Gene Garthe is a legacy fruit grower in Northport, Michigan. He is a poet’s farmer who thinks deeply about the world and the agricultural system, including puzzling out issues of scale and diversity. I was lucky enough to be the neighbor of Gene and his wife, Kathy, when I was farming at Bare Knuckle. Together we experimented with running hogs through his fruit orchards, yielding some of the best-tasting pork I’ve ever had. (It helped that Kathy is an incredible cook and they both are tremendous conversationalists as hosts.) Gene also tends several acres of quince for Justin Rashid of American Spoon, a small-batch preserves company out of Petoskey, Michigan. Gene took a couple of hours to talk with me one Saturday in March of 2021.
