Hannah Breckbill (She/They) | Decorah, Iowa
Humble Hands Harvest | We celebrate our reliance on place-based community, grounding ourselves by growing food for this place and gathering together on the land.
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What do you grow?
Our farm is a diversified 22 acres: Organic vegetables for farmers’ market, CSA and wholesale; grass-fed lamb; and young apples, chestnuts, and hazelnuts that have yet to produce a crop.
Tell us a little about the land you farm. What does the landscape look like? How did you end up there?
Our 22 acres is on a bluff top over the Upper Iowa River. We’re at the end of a dead-end road, with good neighbors to the east and west, and state land to the south with woods and fields to wander in. Our farm was in conventional corn until 2014, when a group of community members purchased it together so that it wouldn’t go to auction. They wanted to see a more earth-friendly alternative to conventional agriculture happen on the land. I was lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time (I was farming and renting land and I was well-connected to the group of people who bought the land) to be able to persuade the group that the land could become a diversified farm. After several years of gathering resources (including finding a co-farmer), I was able to buy part of the land from the group ownership and was able to start investing in infrastructure: A well, electricity, a greenhouse, and a yurt to live in. In 2017, we started Humble Hands Harvest on this land and it has become so much in the past 6 years.
Share about a time when you felt blessed to be farming.
I feel so blessed to be farming, always, because I understand how our economic system, which commodifies land, has made farming into a capital-intensive occupation that is nearly impossible to break into without inherited wealth, usually in the form of inherited land which was, of course, first appropriated from Indigenous peoples. Somehow I, as a first-generation farmer, was able to leverage community goodwill, generosity, and creativity to make farming *on land that I own* possible for me, even within capitalism. The biggest blessing that I feel on a daily basis is that of my local community, which has supported our farm in so many tangible, counter-cultural ways; I get to build a life that is more closely aligned with the world I want than with the status quo of the world right now.
How does your faith call you to farming? Where do you see a higher power in your work as a farmer?
I started farming because I wanted to do something that tangibly made the world better for my neighbors and community. My faith is a practical one. I want connections to other people, to community as a whole, to the earth, and to spirit to be explicit, clear, and celebrated. Growing up Mennonite gave me a lens that sees *community* as the place where God expresses themself and where we, together, can build God’s kingdom, the world that the Creator intended and that we all deserve. Farming gives me a clear role in community, and an opportunity every day to notice and give thanks for the communities of life in this place.
How does farming call you to climate action? What future would you like to see for Iowa and agriculture?
My particular forms of climate action include: Using my body rather than fossil-fueled machines whenever I can; thinking, creating, and writing/speaking about alternative/queer economies that can be more in line with the human world we need and deserve; and I charge myself a “gas tax” where I keep track of what I spend on fossil fuels and then make sure to give at least that much money to things that make the world more resilient. I want to see a future in Iowa with land that is tended in common, rather than commodified; I’d like to see worker ownership; I’d like to see prairies returning and flourishing, bobolinks and meadowlarks singing everywhere.
Where can we follow you online?
@humblehandsharvest on Instagram.
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