Livengood Family Farm: An Oral History of Sourcing a Local and Regional Foodshed
“Reach down deep with tree roots, pull up minerals that have long leached away from the surface grass and vegetables. Put them back on top. Harvest protein and vegetables and grass from the same acreage. Those are the things that are catching our imagination these days and we’re putting in front of our children. It creates hope.”
Interview by Rebecca Steffy, with Dwain, Audrey, and Earl Livengood
In May 2005, I found myself cold-calling farmers growing organic produce in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I was fresh out of college without a clear plan for next steps, and I decided that a summer outdoors sounded as good as any. I was a Lancaster County native who grew up with a backyard garden and spent childhood summers working at a roadside produce stand. Delving deeper into local agriculture appealed to my connection to place, my work ethic, my love of food, and my sense of beauty. Lucky for me, one farmer called me back – Earl Livengood of Morningside Drive in West Lampeter Township.
That summer, I worked with a crew of six or eight other workers hired by Earl and his son Dwain, tending and harvesting a variety of fruits, vegetables, and herbs on their farm. I also helped sell the produce at Reading Terminal Market on Saturdays, and as summer waned into fall and I found myself moving to Philadelphia, I occasionally joined Earl or Dwain at weekday markets in South Philly and Fairmount.
When I agreed to work on the farm that summer, little did I know that the Livengood family was deeply involved in the Lancaster to Philadelphia foodway connection that thrives in farmers markets and CSA boxes across the city and region, that they contributed to the development of the Pennsylvania Certified Organic label, and that they are now forging new directions in regenerative farming and permaculture. Yet their farming story begins with a relationship not to Philadelphia but to Lancaster city and with what historian Sally McMurry calls “a hidden history” of door-to-door sales that helped keep Pennsylvania farming families afloat in the early twentieth-century.
On May 7, 2023, Earl, Dwain, and Dwain’s wife Audrey welcomed me back to the farm to talk about their family’s farming story. Audrey served strawberry switchel, and at a large kitchen table, I asked questions about their experience. A felt absence was Joyce Dieter Livengood, Earl’s wife of nearly fifty years, who passed away in spring of 2021. Like every family’s story, theirs can be contextualized by historical, economic, and social forces. It tracks with important local, direct marketing trends and alternatives to corporate agriculture in the greater Philadelphia region for nearly a hundred years. It is also singularly theirs.
We pick up the story after Earl has described that his dad was a wheelwright, having learned the trade from his father, working on carriages, buggies and wagons mostly for the Amish.
Beginnings: the 1st Generation at the Livengood Farm
“My parents moved here and got this place right after they were married in 1925. Mother had the peddle route in Lancaster. I was probably 4 or 5 years old when I started going along. By that time, she basically had customers every week, who got eggs or milk or butter. That’s what I grew up with, going from door to door”
Earl: My parents moved here and got this place right after they were married in 1925. What their dreams were when they came to a place like this, I can’t answer that. But they got into utilizing the land, and butchering animals, especially pigs, chickens, and turkeys.
Dwain [picking up a small hardbound book]: This is Grandma’s diary from 1944. February 8. She butchered two big hogs that day and have 68 butchered so far. So that was probably since Christmas when the butchering season would have started.
We were trying to imagine what kinds of kitchen table conversations then led to a big asparagus patch, and strawberries, and a peddling route in Lancaster City, which is what dad grew up doing as a young person. These diaries are full of how many bunches of asparagus, and how much they sold them for, bunches of spring onions, and strawberries, and so on.
Dad, do you know which came first? Was it the eggs or was it the vegetables? Because chickens were a big thing here for Grandma. There’s a level in the barn, they had them outdoors, a couple brooders scattered around with rain shelters here and there, the remnants of which are almost gone now. But eggs were a big part of that. She had them year round.
Earl: Yes, that’s what I remember. I would think that would have been typical of most any family at that time, to have a few chickens. We had more than a few.
Dwain: Up around 600 hens.
Earl: Well, I remember that many, yes.
Dwain: For this sized place, that’s a lot.
Dwain: Grandpa built farm wagons and truck beds for neighboring farmers, and he was the holder of a Greider tobacco bale press, so he would build new ones of those and fix ones that needed repairs. It’s kind of a conglomeration of little enterprises that went on in making a rural family run.
Earl: Mother had the peddle route in Lancaster, too. I was probably 4 or 5 years old when I started going along. By that time, she basically had customers every week, who got eggs or milk or butter.
