From Soil Health to Her Family’s Health: A Central Illinois Farmer is Connecting the Dots Through Regeneration.
By Kathy Kaesebier
Kathy Kaesebier lives on a farm in Logan County, Illinois where she farms with her husband, Rick. Here is her story of regenerative transformation on their farm and why it matters.
…the Amish think of “the community as a whole” — that is, as all the people, or perhaps, considering the excellence both of their neighborliness and their husbandry, as all the people and their land together. If the community is whole, then it is healthy, at once earthly and holy. The wholeness or health of the community is their standard. — Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
I wish I had known about Wendell Berry and his seemingly prophetic writings decades ago. He was writing the answers to questions I have before I knew I had them. I was born a farmer and married a farmer. I am a woman in a man’s world of farming. I have always lived an unconventional life in a conventional world starting with being a medical transcriptionist in my home office and a result, being neither a stay-at-home Mom nor a working Mom. And now my husband and I are living in the margins of central Illinois farming. I know what it’s like to be different, living in the margins — listening to the beat of a different drummer.
We are farming unconventionally in a conventional farming society by transforming our monoculture farm of corn and soybeans into a diversified farm of corn, soybeans, wheat, and cover crops. In the past two years we have added animals to our land for the first time in over 50 years! Beef cows, meat and laying chickens, Khatadin sheep, and honeybees are thriving on lush green grass and cover crops. Wildlife has found our farm as an oasis in the area once described to me by a Chicago native as “the corn desert”. Why all this change and why now?
There are two reasons for these drastic changes. We have lost hundreds of acres to industrial farmers, so we must focus on integration horizontally rather than vertically. But more importantly, we saw a problem in our soil that none of the professionals could identify and that couldn’t be ignored any longer. We found the answers behind our soil issues in the regenerative farming and soil health community. Our issues appear to be the results of the breaking down of the microbiome in the soil due to our farming practices. While we had stopped tilling our soil years ago, it wasn’t enough to improve our soil, so we added cover crops to our rotation and now the ultimate rotation of animals has been added to further address the deficiencies causing the soil problems.
Bacteria, fungi, arthropods, and protozoa — plus so many more organisms that are still being discovered — make our soil a living, functioning being. These are what makes our plants healthy and then, they impact the health of the animals and humans that consume these plants. Ultimately, a healthy soil microbiome makes for a healthy human gut microbiome, and a healthy human. The more we learn about soil health, the more we learn about how many of our health issues are actually nutrient deficiencies — a direct result of how we are treating the soil.
I once had a smart woman ask me the question, “Do farmers think they are growing food?” It made me pause and realize that most of us farmers do not think that what we are doing is the simple task of growing food. We have followed agribusiness into believing farming should be a business and about profits and have turned away from the concept that it is our job to raise delicious and nutritious foods. We have chased the lure of big machinery and technologically advanced nutrients and genetics to take the drudgery out of farming. But in doing so we have caused the food web to wobble out of balance and are now producing nutritionally-deficient food causing so many health problems. The amazing thing with nature is if man gets out of the way then Mother Nature heals herself. We have seen it in so many ways on our soil health journey and in our own family’s health journey through various health problems.
It takes some time and effort to start soil health changes on the farm, but more importantly it takes a paradigm shift. The farming community is suffering through record numbers of suicides and depression as farmers fight not only the depressed farm prices but also the constant threat of farm consolidation. Where we have found a positive flow of energy is in the gathering of regenerative farmers. Their focus is on reducing input costs and finding specialty markets for their crops and value-added food products. It is a shift from focusing on growing bigger yields into a focus of how to grow healthy foods economically as well as ecologically. We find the farmer friends who are practicing soil health are finding it “fun to farm again”. They are making informed decisions in anticipation of what the growing year will provide instead of reactive decisions as problems arise. They are adding animals to their farms again, and enjoying the pastoral time spent in the pastures with them. Farming is not just a business. It is a way of life in addition to a livelihood, and we should be proud to think of it this way. A friend once commented he didn’t understand how I could hand feed our cows one day and take them to the processor the next. Our philosophy is our animals should have only one bad day in their lives.
We are regenerating our farm to make it resilient: a farm that thrives with less synthetic nutrients and pesticides that is improving the health of our family and the people and animals that consume our crops. A farm where the soil is not tilled that is reducing the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere and reducing the amount of soil eroding in our air and rivers. A farm that we will leave to the next generation that is truly better than the way we received it.
