ON HENRY’S FARM

Experimenting with Radical Adaptation to the Climate Crisis

In late September 2021, Henry Brockman kneeled in the field harvesting dried beans, their vines entwined over parched, dusty soil marked by fissures resembling lightning strands. He tugged the deep brown pods in a bushel basket alongside him beneath the early autumn sun in the rolling glacial hills of Congerville, Illinois. It had been two months since it had rained.

By late October, heavy rains arrived, but the month would historically come and go without a frost. Thin ice crystals would finally blanket Brockman’s operation, called Henry’s Farm, in the dark, crisp morning hours of November 2 As Thanksgiving neared, the fields slipped into a slumber.

Fifty-seven year old Brockman is a small compact man who says he always carries the aroma of the last thing he harvested, will not rest, however. After twenty-eight years as an organic vegetable farmer, he says climate change has forced him to start over and spurred him to a state of constant experimentation as he works to keep his farm afloat and make it as resilient as possible for the coming generation.

Central Illinois is seeing weather and temperature extremes, as is the rest of the country. The climate there is changing more rapidly than it has in the past, explains Don Wuebbles, professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

However, the region’s most significant changes are occurring at night. While the average temperature in the state has increased one to two degrees over the last century, the increase in overnight temperatures has exceeded three degrees in some parts of the state.

This part of the Corn Belt has seen a 10 percent increase in precipitation over the last century and the number of two-inch rain days in Illinois has soared 40 percent in that time. As a result, the state has seen an increase in soil moisture. But, due to elevated rates of evaporation, the soil also tends to dry out faster, and longer dry spells have become more common.1

All of these changes will likely make crops more susceptible to weeds, pests, and diseases, which will likely lower yields.

“We have models that say by mid-century, there will be a 10 to 50 percent decrease in yields in Central Illinois. We really have to think ahead,” Wuebbles warns.

Six years ago, Brockman took a year off farming and started doing just that. He penned an emotional eighteen-page letter to his children, Asa, Aozora, and Kazami. It was written as if from the future, to warn them about climate change. Dotting it are words such as “mourn,” “woe,” and “destruction” as well as “hope.”

In the scenario he imagined, it’s 2050 and the farm is much smaller and mostly feeds the family. Brockman is in his eighties and corporate farms produce much less food. Their synthetic, petroleum-dependent fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides are no longer widely available or affordable. Combines lay rusting in nearly barren fields. The climate in Congerville feels like Dallas.

“The world is changed utterly,” the letter reads, “by human avarice and ignorance, and continues to change at a rate unprecedented in human history.”

Since returning to the farm, Brockman has been dedicating himself to preparing for the future. An award-winning documentary, Seasons of Change On Henry’s Farm, documented some of the challenges he faced before and during his leave. The changes since then, he says, are coming much more rapidly and more severe.

A Small but Mighty Farm

Brockman grew up with five siblings on a one-acre farm surrounded by nearly fifty acres of woods. All the Brockmans write and have published books about farming and farm life. Three of them farm nearby and all four operations promote their work together online under the name Brockman Family Farms. Congerville is considered a mecca for organic farming due to its rich soil and rolling topography of ridges and plains formed by glaciers. The area is dotted with dozens of small-scale organic farms, some that belong to Apostolic church members who live off the land.

Outside Congerville, however, central Illinois is generally farmed by immense soy and corn operations that stretch, “a hundred miles in all directions,” says Brockman. When he crosses paths with the large-scale conventional farmers who have known him since high school, he says they often call out, “Hey Henry! How’s the garden growing?”

At twenty acres, he jokes his farm “isn’t even large enough for them to drive a tractor onto.”

Although small, Henry’s Farm is lush, producing one to four tons a week of more than seven hundred vegetable varieties. Brockman farms with intention and instructs his interns to be present and respect everything they harvest, while being mindful that it will be someone’s food.

“Plants, like any living thing, play their role in the cycle of life and death,” Brockman says. The farm feeds 345 families with its own community-supported agriculture (CSA) program and others in the Chicago region. It sells most of what it grows to dedicated customers at a farmers market in Evanston, Illinois, whose customers Brockman has fed for the length of his career. It’s nearly a seven-hour drive, roundtrip.

