About Us

Andrea and Luke are stewarding a little corner of the Earth, managing it in communion with nature and the natural way of things to foster a wholesome and productive landscape and to produce super high quality food for our local community.

We decided to farm differently than most places, to be radically traditional by putting the animals on the land and renouncing all chemicals and drugs. The effect of getting rid of the chemicals was almost instantaneous. The land came back to life in the blink of an eye. Frogs came back the first year, droves of dragon flies the second year. Salamanders and earthworms and dung beetles and a dizzying array of pasture plants, spiders and butterflies. In year 5 (2025), it keeps going. The ecology of our farm, the energy of it has become a symphony. And that is where we raise all of our animals – the cows, the chickens, the pigs – all of them among and contributing their own part to the symphony - outside, in the sunshine and shade, in the infinite fresh air, upon the living earth. Raised outside, the symphony of our natural world infuses the animals with life, making for robust and beautiful animals, and nutrient dense and delicious meat.

At present time, everything we sell is raised on our farm. If at some point we sell someone else’s product, like honey or what have you, we would clearly indicate that someone else grew/raised/produced it.

When we say we raised it, we don’t mean it was here for a little while then it went to the butcher and now we are selling it. Our animals are either born at Farmcraft or come here when they are just a day or two old. Piglets are born here each Spring. Meat chickens come as day-old-chicks. Hens come sometimes as 10 week old pullets and sometimes as day-old-chicks. Some cattle come as 2-day old calves from the neighboring Jersey dairy. Other cattle are born here each Spring and Summer.

Following is some detail on our practices in raising Pigs, Chickens, Hens and Cattle:

Pigs

Piglets are born outside in mobile shelters to their mama sows each Spring. They’re raised for 6 to 8 months, rotated around the farm on living green pastures until late Summer or Fall when they are butchered at the peak of their nutritional intake. They are provided an organic feed mix including corn, soybeans, wheat, kelp, calcium and salt. Pigs perform well on this mix, growing steadily with vibrant good health. Some people don’t want corn or soy fed meats. We have considered this and have not found organic corn or organic soy to be objectionable. If you have something we should read regarding organic corn or organic soybeans, we are happy to see it. We feel that our mix of organic grains, especially in conjunction with weekly paddock rotations to diverse living green pastures, sunshine and fresh air, are producing an absolutely top quality pork to nourish you and yours. We raise Idaho Pasture Pigs, Gloucestershire Old Spots, and crosses between them. These are heritage pig breeds that mother well, grow at a moderate pace, thrive on pasture and produce delicious heritage-flavor red-colored fat-marbled pork.

 

Meat Chickens

Meat chickens come here as day-old-chicks. They are Cornish Cross chickens, aka Jumbo Broilers. These fast-growing big-breasted birds are what consumers expect when they buy and eat chicken, and they can be grown on our pastures in a way that is kind and gentle for the birds and beneficial to the land. The feed is an organic grain mix similar to the pig feed but with a little higher protein, see above for a discussion of that. They are housed for the first 18-21 days in a warm brooder, then they go to the pasture until 7-8 weeks old. In the pasture they are in mobile pasture pens that are moved each day to provide shelter, shade, water, a move away from yesterday’s manure and a fresh set of greens to eat and lounge on. In the mobile pens, we give them the exact environment they want – clean ground, fresh water, no crowding, a nourishing mix of grains, a mineral and vitamin rich mix of living forages, sun to warm them in the morning, shade to protect them midday, protection from the predators at night. We don’t use pharmaceuticals and have good robust health in our meat chickens, due to the fresh air, sunshine and copious intake of fresh green pasture plants.

 

Hens and Eggs

Hens sometimes come as day-old-chicks or sometimes as 10-week old pullets. They are raised similar to our meat chickens until they start laying eggs at 18-weeks old or so. They spend Spring through Fall on pasture with regular moves to a fresh ¼ acre paddock, about every 5 days or so. This means that they always have legumes, forbs and grasses to forage and bugs and roots to scratch and dig for. This exercise, fresh air, relaxed environment and nutritious foraging allow the hens to lay incredibly rich and highly nutritious eggs. Besides the pasture, the hens are offered an organic mix of grains similar to the meat chickens. During winter, then hens are housed in our vegetable hoop houses bedded with 12” of wood mulch. They continue to thrive through the winter in this bright and airy shelter. We provide high quality organic alfalfa during winter to keep up their intake of green vegetation, helping to maintain their good health and egg quality. In 2026 we plan to raise a new group of hens by incubating fertilized eggs from Polyface Farm.

 

Beef

Our beef is 100% grass finished.

Some of our cattle are Jersey calves we buy from the nearby family dairy farm in the early Summer. We get them at 1-2 days old and raise them in group pens near our house, giving them constant attention and sweet songs and loving touches for 10 to 12 weeks. It’s easy to give them this attention, because they are sweet and adorable. During this time we give them the highest quality milk replacer we have found, clean hay bedding, and high quality organic hay to eat. This year (2025) we also gave the calves organic grain for this first 10-12 weeks. Last year we did not. We hope the grain helps the calves develop their rumen faster, so that they are more able to digest grass and pasture plants during the Fall so that they are bigger and stronger for the winter and more able to digest the hay we feed during winter. They’ll be on our farm for about 2 years, over 100 weeks, after being weaned from milk and grain, so they will certainly have lots of time to assimilate the diverse pasture nutrients that make grass-fed/finished beef so delicious and nutrient dense.

In addition to bottle calves, we raise cattle via cows. A “Cow-Calf to Finish” operation, at they say. We have a beautiful and diverse herd including a Dexter bull and a number of Jersey and Dexter and Speckled Park cows, and these cows give birth to calves in the early Summer. The cows raise the calves themselves – birth them, lick them off, nurse them on colostrum and then milk, keep them close, show them how to graze and be part of the herd. It’s a beautiful cycle to behold.

None of our cattle get drugs or vaccines or anything like that.

All of the cattle rotationally graze together as a herd. We move them from paddock to paddock each day, providing fresh water, mineral rich salt and kelp, fresh air, shelter (trees) as needed, and copious amounts of living, green, diverse forage. They chow down for about 8 hours a day, the other 16 hours given to laying down, ruminating, staring off, standing on a mound, and generally being happy relaxed bovines. During the non-growing season (December through April or so), we feed the cattle organic hay. They are still outside and eating the highest quality hay we can find. They grow long thick coats of hair that make them largely impervious to the cold and snow. Still we give them hills or trees or hay or a tractor wagon as a windbreak that they can use when they want. This is called “outwintering”, and the cattle and the land respond to it with good health and fertility.

--

If you have questions about our practices, we are happy to talk about it. If you have suggestions, we are happy to hear them. The craft of farming is what we do, what we think about, and we enjoy talking and listening about it.