The occasional summer I would go to Arkansas for a few nights when my family would make the trip out there from Dallas, Texas, they would only stay for a short period  it was my aunt and uncle's Chicken farm. They were conventional growers for Tyson.  It was a fun time out there, but I do remember thinking  this is an enormous amount of hard work. My aunt and uncle never get to leave this farm and there's one thing I know for sure. And that's--I don't want to be a farmer.—Vanessa   Chickens can't be productive without a grain implement.  The other thing is a lot of our ..read more

It feels good that we're providing this product for people's nutrition, for their families. They keep coming back to us and appreciating that. We are who we are; we're the face, we talk to them, we have them to our farm for tours. That's what people are looking for.—Beth   We both have a full time job figuring out how to move this business forward that that you can't get done if you're picking eggs and putting down bedding in the layer houses or fulfilling orders. Can't do it.—Bruce   Beth Whiting and Bruce Hennessey are the co-founders and co-owners of Maple Wind Farm, a diversified ..read more

Watching them [kids] come to the farm; at first, it can be quite challenging. There is definitely an arc of sort of comfortableness just with being outside doing chores, hard manual labor. That takes a minute for a lot of kids to adjust to.  But as they adjust, it's so cool to watch them come out of their shells.--Haley   Hello my name is Haley Goulet, I am a livestock manager at a community farm and work to educate the public about livestock farming. I am passionate about teaching folks about the origin of their food and continuing to learn the best ways of ethically raising meat ..read more

I remember being seven or eight years old and drawing… having construction paper, big rolls of paper all over the living room floor, drawing pictures of where my cows and my sheep and my chickens would go on my future farm.—Melissa   You pick and choose your battles for sure…do we want to focus on cleaning up all of our  step-in fence for the sheep and  do all the outdoor stuff or are we going to focus on a house that we can bring friends into? So unfortunately,  our game nights have taken a hit on not being able to invite people over, but our understanding of field ma ..read more

I've wanted to quit about a hundred gazillion times, a lot- a lot. But I want to do what I love. So that is the key, right? To do what we love. And this is what I love to do.  It comes with difficulties and it comes with rewards. I have to be able to handle both and know both.   Nicolle Ferrier and family moved from Southern California to central Vermont to experience a more relaxed lifestyle, but soon found themselves creating a farm and business with plenty of excitement. They raise six different types of unusual and heritage fowl, from game birds to emus (in order of size), caring ..read more

There is a legacy throughout my family of having at least one member who served in all major conflicts back to the Revolutionary War. The other side of that coin is they were all farmers, homesteaders and innovators of their time from Eastern Tennessee and Kentucky.    In 2009, my wife and I kept grew our first garden in a community growing space in northern Vermont.  There was a moment of clarity and renewed sense of purpose after being recently discharged from the Marine Corps with multiple combat deployments, that encouraged further exploration into food production.  Ove ..read more

We could actually look into the animal, the live animal, see intramuscular fat and tenderness. We also had these tools, linear measurement tools that we could actually physically measure the animals and began to find almost in any group of cattle the right kind of cattle that would make a delicious piece of meat.   Ridge Shinn is the Executive Director of the Northeast Grass-fed Beef Initiative (NGBI). He also is the co-founder and CEO of Big Picture Beef, recently launched to produce Northeast grass-fed beef for Northeast customers.  He has been a leader in the shift from feedlot pr ..read more

I'm excited that the pandemic--for all its negativity--also said, “Hey, wait a minute. We need to concentrate on food resiliency”.  We need to encourage these small diverse farms because the big operations, the five huge companies that sell 99 % of the meat in this country, failed us. For what reason? The structure, this food system structure failed us.   John Roberts was appointed by the Biden Administration to serve as the State Executive Director of the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) in Vermont in February 2022.   Roberts immigrated to Vermont from Great Britain in 1974 after ..read more

We'd rebuilt the milking parlor, which hadn't been operating. We've done all of this sort of stuff. When we came to close the sale we had two years of numbers to show that we actually knew-vaguely knew--what we were doing. We were off and running. We were here from 1977. We’re still here. We sold the farm, and we kept 10 acres, but we farmed until 2012. John Roberts was appointed by the Biden Administration to serve as the State Executive Director of the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) in Vermont in February 2022.   Roberts immigrated to Vermont from Great Britain in 1974 after earning hi ..read more

“My husband had been fascinated by Scottish Highlanders. We would drive by this place and you'd have to stop, get out of the car and like look through the woods to see them. And I was like, they're just big, shaggy horned beasts.  I don't know about horns, you know, and it was like, oh my gosh.  They wanted to sell the herd. They were getting older, had health problems. They wanted it to go somewhere local. A young family. I'm like, well, we're young, we're a family,  maybe we could buy some calves. I didn't want anything to do with moms.  I will buy some calves. So I come ..read more