Organic Landmark: Exploring the Rodale Founders Farm

J.I. Rodale's original chicken house at Founders Farm is a work of art.

After dropping my luggage in my room, it was time for my tour of the original Rodale farm with Maria! As excited as I was about getting to stay in the Rodale house, I really wanted to walk around the farm grounds as well. We started in the lovely gardens behind the house, with stone terraces, curving stone steps, and lots of beautiful trees like dawn redwoods and Japanese maples. There are more trees on the farm than there were in the 1940s because Bob Rodale turned it into a working tree farm/arboretum in the 1980s, with groves of different kinds of trees scattered all over the property.

The J.I. Rodale house is surrounded by delightful stone terraces, steps, and trees like these Japanese maples.

All the outbuildings constructed by J.I. and Anna Rodale are still there. We went through Anna’s bakehouse, with a stone oven and chimney. Then we headed over to a beautiful stone structure with low, rectangular windows near the bottom and little stone steps leading up to a door in the middle. “This is the chicken house,” said Maria. It was such a nice building that I thought it must have originally had another purpose, but Maria explained that it was the original chicken house that J.I. Rodale built in the 1940s. On each side of this palatial poultry duplex, a deep, brick-lined pit takes up the majority of the floor space. Removeable wooden roosts over wire mesh rest atop the pit. That way, all the chicken droppings were concentrated in one place, where they could compost in situ and be ready to spread on the fields after a few months.

The inside of the chicken house still looks exactly like it did in photos from the 1940s--complete with moveable roosts and pit to compost the chicken manure.

The following day, I got a tour of the vegetable, herb, and flower gardens from Jenni, the farm manager. It's Jenni’s first year working at Founders Farm, and she’s thrilled by the opportunity to manage the vegetable operation at a place with so much history. “I wasn’t really thinking about leaving the farm I was working at, but when I saw this job posted, I had to apply,” she told me. Even though it had been a few years since any crops had been grown in the fields, the soil is still in great shape, rich in organic matter from years of organic production. The farm’s vegetables currently go to Phoebe Ministries, a faith-based organization that has turned Rodale Press’s old South Building in Emmaus into an upscale elder care facility.

Jenni told me they didn't even notice at first that they had lined up these lovely heritage tomatoes right in front of the tomato magazine cover from Organic Gardening.

Just up the hill from the chicken house is J.I. Rodale’s original stone-mulched garden, which I was surprised to see still existed. The stones were actually visible, not obscured by weeds, because they had spent the last couple years buried under tarps in an attempt at weed eradication. Jenni confirmed my suspicion that, yes, the stone-mulched garden has always been a nightmare to weed because there’s just no way to get the roots of perennial weeds out from under the rocks.

I totally did not expect to see J.I.'s stone-mulched garden still in existence and looking so good.

Near the stone-mulched garden are what look like a series of sixteen circular concrete raised beds. At least I recognized those from a photo I had seen—they’re the Sir Albert Howard plots that J.I. built in the late 1940s to use for soil fertility experiments. Jenni told me that the concrete tubes are actually twelve feet deep—J.I. wanted to make sure there was absolutely no underground connection between plots. They’re currently planted with various herbs; she’s still thinking about what to do with them next year.

These sixteen concrete cylinders were built by J.I. Rodale to conduct his own soil fertility experiments, since he couldn't get any research institution to do them for him.

It was encouraging to me to see that the original Rodale farm is still so well maintained, and I am very thankful for the warm welcome everyone at the Rodale Institute gave me. I hope they'll consider offering regularly scheduled guided tours of the house and grounds at the Rodale Founders Farm to the general public so that everyone who’s interested can experience this amazingly preserved piece of organic history for themselves.