By Ronnie Hess
Madison Magazine
Special To Channel 3000

It's eleven o'clock in the morning and Harry Stoehr is, by his own admission, having a terrible time. "There's nothing in the cooler," Stoehr says, with a sigh. He's sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by open cookbooks, trying to figure out what to feed about a dozen hungry farmhands for lunch, let alone dinner. And it's hard in early June, in between morels and spring ramps (a pungent wild onion) and the not-yet-ready-for-prime-time summer vegetable crops. But that's part of the challenge, the very reason Stoehr is here at Harmony Valley Farm, tucked away in hilly country a dozen miles west of Viroqua, not far from the Mississippi. He's here as an intern chef.

"Fennel should be in. It's big enough to eat," says Harmony Valley's Linda Halley, almost trying to reassure him. And in no time, Stoehr, dressed in purple tie-dyed T-shirt, chef pants, a wool cap turned around the wrong way and horn-rimmed glasses, has assembled asparagus, green garlic (the early stage of garlic before it forms into individual cloves), winter onions and purple kohlrabi. He puts sun-dried tomatoes reconstituted in olive oil and arugula into a food processor to make pesto.

"Everything I do is experimental," Stoehr says as he puts spaghetti into a pot of boiling water. "We'll see how this comes out."

Stoehr is not the first chef to be put through his paces at Harmony Valley. Over the years, Halley and her husband, Richard de Wilde, have employed several young cooks on their 70-acre certified organic spread. They have both practical and philosophical reasons for doing this.

It all started around 1995 -- the couple are not sure of the exact date -- when a young chef from Kansas City approached them, saying he wanted to learn about food, basically from the ground up. "He just begged to have a job here," de Wilde says. And it made sense to them. For they were so tired at night after working the fields that instead of eating their own produce, they'd often pop a pizza into the oven. The couple, acknowledged leaders in Wisconsin's organic farming movement and successful purveyors of specialty vegetables, also saw the germ of a bigger idea. They could offer chefs a training ground for learning about organic agriculture and an opportunity to know how to cook with the seasons, with locally grown produce.

The chefs could also begin to appreciate food from a farmer's point of view. De Wilde makes it clear that Harmony Valley, unlike most commercial food distributors, doesn't have a warehouse and doesn't store large quantities of food, but picks for flavor, only when the crop is ripe. In other words, you can't just call de Wilde with an order and expect immediate delivery.

"We have to go with the weather. We need time," de Wilde says. "When chefs understand that, they plan ahead better."

It would seem a lot of chefs are eager to go back to the farm. Shortly after Stoehr completed his internship, Cayce Carnill, a Culinary Institute of America student, took over in the kitchen. This spring, Matt Overdevest, a CIA graduate who has been the forager and point person for ordering produce at L'Etoile, one of Madison's top restaurants, will take up duties at the farm. Odessa Piper, L'Etoile's James Beard Award-winning chef, has been a longtime patron and booster of Harmony Valley, routinely encouraging her staff to visit or work there.

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