Meet your farmers!

Susan graduated from Southern Oregon University’s Environmental Education Masters Program in 2010. 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 any given afternoon, you can find Susan working at the egg cleaning machine, labeling olive oil or churning out some fresh yellow butter.

Ken is 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.

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.

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.