Homeschooling and Organic Food: Seeds of Hope: The Azure Standard Story
I was homeschooled long before it was cool and only shortly after it became legal in Michigan. Most of my childhood and teenage friends were also Christian homeschoolers, and I don’t recall any of them having any interest in organic food or the environment. And the people I knew in the late 2000s who were interested in organic food didn’t homeschool. (It’s much different today.)
So imagine my surprise when I started reading David Stelzer’s Seeds of Hope: The Azure Standard Story and discovered that it was about a homeschool family with kids my age—except that they were in Oregon and they were organic farmers. And they started what’s now one of the largest organic food distribution companies in the United States, Azure Standard. It’s not often that I run across a book that bridges both the organic and Christian homeschool worlds.
I guess if you were to try to pigeonhole Seeds of Hope into a specific nonfiction genre, it would fit best in business autobiography. That’s not a genre I generally enjoy reading because it’s often too self-congratulatory, but thankfully David Stelzer isn’t like that. In fact, parts of his story are more about how to not be successful in business—like when he nearly bankrupted the company by getting scammed by a software developer. He’s honest about his mistakes and failures, and he credits much of Azure’s success to the work of others, especially his family.
Because the book is focused on the Azure Standard business, there’s not quite as much about organic farming as I was hoping to see. David casually mentions that his family planted fruit trees and started producing lots of organic fruit. Then he moves on without giving any details on how they accomplished that remarkable feat (fruit is one of the most difficult crops to grow organically). And his section about GMOs and glyphosate has a few minor technical errors.
But David does a great job at getting at the root of the organic farming philosophy: “The passion of our company is to provide healthy food from healthy soil for healthy families.” I really like how he weaves together organic farming and Christian values, both for business and for life. And I especially appreciate his head-on approach to the widespread evangelical Christian belief that there’s no need to take care of the earth or our bodies because Jesus is coming back soon. As he puts it in the chapter “Jesus, Helga, and a Steer named Charley”:
As I considered why we were on the planet, I concluded that we were here to make a difference. I no longer bought into an escapism kind of theology that implied we were simply biding our time until Jesus returned. No, we were here to occupy the earth, to do our work with excellence, and to represent Him well.
I think this is an important book in many ways, but it’s the combination of Christian values, homeschooling, and organic farming that resonates most with me personally. To know that there were people even forty years ago who shared my strong Christian faith and a desire to care for the earth and grow healthy food is greatly encouraging. And it makes me wonder—how many other Christian homeschooler organic farmers are out there that I just don’t know about?
Thanks to coauthor Ken Abraham, this is a very well-written, engaging book. I’ll be curious to see if it starts some conversations in today’s Christian homeschooling community, where my peers are now homeschooling their kids—and maybe buying organic food from Azure Standard.
