Along the intersection of South Valley Road and Bannock Highway in Pocatello lies a stretching dirt road that creeps alongside a rustic and unassuming house.

On one side sits a potting shed, the smell of fresh dirt married with a symphony of sweet flowers and dried herbs. Nearby are piles of mulch and the remnants of a pair of claw-foot bathtubs, surrounded by an array of farming equipment and Toyota trucks.

On the other side is a lush and beautiful farm, carefully cultivated and brimming with life. Vibrant Baltic red and scarlet kale flourishes alongside rows of summer and winter squash, plump melons, garlic, potatoes, basil and countless other nourishing fruits and vegetables.

The nearby greenhouses are teeming with brilliant red heirloom tomatoes, housing an assortment of varieties including a dusky-rose-colored Cherokee purple with a distinct rich and sweet flavor. Massive and delightfully crunchy bell peppers twist out of the nutrient-rich soil, which has nurtured them over the months leading to their harvest.

It is among the leafy greenery sitting on a small patch of barren dirt that owners Matthew Bowman and Charelle Walker reflect on their relationship with the soil and the place that has become a mirror of their hopes and dreams in what is known locally as Bowman Farm.

Originally started in 2008 as a simple backyard garden, the project grew with Bowman’s desire to find a line of work that could have a positive impact on the community and work in a field that valued sustainability.

“Originally, this was intended to make a living, even when it was a backyard garden,” Bowman said. “Everything was designed with that in mind. It was never idealized because I’d done enough that I didn’t want to do in life. I was committed, I was going to figure out how to make this work because I didn’t want to do anything else.”

Planting that initial seed was all it took, that small beginning budding into a ripe new opportunity. Spreadsheets on a tiny garden with which they marked their progress, taking as little as five heads of lettuce to market and tracking the market demand. Those meticulous records taken early in Bowman Farm’s lifecycle show their devotion to making the farm something truly tangible.

From 2014 on, the farm allowed Bowman to make a proper living from it. The metrics were sound, their profits doubling every year, and the exponential growth pushing them to relocate in 2017 to their current space to accommodate the gains. Sometime in 2018, however, the farm hit a wall.

The farm didn’t lose profitability, but managing a farm with just a small handful of workers was spreading everyone thin, especially Bowman who was working 15-hour days with three hours of sleep and struggling to meet the physical demands. Part-time workers were hired, and extraneous help was added down the road in 2021 with the incentive to work for a few hours and get credit to use at the Portneuf Valley Farmers Market.

“We do that to make sure that people have a tie with what’s going on here,” Bowman said. “The economy of it versus the altruism of the ideal, versus the reality of it. It’s so easy to get wrapped up into the ideal of it for anyone coming out here because they just see this pretty garden. But as they soon get acquainted with the labor associated with it, even if they’re only here for two hours, they’re still going to feel it because nothing out here is easy. They get that experience. We don’t just give them some vegetables and they go on their way.”

In addition to working for credit to use at the farmers market and integrating the community to their farming process, Bowman Farm offers guided tours to showcase the the day-to-day procedures and provide insight about what goes into creating rich and nutritious organic food.

Cohesion with the community and encouraging a return to the way many Americans used to cultivate food and engage with the citizens in their towns seems important to Bowman Farm and is something they are working toward.

“Something that I’ve noticed a lot ... is the sense of community that is being developed and recognizing that this is so much bigger than us,” Walker said. “That the community here at the farm as well as the community that comes and supports us at the farmers market is building and being cultivated, and there’s relationships happening that are beyond us.”

Walker continued, “You can have a relationship with your food and the earth that is a bit more conscientious. ... Most of our grandparents or great-grandparents not many generations ago did this kind of work. They were connected to the earth. I think that there’s a lot of suffering in the world that is coming from disconnection. To go back to our roots has a lot of wisdom to it. It can help us connect in ways that we might not even know that we needed. It’s important for healing ourselves and the planet, to come back to the earth.”

Certainly, there has been a disconnect from the way that most farms approach cultivation. Large-scale industrialization is widespread, blanket pesticides cover masses of crops, even the soil itself can be manufactured. Profit margins are the primary focus, the local community disconnected from the overall picture. For Bowman Farm, an organic approach to soil and food keeps them grounded and aware of the whole picture.

“We’re trying to build something that is fundamentally earthbound,” Bowman said. “It’s fundamental, you can’t break it, because it’s built solid. It’s built on understanding and knowledge that is inherent. It’s really not abstract to recognize that there is wisdom and knowledge to be gained from interacting with something like soil. There’s so much foundational knowledge just in trying to do something between you, a plant and the earth.”

There is something to be said of creating something wholly naturalistic. Even as Bowman and Walker reflected on their journey, sitting haphazardly in the dirt amongst their bounty, a daddy long-legs spider crept along the face of a leaf, butterflies danced playfully throughout the garden, and small insects buzzed near the mouth of the greenhouse.

Beauty and life are here in abundance at Bowman Farm, but there is much toil and hard work that has gone into creating this emerald oasis. Payment is paid with blood, sweat and tears. The cost is oftentimes the emotional and physical fatigue associated with a passion project that is decades in the making.

“To make something like this work within the world takes a tremendous amount of devotion to something that is bigger than you,” Walker said. “I hope to see more people doing this in our community. Doing small-scale organic farming and sharing that with our community at the farmers market. There’s a lot of people that have a dream of doing what we’re doing and I recognize how lucky we are in many ways that we get to do this. The reality of making this happen, though, is a tremendous amount of sacrifice. You have to be willing to commit day after day and recommit. Sometimes this work gets idealized and romanticized, and I think it’s important that people understand that the reality of it is a tremendous amount of work. Sometimes you’re on your knees for 12 hours a day weeding, bent over and you have back problems because you are bent over all the time weeding, planting and harvesting. But sacrifice is not a bad thing. It’s a good thing in many ways, but it’s hard. It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s worth it.”

Bowman echoed Walker’s sentiments, adding that the importance of the truly organic nature of Bowman Farm.

“We want to make sure people understand that it is a farm that is doing things without any kind of chemical inputs without any kind of specific purchased organic supplements,” he said. “That it’s really about soil building as a foundation. We are becoming soil artists, so to speak, learning how to bring life to the soil and then all the things that stem from that all the way to the point of community building. Soil building becomes community building.”

For more information, visit facebook.com/BowmanHomestead.