This Land Was Made For You and Me: Digging Into Groce Family Farm
35mm Photography by Taylor Cochran
“Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.”
“It feels like fall just started 15 minutes ago, what a perfect day.” Luke Groce greeted us in his driveway in English, IN with those words on an overcast day in October, our second attempt to make it out to his land. Our first excursion was thwarted when an oversized semi-truck ran us off a curvy country road into a muddy ditch. It could have been a horrible day. It wasn’t.
We learned why Luke and his wife Katherine had uprooted their lives in Louisville to move to this tiny community. Somewhere between a hamlet and a holler, every single person that passed the Volkswagen with Kentucky plates helplessly trapped in a mudbank pulled over to offer assistance.
We waited for a tow truck for 4 hours or so, spending most of that time in a nearby driveway where we could get a phone signal. The driveway belonged to a man named John with a young and restless dog named Baxter. He never went back inside his house, kept us laughing, told us the town gossip and offered us cold Bud Lights from a cooler in his truck bed. Before we left, I found out that I grew up with his nieces in Louisville.
It’s a small world. We’re all connected. A perfect introduction for what we would learn more fully when we finally made it out to Groce Family Farm.
THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS
Luke Groce
Luke and Katherine grew up in the city. They played in suburban creeks and explored suburban woods, but farming wasn’t something they were born into. They both spent several years in their 20’s working in the service industry, primarily at Proof on Main. I remember Katherine serving me brunch while she was pregnant with their first son, Hugo.
I first met Luke when Hugo was around 4 and I was serving at Proof’s sister restaurant, Garage on Market. Luke was a regular fixture, often hanging out long enough to have one beer after dropping off fresh pork products in the kitchen. By then, they had added two more free-range kids to their growing flock, twins named Oscar and Lyda. Hugo took it upon himself to pull them in a wagon behind him, even through the gravel parts of the patio. I was a good 20 years older than him and envied his almost stoic sense of responsibility.
It’s something you’ll always notice about farm kids, they’re a different breed. There are 5 Groce kids now, little sister Vera and baby Rose rounding out the bunch in recent years. Farm kids often feel like they’re from another era, raised on seeds instead of screens. “My children are just getting a fuller sense of the advantage of living an outdoor life, one that’s connected to the land. They know far more than I ever did as a child. They’re curious and they’re wild but our land also hems us in,” said Katherine. “People talk about how being outdoors is grounding, but one thing that you get from being wild in the outdoors is an understanding of your smallness and the wonder of creation around you and I feel like I see in them this propensity to be in awe. Nothing is controlled around us so they’re existing in a place that is beyond their capabilities, yet, they learn and explore. In all of our outdoor activities and work, they see that we really have a place in it. I feel like I see in them this sense of freedom and belonging to this land in a way I never experienced as a child in nature.”
That sense of belonging to the land is really at the core of their operation. They started this journey as vegetable farmers and Luke said they began farming pigs because “it was what the land asked for.” He went on to say that rough, overgrown landscapes that need to be plowed down and tamed are perfect for free range hogs, calling them nature’s bulldozers. Our conversation eventually led to the modern ethical eating dilemma facing our rapidly warming planet and the nuances that get left out of the conversation.
“If a pig is a bulldozer, a plow is a nuclear bomb.”
-Luke Groce
FOR THE HOG KILLING
The subheadings in this story are named for poems by Wendell Berry. Luke and Katherine both point to him as their ongoing inspiration and greatest teacher in this pursuit. Seen as a quintessential voice of Kentucky, Berry is perhaps best known for his 1977 book The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. In it, he argues that the agribusiness model that has taken over farming has completely removed the cultural core of our food. As societies move further and further away from understanding the ecosystems around them, how can they possibly know how to care for them?
So, how is a plow like a nuclear bomb? It’s an apt metaphor for the kind of bloodshed that gets left out of the conversation when veganism is touted as somehow morally superior. Hogs till the land by stomping around and snorting through the dirt. Plows for row crops spin blades deep into the soil releasing carbon and slicing up nests of baby moles, rabbits and foxes. And it only gets more complicated from there.
When you factor in the abuse and exploitation of migrant farmers, the ecological devastation of monocropping, protein substitute demands upending entire economies, and the rate of suicide for independent farmers being higher than any other occupation, it gets harder and harder to defend a one-size-fixes-all lifestyle choice.
But, don’t let that discourage or overwhelm you. One of the best things you can do to care for the planet, its creatures, your fellow man and yourself is to learn more about the land where you live and eat accordingly. A quick google search will likely lead you to dozens of nearby farms offering convenient, customizable CSAs that deliver right to your door; a system that we have all become more accustomed to in recent years. If you have the time to make it to a farmer’s market, it’s the best opportunity to meet a host of local producers in one place and develop a relationship that works with your lifestyle. There are local butchers like Red Hog that are committed to sourcing locally and using the entire animal. Recently, they’ve even started accepting EBT to make sustainable, local food as accessible as possible. You can find the fruits of Luke and Katherine’s labor in any of these places.
Groce has also started offering seasonal farm visits for anyone who wants “to see not just an idealized highlight reel on Instagram about what a farm looks like, but to see the animals moving on the land,” said Katherine. “…to understand what a piece of ground looks like before, during and after a ruminant or some other grazing animal is on it, to smell the smells and really feel themselves in that place. Again, it’s really that sense of belonging to a place. It’s not one that comes without effort anymore and I think that it builds a sense of solidarity in people. They want to be a part of where their food comes from and I know that sounds so cliché but it really has made a difference in me and I imagine that it would do that for someone else too and give them an appreciation for the realities of it. It’s smelly sometimes. It is nasty sometimes. But that’s part of what beauty is. It’s not a romantic walk under a sunset sky with a rainbow overhead, it’s watching life thriving.”
The circle of life is something that we are all taught from birth, but our removal from the land has sanitized it beyond recognition. Luke hopes that their efforts can reteach us the fundamental facts of life and the necessity of death to sustain it. We’ve been consuming animal protein for the entire history of our species, but we used to honor their sacrifice. Now, we mechanize and industrialize it.
Life is messy and complicated but, for now at least, we’re all in it together. Independent farmers like Luke and Katherine are working hard to connect with people like you, to feed you what was lovingly grown by their family’s hands in accordance with the understanding of the land they inhabit. Supporting local food producers is harder and more expensive but every little swap counts.
Heck, maybe the only ethical consumption left under capitalism is buying a chicken from your neighbor, especially when you have neighbors like these.
“We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist. ”
