Orland's Organic Oracles: Johnson Bros. on Gourmet.com

Charlie Johnson, out-standing in his field.
(Photo by Sam Hurst, for Gourmet.com)

Charlie Johnson's grizzly visage probably isn't the first image you'd associate with the gourmet crowd. But sure enough, there he is, gazing out at us from his oat field in Orland Township, Lake County, on the e-pages of Gourmet.com in Sam Hurst's latest report in his "Four Farmers Project" series.

Think organic food is for hippies and dreamers who'll never make it against industrial agriculture? Charlie and his brother Allan might accept the first half of that proposition—Charlie says his dad Bernie was a hippie with a crew cut—but not the second. Bernie Johnson and his brother went all organic in 1976. 32 years later, sons Charlie and Allan are still at it, practicing a six-year crop rotation on 45 fields and fighting weeds by hand.

The results: corn as tall as their neighbors', oats chest high now and almost ready to harvest, and organic crops that sell for almost twice the already record-high prices conventional farmers can get.

Now Charlie and Allan aren't practicing the really small-scale ag I've advocated previously: their spread includes 2,400 acres. Remarkably, farming almost four square miles still ranks Johnson Farms as a middling operation: an "absentee industrial farmer" plows 50,000 acres all around Johnsons for commodity grains.

But whatever your sense of scale, Charlie and Allan prove that farmers don't have to embrace the holy "trinity," as Hurst calls it, "of genetically modified seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and ever more powerful, ever more expensive tractors and other equipment."

Organic farming: darned hard work, but less debt, less dependence on corporations, and 32 years of success.