The Hawk Eye
John Gaines
MOUNT PLEASANT — Morgan Hoenig never thought she would wind up back in her hometown after college.
A graduate of Luther College who studied history, Spanish and international studies, Hoenig didn’t anticipate going into the organic farming business, either.
Mostly, though, she couldn’t have expected her unlikely career path would someday earn her a presidential visit.
“I was planning on traveling the world for a job,” Hoenig said after President Barack Obama’s visit Tuesday afternoon. “I ended up in Mount Pleasant, but I still got to see the president.”
Hoenig, 27, got to do much more than see the president. She offered him a tour of her MoGoOrganic farmstead and the three acres of crops on the surrounding land.
Hoenig grows everything from lettuces to heirloom tomatoes to wild blackberries. The buy-fresh-buy-local supporter gets many of her seeds from Seed Savers, based near her alma mater in Decorah.
Her operation so impressed Obama that he mentioned the garden in his Ottumwa town hall meeting a couple hours after his visit to MoGoOrganic.
“She’s got a small loan; and she started participating in the farmers’ market; and now, she’s been hooking up with the local department store, and pretty soon she’s going to be with the schools, and so we’re getting fresh produce to market,” Obama told the crowd of 2,100 at Ottumwa’s Indian Hills Community College student center. “She is starting to make money, and you’re seeing that kind of entrepreneurship all across the state and all across the country.”
He said the visit to her farm and to Iowa reminded him of the importance of getting outside the Washington, D.C., beltway.
“There’s a lot to learn from rural America,” Obama said. “It’s towns like (Ottumwa) that give America its heartbeat.”
Proving his point, Hoenig said the president asked many questions about herself and her farmstead. Obama left it to his Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a former mayor of Mount Pleasant and two-term governor, to talk to her about the opportunities she might have available through the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“Tom talked a lot more business, a lot more about programs that they’re doing that I could get involved in; he talked about the farm-to-school programs that are around,” Hoenig said. “He encouraged me to get involved in things like that.”
Obama, instead, asked what attracted her to organic farming in the first place.
Hoenig went organic two years ago with an investment in a greenhouse shortly after winning a competition through the Mount Pleasant Area Chamber Alliance best business plan competition. Until last year, she also was a full-time florist at her parents’ shop.
Plus, she told the president, being a vegetarian in Mount Pleasant wasn’t easy and neither was access to fresh, local produce — other than through her parents’ gardening efforts.
Hoenig, an Obama supporter in 2008, said she was reassured by Vilsack who told her she was far from the only young farmer with a focus on local organic produce.
“It’s kind of encouraging to know that there are more of me out there,” Hoenig said.
Hoenig plans to continue to grow her farmed acreage, adding that she hopes to double her production next year.
“I feel so honored to have been selected,” Hoenig said. She’s also happy to have a supportive family and friend network who helped her spruce up the farm in advance of the president’s visit. “We whipped it together in about a week.”
Hoenig spoke to The Hawk Eye, while enjoying her first meal in a couple days, forgoing food out of nervousness and a hefty to-do list.
“At first I wasn’t sure if it was him coming out of the car, because he just looked like a regular guy,” said Hoenig, who was joined by her family for the president’s visit. “There was so much anticipation, and I was really scared. But I was very comfortable talking to him, which was really nice.”
