FINDING BOERSON FARM
Boerson Farm is a beautiful, 80 acre, Certified Organic farm tucked into the rural fabric of Green Lake County. We find strength in diversification and strive for the farm to produce for its own needs as well as our own. We are committed to organic and sustainable farming practices that heal the land, increase biodiversity, and produce amazingly delicious whole foods including vegetables, fruit, pastured pork, grass fed beef, eggs, and grain. Rich compost feeds the soil and cover crops restore life to the land that was for years farmed with petro-chemicals. The farm is now home to a team of draft horses, Valerie and Vonda, who will provide much of the power needed to work the land. Boerson Farm achieved Organic Certification in 2011 through MOSA, a Wisconsin based certifying agency.
As much as a farm is a place, rooted on all levels in the soil it stands on, it is also a state of mind. We have been in the process of finding our farm, physically and otherwise, for some time. Our journey has taken us along the curvy back roads of our minds, society, and rural places and what we are finding is more than a barn, fields and a menagerie of animals.
It was after a long day of work in the fields of a Costa Rican coffee farm that a Dutch woman revealed to us the translation of our surname, “Farmers Son.” Mat had made it through 25 years of life without ever considering what Boerson meant, or what profound implications it might have. We went abroad in search of something other than a conventional career path after years of disillusionment in the university system, and what we discovered was a yearning for connection to the land.
In a farm bungalow on the island of Bocas del Toro, Panama we checked our bunks for scorpions and spiders before slipping under the mosquito netting for the night. For hours we processed the poignant contrasts we were seeing and how it might change our lives upon our return “home”. That night, Boerson Farm was born, or perhaps awakened from its generational slumber.
Mat’s Grandparents were dairy farmers near Alto, Wisconsin but the farm was sold when their kids showed no interest in continuing the family vocation brought over from Holland. Danielle’s Grandma grew up on a beautiful farm on the edge Green Lake, Wisconsin and knew the wonders and challenges of an agrarian life like so many people of her generation. That farm was sold out of the family as well with no one to work the soil and no ambition to husband animals. We returned to our Wisconsin roots, with our focus on agriculture and what we found shocked us.
The farms so quaintly pictured in family photos had become scenes of crimes against the land, agrarian ways, and family traditions. The farm Mat’s Grandpa tended with love is now a factory farm that treats animals like machines and the fields like a landfill. The farm Danielle’s ancestors worked hard to build has been used as a topsoil mine and held hostage by inflated land values.
Boerson Farm is a work in progress, both a place and a journey toward sustainability. We cannot shut down the mega dairy nor can we afford to buy back the land our families once called home, but we can move forward in a way that honors our past and gives hope for the future. We farm because we love it and because we are working to create the kind of world we want our children to inherit.