Paul hired John as an hourly employee. John and Halee sold their house and started remodeling the old farmhouse on a back 40, infant in tow.

“It was a very radical change for us,” Halee said. “A lot of people in the outside world were worried for us. We didn’t even have a contract with Paul. We had a mutual need and a lot of trust.”

Bickford had run the farm as a confinement dairy, and then as a grass based dairy, then an organic corn and soybean farm. He didn’t know much about growing food-grade grains, but he shared with John and Halee a desire to build the next incarnation of Bickford Farms.

The Wepkings had taken circuitous routes to this windswept, ridgetop farm 35 miles west of Madison, Wisconsin, just off Interstate 151. John got a degree in religious studies and worked in urban planning, and Halee studied modern dance. Separately, they found themselves in second careers and met while cooking at Prune in New York City.

“We both had a desire to get to something basic and something that felt more universal,” Halee said. “Cooking got us to that place, opening a backdoor into agriculture.”

Seeing the beginning of the regional grain movement in New York “really planted a seed, literally, for what it was possible to do in Wisconsin,” she continued.

The other ingredients in their success? “Having an existing market, a really amazing mentor and partner, and a real commitment and need to generate more revenue,” Halee said.

Today, Halee and John run Meadowlark Organics, a flour mill producing organic flours, beans, and corn, much of it grown on their land. Paul passed away in 2022, but his legacy is felt in the farm’s commitment to organic and regenerative principles.

With assistance from the USDA, Meadowlark Organics is now building a robust Wisconsin grain market. In 2016, they received a federal Value Added Producer Grant (VAPG) to bring their milling in-house and develop the Meadowlark brand. A federal Organic Market Development Grant (OMDG) in 2024 helped fund a gravity table, optical sorter, and connecting bucket elevator to improve grain handling.

Federal funding has helped other Midwest farmers find a market for their grain milled at Meadowlark. Meadowlark has hired more employees. Artisan bakers, distillers, and other Wisconsinites can now feed their families and community locally grown grains and beans.

They supplement approximately 230 wholesale customers with direct to consumer sales, including Grain Shares, a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) for grain.

They’ve also been awarded a Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure (RFSI) grant to build a cold storage facility and improve grain storage and handling for food-grade grain grown by Meadowlark and their community of fellow farmers. RFSI is authorized by the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

As they grow and learn, the mill has become a hub for regional food connections, like the Tribal Elder Food Box program, which provides quality food for elders across Wisconsin’s 11 tribal nations. “It’s been an amazing program to be a part of,” Halee said.

Through that program, they connected with Ohe·láku, an Oneida nonprofit that grows traditional white corn. The Wepkings helped connect Ohe·láku with an available stone mill and supported them with technical assistance to get it up and running,, giving them total sovereignty over the processing of ancestral white corn.

The mill also supports regenerative land use on the 950-acre farm. “We talk about the mill being the tool that enables our diversity on our farm,” Halee said. And it also helps other regional farmers to increase crop diversity. In 2024, vomitoxin fungus that grew after June rains affected some of their wheat. That same rain helped their corn produce high yields. “Having that diversity is our crop insurance,” Halee said. “We have limited crop insurance, but much of what we grow isn’t covered. In general though,  if one thing doesn’t do well, other crops will.”

Meadowlark Organics grows five varieties of edible beans, alfalfa, rye, several varieties of winter wheat, spelt, oats, spring wheat, buckwheat, hybrid corn for feed, open-pollinated corn for milling, soybeans, and Austrian winter peas, all in a six- to eight-year rotation. Their crop maps look like a Color by Number, Halee said.

This year, they’re growing a new wheat variety developed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It’s named Bickford wheat, in honor of their mentor and partner Paul.

Paul shared with the Wepkings his commitment to the ongoing evolution and diversification of organic agriculture. “(Paul) was always forward-thinking. He had a passion for organic agriculture and for survival, making it work, not giving up, not selling out, not cashing out,” Halee said. “That’s what we learned from Paul, that there are no silver bullets. It’s the system we’re trying to change, which is way harder.”