Dwain: The early subscription service.
Earl: Yes. So we started going around on the outskirts of the town here and we ended up in the city. I was this cute little boy, you know, who was going along. These ladies would look for me to come carrying my basket of eggs, or asparagus, or strawberries, whatever was in the basket I had that day. At that time, most ladies were home, they did not work anywhere. They could have been sitting out on the porch, some of them. And, yes, we’d go to the house.
Dwain: There were some customers who got nicer produce and paid more for it, apparently, by a few cents.
Earl: Well, one lady especially, who made strawberry jelly. She wanted the nicest, biggest strawberries we had, and was willing to pay a premium for them, whatever a premium was at that time.
I remember when we would peddle black raspberries, we stopped at a place once. The price was maybe 50 or 55 cents a quart. This lady said she could get them for a nickel less down the road at a farm market stand. I think my response was, well, that’s the place to get them, I guess. She turned out to be one of the better customers after that time.
That’s what I grew up with, going from door to door. You soon learned which people were glad to see you and looked forward to you coming. If others weren’t interested, we didn’t necessarily go to their house.
Dwain: Meanwhile, mom was a young gal who lived south of here on her family’s dairy farm. Her father passes away when she’s nine years old, in 1951. That started a cascade, where they ended up moving to a smaller farm on the outskirts of Strasburg. She and her mom and her other sister who never married were responsible to make a go, with the help of the brothers who were married and living not too far away. Their go-to was to begin selling eggs, and dressed chicken, and vegetables that they could grow on their place and sell at one of the markets here in town. Lancaster city would have boasted the Northern, the Central, the Southern, the Western, and the Eastern Markets. So they would have been Southern Market stand-holders for years. There’s a photo of the governor at the time, stopping in front of their stand at Southern Market, where mom and Grandma are offering their wares for a photo op with the governor.
Moving into the Farming Business: From Roadside Stand to Wholesale Organics
“It was all roadside sales here at Morningside Drive, with my brothers and I out front. After school, I had something to do. Dad’s go-to phrase, when he was pleased with what was happening during those years, he would look at the pile of whatever we had just picked, and he would say, “My, look at what this little farm can do.”
Dwain: So this is kind-of a two-pronged stream that converges in my family, with both parents having this background in marketing and offering the excess from their gardens and coops to urbanites.
Earl: Yes, we had excess things here that were grown. We found out that these guys going down Philadelphia way, they were just craving for it, for their customers.
Dwain: These were long-term markets, like Wayne.
Earl: But we didn’t get involved right away with going down there. It started here at home.
Dwain: I get the impression though that when you and mom married, you weren’t necessarily imagining a farming life. You were pretty involved in the shop, the carriage business. And there were still Amish customers at that time and bale boxes to be fixed for the tobacco crowd.
Earl: I began losing interest in doing this Amish work, repairing wheels and so forth. Of course, by that time, I was getting into more antique restoration, sleighs, fancier wagons. That was my interest. I did that for a number of years, too.
Going into the early 80s, one year, I decided I was going to plant some veggies and see what we could grow and sell here at home.
Dwain: It was all roadside sales here at Morningside Drive, with my brothers and I out front. After school, I had something to do. Dad’s go-to phrase, when he was pleased with what was happening during those years, he would look at the pile of whatever we had just picked, and he would say, “My, look at what this little farm can do.” Which is kind-of, you know, testing production of the land, because it had been plowed up hay field for a time, which takes a bit to get back into vegetable production.
At this point, we’re on the farm, and we’ve got this debt load, and we’re really scratching around as a family. The shop business is nip and tuck. We didn’t always know what was coming in next. So it’s a financially challenging time. You can look back on mom’s old calendars and see the little tallies written down the side. I guess we’re still here.
And then you got a visit from Chris Petersheim, wondering if you had the willingness to try something organic. Remember that?
Earl: Yes, that was the push.
Dwain: It was the introduction to maybe this was possible. I mean, organics was kind-of a weird thing at that point. We didn’t have pony tails. We buttoned down our shirts.
Earl: I think he was especially interested in potatoes. We were always growing some potatoes. So we had the encouragement from him to start raising things organically.
