Faith, forests and final rest: Iowa Trappist Monks blend spiritual life with conservation, sustainable craftsmanship

PEOSTA — Every morning before the sun comes up, Brother Joseph is beginning his day.

Brother Joseph, a Trappist Monk, is up by 4:30 a.m., heading out to start work in the New Melleray Abbey’s garden.

He spends hours picking fruit off trees and tending to plants growing in the earth, stopping only for meals and Mass.

Brother Joseph is one of 12 Trappist Monks at New Melleray Abbey in Peosta who have given up families and access to the outside world to take a vow of obedience to live a religious life, giving back to the world around them.

Brother Joseph said that other monks at the monastery all have jobs that relate to “working with their hands,” ranging from gardening, working with timber, crafting sustainably made caskets, making cheese or growing mushrooms, in addition to leading prayers and singing in the choir.

Although the monastery has shifted away from farming on the property, Brother Joseph said much of their work focuses on conservation and the natural world.

  Buy Photo

Focus on conservation

In fact, with the help of the Abbey’s full-time forester John Schroeder, the monastery has been actively working to implement dams in the creeks along the monastery’s wooded property.

Schroeder said he and volunteers have built several beaver dam analogs, which are human-made dams built into a stream that mimic a natural beaver dam, slowing the water, tapping sediment and fostering a healthy wetland habitat.

Schroeder said building the beaver dam analogs is a simple solution. They are natural and cost-efficient, and beavers will often finish the work of building the dams, saving money and time.

“A creature is willing to do the work for free, if you give it a combination of space and some sticks,” he said.

  Buy Photo

With nutrient loss into waterways a persistent issue throughout the state, Schroeder said beavers can reduce the amount of phosphorus, nitrogen, sedimentation in the water, and they can slow the water down as it flows through the creek.

As of this month, the monastery has built 12 beaver dam analogs and four primary, more traditional dams across the property.

Schroeder said the monastery also has prairies throughout its property, which act as a buffer for the nutrient runoff that comes from their neighbors, who farm the land with more traditional agricultural practices.

Not only have the prairies helped limit the amount of runoff that goes into the monastery’s streams, but Schroeder said they’ve allowed for wildlife — including ring-necked pheasants, turkey vultures and bald eagles — to return to the area.

Schroeder said the pheasants are a good indicator that there is a healthy amount of grassland habitat.

In fact, the monastery has been awarded more than $3 million to continue — and expand — its conservation work under the Forest Legacy Program.

The Forest Legacy Program — housed within the U.S. Forest Service — helps protect private forests from being converted for other non-forest uses.

So far, through their restoration conservation project, the monastery has planted about 50,000 trees across 50 acres.

Aron Flickinger, forestry program specialist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, oversees the Forest Legacy Program for Iowa. He said the program helps keep “forests as forests.”

The Legacy Program is federally funded and is administered individually by each state in the U.S., Flickinger said. He said it is up to each state to identify and assist landowners who are willing to put their forested land into an easement through the program.

He said landowners often put their land in the program to ensure it is safe from conversion, commercial building or urban sprawl and to help fight invasive species.

  Buy Photo

The monastery sits on the headwaters of Catfish Creek, a tributary of the Upper Mississippi River. So, under the project name Catfish Creek Headwaters, the monastery has been allocated funding to put 1,456 acres of timber land into an easement so it can stay forested permanently.

Flickinger said states are allocated what he called “core funding” from the U.S. Forest Service, which is then awarded to natural areas that qualify for the program. He said his role with the Iowa DNR is to find eligible properties to submit for funding consideration.

“Even if we find a property that we think fits the criteria for Forest Legacy funding, we're still competing against all the other projects across the United States,” Flickinger said. “It’s not automatic funding.”

Flickinger said that once an application is submitted, it goes to a national panel that ranks all projects that have requested funding to determine who will get funding.

He said the Catfish Creek project at the monastery was selected because of how atypical it is.

“It is competitive, and their applications are pretty involved,” he said. “You (must) have some lead time to get on the properties.”

Schroeder said the monastery submitted its application for the program in 2022. They were allocated funding in May 2025.

He said this federal funding is important because it will support the monastery’s conservation work on their 1,400-acre property and help supply jobs to both monks and workers in Dubuque County.

Specifically, the $3,335,000 worth of funding will boost the monastery’s in-house casket making business.

  Buy Photo

‘More than just a box’

Since its inception in 1999, Trappist Caskets has produced about 2,000 high-quality, handmade wooden caskets built from sustainably harvested wood from their forest each year.

Trappist Caskets has generated about $5 million in revenue from international sales.

Sam Mulgrew, founder of Trappist Caskets and director of the business at the monetary, said there are four different sizes of caskets available for purchase. He said they also make a child-sized casket for no charge.

“Every day, we ship out children's caskets across the country for families that are in need,” Mulgrew said.

Typical adult caskets made at the monastery range in price from $1,500 to $4,000. They also make wooden cremation urns as well.

Mulgrew said there are some other monasteries across the United States that are doing similar work, but Trappist Caskets was the first.

We were “the first ones to kind of get into this and really take it seriously,” he said. “The tribes here are doing it because that's how they earn their living.”

Mulgrew said the issue with the “death care industry” in the Western Hemisphere is that it is controlled by the private sector. Mulgrew called it “profane.”

“If we're in Asia or India, the priestly class handles that intersection of life and death. In the United States, it is done by capitalists, funeral directors, the whole sort of death care industry, industry is guided by profit and loss,” Mulgrew said. “The Trappists don't approach it that way. The sacred part of making a casket and adding value to it that's more than just a box, a container to hold a body.”

He said that each casket also blessed by the Trappist Monks.

Mulgrew said the forests across the monastery’s property are not “mined” so they can cut down and use cheap wood for the caskets.

“It's the opposite,” he said. “We're really more focused on trying to create a genetically diverse ecosystem out there, and when that ecosystem says, can provide us material for caskets.”

Brother Joseph said that part of the casket making business model is the monastery’s commitment to replanting trees that were cut down to make the caskets.

  Buy Photo

Mulgrew said in the 1950s, the Forest Department was pushing for more white pine — which grows quickly — to be planted. Mulgrew said the monks planted much of it.

“Never did they think in a million years that they would be harvesting those trees to make a wood product that would go on the market,” he said.

Schroeder said that forestry and monastery labor work well together because they are both “focused on the long term.”

It “makes forestry a natural fit for the Trappists,” he said.

Mulgrew said there have been opportunities for the monastery to expand the number of caskets shipped around the world, but the Trappist Monks collectively decided against it.

“We're not interested in growing the casket business,” Mulgrew said. “We're not willing to take the risk of allowing the tail to wag the dog. Growth is of interest to us, but not in terms of volume growth or making more caskets to make more money. That's not where the monastery is psychologically.”

Olivia Cohen covers energy and environment for The Gazette and is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues. She is also a contributing writer for the Ag and Water Desk, an independent journalism collaborative focusing on the Mississippi River Basin.

Sign up for our curated, weekly environment & outdoors newsletter.

Comments: olivia.cohen@thegazette.com