In the southern reaches of Lake County, in the shadow of two-story tract homes and two-car garages, sit 80 acres of anomaly.
Sue Didier Brosio and her siblings intend to keep it that way.
Their lives are rooted in the Didier Farm Inc., and as they labor to keep it from becoming just another small-farm-pushed-out-by-big-city-developers tale, their family also stands as a curiosity amid the larger story of the disappearing American farm.
A number of years back, Brosio had emerged from college and, like thousands of others in the Class of ’86, joined the nation’s urban work force. Brosio became an elementary school teacher in Waukegan Community Unit School District 60.
But after three years of grading tests, parent-teacher conferences and taking gum away from 1st-graders, Brosio did what virtually no one in her situation does.
She quit her job and went back to the farm. Her brother, John Didier, also returned after 22 years in banking and after their father’s death to manage the farm’s finances.
Now Brosio’s day begins at dawn, not with visions of the day’s arithmetic lesson, but a trip to the farmers markets to sell bundles of freshly picked squashes, tomatoes, corn, broccoli, eggplants, green beans and cabbages.
With that comes the unforgiving arithmetic of keeping the 83-year-old farm alive in the face of a truckload of national trends.
“There are only a handful of people who grow up in the farming community, leave it and come back to it,” said Howard Sacks, sociology professor at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. He is studying farming communities in central Ohio. Of the 100 people he has interviewed, only one woman left a professional job to return to her family’s farm.
“It’s easy to wax romantic about this, to make family farms into some kind of a romantic myth. But there’s another side to this, a lot of drudgery, a lot of work, unpredictable weather and difficulties that come with a very hard life,” Sacks said.
The 31-year-old Brosio shrugs off the labor. “I’ve lived here all my life,” she said. “As a kid, this wasn’t work; it was fun.”
Of the nine children born on the farm, five actively are involved in the farm’s operations and live within 5 miles of it. Two of the younger Didier sons never left the family business or the farming community, running the farm’s daily operations for years.
The Didiers are aggressive in their determination that the farm run smoothly and churn out a profit.
“We lose farms every year to suburbanization,” said Calvin Beale of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “There’s always someone who has to be the last one. It’s difficult for farms to survive when they’re surrounded by homes.”
Throughout the country, and particularly in Illinois, the number of farms has decreased markedly due to widespread urban growth, experts say.
In 1969, there were 123,565 farms in Illinois and 29.9 million acres of farmland. By 1992, that had dropped to 77,610 farms and 27.2 million acres.
Farms in Lake County have struggled over the years in the face of increased development, a highly competitive market and soaring suburban land values that tempt farmers to sell out.
U.S. census figures show there were 660 farms and 186,200 acres of county farmland in 1969. By 1982, that number had dropped to 513 farms and 92,136 acres. According to 1992 statistics, the most recent figures available, Lake County has 375 farms and 73,142 acres.
“The pattern is to move away from the farm and go into the industrial sector,” said Ida Harper Simpson, professor of sociology at Duke University who studies farm families in North Carolina.
“When you move from working with symbols in your head to working with your hands, your whole life value is changed,” Simpson said. “Professional work is considered more economically rewarding and more prestigious. Very few people would leave professional careers to return to hands-on farm work.”
The struggle to keep the farm going involves dozens of gritty chores. The day before the vegetables are sold, they must be cleaned and prepared. As Brosio scrubbed dirt off the vegetables and looked them over for bruised ones, she was in constant motion.
The fact that the Didiers are so closely knit will help the farm’s chances of surviving financially, said Sonya Salamon, professor of family studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“This family is unique in that many of the children are united. The fact that they’re all connected to the land and they’re together-that’s an extreme example of cohesion and attachment to the land,” said Salamon, author of “Prairie Patrimony: Family, Farming and Community in the Midwest.”
“They’re doing labor-intensive agriculture that keeps mostly everybody in the family involved, and that’s unique,” Salamon said.
After an hour of busily preparing her load of vegetables for the next day’s farmers market, Brosio took a break, left the barn and walked out near the cornfield.
As she gazed out over the field, she remembered years ago when other family-owned dairy and vegetable farms were nearby. Camaraderie among farmers was high; the community was like an extended family. Now that’s gone, and the farm is a solitary emblem amid the suburban development.
Brosio returned to the farm, in part, because she missed the closeness of being with her family and being active in the community.
As she got back to the barn to continue sorting vegetables, her brother, John, 46, stood nearby taking phone orders from local independent grocers.
John Didier left his banking job to go back to the farm after his father, Herb, died of a heart attack two years ago. Mary Sue Didier, Herb’s widow and mother of the nine Didier children, is the only one who actually lives on the farm. Most of her children live nearby.
Because of his banking expertise, John Didier handles all of the farm’s finances. And, occasionally, he deals with the public.
A tall, lean man with a warm smile, John Didier was a loan officer for a credit union that aided farmers in Wisconsin before he returned to the farm. He never wanted to leave the farm, but did so after graduating from college. At the time, his father couldn’t support all nine children on the farm.
Although he grew to enjoy his banking job, he longed to be his own boss.
“When Dad died, (the family) asked me to come back and help out on the financial end,” John Didier said. “My brothers told me I’d have to work a half a day, but they didn’t tell me 12 hours was considered a half day’s work. And, they didn’t tell me that a full day’s work was 24 hours.”
“Going back to 40 hours a week would be like a vacation,” he added.
Though life on the farm is difficult, he relishes the work. And, he hopes the farm will continue another 83 years. His 17-year-old son, Brian, sells the family’s produce at the same farmers market that John Didier used to go to before he became a full-time farmer.
It’s Mary Sue Didier’s dream that her grandchildren carry on the Didier family tradition.
“I’d be very pleased to have them go into farming,” she said. “That’s the only life I wanted to have, be on a farm and see things grow. Farming is the lifeline for the world. Everybody has to eat.”
