Home

Products

Past & Future

Farming Approach

Why Organic?

Purchasing

Farm Orders

Photos

Contact

History

Our commitment to organic farming has allowed us to grow from our small beginnings to what we are today while still maintaining our standards with regard to animal care and environmental preservation.

The Beginning

In 1988 our family moved to this small farm near Kettle River, Minnesota. We started a hobby farm so that we could produce some of our own vegetables as well as some home grown meats for our family to eat. We also started tapping maple trees in the spring to collect sap that we could make into maple syrup. Our original goal was to produce enough food so that our family could eat and so that we could sell enough to equal our costs of production.

Expansion

After a few years of farming under this goal we realized how much we loved to farm and how great the demand was for the products. We decided to expand and start selling a greater quantity and variety of products. We started by selling farm fresh eggs, chickens, and a few Thanksgiving turkeys to friends and neighbors. We also started more gardens to increase our output of produce. We then began to sell our products at a local farmers' market once a week. This was a good experience, where we met many people with the same approach to farming and life as us. We received many orders for vegetables, chickens, and turkeys and had many return customers. Because of the support of our customers as well as that of other farmers, we decided to expand even further. We constructed a new barn that could house more chickens, turkeys, pigs, and that also contained a small greenhouse which would extend our growing season. We also purchased more taps to collect maple syrup and constructed a larger evaporator which is used to turn sap into syrup. We began to sell our produce at the Whole Foods Co-op in Duluth, Minnesota as well as at farmer's markets and from our own home. In 2008 we started a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) that grew to service more people each succeeding year. In addition to having built a greenhouse in 2007, in 2008 we bought a walk-in cooler and in 2009 we purchased another greenhouse.

Currently

Currently we are tapping 150 maple trees for sap and we have begun to sell our syrup at farmer's markets. We also have approximately 50 egg laying chickens which produce 15 to 20 dozen eggs per week. We raise 65-70 turkeys for Thanksgiving dinners, and 150-200 chickens that we sell mostly by pre-order. We also raise 4 pigs per year, which we sell for meat. In terms of produce we currently have 7 large gardens in addition to the 2 greenhouses. Our produce was sold mostly through our CSA and at the Whole Foods Co-op in Duluth, Minnesota. This year we stopped our CSA and will now take orders for bi-monthly deliveries of products, ordered from our website, to Moose Lake and Duluth.

Plans

We worked up two larger fields in 2010 and planted oats and peas and in the fall we planted winter rye. This year we will take soil samples and see what we need to do to make the soil fertile. Once the soil is healthy we plan on planting oats and harvesting straw and the grain. We promise to continue providing an organic alternative to supermarkets, and to maintain our standards by remembering our reasons for starting this farm.

.