understand all that.”
Steve Schwen didn’t grow up on a farm himself, but the agricultural wisdom he gently, passionately described to David Hougen-Eitzman’s Agroecology class this week was as old and wise as the soil itself. Born in rural Minnesota, surrounded by farms, Schwen followed his family’s advice to seek “greater things” by attending Medical School. His passion quickly shifted, however, with the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960’s. “The heart of the whole thing was a spiritual awakening,” Schwen stated, and said that he experienced the awakening intimately himself. He has been farming in southeastern Minnesota ever since.
Schwen’s farming methods are far from the conventional industrial model that we are surrounded by in this part of the country. He is an organic farmer in the traditional sense, meaning that he has never been certified but sets very high standards for himself and has always grown the cleanest food around. He is a self-described peasant with 14 acres of land (compared to the hundreds of acres that conventional corn and soybean farmers have) and practices Permaculture, a method of planting sections of perennial plants such as apple trees, raspberries and asparagus along the natural curvature of the land. The land between these permanent plantings becomes naturally leveled and terraced for all of the annual crops. Schwen cultivates using a team of two loyal horses, who he showed picture after picture of like a proud parent. “Horses are solar-powered” Schwen said, “and their only exhaust is fertilizer for the farm!”
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