A young Hutterite boy from the Hartland Colony waits for the water to flow so he can wash a cart used to gather butchered chickens. The colony uses the water sparingly, fearing that a lingering drought could deplete their well.

Water from a stone

Written by VINCE DEVLIN Photographed by KURT WILSON of the Missoulian

The Hartland Hutterite Colony near Havre has dug deep to come up with a system that provides for the needs of the entire community

HARTLAND COLONY – Twenty-four hours earlier and we would have had to shut our eyes to keep the dirt out, says Joseph Waldner of the Hartland Hutterite Colony. The wind was howling, and this prairie, parched by the effects of four years of drought, was exporting its topsoil into nearby Canada.

“Was like a dust bowl,” Waldner said. “Blotted out the sun. You couldn’t breathe around here.”

But just a day later, and Waldner is up to his ankles in mud. A rare blizzard for spring – or any other time of year, for that matter – has struck the plains of north-central Montana. Snow and sleet rain down from a depressing sky, only to fly sideways: The wind’s still howling. On ground where not much has grown due to the drought, the mud is slicker than ice in some places, and seems deep as quicksand in others.

It is bitter cold. The sleet stings our faces. The wind penetrates our clothes. The mud swallows our shoes. Joseph Waldner offers a rare smile.

“This is good,” he says. “But the truth is, we need it to do this for 40 days and 40 nights.”

The Hartland Colony is not just a farm – including state and Bureau of Land Management leases, these Hutterites control 14,000 acres of land, 8,500 of which are farmable – it’s a community, too. It has a population of 75. Fourteen families live here, where a rainstorm is as rare as a pine tree. Their well, the capacity of which is rated “relatively low,” goes 834 feet deep into Montana to find water, and they tap a creek so stagnant their cows won’t even drink out of it, for other uses.

After years of rainfall measured in single digits, the coming months will offer a respite. Down in Havre, the closest town, the National Weather Service will report that the area has already surpassed its average amount of yearly precipitation – 11.18 inches – by August.

But is it the start of the end of the drought cycle, or just a peculiar year? In the Hutterite religion, death is seen as the reward for all the pain life dishes out, and on this colony, one of the pains has certainly been water. There just isn’t much of it.

Dead chickens by the hundreds stand at attention on racks. Their gizzards and livers have been yanked from their cavities and separated onto a large two-sectioned wire mesh strainer that sits on the concrete floor.

A few hours earlier, the building was alive with the sights and sounds of slaughter as the birds were beheaded, gutted and tossed into whirlpool-looking machines that pluck the feathers. But now the naked fryers perch silently on row after row of metal rods. They are waiting for a school bus full of children who will help get them on their way to dinner tables up and down the Hi-Line. The bus will trundle up the road that comes in mostly straight lines and right angles for some 40 miles north and east from Havre – so far north that were it three miles farther, this would be Canada; just east enough to slip over the county line, from Hill to Blaine.

Into this room and out of that unusual blizzard clomps Waldner, aka “The Plumber.” Like all the men in the colony he has a beard and wears a plaid shirt, but otherwise is dressed in black, from his hat to his knee-high boots. A few days earlier some lye splashed on his face. His left eyeball swims in a sea of red.

“Maybe I should go see a specialist,” he says.

He scoops up handfuls of livers from the strainer and piles them on a nearby metal table. Soon he’s joined by three other men. One is the boss of the colony, one is essentially the head of the chicken division of the farm, and one is Waldner’s father-in-law.

The school bus has returned from a field trip, chugging through the deep and slippery mud, and some of the children – older girls, younger boys – have entered the building. The boys are dressed like the men. The girls wear floor-length and neck-high blue dresses. Scarves hide their hair. They strap on rubber aprons and soon the building is humming with activity, if not much conversation.

The girls stand at the metal table and snap off the chickens’ necks, inserting them, along with the livers and gizzards, into the cavity. The men sack them in plastic, weigh them, dip them in a tub of hot water to shrink-wrap the sacks. A girl snips off any left-over plastic and loads them in boxes.
Time passes slowly. But the boys are pre-occupied by the presence of “the outside world” – a reporter and photographer.

Joseph Waldner, the Hartland Colony plumber, rinses the floor of the butcher shop during the processing of hundreds of chickens at the farm.

Miles from the next farmhouse, in a religious sect that bans outside influences – television, radios, stereos, computers, games – a photographer with a digital camera is an eye-opening experience. Photographs, too, are taboo, although grudgingly, the Hutterites will allow this one to take pictures of them at work, preferably from behind or to the side. A straight-on photograph is most certainly a violation of their religion, which stresses modesty. Photographs are allowed at weddings and at no other time.

But the boys have figured that the outsiders are interested in them, and interested in how Hutterites use water. The youngest stands on his tiptoes trying to reach a lever that will turn on warm water to wash out a shopping cart. He sprays and sprays, staring at the cameraman. His aim wanders and he nearly soaks one of the girls kneeling by the chicken livers. The girl glares at the boy but remains silent. The water returns to the cart, then slowly edges away from the cart and toward the girl again. Finally, one of the men notices and barks at the youngster in German. Joseph Waldner turns and gives his son the evil eye – a bloodshot one, to boot.

“You are a disruption,” he tells us after, though his tone is informative, not harsh. “The children are not usually like that. They never waste water that way. You never use 10 gallons where five will do.”

The Hutterites purchased this property a year before the drought began, but their farm buildings and residence halls weren’t completed until the drought was 2 years old.

It is the Plumber’s job to make sure the colony has water. He got the job because, “I was the oldest guy without a job, I was next in line,” he says. But he now holds a state of Montana certificate for water and wastewater operators.

Waldner designed a two-source system, one for domestic use, and one for agricultural purposes (although, in fact, the domestic source is often in use in the many metal barns and shops for sanitary purposes).

