The aroma of homemade soup warms the bright kitchen as Erin Schneider and her husband, Rob McClure, scurry about the room preparing the table for the perfect fall meal.
“Sit down, make yourself at home,” Schneider calls from the counter as she slices a loaf of bread. I find my chair and am served a bowl filled with broth, a variety of colorful vegetables and slices of chicken. Schneider brings a plate of bread and cheese, and the three of us sit down for lunch.
“I hope you like the soup,” McClure chimes in as I eagerly take my first bite. “It’s all vegetables from the garden and a fresh chicken from next door.”
I nearly drop my second spoonful and look across the wooden table at the couple, bewildered.
“From next door?” I ask.
“Yeah, they raise broiler chickens just down the road,” he says casually as he takes another bite.
Although this catches me off guard for a moment (my chicken usually comes from my freezer, not my neighbor), I finish every last drop of the delicious soup. This, I realize, is the essence of Wisconsin family farming and community supported agriculture: a meal made from the fruits of your own labor and shared with others, even a total stranger.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines community supported agriculture — often called CSA — as “a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so the farmland becomes, either legally or spiritually, the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production.” Community members purchase a share in the farm at the beginning of the growing season, usually in mid-May. In return, members receive boxes of the season’s harvest each week throughout the summer and early fall.
The CSA trend has been steadily growing in the Midwest and particularly in Wisconsin. According to Fair Share CSA Coalition, in 1996 more than 4,000 Madison-area residents participated in a CSA. Today, that number has increased to more than 25,000 CSA members in and around the Madison area, the main CSA hub in Wisconsin.
Located in the village of La Valle in southwestern Wisconsin, Hilltop Community Farm — Schneider and McClure’s farm — is hidden behind a vast expanse of trees. Like the name suggests, it rests atop a grassy hill overlooking its orchard and various gardens. The long uphill gravel driveway, hidden behind long grasses on the side of the road, is easily missed by the untrained eye and winds its way through the woods.
My first impression [of the farm] was, ‘Oh, I love the adventurousness of this driveway,’” Schneider recalls, laughing. “Now the novelty has sort of worn off.”
But the reward waiting at the end of the menacing driveway is well worth it. The white 1930s-style farmhouse, which McClure inherited from his parents, was a somewhat spur-of-the-moment purchase by the McClure family. The native Chicagoans loved any excuse to take a leisurely drive through the “sand counties” in Wisconsin. As luck would have it, while driving home from a family vacation, the McClures happened to pass through Sauk County when McClure’s father had an idea.
“He wasn’t specifically looking to buy a farm,” McClure says. “But we ended up buying what was then this abandoned farm.”
“By humans anyway,” Schneider quickly adds with a smile.
“Yes, it was abandoned by humans. There was a robin that was living in here on the top of the door jamb,” he says, gesturing across the kitchen. “And a barn swallow lived in the other room, there, and there was a skunk living in the basement. So it was really well-inhabited.”
The inside of the house, now home only to two humans, is a sort of mismatch of old furniture that McClure’s father acquired from other local farmers and junk shops, and fading wallpaper, which only adds to the farmhouse’s classic, cozy charm.
“It was their interior-decorating project,” McClure laughs, looking around to admire his parents’ handiwork.
Although his parents may not have intended to own a farm, a garden was quickly built and put to good use by the McClure family. McClure’s mother, an amateur gardener at best, surprised him with her gardening aspirations. But his skepticism soon morphed into a shared love of playing in the dirt. Since inheriting the property, McClure’s passion for gardening has transformed into a thriving farming venture.
“We always had gardens here, so I grew a lot of vegetables for myself and gave them to my friends. And eventually the garden got so big that I decided to start doing CSA when the CSA movement came to Madison in the early 1990s … I’ve been doing it ever since,” McClure says.
According to the Rodale Institute, the first conceptions of Community Supported Agriculture began in the 1960s in Germany, Switzerland and Japan in response to food safety concerns due to pesticides and the desire of farmers to find stable markets. In Japan, women started some of the first CSA-like models, called “teikei,” to combat the influx of imported food and the loss of arable lands due to urbanization. During the mid-1980s, the CSA movement spread to the United States with the founding of two CSA farms in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Wisconsin has become a leader within the CSA movement, with Madison at its core.
Hilltop Community Farm’s success is rooted in Schneider and McClure’s deep love and understanding of the land, their farm and each other. Schneider in particular has a unique relationship with the land itself, specifically a love affair with soil.
“I’ve always liked being in the dirt,” she says. “Here’s this thing that we walk on every day that we pay no heed to, and without this Earth’s skin, we really wouldn’t be here in a lot of ways … I kind of have this love of things unseen.”
Schneider’s fondness for digging in the dirt and exploring the soil harks back to her childhood in Boscobel, Wisconsin.
“We used to make these mud soups,” she recalls with a hearty laugh. “We would get together with the neighbors, and you know the stone soup story where you throw everything in the pot? We would do that out in the garden and put in the soil and stones and what we thought were good vegetables — but they were really the ones that were still rotting — and we would mix it up and pretend to eat it.”
