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By KEVIN NEVERS The popular Chellberg Farm destination at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore (INDU) has ceased to be a working farm. Budget cuts which have reduced the interpretive staff at INDU by fully 20 percent have forced the National Park Service (NPS) to discontinue all farming operations at Chellberg, INDU spokesperson Lynda Lancaster told the Chesterton Tribune on Wednesday. Right now NPS is working to find homes for the remaining animals and to sell the pair of draft horses, Lancaster said. “It’s not going to be a working farm. We just don’t have the staff to support the animals in the way they should be supported. We don’t have the staff and that’s not going to change. We don’t want the animals’ well-being to suffer.” As matters currently stand, moreover, neither the crops nor the historical vegetable garden will be planted this season either, Lancaster added. “The farmer did retire, and since we do not have the farmer, we cannot plant the crops,” she said. Newly designated Resource Management Ranger Ted Winterfield is, however, “looking into other options for planting,” Lancaster noted, and is exploring the possibility too of recruiting a “volunteer group like a 4-H group or a Master Gardener that can plant the vegetable garden historically accurately.” Lancaster did say that Chellberg will remain open to visitors and that the annual Duneland Harvest Festival will be held in September this year as usual. Meanwhile, INDU will seek the community’s views on potential uses of Chellberg at a forum scheduled from 6:30 to 8 p.m. on Tuesday, May 5, at the Porter County Visitors Center, located off Ind. 49 between U.S. Highway 20 and I-94. “The Chellberg farm site of Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore has seen many uses over the years. As NPS plans for the future of the site, we are looking for public input. What ideas do you have for this site and the areas around it? We want to hear from you,” INDU said in a statement released on Wednesday. “Many people have strong feelings about the farm, its past and what happens next there,” INDU Superintendent Constantine Dillon said. “We want to hear from those people.” Don Mohar, chair of the Friends of the Dunes Board of Directors, lamented Chellberg’s fate when contacted by the Tribune. “There are a lot of people very upset,” he said. “No pigs, no chickens, no goats. It’s no longer a farm and they’re very upset about that. It’s a shame that parents and grandparents can’t take their children and grandchildren to a farm that’s an actual working farm and see the animals and smell the smells of the kitchen.” INDU is still coming to terms with a downsizing implemented in the wake of an audit of park operations which the U.S. Department of Interior ordered several years ago. That audit reviewed the work done by each NPS employee and then conducted an efficiency study. The upshot: the audit identified 17 positions to be eliminated by September 2008. That audit also determined a need to place the Chellberg farmer on furlough for three months in the winter. The farmer subsequently retired and was not replaced.
Posted 4/9/2009 |
