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Harvest Public Media is sharing stories from farm kids with My Farm Roots, stories about what it’s like growing up in a changing rural America. Midwest kids have a strong connection to the land, and in farm country, roots run deep.
The Matthew family farm, M&M Farms, outside of La Harpe, Illinois, looks different from the farms surrounding it. It’s not filled with neat rows of soybeans or lines of corn that’s over-my-head high in late July. The Matthew’s place is a bit more disorganized and far more diverse.
“A lot of people grow corn or beans,” Mitchell Matthew tells me as we take an afternoon stroll around his parent’s hilltop property. “Here, we grow everything. Everything you can think of.”
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Mitchell Matthew likes to raise what he calls “rainbow popcorn.” He helps hand shell, bag and label the red, yellow, and blue kernels that all pop bright white. (Photo by Abby Wendle, Harvest Public Media)
Mitchell points out peach trees, apple trees, cherry trees, and blueberry bushes. Greenhouses filled with tomatoes are nestled into fields of sunflowers, sweet corn, and popcorn, and there are beds of zucchinis, peppers, onions, leeks, green and yellow beans, and squash.
Despite helping his folks plant, raise and harvest so much produce, Mitchell, 19, says he doesn’t eat much of it. Unless you count his burger trimmings.
“I like to eat a lot of hamburgers,” he says with a sly smile. “I put some onions in my hamburgers.”
Mitchell, who falls somewhere on the autism spectrum, grew up selling produce with his mom at area farmers markets and helping his dad care for the hogs they used to raise. He remembers feeding the animals and taking them to get butchered. It was his job to spray hog manure on the vegetable beds for a boost of nutrients.
“My dad taught me a lot about farming,” he says. “He kind of made me who I am. When I start a job, I want to finish a job. Like, I don’t stop.”
Mitchell graduated from high school this year and is full of dreams for his future. He plans to grow his lawn care business, work part-time stocking shelves in a big box store in town, and continue helping his parents with the farm. He loves working with machinery, too, like generators and big lawn mowers, so he might enroll in a trade school in a few years.
Mitchell’s dad, Mark, credits his son’s strong work ethic to growing up in a small, rural community.
“I just feel like he would have been lost growing up in a city,” Mark says. “Out in the country, you’ve just got room to move around.”