Learning off the land

Organic farm teaches
sustainable agriculture practices

Story by Julie Blakley
Photos by Ashley Baer

Ashley Baer / Photo Editor

Staff member Jena Botte works through rows of lettuce, “timely hoeing” the young heads, which helps prevent weeds from growing.

Visiting Horton Road Organics feels like stepping back to a simpler time, when gas didn’t cost more than three dollars per gallon and reports of global warming weren’t flooding the evening news.

A small group of people who live on the land has given up modern conveniences to live in a rustic barn. They have dedicated their lives to living off the land and learning about the Earth. Their lives on the farm, nestled in a valley 35 miles west of Eugene, can be a culture shock to outsiders.

In 1993, husband and wife Bill Booth and Debra Martin started Horton Road Organics. They’ve spent the last 14 years passing on lessons of sustainable farming to college-age students.

At Horton Road, fields are classrooms, vegetables are assignments and the barn is a dorm, where the bathroom has a composting toilet.

Farm:

Martin and Booth run an apprentice program aimed at bringing people to the farm to not only help work the land, but also learn about the process of sustainable farming.

“It’s a place where college dropouts and poets and romantics can come and find a place that’s meaningful,” Martin said.

They appreciate the labor from the apprentices, but are most excited when former students start their own farms. Through the program, they sustain the ideal of local, organic farming along with themselves and the land.

Over the six-month growing season, Martin shows her new apprentices how to sow seeds and hoe weeds, as well as more formal teaching sessions.

“About 98 percent of the people we get are college graduates,” Martin said, grinning knowingly at Terra Sorensen, her current staff member and former apprentice.

Sorensen, who will celebrate her 32nd birthday this June, graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in art. She had big dreams of moving to New York City to be an artist, but through a mixture of circumstances she ended up at Horton Road learning how to grow vegetables.

She stumbled into farming much the way she stumbled into being a vegetarian 16 years ago. She visited a roadside restaurant named Ollie’s in Nebraska, famous for its burgers and notorious for its real stuffed-animal décor.

As she ate her buffalo burger, Sorensen looked up and saw a mounted buffalo head starring back at her as she chewed.

That was it: no more meat.

Ashley Baer / Photo Editor

Working at the Horton Farm Organics booth at Saturday Market in Downtown Eugene, Ore., Terra Sorensen weighs salad mix for a customer. During the busy months, starting in July, five people — three openers and two closers — will staff the booth.

After apprenticing for Martin and Booth for one season, Sorensen was hooked on the vegetable-raising life. She knew this was where she belonged.

However, despite watching her mother gardening at home in Iowa when she was a child, Sorensen did not appreciate growing things until later in life.

“As I got older I realized how beautiful it was,” she said while hoeing weeds from tender, young lettuce heads sprouting in perfect rows.

It was an appreciation that would develop into a lifestyle.

After graduating from college, Sorenson joined the Peace Corps and headed to western Africa as an agricultural agent in a small village. After arriving, she saw how the people mastered living off the land and how the food they grew sustained their culture for so many centuries. They connected to their land, the food and each other.

“It was a very eye-opening experience,” she said. “They farmed organically and the community of people really took care of each other.”

Sorensen returned to the U.S. with new experiences and a refreshed view of the world. She finally ended up in Eugene where she worked as an activist at the University of Oregon for the new voters project.

Still, she felt something was missing in her life.

“As cool as it is and as noble as I thought it was, I was still displaced from what sustains me,” she said.

After her experiences in Africa, shopping at grocery stores and buying her food off shelves just didn’t feel right.

Ashley Baer / Photo Editor

Debra Martin and her husband, Bill Booth, have owned Horton Road Organics farm since 1993. The two promote sustainable practices and teaching others through an apprenticeship program.

“I had all these ideas of how I wanted to live and I finally said, ‘You know what? Let’s try it,’” she said.

Sorensen set out to find a place where she felt at home. Four years later, she lives in a yurt behind the converted barn dorms.

To a woman who admits to burning out on jobs quickly, four years seems like a decade. The apprentices live in a converted barn without heat. On cold spring and fall nights they crowd around a space heater in the common room.

The rooms are simple and the kitchen simpler. But for the apprentices who live there, the barn is home.

Their experiences on the farm are vast — some days are spent learning how to hoe weeds or fertilize soil, other are spent selling the produce at farmer’s markets.

Martin spreads her joy of farming (and a little know how) to her eager students, some of whom have gone on to study permanent, renewable agriculture. Like Sorensen, Martin stumbled into farming accidentally. After working in AmeriCorps and traveling abroad, she says her eyes opened to the current global situation. She thought about spending her life as a political activist, but instead found herself in a temporary summer job picking tomatoes.

Martin believes in not only sustaining the earth, but in sustaining ideas. Her frustrating experience in political activism led her to want to teach others how to farm.

“The impact of growing your food is really important,” she said. “It’s very important to have ideas, but it’s also important to have the physical.”

That’s why at Horton Road Organics, Martin and Booth combine the mental and physical work in their apprentice program. They teach the science and ideas behind the farming, and then integrate those ideas with the physical labor of farm work.

They think that a six-month growing season can introduce a person not only to the pragmatic side of farming, but also teach the apprentices something about themselves. Martin, who is also a Zen Buddhist leader, finds spirituality in farming. She says the combination of the mental and the physical work with the connection to nature has powerful effects.

“There is a life force in nature,” she said. “People are drawn to it. There is a life out here and it’s healing and has intensity.”

Martin says the people who come to Horton tend to be educated career people who may not find fulfillment sitting behind an office desk. Some need to reconnect to themselves and nature; others are drawn to working the land.

“There is just nothing better than being out here and saying ‘what’s for dinner?’ and then going out and harvesting it,” she said.

Sorensen plans on eventually taking her knowledge back to Iowa — a place that evokes images of sprawling wheat fields, tractors and ears of corn.

Ashley Baer / Photo Editor

Bill Booth (center) explains to apprentices Megan Maxey and Clare Hogan how the different ingredients in the potting mix help retain and repel moisture. The dual action helps make sure that the plants receive enough, but not too much, water.

Starting her own small organic farm there will let her be closer to family and continue the life she loves.

Despite the difficulties of running an apprentice program, Sorensen is proof that Martin is successfully spreading her ideas and love for farming. But Sorenson is not the only one who has used skills learned at Horton Road, adjusted them and taken them elsewhere. In fact, Martin and Booth have several former apprentices working at farms nearby.

Staff member and former apprentice, Jena Botte, also has plans take her farming skills east. She plans to take the skills learned in Oregon and move to Michigan, where there are fewer farms like Horton Road and the land is cheaper. Botte says her experience at Horton Road has taught her important lessons.

“I think it’s a lot of work to have an apprentice program,” Botte said. “(Martin and Booth) have that vision for the idea to move on. It takes a lot of patience. But you end up getting the tools to know how to farm.”

However, Botte and Sorensen will have to adjust their skills learned in Oregon to the climates and soil of Iowa and Michigan.

“What we are doing here works here,” Botte said. “You are going to have to adjust.” Botte will combine her knowledge of the land and the vegetables to successfully farm in a different environment.

“I’m excited,” she said. “I don’t think the learning ever stops.”