Sorrel Lyman Hatch
Cornell University
Class of 2006

“‘Why be a farmer, Sorrel?’ When I’m asked that question, here is my answer. The connections to the community that my family’s Upinngil Farm has forged — not simply as a roadside produce stand, but by our numerous informal arrangements with the neighbors, the sharing of equipment and animals, the trading of goods — all these busy goings on around me throughout my childhood that I always took for granted — I now see them for what they truly are. I understand the value of these bonds and how important they are for healthy communities, healthy lands, and a healthy way of life.”

“In the fall, a class from the Gill Elementary School goes on a field trip. They take a walk in the woods behind the school and emerge, astonished and wide-eyed, in our Upinngil cow pasture. We might show them how a beehive works, how to milk a cow, or what it’s like to pick a pumpkin.”

“If the consumer could know the land, know the people, and understand the value of what they eat and the sweat that went into it … if they could feel attachment to and ownership for the soil, the water and the air that grew their food … it would profoundly change the way we produce food in this country.”


Sorrel Lyman Hatch

Many college graduates go off on an overseas adventure after commencement. Sorrel Lyman Hatch of Gill, MA has decided to follow a different path — on foot instead of in a jet. She plans to hike along the Appalachian Trail, which stretches more than 2,100 miles from Maine to Georgia. After all, taking to the woods is a fitting way to celebrate her four years as a Henry David Thoreau Scholar. Then, it’s back to work at Upinngil Farm.

This year, Sorrel received her bachelor's degree in Entomology — the study of insects — at Cornell University. Cornell has become the most popular undergraduate destination for Henry David Thoreau Scholars. Eleven of them, including Sorrel, have chosen to earn their bachelor’s degree there.

Last summer, she joined the staff of the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station. Her farming management experience was invaluable out in the test fields, where experiments took place in managing the diamondback moth, a major agricultural pest. Earlier, she had carried out studies on another farm insect, the flea beetle. She reflects that her entomology classes “have given me a perspective on the natural world that broader environmental classes could not have: an intrinsic understanding of the minute and infinite complexities that govern the functional ability of all life on earth.”

When not studying or researching, Sorrel turned to athletics, just as she had in high school. She made her mark in a new sport — rowing for the Cornell Women’s Crew Team.

While most Thoreau Scholar graduates pursue advanced studies, Sorrel has decided to join her father in managing their Upinngil Farm. Clifford Hatch is known in the Pioneer Valley region and beyond as an entrepreneur, teacher, and advocate of sustainability. He has drawn his daughter into Upinngil’s operations ever since her childhood. “I followed him through every farming enterprise since I was tall enough to grasp a hoe and old enough to tell one plant from another — endeavors where organic production was sometimes feasible and other times, economically unreachable,” she says.

Sorrel gained a new appreciation for her family's farming traditions while she was studying at Cornell’s School of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She sees Upinngil as building a community of those who appreciate locally grown food. Its many customers number schoolchildren, neighbors, tourists and fellow farmers who buy cucumbers for pickling, raw milk for cheese-making, maple syrup for pancakes, and self-picked berries for pies and jam.

“It was the classes outside my Entomology major — such as Environmental Governance, Green Cities, and Plants and Human Well-Being — that have inspired in me a vision of a new way of life, a lasting and satisfying way of life, for humanity,” she explains. “With this vision, I would find it difficult to settle into a research position that is limited in scope and would allow me to have little impact on the direction in which U.S. agriculture is heading.”

Sorrel is frank in expressing her frustrations about commercial food production. “The distance and self-inflicted isolation that we have from our source of sustenance allow us a sense of detachment, apathy and lack of control. This sense permits us to unforgivably desecrate both the land we live on and the land we eat from, though we are careful to treat lightly where we vacation.” She is especially concerned about "the pesticide treadmill" and seeks to promote "a cleaner, more sustainable future."

She concludes with her own credo. “Knowing the person who grows the food and the land it is grown on, is ultimately the only true safeguard. For me, perhaps the most healthy way of life of all will be as a farmer. Nothing makes me more alive than working with my hands, sweating under the sun, and knowing I have done something real and tangible and good at the end of every day.”

Read Henry David Thoreau Scholar stories
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Amalia M. Aruda
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Kathryn Au
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Nicholas T. Chmura
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Christopher Cosgrove
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Julie E. Erickson
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Christopher D. Golden
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Elizabeth Hadzima
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Sorrel Lyman Hatch
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Alisha C. Holland
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Brenna S. Hughes
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Roman M. Kichorowsky
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Jonah A. Kolb
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Ross Lieb-Lappen
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Lindsey K. Larson
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Caitlin E. Littlefield
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Kehinde S. Oshodi
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Elizabeth A. Wade