By By MARCIA STEFFENS / Dowagiac Daily News
CASSOPOLIS – Occasionally there are people who go against the grain.
They follow their own beliefs, whether or not they are popular at the moment.
Merrill and John B. Clark concentrated on raising organic beef and feed before the label organic gained space in the grocery store aisles and a full page in this week's Newsweek and mention on the cover of Time.
Their family venture, Roseland Organic Farms, has been a certified organic beef and crop farm of 1,800 acres since 1985.
The meat they ended up selling, Merrill said, "others have said 'is good tasting. This is like what we grew up on.' "
Other meat "sits in stores, in plastic containers, under lights, colored, so red it is unnatural – it is ridiculous," she added.
"Hormones, sprays and antibiotics make organic meat even more important than organic vegetables," she said.
Unfortunately, John died last year on May 1 while trying to protect his land off Dailey Road, by cutting down an evasive species – box elder trees.
John was remembered and recognized March 3 at the Kellogg Center on the campus of Michigan State University, as the 2007 Michigan Organic Conference was dedicated to his name.
Merrill, her three children and three grandchildren braved blowing snow to travel to East Lansing for the conference.
Daughter Merry told those present her father was now "part of the deep and lovely woods, the place he loved the most."
She and her husband Bob, now in California, are fixing up the old cabin just east of the Clark house, Merrill said, adding hopefully they will be returning to this area. Then her daughter, who is a personal trainer, will use it as a guest house and photo studio.
Son Lincoln and his wife Shelly, and their three children, Emily, 11; Landon, 8 and Gracie, 6, hope to open a store on their property on Dailey Road, to replace the little one on U.S.-60.
Merrill hopes they will also add some educational elements for children, such as tours of the organic farm and hayrides.
The Clarks used to drive their products into Chicago. When they learned many of the customers had places in the Diamond Lake area, they just told them to stop at the farm.
Toby lives on a third farm just outside Cass on M-60 and Mullen Road. He manages the herd.
The limelight hasn't always been on John, a chemistry professor who decided to return to the land.
Merrill has been a force in her own right, speaking out in the Berrien/Cass League of Women Voters, which she has served as president and is nature resources chair, and as a journalism major, writing columns for Leader Publications.
A reader and writer, someday Merrill said she will write a book about her own mother, who had her own organic farm, with a cow, horse and 300 chickens. "She even had a milking machine for that one cow," Merrill laughed.
Merrill was appointed to the charter National Organic Standards Board (1992-'96) with recommendations from U.S. Rep. Fred Upton and several professors at Michigan State University.
She is so pleased that MSU now has a student organic farm, with organic vegetables, cut flowers, herbs and small fruits which they then sell. The first class of students have graduated from the new program.
She was also a founding board member of the Michigan Organic Food and Farm Alliance, which sponsored the March 3 conference.
On Saturday, March 24, Merrill will be a speaker at Fernwood's Spring Symposium on "Organic Gardening: How to Live More Lightly on the Land" in Niles.
Understand how vegetables are grown without pesticides is not too hard to understand. But what is organic beef? No pesticides, antibiotics, hormones or growth regulators are used; no insecticides or herbicides are used on any of their farms. Also 100 percent certified organic feed is fed to the animals.
Merrill adds the beef used to be processed in the former Brady building just outside Cassopolis, a building which they owned for a few years. Now the beef is taken to Hudsonville and then to Yoder's in Shipshewana, Ind., to be packaged.
They process between 50 and 70 animals a year.
Light filters in the panels at the Clark home where butterflies and leaves seem to dance in resin, which John developed. The couple sold the pieces at craft fairs for about 10 years, Merrill remembers.
She also remembers the time about 50 years ago when two French horn players met in St. Charles, Ill. They would meet again at the University of Illinois and join the same choir and later the same causes, marrying in 1959. She is sorry they were not to celebrate their 50th anniversary, as John, a diabetic, died of a massive heart attack.
A small portion of the acreage, about 100 acres behind some wetlands, which they have protected from chemicals for so long, has been sold for homesteads, which she hopes they keep organic.
She has also donated three acres on Mullen Road for Barnswallow Theatre should they wish to use to build a replacement for the theater which burned down. Merrill herself was in some of the group's plays and her son Lincoln does lighting.
A recent auction saw some of the many objects John collected being sold. A fire truck from Tippecanoe Township, along with another old fire truck, was bought back by the township. "We used it to water our gardens," she said.
There were some old Studebakers back in the woods. "We still have so much stuff," she added.
"'Never throw anything away – there is no away,' John always said."