Downstate farm bans chemicals
ELWIN, Ill. — Keith Brown is pretty handy with a paintball gun.
Chances are he could nail a squash bug at 20 paces, even while allowing for wind, which he gets an awful lot of down on Golden Oldies Farm in the breezy prairie two miles west of Elwin.
Brown, a spare-time paintball enthusiast, runs Golden Oldies with his partner, Sierra Eaves. The place is named for their aging golden retrievers Oliver, 14, and 12-year-old Dexter. Golden Oldies, covering just 2¾ acres, forsakes the standard corn and bean monotony in favor of rows and rows of vegetables grown naturally. No pesticides, no chemical fertilizers and no genetically modified Frankenseeds cooked in a lab.
Just nature. And bugs: an army of creepy crawlies with big vegetable appetites. Blasting them individually with a paintball gun would no doubt be so colorfully satisfying on a personal level. “I wish I could,” said Brown, 31, as Eaves nods enthusiastically. “It would be awesome,” she adds.
But back at Realityville, amid the art of the affordably possible, those who have beaten their chemical spray guns into plowshares are faced with picking the bugs off by hand and encouraging the frontal assaults of friendly insects such as ladybirds. These spotted critters, apparently, chow down on pests like they were M&Ms.
And then there is always running the vacuum.
“To be quite honest, this year, I am going to use a little DeWalt shop vac and get out here at dawn and vacuum the bugs right off the plants,” said Brown, who wears a ratty paintball shirt and a determined look.
“And then we’ll feed them to the chickens,” said Eaves, 25. “If it moves, they’ll eat it.”
Going to such lengths is just another day on the farm at Golden Oldies, where no trouble is too much trouble to bring to market “heirloom” vegetables with unadulterated genomes and leaves that have never felt the cold kiss of an herbicide. Brown and Eaves walk a visitor along row after row of the stuff: carrots, broccoli, cabbage, onions, kohlrabi (sort of turnipish), green beans, Swiss chard (a kind of heat-tolerant spinach), radishes, peas and on and on and on.
“We grow almost 110 different varieties of heirloom vegetables,” said Brown. “It’s fresh, local and, about 99 percent of the time, the day you buy it is the day that it was picked.”
Golden Oldies was launched a year ago using some leased ground owned by Brown’s family after the farm couple got the idea of creating their own employment opportunity by tapping a growing passion for fresh, unadulterated fruit and veg. Teaching themselves how from books and asking lots of questions, they also raise hearty breeds of free-range chickens for eggs and, new this year, have added a pretty type of chicken called “Barred Rocks,” which live in the open air on a diet of annoying bugs and are being raised specifically for their meat.
This is what’s called “community-supported agriculture,” and Golden Oldies has more than 40 customers who have committed to financially support the farm in return for a regular share of the harvest. And there is usually an overflowing cornucopia to go around despite the bugs and a never-ending close-quarter combat with weeds. Brown and Eaves sell the excess from a groaning produce stand at the Saturday Farmers Market, hosted in Decatur’s Central Park.
What’s also driving demand, they say, is a growing customer base fed up with substandard produce, grown with chemical assistance, and then trucked over vast distances before being anointed with water sprays on store shelves in the hope of giving a vague blessing of freshness.
“They say any given piece of food travels like 1,500 miles to get to your store,” said Eaves, who has clearly been reading up on all this. “Our customer base is pretty educated, they really get it, and they don’t want it.”
But like Eve wandering blissfully in a sustainable Garden of Eden, Eaves’ earthy knowledge does not always save her from processed fast-food temptation and the lure of a serpent whose body writhes in the shape of golden double arches. As Brown looks at the ground, perhaps intent on hunting squash bugs, Eaves fesses up: “I do occasionally like McDonald’s,” she said. “Sorry, I just can’t lie.”