No tilling, no tractors: Centre County ‘intensive market garden-style’ farm enters third year

Chris Hench is one of Centre County’s newest farmers. He and his wife, Amber, own Blackbranch Farm in Julian. However, Chris’s background is far from agriculture. After art school, he traveled the world as a freelance photographer — but farming was always his end game.

“My whole adult life, my end game goal was to find somewhere suitable to homestead and live off the grid,” he said. “That was my exit strategy from working in Hollywood, doing this freelance photography work and feeling burnt out all the time. How could we make money homesteading ... full-time? The answer was farming.”

Blackbranch Farm is in its third year of production. Launching in 2021 came with its own challenges, as the world navigated the first summer following the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only, Chris said, were they building a farm — infrastructure-wise — from scratch, but they were also attempting to build relationships with chefs and enter farmers markets for the first time. Now, though, you can find Blackbranch Farm at the Pine Grove Mills Farmers Market, and online through Centre Markets and State College Market. The farm also works with farm-forward restaurants around the area, such as Allen Street Grill, Pine Grove Hall, Creekside at the Gamble Mill, Grace at Carnegie House and Four Ways Pub & Eatery.

Blackbranch Farm is thought to be one of the only no-till, intensive market garden-style farms in Centre County. It’s a rare farm model due to the labor intensity, Chris said, but it’s healthier for the soil.

“One of my guiding principles to farming is, I wanted to farm as naturally as possible and beneficially to the earth as possible. I didn’t want to take and not give,” he said. “I follow very regenerative farming practices. ... We don’t till, so we aren’t coming into the fields and ripping up the soil biology and destroying layers of soil. We establish the fields and then just leave them be, with cover crops in the off season to feed the soil. ... It’s a whole philosophy of farming as naturally as possible.”

The farm is Certified Naturally Grown, a certification that comes from a non-governmental organization, and with somewhat stricter standards than organic certification. The farm also does not use any tractors in the fields, and all three acres are hand-tended. Because of this approach, the farm, according to Chris, can produce the same quantity that a traditional 12-acre farm might — which leads into the farm’s “intensive market garden-style” of farming.

“We’re selling at the farmers market, then have permanent standing orders with local restaurants, then bagging a hundred-something bags of lettuce for the CSA, and we can do that week to week and never run out because of the intensive planting,” he said. “We’re mostly transplanting, so when one crop’s done, there’s already another crop in the nursery that’s been growing for 30 days, and we can swap out for that crop.”

Both originally from the Lancaster area, Chris said that one of the elements of farming that he and Amber love most is simply the food. “We like eating healthy. We like cooking… We like cooking and high-end culinary…” That, and a desire to work with area chefs and high-end restaurants, has informed the farm’s crop choices.

“We grow, in one season, 80 or 90 different varieties of produce,” Chris said. “This is also partly because we run a pretty large CSA and the CSA is free choice. Each Sunday, members log into their account online and build their farm share box. They’re customized each week, so I want to have a big variety.”

“We grow a lot of different leafy greens and specialty mixes, like spicy mixes, frilly mixes… We do candy-striped beets and rainbow carrots and rainbow-colored radishes — a lot of the stuff the chefs we work with want. We don’t do any melons or corn, but we do buy corn from a local organic farm for the CSA, just because everyone has to have their corn in the summer,” he added. The farm also has a large microgreens operation.

The farm’s summer CSA program, which offers both pick-up and delivery, has grown rapidly since the farm’s founding and runs May through September. CSA spots for the upcoming season are still open and available, at blackbranchfarm.com.

Holly Riddle is a freelance food, travel and lifestyle writer. She can be reached at holly.ridd@gmail.com.