Dwain: Chris was from Paradise Organics, a really intensive, at that point, four-acre farm in Paradise, PA, east of us here, who was big into marketing. He had a delivery route that he was developing down through the Main Line into Philly. He would loop around, come home again, visit all the little health food stores. He was scratching around trying to find suppliers, because there was a market for organics east of us. So he said, this is what you can do price-wise on potatoes, if you can grow them for me.
That started us on that journey. Organics was a learning curve. The whole certification thing was kind-of new yet. But that led to becoming certified by Organic Crop Improvement Association (OCIA), a nationwide certifier in that day. And we learned pretty quick that Dad hated paperwork, and I was the only one able to stomach it, so we carried on. There’s a whole annual application, and then you have the inspector visit, and then you have their suggestions. It was a good thing to get into while I was young [laughing].
Potatoes led to, well, what else can you take, Chris? We have some of this, or some of that. In my early teenage years, with my brothers not far behind, we did all kinds of things. We learned a lot about organics, what worked and what didn’t work. But we also learned that wholesaling wasn’t our passion. Chris is a tough customer. He’s extremely good at what he does and he pulls everybody up to a level of quality that could be frustrating at times. We knew what sold with our customers here at the stand, and to have a box of things returned for some reason was challenging.
Earl: Yet Chris shared a lot. A lot of information we got from him, how to do certain things.
Dwain: We had this perception as a family that, local customers and wholesale accounts aside, there are urban centers that want these things even more, but we just don’t have an in. There’s no way to get there. Or we never had the energy or time to pursue it. There was always a shop project to do in the wintertime, and we were in school, just growing up.
THriving in the Lancaster to Philadelphia foodway connection
“The next big break comes when Dad responds to an invitation to a meet the farmer event at the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, the Taste of Harvest Festival in 1990 or 1991. Our world just exploded at that point. None of this was planned. But we have found ourselves on the leading edge of the swell of organic interest. And we found ourselves on the leading edge of this farmer’s market renaissance in Philadelphia.
What gave our family energy in those tough, we-don’t- know-if-we’re-going-to-make-it years, was you had a hundred people a week telling you that you were doing the best thing possible. ”
Dwain: The next big break comes when Dad responds to an invitation to a meet the farmer event at the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, the Taste of Harvest Festival in 1990 or 1991. This is all new to us. We knew nothing about the Terminal or its history or anything. But we kind-of had these perceptions built up over the years of dealing with these other Philly growers.
So you borrowed your brother-in-law’s step van that would hold a couple skids of things, and we brought up some tomatoes, and some cantaloupes, and some sweet corn, and you and I went to the Reading Terminal. [laughing] Poof. Our world just exploded at that point. We came home, and I was looking at him and he was looking at me and we counted more cash than we had ever held in our hands at one time together. On top of that, the truck was empty, because the big produce grower down there at the end of the day came around and bought what was left. [The Livengoods had a weekly stand at the Reading Terminal Market for 14 years.]
Then we connected with Bob Pierson [of Farm to City] who helped launch the farmers market renaissance in Philadelphia. There weren’t any open air markets before the mid-90s. We were invited into a South St. restaurant for supper once after a Terminal day, with Bob and some neighbors he was talking with. We had creamed butternut squash, and it was delicious. And these people were talking about having outdoor markets. Sure, we knew people love the stuff. But the whole concept to us wasn’t as congealed as it was in Bob’s mind. He had a vivid idea that we need markets outdoors, regularly, in different parts of town, where people can just come out and have personal connection. There wasn’t a Whole Foods on South St., there wasn’t a Mom’s Market in Bryn Mawr, these places just weren’t there. So South and Passyunk was the initial market and we were there. What a journey. We think we’ve been at 20 different markets over the years.
Of course, urban consumers have influenced what we grow. One year, we decided to grow artichokes. It was a year that we had a tour here, where we invited customers out to the farm for a corn roast and tour on a Sunday afternoon. And we have a picture of a customer preparing an artichoke with mom and the rest of us watching. You know, us Lancastrian Swiss German Mennonites had no idea what a good artichoke would taste like. She showed us.
Meanwhile, these things that my grandfather, your dad, had planted, like the pecan trees in the barnyard, the chestnut trees, the concord grape row, and the paw-paw trees that were an old nursery in the middle of the rock pile up there, all these things are starting to bear and drop harvest in quantities that were never seen by Grandpa. Some of the grafting that he had done is fading. English walnut trees aren’t a long lived tree. But we’re starting to harvest pecans. So my childhood sound memory of my grandpa down here in the cellar next to the coal fire on his anvil cracking nuts became my dad and now he’s cracking and picking pecan pieces in the wintertime instead of restoring coaches. And these pecans are so well received. Who knew pecans grew in Lancaster?
