Written by Brennan Berryhill
Every morning and evening, a group of dedicated Hillsdale College students drive a few miles from campus to get their hands dirty collecting eggs, feeding chickens, watering plants, and completing any basic farm chore.
Director of Campus Recreation and Club Sports Ryan Perkins, ’22, believes there is value to getting your hands dirty. That is why he started the Hillsdale Homestead, a roughly 3-4 acre farm built on property the College bought from the now-defunct Glei’s Orchard.
“The mission [of the homestead] is three-fold,” Ryan says. He wants the farm to teach students “hands-on, practical skills” through daily chores and problem solving. He also wants the homestead to teach sustainability. Students work the “entire farm-to-table process,” Ryan says, “from planting seeds to eating the meal.” The third—and most important—part of the mission is moral formation and character building, which Ryan believes is a byproduct of the manual labor that homesteading requires.
Creating the homestead had been on Ryan’s mind for a while. When he was a junior at Hillsdale College, his cousin offered him the opportunity to work over the summer on his family’s Iowa cattle farm. Ryan loved working with his hands, and the lifestyle captured his imagination. Even as a Niedfeldt RA (resident assistant), he talked about starting a farm at the College. Not only would it teach important life skills and instill leadership qualities, but it would allow the College to begin growing its own food.
The perfect opportunity came when the College bought a portion of Glei’s Orchard, which went out of business two years ago. During the summer of 2024, Ryan and the Student Activities Office (SAO) realized the new property could make his homesteading dream a reality. They got to work.
“I spearheaded a lot of the effort,” Ryan says, “but the SAO umbrella has really taken on a lot of supporting roles.”
Starting the homestead in July meant that they were behind in the harvest cycle, limiting how much they could accomplish the first year. It would work out well, though, because Ryan knew they had to start out small and gather interest. For a start, they bought 50 chickens and planted tomatoes and peppers. They sold some eggs and produce to faculty and staff, and Ryan began telling students about the homestead by word of mouth.
Initially, Ryan was worried students would not be interested in volunteer work, but he quickly found this was not the case, saying that “students have been overwhelmingly interested in being able to spend time out on the farm.” A committed group of 25 students operated the homestead during the fall 2024 semester. “We let them take the fruits of their labor,” Ryan says. “They get priority on the produce that we have. We sell leftovers to staff and faculty.”
Nolan Lazuka, ’27, is one of those students. He goes to the homestead twice a week to collect fertilized and unfertilized eggs, feed the chickens, and close up the coops at night. He says, “It’s really nice to get off campus and work with your hands.”
Jihye Kim, ’26, raised chickens growing up in Mali, West Africa, and now works on the homestead. She loves the homestead because “it is a return to Hillsdale’s roots,” where students learned frontier skills. Jihye says that it is “a good opportunity to work with your hands, care for animals, and be in nature.” Her work has included caring for the chickens, tending to plants, and building a coop. She even butchered a chicken.
Students are not the only ones invested in the project. Rich Day, who retired from the Hillsdale College maintenance staff, works part-time overseeing the farm property. Ryan credits Mr. Day for creating infrastructure for the homestead, such as choosing their water source, designating an electrical supply to heat the chickens’ water for the winter months, and helping with greenhouse repairs. He may not have an official title, but Mr. Day often advises Ryan on how to successfully operate the farm.
Rachel Marinko, ’20, director of Student Programs, covers responsibilities when Ryan and students are not able. Ryan said staff like Mary McGovern, ’24, from Career Services, Mary Ann Powers, ’24, and Shelby Tone, ’22, from the President’s Office, as well as Carly Boerema, ’23, from Students Affairs have been enormously helpful. Ryan is impressed with how help is “pulled from a lot of different corners of campus, even on the staff level.”
There are a lot of big plans on the horizon going into 2025, the homestead’s first full calendar year. Ryan wants to plant a full acre with 12 different crops like tomatoes, peppers, beans, carrots, onions, and wheat, to name a few. With the demand for eggs incredibly high, Ryan would like to increase the number of laying chickens. At the end of the day, the farm is a business, and Ryan hopes to give students more opportunities on the business end of the operation and to ask questions like “how do we make the homestead more efficient?” Eventually, Ryan wants to buy sheep or a dairy cow.
Operating a homestead is not cheap, so Ryan has searched for ways to make the homestead more financially sound. One of those ways is raising chickens from chicks to full maturity and selling them for a profit. Ryan knew he had to keep an eye on the chicks, and his solution was to raise them in Whitley Residence, where he works as a house director.
Every three weeks, Ryan incubates 100 eggs and raises them in the house director suite. As a Whitley resident myself, I can say they are a huge hit. Ryan pointed out that the batch of chicks he raised over winter break when students were off campus turned out like normal, wild chickens, but the chicks he raised while students were in the dorm became ridiculously people-friendly. It would be easy to step on them because they do not run away from people.
In the future, Ryan hopes to offer a one-credit course teaching students the basics of running a farm. He sees the homestead as a tool that can be leveraged across multiple departments, and even implemented into GOAL volunteer programs.
However far the homestead expands, Ryan’s purpose is clear. “I wanted to figure out how to develop leadership in students,” he says. “I don’t think of homesteading as leadership, but there is a real sense in which it’s real life, hands-on experience where you need to have that sort of self-confidence, humility, and perspective.”
Brennan Berryhill, ’27, hails from Denver, Colorado, and when he isn’t writing or obsessively taking notes, you can find him playing trombone, debating, or nerding out over football.
Published in February 2025
