About Us/Practices

Meet your farmers!

Susan is 33 years old and a recent graduate of Southern Oregon University’s Environmental Education Masters Program.  Appropriately enough, her focus during her studies was farm education.  She delights in checking in with each animal every day, assessing health and happiness.  On warmer afternoons, you can find Susan sitting at the picnic tables, sorting eggs and eating bread with our wonderful olive oil and balsamic vinegar

Ken is 29 years old and a graduate of Stanford University.  He was born and raised in Woodland, California on his family’s farm.  There are stories that at the age of seven Ken was left on a tractor to rake alfalfa.  He did fine for a few hours, until an unfortunate encounter with a tree.  You can usually find Ken with a shovel or drill in hand, constantly working to build a sustainable farm system.  He has been known to eat eggs with almost any other food you can imagine. 

Margaret and her husband, Doug bought the farm property in 2004 as a place to retire, grow blueberries and make hard apple cider.  They loved that the property was close to town yet had a country feeling, and was relatively flat for ease of walking. Margaret’s interests lie with the farm’s plants, and she can most likely be found in the garden, or in the kitchen, preserving the garden’s bounty.  Learning new skills is very important to Margaret; she has recently taught herself how to render lard and produce olive oil soaps.

 

 

 

 

 

We believe first of all in sustainable farming practices. In the last few years “sustainable” has become a fashionable buzzword that has been so co-opted and misused that it has lost much of its meaning. Sustainability is the capacity to endure. As such, sustainability has both ecological and economic components.

On the ecological side, sustainable agricultural practices are those that treat the land and environment in such a way that they are preserved or improved over the long term. In this vein, we use no pesticides, herbicides, or synthetic fertilizers, refrain from giving our animals antibiotics or hormones, and use organically grown feed except when it is impossible to find. We installed solar panels in 2008 in an attempt to generate as much of our own electricity as we can.

A large part of sustainability, and one that we feel is often overlooked by many consumers in the push to consume organic foods, is buying locally. Buying locally both reduces food miles and keeps money in the local economy. We are currently looking for ways to get more, and ideally all, of our purchased inputs, especially feed, locally.