The Kirschenmann farm, dotted with sloughs, is in the white pelican nesting area along a wetland bird corridor. It also sits in the middle of the state’s largest concentration of organic farms. Still, there are plenty of conventional farmers nearby. If they spray chemicals when the wind is blowing, as it almost always does, the chemicals drift onto gardens, wetlands, organic fields. After pesticides were sprayed last summer, there was a massive die-off of salamanders. Tomatoes in Raffensperger’s garden were damaged by drifting herbicides. There seems to be no way to avoid the chemicals, even on one of the largest organic farms in the country.

"We are the land, the water, the grizzly bear, the soil microbes," she says. "This is not a New Age statement. It is a medical statement. We forget that we are porous, not only through our mouths and noses, but also through our skin."
The land around Windsor has begun to yield some unsettling remind-ers of how interconnected all these factors really are. Though no cause has been determined, some farmers in the re-gion have noted that heifers as young as 3 or 4 months are getting pregnant, she says; 12 to 18 months is more the norm. Another sign hits even closer to home. "While many men in Fred’s father’s generation died of heart problems," she says, "Fred’s generation seems to be experiencing an epidemic of cancer."

Kirschenmann, 66, was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer last year. Raffensperger mentions the pesticides he used as a teenage farmhand and the dioxin in their meat as possible causes. "I made the mistake of thinking we were safe from cancer because my husband is an organic farmer," she says. They were not.


Raffensperger has four deep freezers full of food she’s grown. For dinner she serves Indian woman bush bean and beef soup, ratatouille and kale pizza, raspberry cobbler, and chokecherry wine—nearly all our meal is a product of the farm. "I eat and drink as an act of defiant hope and as a medical statement that I am part of this land," she says. Still, accepting her husband’s illness has been hard. "No matter how much kale I feed him," she explains, "it’s not in my hands."

After weighing several treatment options, the couple chose surgery for Kirschenmann—the only choice that would not harm the environment. Along with chemical agriculture we also have chemical medicine, Raffensperger notes; and nature doesn’t know how to handle those chemicals once they leave our bodies. She mentions the prescription drug traces now flowing in our rivers. "I don’t know about you," she says. "But I don’t want to be drinking other people’s Viagra."