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Millard church members work the land to feed food pantry

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Millard Community Church members, from the left, Neil Watson, Gary Lawton, the Rev. Lyle Heinitz, Curt Rowley and Jerry Chamberlain pose for a photo during harvesting for the church’s five-acre Grow project. Donations funded the corn crop from planting to harvesting, and nearly $6,000 was donated to the Elkhorn Food Pantry as a result.

Betty Felton, and her son-in-law Neil Watson, are shown here at the Elkhorn Food Pantry. Watson farms eight acres of his in-laws’ land and this year, they donated five acres for a corn-growing mission project through Millard Community Church, where Watson chaired the project. The money made from the corn crop went to the food pantry, where Felton is president of the board of directors. Dan Plutchak/WalworthCountyToday.com.

SUGAR CREEK TOWNSHIP — If the members of Millard Community Church were gamblers, they’d be holding a winning lottery ticket. But as it stands, they still won a bounty for a worthy recipient: the Elkhorn Food Pantry.

Church members decided to raise corn in a Grow project, or mission activity, this spring and use the proceeds from the sale of the harvest to benefit a local charity — the Elkhorn Food Pantry, located at St. John’s Lutheran Church on Broad Street.

Thanks to a record year for corn, the five acres donated to the project yielded a bumper crop of 1,120 bushels — that’s 224 bushels to the acre — and netted them $5,892.

“The yield was very, very good,” said Neil Watson, board chairman of the Millard Church’s Grow project and a program technician with the Farm Service Agency in Walworth County. “I think the members are really excited and want to do more acres next year. We haven’t officially talked about it, but I told them this was an abnormal year.”

Watson had suggested the Grow project to church members as a possible mission activity after he’d heard about it while in Louisiana with other church members helping to clean up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The activity became a collaborative effort, with members volunteering to plant, spray and harvest the corn.

Church member Diane Wuttke, who also is a pantry board member, said the project fit the church’s mission statement, which is to help the local community.

“It was great to come up to the fields and see that big wagon of yellow corn against the blue sky,” she said. “It was like a blessing from God.”

Read the full story in the Oct. 31, 2010 e-edition of Walworth County Sunday, PAGE 12A.