Webmaster’s note: The format of this column includes all of the Quill’s Endians participating at various times and in various ways! Phil writes this month’s column.
The Work Has Meaning
I had a chance to travel out of state last month to celebrate my mother’s 80th birthday. Most of my siblings made it to the party in Saginaw, MI. I stayed with my older brother in the old neighborhood around the high school we all attended.
A lot of things stuck me about the city and its citizens.
This body has always needed movement, and on daily walks around the neighborhood I remembered the lovely uncomplicated days there. Killing time with a gaggle of neighbors, bicycles at the ready to travel about as we whiled away the summer.
The sidewalks are empty now. My daily walks held not one interaction with man or beast. No one shooting hoops or sitting on the front porches. I’ve got theories, but mostly just sadness.
While in Michigan, I wanted to visit my cousin. He and his family milk 130ish Holsteins that live in a free stall barn 365 days a year. His acreage, flat loamy soil, grows hay, corn, and soybeans that then make up the diet for the cows. Most of our tour of the farm concentrated on seeing equipment. Tractors with eight tires and 4 steps into a climate-controlled cab.
Very much a dying breed, this is the example of small farms that the 1950’s envisioned. They keep no garden, they raise no critters for their own table, they do not drink milk from their cows. They shop for groceries.
My cousin, now nearly 70 years old, has made a life and a living from his farm. His son and family will continue. An anomaly among the 1% of Americans that are farmers.
It was difficult to travel. A mix of emotions as I spent time with family and also experienced a taste of 2026 in an American city and on an American farm that feeds into our industrial food system.
Time away refreshes what we do at Quill’s End. It turns out that growing food for ourselves and for our community adds layers and layers of satisfaction. From soil to patron, community to ecosystem, the work has meaning. We thank you for the chance.
Heather and Phil Retberg and their three children run Quill’s End Farm, a 105-acre property in Penobscot that they bought in 2004. They use rotational grazing on their fifteen open acres and are renovating thirty more acres from woods to pasture to increase grazing for their pigs, grass-fed cattle, lambs, laying hens, and goats. Quill’s Endians are members of Halcyon Grange and publish a newsletter for their farm’s buying club of farmers in the area, and generously permit us to share some of their columns with Grangers. Visit the Quill’s End Farm Facebook Page for more information.