After making her fair share of mud soup, in college Schneider traveled to Alaska to do soil survey work and map different soils. The colorful blues and greens of the soils, the excitement of finding permafrost in the frozen Alaskan tundra and the sight of the edge of a glacier only strengthened her literal love of the land. However, her Wisconsin roots brought her back to Midwestern soil.
“I’m a rural girl at heart. I don’t mind dancing in between different spaces,” Schneider says. “My heart is in the countryside, and I need connection to the ‘home-sphere’ as well as humans, too. I was at a place where I moved back here for family and community.”
It was upon her return to Wisconsin and her work with what is now Fair Share CSA Coalition that she met McClure. During her year-long tenure as executive director of the Madison Area CSA Coalition, Schneider made it her mission to visit all of the organization’s members and ask what the coalition could do for them. Enter McClure, a long-time member of the coalition and passionate farmer. They first met in late August — pear season — and their supposed-to-be-quick meeting turned into a several-hours-long discussion about the philosophical meaning of currency.
“I thought, ‘Wow no one else will let me go on and on about this for two hours and actually contribute to the conversation,’” McClure remembers while Schneider laughs at the bizarre reality of their first meeting. “We’re both sort of tuned to the same things, and I think that helped kick off our relationship pretty well.”
However, their love story did not exactly start there. In a twist of fate, the pair happened to live only three blocks from each other in Madison, which led to a mutually anticipated reunion.
“I brought you a pear dessert that my mom makes,” Schneider reminds McClure. She turns to me, smiling, “I was just sharing that as a gratitude, and also as an excuse to see him again. I felt like, ‘I have to bring him something, it can’t just be me!’”
The pear dessert proved to be a hit when McClure later agreed to meet up for dinner despite a snag in what was intended to be a unique invitation. After designing an elaborate scavenger hunt through Tenney Park, one of her favorite spots in Madison, Schneider was saddened to discover that her plan was foiled by one tiny detail.
“Rob couldn’t read my handwriting. … It was a little bit embarrassing.”
The pair laugh as they share these memories from years past, and it is refreshing to witness a couple so at ease with each other’s imperfections and each one’s obvious love for the other.
“I fell in love with a farmer, and the rest is history,” Schneider says. “It just really works; it’s nice, I feel really lucky.”
Through her relationship with McClure, Schneider also fell in love with the farm that she now calls home. After working in various public- and private-sector jobs, Schneider says that she found herself and her true passions for farming and hands-on work with McClure.
“It was like stepping into your calling. It’s a way that I can use all kinds of different skills that I’ve learned both in school and in life experiences,” Schneider says. “I’ve always loved to be growing something and to be outside and to have this sense of autonomy and decision-making and even though it’s kind of funny because you’re sort of on ‘plant time.’”
The farm is somewhat of a haven for Schneider and McClure, a quiet place to relax and be at peace with Wisconsin nature.
“There’s this sense of wildness here but at the same time it’s settled and loved,” Erin says. “You come out here and you just exhale more. … It’s a lot of work, but on the flip end, you just see folks relax more [when they come here]. And if we can be this place for that, then why not?”
Schneider’s love of soil and her passion for the farm finally merged when the United Nations declared 2015 to be the Year of Soil. She decided to pay homage by creating a collaborative soil quilt. To turn this idea into reality, she sent out nearly three dozen squares of white fabric to farmers in eight different Midwest states and asked them to bury it for two weeks in a place that had meaning to them. Then the soil would begin “painting” the squares with various shades of turquoise, pinks and deep purples, tie-dying the cloth to create surprisingly beautiful pieces of art.
“It was a little metaphoric [with] the idea of the quilting being this sort of quotidian thing, but it’s really a big part of rural life,” Schneider says of the initial brainstorming for the project. “When people are working with their hands and talking, some real interesting things come up.”
The project was met with more enthusiasm than Schneider expected; many farmers returned their painted cloth with personal stories, pictures, videos or poems. The squares were then sewn into a quilt in a series of quilt-making sessions. The final product was proudly displayed on the farm for the annual Fermentation Fest and Farm/Art DTour in Sauk County.
This project was a perfect combination of all of the ingredients that Schneider and McClure hold dear to their hearts: the land, the farm and each other. People, plants and dirt are what drive this couple to continue their work in La Valle.
“It’s all tied, you know? … Farming is very demanding … it takes a lot of love and effort,” Schneider says. “I just love this place, I love who I’m with, and I can’t imagine not doing it — at least until my back tells me otherwise.”
Kara Rheingans
Kara is a lover of any and all breakfast foods and prides herself on her ability to find a Harry Potter quote to fit any situation. She dreams of one day traveling to Spain and finally tasting authentic Spanish paella. Kara will graduate in May with degrees in strategic communication and Spanish and hopes to land a job that allows her to further develop her creativity and cure her wanderlust.