Eat Well Food Tour: Interview with Harriet Kattenberg

[Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma]

In the course of planning the first leg of the Eat Well Food Tour, Dan Perkins suggested I get in touch with the Kattenbergs at Seed Time & Harvest, a certified organic CSA and market garden in Hull, Iowa. While Dan was at Dordt College, he had worked at the farm, one of the many students who have participated in seeding, transplanting, weeding and other labor-intensive chores over the past several years.

We're glad we followed up and grateful that Harriet Kattenberg agreed to meet with us in the middle of a very busy week. Earlier that morning, a group of about 20 elementary school students had been on the farm learning how to enjoy sauteed radishes and picking vegetables to bring home as part of a program that's teaching them to delight in healthy foods and be young ambassadors to their families. After a storm system blew through, necessitating the children and the hay wagon covered in seedlings to be shuffled indoors, the afternoon was shaping up beautifully by the time we arrived.

Harriet and her husband Henry bought their farm, which is surrounded on three sides by huge corn and soybean farms, in 1983. The very day they took possession, the weed commissioner (yes, there is such a thing) was on their case to clean up the neglected land where thistles had grown so big the stems were the size of your wrist. Having jumped in without any equipment to clear the land, they finally found someone to loan them some machinery and they've been cultivating and improving their land ever since. Out of the ten acres, about five are cultivated in produce and flowers. The Kattenbergs' married daughter maintains a cut flower business from the property and Seed Time & Harvest serves 80 families with CSA shares, in addition to having enough additional produce to sell at the farmer's market in Sioux Falls on Saturdays.

Harriet's emphasis as a grower is on being able to offer produce that is certified organic and nutrient dense, fertilizing with sea minerals and rock dust. Like many of the farmers we've spoken with, she recognizes that "certified organic" is only useful as a label as long as consumers demand it. As a term owned by the government, "organic" sets minimal standards that huge operations can achieve, while smaller farms like Seed Time & Harvest and Kinnikinnick Farm go far beyond the basics dictated by certification to maintain a more healthful balance on their land and in their products.

For Harriet, her efforts in the dirt and heat are driven by something that's simply in her blood. She grew up in a local farming family and, while her mother always gave the kids the easiest tasks when it came to harvesting and preserving, she found herself drawn to the hard, but rewarding work of cultivation. While her mother was reading magazines like Organic Gardening, her dad read professional magazines from the farming industry, and always practiced the latest methods of agriculture for the family corn operation. After her dad had health issues, however, Harriet's parents moved to Washington state and their eating habits changed as they both started responding to common reading material about the best foods for maintaining health.

In addition to the food and farming inclinations in her family line, Harriet finds that farming is meaningful work for expressing her faith in God and responsibility to creation:

I feel the Creator gave us a beautiful earth and we have really poisoned it. And that's not very comforting, to have poisoned it to the point where we're worried about water--good, clean water. Streams are dirty, the ground source water has chemicals in it, there are medicines coming back through water. It's just like, why is man so ugly? Why have we done these ugly things to such a beautiful creation? So you try to walk as gently as possible and treat the land as gently as possible.

I got the sense that her motivation comes from a place of deep sorrow as well as deep joy. Toward the end of our tour, we stood at the edge of a bed where five of the summer's eight college-aged employees were weeding rows of garlic that wafted around on the wind. Beyond Seed Time & Harvest's vegetable gardens and greenhouses stretched fields of corn and soybeans, as well as dairy farms and hog confinements as far as the eye could see. One farmer we had spoken with earlier described this as the prettiest time of year, with the fields in deep green, as peaceful and expansive as the ocean. I asked Harriet if she saw, in this vista from the farm, just a sad and broken world or a beautiful world. She paused briefly. "It's still beautiful," she said. "The land has a remarkable ability to heal itself."

On the way out, we passed the apple trees, which are certified organic, though Harriet is still battling worm issues. As we parted, she pointed out an oriole flitting around the orchard. Birds and butterflies and bees--they're all signs of a healthy ecosystem, indicators of land that, in partnership with humans and animals, is indeed healing itself.

For photos of Seed Time & Harvest, as well as other locations from the Eat Well Food Tour, visit the tour page on Flickr.