For Congerville farmer Henry Brockman, life and death are part of nature’s plan

In the gray, predawn light, a thick fog lingers over the soil as Henry Brockman, barely visible, cuts tender stems of arugula, basil and malabar spinach.

A miniature electric lamp is strapped to his head, more out of habit than necessity. On his longest days, Brockman is in his fields at 4 a.m., not finishing until dusk.

He straightens his 61-year-old frame, the same body that, for a few terrifying seconds last year, endured punishment that probably should have killed him: He was run over by his own 3,000-pound tractor.

From head to toe or, more precisely, from toe to head.

“I remember a vague and fleeting concern for where the tractor was going to end up, but then the pain kicked in, and the world became very, very small, with no more thoughts of a driverless tractor careening off somewhere,” Brockman wrote in a seven-page letter about his March 4 accident to his customers.

More believers than customers. Belief in a man for whom the seasons and what he grows in his chocolate-colored, loamy soil are as important as, say, Easter, Christmas and Lent are to devout Christians.

Brockman’s tomatoes — from the pink champagne variety to a chocolate mystery — along with beets, burdock, okra, wild greens and hundreds of other fruit and vegetable varieties mostly end up about 160 miles away at the Evanston Farmers’ Market, held Saturdays from May 3 through Nov. 1.

Brockman is something of a celebrity at the market, where he sets up his stall under the banner “Henry’s Farm.”

“He has many things that other vendors don’t have,” said Marti Ross Bjornson, who has been buying Brockman’s produce for almost 30 years. “In the spring and early summer, his magic wall of lettuce is huge. … The lettuce, specifically this year, was astonishing.”

His tomato displays are Crayola crayon bright and he’s been known to assemble towers of carrots — in orange, purple and yellow.

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Before the three-hour drive to downstate Congerville, Brockman’s sister, Terra Brockman, had cautioned that finding time to chat with him might be tricky. Too busy while harvesting. His drive up to Evanston could be a good time, except for the first hour from 1 to 2 a.m., because he needs quiet in order to clear his mind and plan his market display, she said.

I arrived at the farm with Chicago Sun-Times photographer Pat Nabong at around 4:30 a.m one Friday in late August. Crickets chirped beneath a black sky. The smell of onions filled the air.

Trays of tomatoes — green, yellow, orange, red — were stacked and ready for the Evanston market. Brockman was tidying up his barn in preparation for that day’s sun-up to sun-down harvesting. He is 5 feet 4 inches tall, lean, deeply tanned, and his face brings to mind the late American character actor Michael J. Pollard.

“If you’d been here a couple of months ago, we’d already be out in the field picking,” Brockman said, a couple of hours into our visit.

Turns out, he doesn’t mind chatting, although he prefers not to talk while working. It’s distracting, he says.

Brockman doesn’t fit the mold of the stereotypical downstate farmer. His taste in fiction ranges from “War and Peace” to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series. In a community where one local coffeehouse serves its brew with a Bible verse inked on the lid, Brockman has a different view of life.

“Life definitely continues after death, but I don’t think Henry does — and I’m fine with that,” he said.

His route to farming was unconventional too. As a young adult, he traveled to Nepal, Israel and Japan (where he met his future wife, Hiroko) before returning to Congerville, where he grew up from age 8 on. In 1993, he set up his farm about a quarter mile from where he lived as a kid.

“We have some of the best soil literally in the world here,” he said.

His farm is tiny — about 30 acres and all organic — in a sea of commercial grain farms, each growing soybeans and corn on hundreds of acres.

“He’s not mainstream by any means … but he’s been here his whole life and everyone is used to him,” said Nathan Wieland, a neighbor, friend and part-time farmer.

Wieland always knows when Brockman is working; he wears a hat with side flaps, like something out of the “French Foreign Legion,” Wieland says.

Unusual too: Almost everything on the Brockman farm is done by hand. Almost. He drives a Ford 1720 tractor, the same machine he’s used to till his soil for three decades.

More than a year after his accident, Brockman still can’t quite understand how it happened.

“To have your very own tractor just run over you — it’s pretty unheard of. It shook up people around here,” Wieland said.

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On a cloudy, humid day in early March 2024, Brockman had just retrieved a knife from his house to cut away corn stalks snaring his tiller. To get at the stalks, he needed to raise the bulky piece of equipment; to do that, he had to turn on the tractor ignition.

He didn’t do two things he thought were “totally ingrained” in his muscle memory: He started the engine without being in the tractor seat and forgot to check if the gear was in neutral. It wasn’t.

Instantly, one of the giant rear wheels pinned Brockman’s left foot and slammed him to the ground.

“The way the tire catches my foot, [it] lays me out precisely in line with the direction the tractor is traveling. So I feel the tractor climb straight up my legs,” he recalled.

The tractor rumbled over his pelvis and crushed it. It snapped the ligaments in his right shoulder joint, and it ran over his head. How the farm vehicle didn’t flatten his skull, he says he’ll never know. The earth beneath him was hard and dry. The tire left tread marks on his face.

Luckily, Brockman was only steps from his house.

“I saw Henry was crawling. … He said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ Then he said, ‘I need to go to the emergency room,’” his wife, Hiroko, recalled.

At least once a week, the ER at Peoria’s OSF HealthCare Saint Francis Medical Center sees a patient with some kind of farm equipment injury, said Dr. Faran Bokhari, who oversees surgery there.

Brockman was lucky — the accident hadn’t severed any major blood vessels, Bokhari said; such injuries can kill up to 40% of patients, he said.

“A very severe injury, but not severe enough to kill him,” Bokhari said. “That’s where he had somebody who was looking out for him.”

Brockman never blacked out and, extraordinarily, had no damage to any internal organs. He does have three titanium screws holding his pelvis together. And he has a lesion on his left leg that still hasn’t healed right.

He credits his survival to having a relatively small tractor. He also marvels at the human body and its ability to protect itself: his rib cage bending but not breaking even as a 1 ½-ton machine rolled over it; the same for his skull.

For the first couple of weeks after the accident (he spent just a few days in the hospital), he couldn’t take a deep breath or cough without sharp pain. And in the early stages of his recovery, he shuffled around with a walker.

He missed most of the 2024 farmers market season because the accident happened at a critical point in the planting and growing season.

“The reality is, I cannot be replaced. Even though I am 60 years old, I have always worked the longest hours of anybody on this farm,” he wrote in the letter explaining his absence to his customers.

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As Brockman traipsed across his field in late August, the morning fog having burned off, he showed no sign of his injury, not even a limp. His leg is numb where the lesion has not healed properly. And sure, he has aches and pains, but he wonders if those are just part of getting old.

He’s still working 14-hour days during the busiest part of the season.

“I enjoy the hard work,” he says.

He will tell you he’s grateful to have survived, but his near-death experience hasn’t changed the way he thinks about life — it has reinforced it.

It really bugs him, he says, when he hears about some tech guru in the news striving for immortality.

“It’s the height of arrogance,” he says.

Brockman’s father died earlier this year, at the age of 90. The son grieved, of course, but he accepted it as part of nature.

“Everything I do is about life and death, whether it’s pulling up a weed or harvesting a carrot or killing a worm or feeding people incredibly healthy food that helps them live long lives,” he says. “Nothing can live without killing something else.”

To learn more about Henry Brockman’s farm, visit henrysfarm.com. This year’s farm tour happens on Oct. 11.