The Passing of Dorothy Pavolka and the Fate of the Farm

Pavolka Fruit Farm is located at the very northern tip of Indiana and was founded in 1920, growing old variety apples with names like transparent, snow, and northern spy.  Now, with the farm just six years shy of a century,  Dorothy Pavolka the lady who has run the farm for so many years, has passed away.

Let me start by saying that I never met the woman.  We had only heard about her and this farm from a friend.  We are looking for farmland and when we were asking around about on place in particular, we were gently nudged in the direction of Pavolka Fruit Farm.

The research that we have, if it can be called that, is very simple.  There were two obituaries written about her in the local papers.  It seems she ran the family farm all of her life.  She had three brothers and two sisters but she alone ran the farm. She has plenty of nieces and nephews. Visitors to the farm said that she knew the place like the back of her hand and she knew everything there was to know about each variety of fruit on the property.

Pavolka Fruit Farm was started at a time when and in
a place where there was not much recorded, written history.  1920 in that area in that time was a place where you were likely to find stills and moonshine runners in and amongst the fruit trees.  There is even a story about the previous owner's family cemetery being located behind one of the barns.  When someone passed back then, they laid them to rest where the family felt best.

The farm is as close as possible to organic without being certified as such.  This was not by some grand organic design based on marketing.  Mainly this is because she did things the
way they had always been done with improvements and modifications made only as she could no longer do them by hand and avoiding pesticides and chemicals where ever possible.  A lot of things were done by hand around the farm for as long as they could be done.  There are no websites, there are no Facebook pages or other social media accounts.  Signs were hand made and advertisements were word of mouth.

From what we understand there are no provisions for her passing.  It was not something that was taken into consideration even though she was 86 at the time of her passing.  At a time when the average age of the average farmer is 59 years old and rising and the family farm is giving way to the massive corporate farms, a lot of owners are seeing that they have no one to follow in their footsteps while simultaneously, it is beginning to make more economic sense for them to sell to or work for a major conglomerate.

On our plate are some rather large issues.  First, how do we encourage youth to get into farming?  Land and equipment are almost prohibitively expensive.  There are number of ideas on the table from providing more scholarships to work on farms to youth, to tenant farmer scenarios to encourage batches of youth to work land that is owned by someone else.  Though the sharecropper term has earned a bad reputation in the Jim Crow south, fairly done, it seems like a viable option for young farmers of today.

Secondly, is it possible to get corporate farms to act more responsibly and in a more environmentally and customer oriented fashion?  Monsanto draws a lot of heat for genetically modified foods, but there are many that would make the argument that they fill a void that is rather large in the world.  There are 7 billion people on the planet and they have to be fed.  Monsanto grows in mass amounts that keep food costs low for many and in their search for a lower bottom line, they have created food as a commodity regardless of its effect on the community.  It's a corporation.  It is doing what corporations do, which is act in in own interests for the sake of the stakeholders.  It does it well.

Third, making food affordable for many is a key and what part does the average person have in that equation?  We throw out, by some estimates, half of what we produce in this country.  Many would say the reason is that we are a wasteful society.  What personal choices should we be making to curb these losses.  Growing our own food and dealing with the political ramifications thereof is another subset of this problem.  A lot of local communities are battling with the idea of whether it is even legal to grow your own food (strange, I know).

Finally, we should return to Dorothy Pavolka.  Like I said at the beginning, I have never met the woman and our condolences go out to her family.  We are talking about a farm though that has been around for nearly 100 years owned by the same same family and meticulously worked mainly by one woman.  She has shown her commitment to the community and to the craft by dedicating her life to it, but what do WE owe HER?  How much of this farm does the community own? (with all due respect to the family we do realize that it is legally and emotionally zero.) Maybe not "ownership", but a responsibility to support it.

So this is not just about the state of the Pavolka Fruit Farm, but the state of the American farm in general. In the coming weeks we are going to explore this topic and what can be done.  How do we bring a farm into the 21st century?

Carol Jordan can be reached at 9of9productions@gmail.com
or on twitter at @9t9knives