The Deep History of Henry’s Farm
Henry’s Farm is a sustainable, regenerative, multi-generational, small-scale, labor-intensive farm in the rolling hills and fertile bottom land of the Mackinaw River Valley in Central Illinois. In our fields along Walnut Creek, periodic flooding over thousands of years left deposits of nutrient-rich silt, creating black topsoil so deep we have never seen the bottom of it, even when digging down over 4 feet to loosen the long taproots of burdock.
The rich soil on Henry's Farm is a key factor in the taste and nutrient density of the vegetables he grows, so Henry works hard to replace nutrients removed from the soil in the form of vegetables. He continually enhances the fertility of the soil by growing cover crops, rotating crops, returning all plant organic matter to the soil, and leaving fields fallow, thereby growing rather than purchasing fertilizers.
Henry’s original bottomland field has never been farmed using chemical-industrial methods. Other than the flat bottomlands, Henry’s Farm is hilly, thanks to glaciers that covered this part of the world from 1,500,000 to 10,000 years ago. Those glaciers created ridges and plains as they repeatedly advanced, then paused creating a ridge at the glacier’s edge, and then retreated.
In this map of Illinois, the green area shows alternating bands of ridges (darker) and plains (lighter) that were created by glacial activity during the Wisonsin Episode. Henry’s Farm is on one of the ridges.
