Humble Hands Harvest is a worker-owned co-operative farm. We grow 2+ acres of organic vegetables, grass-finished sheep, pastured pork, and fruit and nut trees. We distribute at the Winneshiek Farmers Market in Decorah; and through a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program for both our veggies and our meat. We found our long-term home in 2017 on Hidden Falls Road, 10 miles from Decorah, on ancestral Sauk, Meskwaki, Lakota, and Ho-chunk land, and began functioning as a worker-owned co-operative that same year.
Humble Hands Harvest practices un-conventional, organic, visionary, slow-growing agriculture. We strive to create a resilient landscape that grounds a vibrant local culture.
Humble Hands Harvest is the first enterprise on a piece of land that we hope to grow into a perennial polyculture commons – where a wide diversity of tree crops produce year after year, animals happily graze, vegetables are abundant through the seasons, and the soil is fertile and teeming with life. We are committed to regenerative agriculture that feeds our community, improves the soil, and connects people intimately to the food that we eat, and so to this piece of our earth.
We are young women: unconventional on the Iowa farm scene, to say the least. We’re grounded in this landscape and driven to make a difference in this place. Get to know us more:
Hannah Breckbill grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. She’s been farming since 2009 when she interned as a CSA manager at World Hunger Relief outside of Waco, Texas. She moved to Decorah, Iowa in 2010 to work at Rock Spring Farm and was part of Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings and Journeyperson programs where she crafted a vision (and a business plan!) for her farm. She has also participated in LSP’s racial justice and community organizing cohorts. After a brief stint at Seed Savers Exchange, she founded Humble Hands Harvest in 2013. Hannah participated in the Savings Incentive Program with Practical Farmers of Iowa and now works as a Land Access Navigator with them. She serves on the board of the Iowa Food Hub, the Oneota Community Food Co-op, the Decorah Farmers Market, and the Driftless Young Farmers Coalition. Besides loving growing things very very much, Hannah plays upright bass with klezmer/Balkan band Maritza, violin with the Oneota Valley Community Orchestra, and jams with anybody who asks! She is queer (instagram @queerdirt), a 4-part harmony-singing Mennonite, and spends her winters dreaming, building community, and organizing for climate resilience.
Emily Fagan‘s vegetable growing experience began in high school in Iowa City when her parents so generously let her dig up half of the backyard and fill it with too many beets and other experiments. She took a step away from the soil to get a degree in physics, but returned to it immediately after graduation, to be a garden educator at Zenger Farm in Portland, OR. From there she interned at Cure Organic Farm in Boulder, CO, before returning to Iowa to work at Patchwork Green Farm in Decorah. There she reunited with Hannah (the two are second cousins!), and they decided to farm together in 2017. She finds great joy in hanging out with plants all day long, whether on the farm, in the woods and fields, or down by the river. In her free time you’ll likely also find her working on art projects and drinking tea.
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