Rodale Institute, pioneers of organic farming, launch partnership with Phoebe Ministries
a. — The Rodale Institute and Phoebe Ministries have launched a partnership that's slated to span five years, supplying freshly grown organic food to the Ministries' senior residents.
There is also set to be an educational component of the partnership, where the Rodale farming property at 2056 Minesite Road in Lower Macungie Twp. will be open for hands-on learning.
That property was the original location of the Rodale Institute in the 1940s, and as it stands, is not an active farm. However, the plan is to get it up and running once again.
To illustrate this, the organizations held a (literal) groundbreaking ceremony on Wednesday, where a giant tractor broke ground and turned over the pale, patchy grass to reveal fresh, dark brown soil. run-down
Speaking at this ceremony were Jeff Tkach, CEO of the Rodale Institute, and Scott Stevenson, President and CEO of Phoebe Ministries.
Tkach said he's excited to bring Rodale's international philosophy to the Lehigh Valley.
"Through this unique partnership Phoebe Ministries and Rodale, we'll actually be producing the healthiest, freshest, most nutrient-dense food for the residents of Phoebe, starting with their Chestnut Ridge campus, which is just a few miles to the south of us, as well as the residents in Allentown, just a few miles to the north of us."
Birthplace of organic farming
According to the Rodale Institute, organic food farming, as we know it, was pioneered on this farm in Lower Macungie Twp.
The Rodale Institute is named after J.I. Rodale, an early advocate for food purity, as well as a big name in publishing. Under his company Rodale Inc., he printed magazines such as Men's Health, and books including "An Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore. Rodale's publishing company was sold to Hearst in 2017.
At the groundbreaking ceremony, Tkach read a passage from Rodale's autobiography that explained the significance of the farm in Lower Macungie.
"The farm that we bought was a most miserable piece of land," he said. "We chose it on account of its location, which little did he know, that this would become an incredible location decades later. It was a greatly run-down farm due to the poverty of the tenant farmer who ran it before me. There were many dead chickens that had been thrown under the corn cribs."
But Rodale's early experiments in the 1940s with what would now be called organic farming apparently proved successful in turning things around for the farm.
"I had difficulty getting a farm hand to help me," Rodale wrote in his autobiography. "But I eventually found one. Together we used no so-called chemicals such as fertilizers, fertilizers or insecticidal sprays of any kind. The result for a couple of amateurs, was pretty remarkable. At harvest time, we brought in wagon load upon wagon load of golden, healthy corn into our cribs."
According to the next passage in the autobiography, it was these early, unscientific experiments with organic farming that lead Rodale to start the magazine "Organic Gardening and Farming" — which remained in publication until 2014.
J.I. Rodale's philosophy, and the history occurring on this farm, Tkach said, are part of the inspiration for launching this partnership.
"Scott's [Stevenson] team and our team at Rodale got together here in late winter, and we began to conceptualize an idea for how we could take this historic farm and begin thinking about the next chapter for this campus and how we could bring health and food equity and food justice to the Lehigh Valley," he said.
