Set amid rolling hills and trees, the gardens of Rainfield Farm brim with a colorful cornucopia of vegetables.
I arrive in early spring expecting to see flat fields of emerging crops, but instead I follow Shane Hansen and Sarah Dillon along paths meandering through their 13-acre organic, non- GMO farm a few miles west of New Carlisle, IN. Each turn or climb to the top of a rolling hill becomes a journey of discovery.
We turn a corner and enter one of the five hoop houses where the couple grows lettuce and microgreens year-round. Descending a hill, we walk past a portable chicken coop minus the chickens, which are roaming in the front yard.
Leaving a shady grove, we enter one of three plots where Dillon and Hansen grow hard- and soft-neck elephant garlic. They produce 6,000 to 8,000 heads annually. Much of it goes to local restaurants, and some is sold for seed.
Farming wasn’t the original plan. Dillon was working at Nike in Portland, OR, when she fell in love with the local food scene. Wanting a change from city life, she moved here to intern with Crème de la Crop, an organic community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm in Valparaiso, IN, before starting her own farm in the area.
Hansen too wanted something more fulfilling than his fast-paced career in marketing Chicago’s nightclub scene. He had been volunteering for years at community gardens and farmers markets in the city and had seen the positive impact of local food.
In 2012, when he was prepping the land for Rainfield Farm, he met Dillon at the Michigan City Farmers Market where both were selling produce they’d grown on their start-up farms. Now the two live and work together, growing more than 50 crop varieties using the tenets of old-fashioned farming—crop rotations, composting and soil conditioning through cover crops and green manure (this is the result of cover crops being tilled back into the ground).
“Much of what we grow here, like spinach, arugula and lettuce, is high-yielding in short periods,” says Hansen. “We replant every 60 days after we harvest from it two to four times.”
Area grocery stores, including Al’s Supermarket in Michigan City and LaPorte, IN, and Barney’s in New Buffalo, MI, sell Rainfield Farm’s produce. Frozen Garden in Valparaiso purchases spinach to use in its ready-to-blend green smoothies. The Rainfield Farms CSA program delivers an assortment of organic peppers, tomatoes, green beans, carrots, cucumbers, herbs, lettuce and more to people in northern Indiana and Chicago.
Rainfield Farm also supplies lettuce to Michigan City Area Schools through its Farm to School program, which is designed to connect family farms and schools through education, local food purchasing and outreach. And Hansen and Dillon also have a grant through the USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program for planting pollinator fields for bees and butterflies.
They also are the only Indiana farm this year to receive the Chef Rick Bayless Frontera Foundation Grant for sustainability projects. They will use the grant money to build a swale for flood prevention, install new sprinklers and fortify their caterpillar tunnels.
Do they miss city life? After all, farming is hard work under difficult conditions.
No, they both say, almost in unison.
“Once you start eating like this,” says Dillon, “you’re hooked.”
8531 N. 650 East
New Carlisle, IN
rainfieldfarm.com
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