FarmHer Profile: Betsy Zarko, Arrowleaf Prairie Farm

Farm name and location: Arrowleaf Prairie Farm/ McCullom Lake Road in Wonder Lake

Years farming: Four

What are you growing/producing? What is your best-seller? We grow vegetables, pork, chicken, lamb, and eggs. It depends on what you are looking for. Some people go nuts for our breakfast sausage, others drive over an hour for the varieties of summer squash and beans that we grow. Everyone loves pulling up the drive and seeing the prairie growing on one side while goats graze and chickens roam on the other.

Why farming? Because I must! “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write …” The female farmer must farm!  I can’t not contribute to a safe and secure food system when I have been so blessed with the land and the innate ability to grow and produce for others. I just love spending my life this way and am grateful for the loving support of my husband as we throw our lives at this work. 

Feelings about or notable experience being a woman farmer? I always say that my most important crop is my children (oh yeah, I have 6 kids). The farm kids and the future of a free, healthy and secure food system really are the intrinsic motivation for me as a farmer. Yes, we are stewarding our land, our time, and our resources with future generations in mind, but I really cannot think of a better way to produce great humans than having them by my side as we grow the farm together. I realize that not all women have this experience, but I think that the difference between a male farming and a female farming really comes down to our innate created nature and purpose. My whole being aches to produce selflessly for something bigger than myself and if I get out of the way of myself, a really great crop will come.

Biggest win/what makes you happiest? When something works! We are still in the slogging stage of building our farm. There was so much to clean up and make way for, but we are finally getting some great systems in place that are requiring less work and brain power. An example of this would be a smarter wash/pack area for our vegetable production. That gives me the glimmers of sustainability for the future that I am working toward.

Biggest challenge? Managing a farm and family simultaneously. Time is everyone’s greatest and most limited resource, I am no exception. Setting things up and managing our schedule in a way that is productive and efficient is essential. Part of this is actively working at not burning out and being overwhelmed by the amount of work to do. Framing the stewardship of our farm as a lifetime decision, not a five-year plan, really helps me remember that we are building a life worth living that will be worth passing on someday.

How are you thinking about your farm in the future? When we make decisions for our farm, we try to make them in reverse. That is, we try to think of ourselves farming at 85. Will this layout work in January when we are 85? How much help would we need to load hogs when it’s just the two of us? While it would be great to hand our farm to the kids, 10 acres could never be enough for 6 families to live on, and we don’t expect any of our children would choose to farm in the future, though they may. To be able to keep it up as we age would be nice, but also having it set up so that it’s productive and ready for someone else to take over is a major goal. I don’t believe that there is such a thing as a small farm. Our property produces a lot and is capable of producing more in time. As the population in McHenry County grows, I see farms like ours being at the forefront of feeding people here, the same way that farms of our scale feed the majority of the world. If we don’t take action to preserve acreages like ours now, the solutions to feeding the future will be much more complicated.

“Regenerative /ecological” practices on the farm? While a huge tenet of my growing philosophy is to be self-contained, our farm can’t produce the animal protein that it does without off-farm inputs from local grain producers. I think something that sets us apart from other farms in the area is my hyper-awareness of water usage. I grew up in the West where water is more valuable than gold. I worry about us bringing too much water up from area aquifers to frivolously irrigate. I have crazy theories about groundwater being introduced into the water cycle, causing more of the severe weather we are seeing globally, and really think that most producers could grow utilizing less water than we do here if we implemented better strategies in our vegetable production.