LATAH, Wash. — “This is my seminary,” farmer Bruce Hogan said on a warm July morning as he sat in the shade of his backyard, looking onto his carrot and beet fields.

He pointed out small green weeds poking up in the dirt.

“What I have ahead of me is hundreds of hours yet of just being on my hands and knees with a little weeding tool,” Hogan, 72, said. “On my hands and knees, that’s really where God wants me, and that’s, I guess, when my ears hear the best.”

Hogan operates the Hirschel Heritage Farm in Latah, Wash., about 40 miles south of Spokane. He primarily raises organic carrots and beets on nearly an acre of the 7-acre farm.

His total harvest ranges from 8,000 to 17,000 pounds.

He sells his crops through the LINC Foods Initiative and the Main Market, a downtown Spokane grocery store. He also has up to eight monthly customers.

Carrots and health

For Hogan, farming is more than an occupation. It is a calling.

His mother-in-law was diagnosed in 1999 with colon cancer and needed carrots for juicing. Carrots have beta-carotene and other carotinoids, which researchers say fight cancer.

Hogan started raising carrots to help her fight off the cancer. According to the farm’s website, she became cancer-free and lived another 18 years.

“We supply carrots on a different pricing schedule to those who are fighting cancer,” the website states.

He also grows beets, which “I can store with carrots without detrimental effect,” Hogan said.

“Bruce cares deeply about the food he brings to the community,” said Beth Robinette, co-founder of LINC Foods. “His farming is really informed by his own family’s health journey and he wants to share that health and vitality with others. That care shows through in the quality of his produce. Some of the best carrots I’ve ever tasted!”

Harvesting by hand

Beet harvest is in August and September. Carrot harvest begins the first week of October.

Carrots are biennial, which means they grow for two years, Hogan said.

Carrot harvest — done by hand after the first hard frost to be sweeter — lasts about three weeks.

“It’s like every day … breakfast, out in the field,” Hogan said.

Carrots are hauled by buckets to the wash line, which Hogan built, then into the prep room and directly into the cooler.

“Carrot harvesting machines are way out there, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I’m a small guy,” Hogan said.

He tried to build his own.

“It works, after a fashion, but not good enough,” Hogan said.

Hymns and prayers

Another reason not to use the harvester: The volunteers prefer to do it by hand, Hogan’s wife, Brenda, said.

“There’s so much going on in the field — the fellowship,” Hogan said.

Several families with six to eight kids volunteer in the field while singing hymns.

“We are not looking to hire anyone,” the farm website states. “We simply set about the task and leave the door open for anyone who wants to come whenever they want to stay as long as they like and we’ll feed them in between. We have made some very wonderful new friends this way.”

Sometimes people come in the midst of their battle with cancer. Hogan will take the person’s first name back to the workers around the tables, who stop and pray for the person “that the carrots will do their wonderful ministry.”

“It’s a discipleship farm,” Hogan said. “It’s for families to come and experience farm life in a context of, ‘We’re going to honor and glorify the Lord here.’ That’s it, period, done deal.

“So that’s why we do it by hand. If I had a machine that could do it all, I wouldn’t need anybody, I wouldn’t have anything to share.”

Growing faith

Faith is clearly of great importance to Hogan. He studies scripture and writes poetry.

His son, Keith, 10, died in 2000, in an accident on the farm.

“Since my son passed away, that’s when you need to get stuff out,” he said. “You can imagine the questions, the pursuit of Him and understanding His ways.”

Someone once suggested he move.

“I said, ‘No, I’m going to stay right where God is dealing with me at the deepest level,’” Hogan said. “I don’t want to miss one day of His class, because I don’t ever want to go through it again.”

The future

Hogan could expand his customer base, but believes he’s at his limit.

“I hope I’ll be doing this for another 20 years,” he said. “I’m just taking it year by year. I don’t know when my seminary is over.”

The farm is profitable, providing a supplement to Hogan’s Social Security “in a very helpful way.”

For Hogan, the important thing is “interacting with all kinds of people and meeting all kinds of needs.”

“I get to end up with something at the end of the season that I can give away, bless people with or meet needs,” he said. “Success for me is being a source of things people want or need.”

Bruce Hogan

Bruce Hogan

Occupation: Steward, Hirschel Heritage Farm.

Age: 72.

Hometown: Latah, Wash.

Family: Wife Brenda, married 47 years; four children; 11 grandchildren.

Education: “Ongoing.” Freeman High School graduate in Rockford, Wash.; Marine Corps; Spokane Community College for electronics, three-year degree.

Hobbies: Restoring a boat, learning how to operate a ham radio. “I’m thinking about Grandpa equipment. … I like to remake things, I like to take something that’s ugly and make it beautiful.”

What’s in a name? The farm is named for the family who previously owned it. Wife Brenda’s mother married into the Hirschel family. Hogan wanted to honor them.

Website: https://www.goodcarrots.com/

Cursing the weeds

Those hours talking with God have changed Hogan’s thinking, and his approach to life, he said.

“Taught me things that never would have crossed my mind even to wonder about,” he said.

For example: Hogan worked from home for years as a software engineer from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., meaning he could weed from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., and 6 p.m. to about 9:30 p.m.

He was out tending one of his three carrot patches one day in 2009 and broke down weeping.

“I said, ‘Oh God, here I am, a software engineer, not too shabby, and nobody even knows I’m out here — by the time I finish the upper end of the patch, I have to go back to the beginning of the patch,’” Hogan remembered. “For several days, I was just broken. ‘I don’t see the purpose. Why am I doing this?’”

The thought came to him: Why don’t you curse the weeds? Hogan wrestled with the morality of that idea for several days — “I wasn’t used to cursing” — and then spent a few more days finding the right words.

“I started to talk to the Lord about it, I made a sound, but I didn’t get a whole word out, and the Lord stopped me right there and said, ‘You haven’t thanked me for the weeds.’ And I said, ‘Oh, God, you’re right,’” he remembered. “We give thanks in everything, not for everything necessarily, but in everything, and here I am in the midst of my struggle.”

He asked for forgiveness and gained a new perspective.

“Those weeds, with vigor and robustness, are doing exactly what they were created to do, and I’m ruing the day they ever made it to my carrot patch?” he asked. “We call plants weeds that we haven’t found a purpose for yet.”

Which raised the question: How to curse something God has engineered?

“I said, ‘Lord, I’m grateful for these weeds being here and what it’s teaching me,’” Hogan said. “’I was just wondering, Lord, if you could have them do their thing somewhere else?’”

The next year, Hogan was walking through a different patch and noticed there were no weeds.

“He said, ‘Well, you didn’t say what patch, what year,” Hogan said with a gentle laugh. “I’m learning about faith through the plants I tend and the soil that’s a living organism.”