We are a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm, featuring weekly neighborhood deliveries of fresh, in-season fruits and vegetables. The farm is owned and operated by Ben Hartman and Rachel Hershberger.

In addition to our CSA program, we sell at the Goshen Farmers Market as well as to area restaurants and the Maple City Market Food Co-op.

Meet Ben and Rachel

We both grew up in the area—Rachel in Goshen and Ben in LaGrange.

Rachel remembers working in her family’s large garden, from which the family ate much of their food.   She has three sisters.  In addition to farming, Rachel makes handcrafted silver jewelry and gourd crafts. She also sews and has made several quilts.

Rachel graduated in 1999 from Goshen College, with an Interdisciplinary degree.   During her senior year, she helped Ben teach a one-credit-hour class at Goshen College on organic gardening.  For two years, Rachel was the Manager of the Goshen Farmers Market.  Currently, in the off-season, Rachel tutors at Goshen Middle School.  This year, she initiated an after school tutoring program for non-native English-speaking students.

Ben grew up with his three brothers on their family’s 400-acre grain farm.   He remembers riding ponies at their Amish neighbor’s house and playing lots of baseball with his brothers.  One of Ben’s hobbies is ceramics–he makes art tiles of rural landscapes and has built a wood-fired kiln (at another property).  He hopes to someday build a kiln on our new property.

Ben has a voice condition related to stuttering; so if you hear a stray s-s-stutter, don’t take it personally.

He graduated from Goshen College with degrees in English and Philosophy.  After college, he worked at Sustainable Greens, a vegetable farm in southern Michigan, and also started a small drywall finishing business.  He honed his carpentry skills on an old Spanish colonial-style house in Goshen that we completely restored from 2006 to 2008.  We lived in the house for two years before moving to our new farm.  Ben still does some finish work and carpentry in mid-winter.

We met in college and were married in 2003.   Before settling in Goshen, we lived in three rural communities-an intentional community in Georgia, and two in Indiana–where we gained an appreciation for community life and for growing our own food.  We enjoy having interns live and work with us and share our farm and our food.

We opened our booth at the Goshen Farmers Market in 2006, and rented farmland for our first three growing seasons.  We learned a lot in those years–about growing systems, marketing, and about the kind of infrastructure we would want on a farm of our own.  Late in 2008, we started looking for farmsteads and purchased our current farm at auction later that year.

Our farm has a lot of small outbuildings, including two chicken houses, a wash house, a beautiful post-and-beam barn, and of course an outhouse.  The farmhouse is newer, the original house burned in a fire.  The farm is located between Goshen and the farmstead in LaGrange where Ben grew up.  It is in a mostly Amish community; we have greatly appreciated all the help and advice we’ve gotten from our neighbors.  This first year, we have focused on very needed maintenance and infrastructure–new roofs for the farmhouse and large chicken house, water hydrants, drain tiles, fences, and putting up two greenhouses.  It’s been a busy summer!

We give back to our community by donating extra produce to the Elkhart County Works Together program and by maintaining relationships with friends who have lost work or are on the margins of society.

In the future we hope to grow our CSA program, get to know our customers and their children better, and continue to learn about growing food all year long, not just in the summer.  We also want to develop our art interests and set up our studios.

How we farm

We use organic growing methods.  To us, this means more than staying away from chemicals.  It means working with nature to create growing systems that are deeply sustainable–systems that rely on local, on-farm inputs, and that increase farm biodiversity.  Through farming, we want to clean up–not dirty–our rivers, and filter–not toxify–the air we breath.

We grow on clay, as our name suggests.  Clay can be a very rewarding soil, if we treat it right.  We do not work it wet, and we minimize compaction whenever possible.  Cover crops and mulch are a must.  In return for careful attention, clay soils will grow crops with darker, greener leaves–and more nutrients–than a sandy soil ever could.

We use appropriately scaled technology.  No big tractors, though occasionally we might disc or cultipack with our small Ford 8N. Much of our cultivation is done by hand or with a two-wheeled walk-behind tractor.  We are always striving for solutions that increase sustainability, increase efficiency, and improve the nutrition of our crops.  As new farmers, we recognize that we have a lot to learn from other farmers both new and old in each of these areas.

Winter production

One of the core challenges facing growers in the local food movement is being able to provide fresh crops year-round.  This year we began pushing the edges of our growing season though the use of greenhouses and cold frames (unheated greenhouses).  We are excited by what we are seeing and want to continue to stretch the boundaries of the traditional June-September growing season.

A picture of one of our greenhouses taken in early April.