Named after the wild prairie potato that grows in the native warm season meadows there, Prairie Turnip Farm was founded in 2007, when Hank Will (Oscar H. Will III) moved his agricultural enterprises to rural Osage County, Kansas, to take an editorial leadership with Ogden Publications in Topeka. Ogden publishes Mother Earth News, GRIT, Heirloom Gardener, Motorcycle Classics, and other magazines.
Prairie Turnip Farm is a diversified food-farm that is home to Will's landrace sheep, Highland cattle, heirloom chickens and ducks and has at times raised Mulefoot hogs and scores of varieties of Native American and historically important corns. Hank's great-grandfather, George F. Will, was gifted a number of Northern Plains Indian corns, and authored the book, Corn Among the Indians, an important historical account of the early inhabitants of the Dakotas.
Joanna Russell Will formally joined the enterprise in 2016 and brought along her passion for bees, the Kansas landscape, raising chickens and nurturing young grazing animals. Joanna comes from a long line of Kansas ranchers and farmers, and has spent a portion of her adult life working on the family farms and working to support sustainable agriculture at the Kansas Rural Center, a non-profit organization founded in 1979. Joanna's grown children, Scott and Genevieve Voigt, are enormous help on the farm, and bring a number of highly valuable skills to the endeavor.
Hank and Joanna have been lifelong gardeners, both have marketed through and served as directors/managers for farmers markets in Kansas and South Dakota and are passionate stewards of the east-central Kansas prairies. The farm currently produces breeding stock, grass-finished beef and lamb, free-range broilers and eggs, honey and other bee products, as well as a variety of soaps. The Wills are committed to no-chemical, no-antibiotic animal production and no-spray vegetable production. They believe that great food should be affordably accessible yet priced to minimize waste during production and in the hands of the consumer.