Here’s the fun part of our story. We have fallen into this stuff, none of this was planned. But we have found ourselves on the leading edge of the swell of organic interest. And we found ourselves on the leading edge of this farmer’s market renaissance in Philadelphia. It was worth our while. It was encouraging. We loved the customer feedback. What gave our family energy in those tough, we-don’t- know-if-we’re-going-to-make-it years, was you had a hundred people a week telling you that you were doing the best thing possible.
Regenerative Farming & A Call for Decentralization
“By having a lot more little farms and connection to the person growing, there’s so much more power to the consumer. ”
Dwain: And now we find ourselves doing regenerative farming. We are not just about sustaining what is, because we have so much rebuilding to do. There’s this wealth of almost died out history that is being implemented in pasture restoration, for example. Let’s plan and plant another canopy of harvest over top of this $50,000/acre Lancaster soil. Instead of just growing one crop, let’s grow three layers of crops, grass underneath, cattle, polycrop vegetables along the side.
Audrey: It’s the whole regenerative permaculture thing. How can we renew the land versus simply sustaining it?
Dwain: Reach down deep with tree roots, pull up minerals that have long leached away from the surface grass and vegetables. Put them back on top. Harvest protein and vegetables and grass from the same acreage. Those are the things that are catching our imagination these days and we’re putting in front of our children. It creates hope. How do we work with what we got?
Yet, none of this really means anything without our Anabaptist perspective and faith playing into it. If you are viewing our time here on earth as get out of it what you can, because it’s going to be burned up in a scorched earth end-of-times scenario, then really, what we’re doing doesn’t have a whole lot of value.
But if you come at it with a perspective where everything that we work with was intentionally designed and is an integral part of creation that as a whole should really work together, and did at one time, and for a season now it has its challenges, but in another day in the future will again become a perfect operating system—why don’t we spend our time here learning how that works?
Audrey: It’s like creation as your teacher. What is it telling you that it needs, and working with it rather than trying to work against it.
Dwain: Rather than dominating it, strong arming it into submission.
Audrey: Trying to listen to it and observe, what is it asking for, what does it need to work in its best way possible?
Dwain: I know that when things are in balance, soil-wise, animal-wise, predator-prey wise, it’s a nice pleasant system to be a part of. It can be very rewarding. In the end, it just feels like the right course of farming.
Now there’s still more that we’d like to do. It’s taking us deeper into forest gardening. These kinds of things become interesting to a young boy who spent his years taking each tributary and walking back upstream till you find the source. Oh, so that starts there.
I guess perspective grows the more you age and are aware of the effects of farming eleven acres here and what it contributes. So are you contributing to the problem or are you part of the solution?
Dwain: We really need more decentralized farming, more small-holder, direct to consumer places. If there’s any chance of standing against this push to commercial, corporate agriculture, it’s a whole bunch of little places like this, that are intensively managed and actively supporting a vocal and supportive customer base. It’s the week-in, week-out customers that support and encourage the development of these small-holdings.
All these northeast cities, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, all these cities need to embrace small-holder things in our suburbs and in our local foodshed, because if we needed anything to illustrate that, Covid was it. Before we went to market one day, I’m looking at the news and I’m seeing empty food shelves portrayed in New York City in the middle of wintertime, and I called dad up and said, can you wash another 1,000 lbs. of potatoes to take along to market? And that was just the beginning. I have never seen people that worried about where their next meal was coming from.
If this network of small farms dispersed throughout the country but available to supply their local regions and neighborhoods with food isn’t in place, this country is in a really precarious situation.
What a wake-up call. It tested our levels of production. We discovered that we couldn’t do it all going into ’21. And then mom and dad went sick all that spring at the same time. There just needs to be more balance, more farmers. There needs to be more of us, to spread this out and share the burden. And the opportunity.
Audrey: Decentralizing the food production really allows the general public to have more of a say and power over what they put in their bodies. There are charts online that are just mind boggling. I think it’s something like ten major companies that control the majority of food in the United States. By having a lot more little farms and connection to the person growing, there’s so much more power to the consumer.
Interview by Rebecca Steffy, with Dwain, Audrey, and Earl Livengood
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