e ssential community
Julie Wolfgram
Roots
We like to think we know how to listen. How to agree, disagree, laugh, help, and empathize. But not every voice is speaking so directly. Our worlds are filled with voices, but so many perpetually screaming go ignored because we don’t know how to hear them. If the squeaky wheel gets the grease, what of the silenced ecosystem once home to humming bumblebees, seeting chickadees, and chattering wood ducks? When Julie Wolfgram chose to follow in the footsteps of her parents and grandparents and become a farmer at her son’s farm, it didn’t take long for her to understand just how much the land was trying to say. “The soil here is not really great soil,” says Julie of her son’s 83 acres. “The first several years felt like a real disaster.” In the beginning, rainy days were some of the worst. “Our soil is very tightly condensed. It’s a clay-based soil, so it’s 28 | m a d i s o n e s s e n t i a l s
actually smaller particles. And it’s like brick. The water takes a very long time to penetrate. ... If it rained one day, I wouldn’t be able to even walk on the property for three days because of the clay mud.” Living like this wasn’t just an inconvenience for Julie, it was a cry for help from her land. When she first started, there was nothing on her field. No buildings. No power. But her son would build a well and pumphouse and get electricity out there with the brief time he had between Army assignments. She would breathe life back into what had become something of a wasteland. “Now, we’ve been mowing and putting all this organic matter back into the soil,” says Julie. She takes wood chips from tree trimmers and other people’s leaves to put some skin on the bones— organic matter on the compacted soil. “That took about four years. They say you can measure the amount of soil
in the Ground
by Kyle Jacobson
your property has lost by looking at an established fence row. ... We’re looking at about a foot of soil that’s been washed away over the last several decades in the modern farming technique. “This is how we got the Dust Bowl. We’re headed in the same direction. They don’t leave enough organic matter on their land. No farmer around here does what’s called green manure. After you take corn off, you plant oats or you plant rye—some sort of grass or wheat. You don’t grow it to get the kernels. You do it to get the green mass. And then it freezes, and it dies in the fall. You go back in the spring and plant your next crop right in that debris. So it holds the soil, but it also gives organic matter to the soil. Nobody does that here.” Aside from a wide range of produce, Julie also utilizes the pastureland of her son’s farm for her chickens and hogs to roam around in and do what they do. Concerning her pigs, “They actually
