Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Three years ago, Amy Horton lived in a one-bedroom apartment in St. Louis Hills. Planning for life after marriage, she and her then-fiancé, Ben Voss, longed to find a place with open land, somewhere they could cultivate their passion for organic living. The couple found their answer down a winding road near Warrenton, past a tree-lined driveway with a rickety old fence—a charming 12-acre plot with a farmhouse built in 1942. She and Voss bought the place and settled in right away.
Today, the couple spends evenings tending 27 chickens, making cheese and yogurt from the milk of a neighbor’s cow, tilling their vegetable garden, and renovating the old farmhouse. In quite a departure from city life and their day jobs, their free time now revolves around a philosophy of living off the land and knowing the true source of their meals.
“When you take part in the process of making food, it makes you appreciate it a little bit better and really slow down and enjoy the meal,” says Horton. “It just helps us to appreciate food and life a little bit more than we did before.”
Growing up in Hermann, Horton learned from her parents to appreciate organic ingredients. “When I was a kid, I can remember my dad asking us to snap beans and shell peas from his garden,” she says. Today, her father still cultivates two large gardens, and her mother cans tomatoes and corn.
In her teens and twenties, though, Horton had a far different relationship with food. An eating disorder drove her to obsessively count calories. To overcome the obsession, she decided to focus on food in a different way. “I don’t know if it was an entirely conscious decision, but the way I dealt with my problem was to turn it on its face and target that interest in food into something healthy,” she explains. “I became more interested in where food comes from and the heritage of the recipes I used.” At her former apartment on Eichelberger Street, she tended container gardens, in which she grew herbs, tomatoes, sweet peppers, and other vegetables.
Today, a major part of Horton’s life consists of caring for chickens, which she and her husband bought as day-old chicks from a hatchery in Lebanon, Mo. Horton says her husband’s experience growing up on a farm near Hermann, where tending livestock was a part of everyday life, was one reason the couple purchased the chickens. Last August, they butchered a number of the male chickens; they gave some of the meat to family members, but kept most for themselves, using it for Horton’s favorite chicken soup recipes. Now, they have 22 female chickens and five males living in a coop decorated with hand-drawn pictures from Horton’s nieces and nephews.
“Since I’ve gotten chickens, it’s made me ask a lot of questions—like ‘How is an egg made in a chicken?’—I don’t think most people think about,” she says. “It’s really quite fascinating and almost kind of a miracle how that happens, and that makes me appreciate the eggs even more.”
Horton begins most days by checking on the chickens. On a nice day, she’ll let them roam around the farm. “I have to admit, I’m kind of a crazy chicken lady,” she says. “I’ll go in the coop every morning and greet the ladies and encourage them to have a good production day.”
She then makes the hour-long commute to her job as a public-relations specialist at Boeing, near Lambert–St. Louis International Airport. The contrast between publicizing aviation technology at work and tilling soil at home keeps her life in balance, she says.
On the weekends, she mucks the chicken coop and shovels the hay into a compost pile to fertilize the couple’s vegetable garden. Weekends also give her time for other hobbies: baking bread, canning vegetables, and making yogurt. After going to a class on the subject, Horton also recently started making her own cheese, partially to save money.
Work on the farm varies throughout the year, she explains: “It differs depending on the season—there will be more work in the summer, especially with the apple and peach trees and blueberry bushes we just planted—but the outcome is more than worth the amount of work we put into it.”
Horton and her husband considered expanding the farm with more animals and crops, but they decided to wait before making a large-scale commitment. For now, the couple trades hay for a neighbor’s cow’s milk. As their lives continue on the farm, however, they plan to grow more self-sufficient.
“We don’t pretend to have it all figured out, but my husband and I share a philosophy of trying to live as close to the land as possible,” she says. “Tying that philosophy to the choices we make about much of the food we put into our mouths, we believe, contributes to a healthier lifestyle.”
Organic Change
Horton acknowledges farm life isn’t for everyone, but believes everyone can incorporate small, natural changes. “People need to keep in mind that a healthy lifestyle needs to be a very personal thing,” she says. “Make it work for your life.”
1) Contain your garden. Grow container gardens with fruits and vegetables: “At my apartment on Eichelberger, I created a porch filled with container plants, including herbs, peppers, and tomatoes.”
2) Meet your meat. Next time you visit the grocery store or butcher shop, ask the pros about the source of the meat: “Make friends with your butcher. And try to buy from the fresh meat counter if you can.”
3) Bake your bread. Taking time to bake bread is not only healthy, but also relaxing: “You can make the dough in bulk, and keep it in the refrigerator after it rises. Then you pull out just a little and bake one loaf at a time. It only takes about five minutes a day.”
4) Shop fresh. During the warm months, frequent farmer’s markets; in winter, check out stores that sell locally grown produce.
5) Relish the moment. Learn to appreciate the experience of cooking and eating: “Being more involved in the production of the food you eat allows you to enjoy it more, because you are naturally more aware of what you’re putting in your mouth and what it took to get there.”