For the last twenty-five years, Brockman has been taking meticulous notes in ten-year black journals, and it’s there that he began unwittingly recording the mercurial weather and climate patterns he’s seeing more of now. Every day he logs the weather, his plantings and harvests, and other observations such as the departure of some insects—the yellowstriped armyworm and the new arrival of others—the brown-striped armyworm. Around a decade ago, his own data revealed that things were starting to go terribly awry. Brockman dubbed it “global weirding.”

His farming season now lasts a month longer than it did when he started, extended two weeks earlier in the spring and concluding two weeks later in the fall. Springtime begins warmer but tends to be punctuated by unexpected bitter frosts that often wipe out newly planted seedlings. And rain?

“Now floods can come in the spring, in July, September, and even in December,” he says. “Due to a flood in July last year, I had almost nothing at the market for a couple of weeks. When plants are underwater for more than 24 hours, their roots can’t breathe and they suffocate.”

Traditionally, Brockman planted heat-loving sweet potatoes in July. He now plants them in early spring and they sprout in May. His spring lettuce season has been cut short but now, due to warmer fall weather, he can plant lettuce again in the early fall and harvest it in November.

“September is what August used to be, and when freezes come they come harder,” Brockman says. “I’d usually be harvesting peppers the second week of July. Now, I’m still harvesting peppers in October.”

While he harvested peppers this fall, the owners of Cook Farm, a mere twenty miles south, flooded after three nearby tributaries rose and converged, leaving the Cooks to kayak across their fields. That week, between October 24 and 30, four and a half inches of rain fell onto Henry’s Farm. “Somehow,” Brockman said, “we had no flooding.”

Preparing for the Climate Crisis

In an effort to adapt and anticipate the changes ahead, Brockman has made some radical changes to his farm. He cut production in half— he’s now farming only ten of his twenty acres. A creek divides his two beloved bottomland fields, and, in an effort to save the rich, two-thousand-year-old soil on that land (and prepare for potential flooding), he moved his annual row crops to rented higher ground two years ago.

In their place, he planted an experimental perennial forest using a permaculture approach. There, he’s growing currants and a variety of berries—gooseberries, honey berries, elderberries—as well as hazelnuts, pecans, pawpaws, and persimmons, in hopes that their more permanent roots will prevent the soil from washing away during heavy rains and keep more carbon in the soil. Among other experimental crops are paddy and dryland rice varieties.

Behind the forest, Brockman is growing a field of sorghum-sudangrass, which will be used as straw mulch to keep the ground moist during dry spells. It will also add carbon to the soil as he cuts out tillage and grows more with cover crops in his rotations. A bit higher in the second bottomland field is a mix of perennial grasses and legumes, as well as potatoes and garlic.

Brockman is also trying to prepare for drought. Henry’s Farm rests on a deep aquifer, and the water beneath was trapped by the glaciers under hundreds of feet of clay. In other words, water there is a nonrenewable resource.

When he began farming, Brockman says he only needed to irrigate his crops in late July and early August. The rest of the year, rain was relatively predictable. In recent years, he has had to use drip irrigation beginning in May, and the need often extends into the fall. This involves running yards of licorice-like hoses dotted with pinprick holes. They are laid across seeded ground to help the plants germinate.

It’s not clear whether one of Brockman’s children will take over the farm, but the word “retire” isn’t in his current vocabulary, said his sister Terra.

“Henry isn’t focused on passing the farm on to someone else, just on farming in the best ways possible for as long as possible,” she said. His daughter, Aozora, is the only one currently working alongside her father. The author of two poetry chapbooks, she often describes life on the farm in her work. In the poem “Roots”, she writes:

In the hottest part of the day we sit in the shade of the shed in a circle of square bins peeling the Russian Reds each dirt-covered strip revealing streaks the color of sky in the last rumble before rain.2

This fall, it was so hot and dry on the farm that Brockman had to irrigate his young crops at night, using the water from his well. He would move his irrigation lines before dark and then get up in the middle of the night to move them again five hours later. Brockman, his fingertips stained from the tomato plants he had trellised earlier in the day, manually laid out forty lines—each two hundred feet long. As he did so, he would jog back and forth in the dark to ensure it got done quickly—so the seeds would germinate. When he finished, he made his way home and back to bed, where he says he’s only rarely able to fall back asleep these days. As the year draws to a close, 2050 looms on the horizon. ○

A version of this profile with the same title was initially published on Civil Eats, and was printed with permission.

Notes

Rose Linke