Veronica Porter was raised on home-grown tomatoes – and peas, lettuce and squash. She and her five siblings thought everybody ate that way. Their parents always had a sprawling garden, and their grandparents, Henry and Katy Wohead, worked the land on their Olesen Drive farm to make their living and feed the community through the dependable rhythms of the growing season.
“It was just the norm,” said Porter, who has lived in Naperville all of her 56 years. “By today’s standards they were organic farmers, but it was just what they did.”
It soon will be what she does as well. Now working on the details of purchasing a local patch of crop land, Porter plans to establish the Veterans Victory Farm and Food Hub, an organic production and distribution center that will employ recently discharged military members and people who have “hidden disabilities with high capabilities,” literature published to promote the project says. Her aim eventually is to purchase DuPage County’s last working farm, the 15-acre Mayneland Farm property at Mill Street and Bauer Road on Naperville’s north side, when it becomes available, and preserve it as the centerpiece of a network of community-based Veterans Victory Farm sites across northern Illinois.
Although she said she can’t remember a time when she wasn’t thinking about it, Porter is certain this is the right time for the project. Awareness of the connections among diet, lifestyle, health and longevity has been on the rise, shedding light on something Porter knew early in life, largely thanks to her biochemist dad. Years before it was being widely discussed, his study of correlations between diet and life circumstances lent credence to the then-new notion that better eating could enable people to avoid developing chronic health problems and depending on prescription medications to support their comfort and function.
“It was realizing we have got to do something,” she said of the increasing acceptance of those links. “We have generations of people who think food comes out of a box, a bag or a drive-through window.”
She’s also always known that while it matters what we eat, nearly as important is how and where it was grown.
“In Naperville, we can get as much organic (food) as we want,” Porter said. “We can get whatever be want, but it’s not fresh.”
Saying that 90 percent of the local food supply originates in California, the southern U.S. or overseas, she admitted that it can be challenging to convert local habits, which for many families are driven in part by the belief that eating well-produced food sharply drives up the cost of putting meals on the table. They often overlook the long distances their food supply usually covers to get to the household, Porter said, and the pre-ripened condition in which much of it is picked.
Porter, whose family has a long history of military service, took those pieces of knowledge and folded into them another broad understanding she had long been cultivating: that veterans and others struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury – including one of her three sons, whose disability stems from a head injury he sustained in a car accident – need productive and fulfilling ways to re-enter the work force.
Along with an organic farm that provides ability-suited work, the plans call for creation of a regional distribution hub for a variety of foods produced within a 200-mile radius of Naperville. A location has yet to be determined for that piece of the endeavor, although Porter said there are vacant properties on Diehl Road that show possibility.
Additional farms also will be brought into the Victory Farms system as they can be acquired and staffed, creating a significant northern Illinois-sourced link in the regional food chain.
It’s a systemic change and an ambitious undertaking; Porter readily acknowledges that. But the idea has sprouted from very basic principles.
“It’s not as complicated as it seems,” said Porter, who is collaborating with area seed-saving groups to reintroduce to the local market assorted heirloom vegetable species that have grown scarce. “You know what you’re growing.”
She anticipates the first growing season will begin a year from now, and thinks it will take three to five years for the for-profit operation, owned in part by community shareholders, to break even. But once it has taken root, she sees the growth potential as abundantly fertile, perhaps including mobile farmers markets, a school-lunch wagon or educational programs that support local-food entrepreneurs.
“Once you start, it’s going to grow exponentially,” she said. “It’s not a stagnant business, and it naturally contributes to society at every level.”
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Porter doesn’t foresee Victory Farm as an unwelcome competitor to the local network of farmers markets and community-supported agriculture farm subscriptions. She says it will support them.
“What I want to do is create the supply for their demand,” she said.
An informational meeting about the farm project, including its mission and investment opportunities, is scheduled at 9 a.m. Saturday at Naperville Bank & Trust, 555 Fort Hill Drive.
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