An 834-foot well provides the domestic water, purified – or “polished,” as Waldner calls it – by reverse osmosis as well as chlorination. Battle Creek, which runs through the property, is the other source. Water is pumped from it into what Waldner calls “dugouts” and held there for use.

When water can be pumped out of Battle Creek, that is.

“We opened up the ice this winter and the cows walked up, smelled it, and walked off,” Waldner says. “It’s that stagnant.”

The colony’s well penetrates 37 feet of glacial till, 656 feet of Bearpaw shale and 178 feet of the Judith River formation. It is cased to 785 feet and is open hole from there.

Up to 10,000 gallons a day are pumped into the Plumber’s shop, where three tanks with a combined capacity of 31,500 gallons disperse it, chlorinated with a sodium hypochlorite solution, to the colony. (Two more of the 10,500 gallon tanks store nonpotable water for the farm.) The water from the aquifer is slightly alkaline. The aquifer’s primary source of recharge is from precipitation and stream losses at outcrops of the Judith River formation, along the flanks of distant isolated mountain ranges. It takes in excess of 100 years for a drop of water to travel from those outcrops to the aquifer under the Hartland Colony.

Fresh-washed eggs are inspected for any irregularities before packing.

The capacity of the colony’s well, according to the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, is “relatively low.”

If the drought continues, in other words, “At some point, we’ll have to be hauling water from Havre,” Waldner says.

Hutterites are Anabaptists because they disown infant, or as they call it, compulsory baptism. Baptism does not occur until Hutterites are about 20 years old, and means members voluntarily make the choice to join the sect. After adult baptism, there are four more basic tenets to their faith: the rejection of oaths, maintaining pacifism, economic communism and non-assimilation.

Economic communism is represented by their communal living. No one in the colony is paid a wage. Instead, each person’s needs are taken care of by the colony, which is ruled by the boss and a council of men. If Joe Waldner decides to see an eye specialist, the colony will pay his doctor bill.

Non-assimilation simply means the Hutterites do not want to be absorbed into the dominant culture.

“The truth is, we need it to do this for 40 days and 40 nights,” says Waldner of a rare snowstorm at the colony.

But unlike the Amish, Hutterites embrace technology when it comes to farming. Their operation on the Hartland Colony is something to see, from the conveyer belts that gently move thousands of eggs through a cleaning and grading process in the chicken barn, to the large carousel that takes dairy cows for a ride while automated milking machines pump on their udders. One trip around on the carousel and the cow unhooks itself by kicking off the pumps and backing off, making room for another cow to climb on.

The Hutterites live in what look like apartment buildings, or residence halls. The individual units are mostly bedrooms, with a sink and cupboards (there’s a communal kitchen and dining room elsewhere on the colony) off a small family room. What little furniture there is – a straight-back wooden seat, a table with four chairs, all hand-made on the colony – is pushed off to the walls. The linoleum floors sparkle.

The walls are bare, save for crocheted signs identifying bedrooms and a bathroom. Waldner’s wife is here somewhere, but never appears. His five children – two daughters and three sons – go about their business with a minimum of conversation. The girls, who are oldest, pay little attention to the visitors, but the younger boys rock back on their heels and stare. They can’t wipe the grins off their faces to save their lives.

One of the children runs water for a bath. Outside a few tufts of grass between the residence halls hungrily drink up the precipitation, but the area wouldn’t qualify as a lawn. It’s primarily mud on this day and dust most others.

“How could we water a lawn?” Waldner asks. “We don’t have water for that.”

“If I had a dollar for every egg I’ve touched,” Waldner says, “I could give you $5 million, and your photographer $5 million, and still have more than the two of you combined.”

The Plumber is standing at the end of the series of conveyor belts and other machinery that carry the eggs from hen to his hands. He can scoop up as many as eight at a time, four in each hand, and deposit them in Albertson’s egg cartons. Waldner says that 80 percent of the eggs sold in Montana stores come from Hutterite colonies.

The chicken barn is one of several buildings on the colony. There are hog and cow barns, the slaughterhouse, equipment repair and maintenance shops, a woodcarver’s shop where the Hutterites make their own furniture, a blacksmith shop, a garage, the residence halls and a K-8 school (public, and run by the Chinook School District). The Plumber’s shop also contains a diesel generator that stands by in case of power outages. Water’s a constant concern, but all the water in the world is useless without power to pump it to and through all those buildings.

“We’re as self-sufficient as we can be,” says Waldner, who was born on the Rockport Colony near Pendroy.

In the cow barn, hundreds of cows occupy row after row of individual metal stalls. They defecate into aisles that are cleaned by what look like giant windshield wipers that move, propelled a foot at a time by iron bars that run the length of the aisles, down the concrete floors, pushing the cow poop away. The animal waste is piped to a two-cell lagoon out beyond the farthest buildings. Effluent from it is spray-irrigated on a nearby pasture. Human waste from the residences and privies in the other buildings is piped to a separate treatment lagoon.

When it comes to water quality, the farm has nothing to fear but the farm itself. The lagoons, sewer lines, above-ground fuel storage tanks and pesticides are the greatest threats to the aquifer. The concrete floors in all the buildings keep anything from seeping into the ground. Leaking sewer lines, seepage from the lagoons or storm water runoff that might carry pesticides and chemicals from mixing areas are the biggest dangers.

Not that there’s much storm water to run off.

“Havre gets more moisture than we do up here,” Waldner says.

He gazes out at the miles and miles of flat land. Even though it is gray, cold and wet, even though the mud is ankle deep on this one rare day, you know there is no irony when the Plumber turns his bloodshot eye in the direction of the sky and says, “For some reason, the clouds can’t seem to find us.”

Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 523-5260 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com.