St. Joseph’s Farm cultivates homegrown Benedictine values

Work, prayer, family, faith
Jason Craig and his sons take a break from their work on St. Joseph’s Farm. The Craig family combines their Catholic faith and their farming under the motto “work, pray, rest,” echoing the Benedictine order’s motto “ora et labora” (“work and prayer”). (Photos by Giuliana Polinari Riley)

COLUMBUS — Wide stretches of farmland and long rows of wooden fences are common in rural Polk County. It’s easy to overlook one special farm out here, especially since there is no sign, no distinguishing landmark along the roadside.

But St. Joseph’s Farm is sacred ground to couple Jason and Katie Craig and their six children, and it is becoming a popular retreat spot for Catholic men and boys seeking to grow closer to Christ.

The Craigs work the soil of St. Joseph’s Farm in the Benedictine spirit while hosting retreats, homeschooling, praising the Lord and maintaining a Grade A micro dairy. The 10-acre farm off Melvin Hill Road is a real working farm – vegetables, herbs, chickens, pigs and dairy cows are all cultivated here.

“And kids!” the Craigs’ daughter Margaret Mary chimes in.

The Craig children run around the property climbing trees and playing on a swing while Jason picks string beans, describes the rotational grazing concept of the chicken coops, and shows the inner workings of the milking machine. The pigs are for the retreats, the vegetables, eggs and chickens for food, and the cows for dairy products.

Says Katie, “If you want to eat, somebody has to do the work.”

The Craigs homeschool their children and make an income through farming, retreats and writing. Jason smiles, “Yes, we are here to farm. I don’t think everybody should be farmers, but I think a lot more of us should, but not because it is a good way to make money.”

Jason and Katie were not raised Catholic, Jason explains as he hands over a baby kitten to his 3-year-old son Joseph.

“We are both converts. I was a Calvinist and my wife grew up atheist. We both became Christians in high school. First Protestants, and then Catholics in our early 20s. We were in RCIA and entered the Church together. We received four sacraments within two months – confession, confirmation, Holy Communion, and matrimony. It was a whirlwind of grace.”

Just as with their faith, they came to the farming life as adults.

“We did not grow up farming, “Jason says. “I do have a degree in horticulture and did work in landscape design for a while, but not farming. We’ve had farming mentors, but we had to figure out how to milk cows and kill pigs. Neither one of us knew farming.”

They combine their faith and their farming under the motto “work, pray, rest” – echoing the Benedictine order’s motto “ora et labora” (“work and prayer”).

“We added ‘rest’ as a reminder in such a busy and hectic world that God made us to rest in Him,” Jason says.

The Craigs start each day with a prayer and a meal together, and then they milk the cows, do some schoolwork, rest, then pray and work some more.

During rest times, Margaret Mary says her favorite thing to do is to wander off into the woods. The younger boys play with the kittens.

Behind their house, Jason’s office features nine feet of neatly shelved books on Catholicism. There’s a rolling library ladder so “The Lives of the Saints” can be reached on the top shelf.

Going inside, Jason glances at the books as he explains, “The Rule of St. Benedict inspires a rhythm of work and prayer, and you can almost see them as one when cultivating the soil and cultivating the soul. St. Paul says to pray without ceasing, but we can’t just stay in the chapel all day, because we need food. That is part of being man. St. Isadore, Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Abraham, Noah were all farmers. Farming is the original vocation of all men. The Benedictines, when they say ‘work and pray,’ what they originally meant was ‘farm and pray’ because you need to eat. Culture grows from ‘the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands,’ like we hear at Mass. Even to say Mass, you need farmers. People have to grow grapes and people have to grow wheat.”
Jason, with a master’s degree from The Augustine Institute and Katie with a degree of her own, could easily go into other work and be “successful.” But they traded the lifestyle valued by contemporary culture for a lifestyle centered around the traditional values of home.

“Farming has something to teach us within itself,” Jason says. “Part of the reason we are doing this farm is because American families are so detached from their homes. Homes are where we sleep and maybe eat but don’t serve a function in our economic life, which is what makes them truly functional. The goal with our homestead is to functionalize the home. We made the home not only a place to be together, but to do together. The retreats and the farming, we do together. The homeschooling makes the home function as a schoolhouse. It is part of the philosophical approach of turning a house into a household. The household is a place where there is a whole bunch of things happening, including economics and education. Everyone has a moment at some point when they think, ‘I need simplicity, things have gotten loud and complicated,’ and we go back naturally to the soil from where we came from.”

Jason warns, “Farming is basic to human culture, but we are disconnecting from it and we don’t learn those needed lessons. It becomes hard even to grasp the meaning of some of the parables. What do seeds thrown on bad soil look like? Why does God have to prune us? One to two generations ago, we were all barely removed from the farm, if removed at all. An overwhelming majority of man throughout time has had a connection with farming up until, really, us. We are kind of an experiment. What will we be like when we are not connected to farming and the earth, sealed off away from nature? There is going to be an effect when we have no understanding how these things work, because God created the natural world so as to communicate Himself to us. We are so disconnected from the land, and it is going to matter.”

The search for God through family, household and farming was initially what brought the Craigs into this Benedictine lifestyle. Jason’s concerns about masculine identity in contemporary society led him directly to agriculture.

He explains, “The primary reason I did this was because I was studying for my master’s and I was looking into what happened to families. Particularly men, why is there such a deficit of fruitful Catholic men? Part of it has to do with economics – men are not connected to the home by their work, but driven away from it.”

One of the Craigs’ missions through the farm is to raise up strong Catholic men, and not just their own boys. Through the Fraternus organization, the Craigs are able to share their apostolate with fellow Catholics. Local chapters include St. Ann in Charlotte, St. Michael in Gastonia, and St. Mark in Huntersville.

Jason describes, “As boys leave boyhood behind and become adolescents and eventually become men, they need to be instructed by men. If they don’t have a father, they need fatherly mentors. All boys need male mentors and fathers. There are so many boys without spiritually mature fathers. A mother can give everything, but she can’t give masculinity, because she can’t give you something she doesn’t have. Fraternus exists because boys are leaving the faith, because they do not have a spiritually strong man in their life. It is getting worse and worse.”

During the weekend retreats at St. Joseph’s Farm, men and boys typically become bonded in an experience of prayer, work and brotherhood. Craig centers the retreat around harvesting a pig for food.

“It is particularly fruitful to recalibrate and gain a sense of silence, a sense of wonder, a sense of God,” he explains. “We are not sending people back to Charlotte to start a farm. But there is something that happens when you see a bullet go into a pig’s forehead. When you kill that pig, everything changes. That adolescent wakes up and gets out of the funk he was in. Everything goes down to the nitty-gritty of life and it happens very quickly. It is shocking, but it is good to learn that life comes from death. When you hear ‘Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,’ you are not supposed to think ‘Jesus is really cute as a little lamb,’ but about His sacrifice, about the Passion. To see an animal die to allow you to live, you don’t need to delight in it or even enjoy it, but in the end, you will gain an appreciation for it. Just like in Mass, there is a reality of sacrifice and thanksgiving in every meal.”

— Lisa Geraci, Correspondent