You can help our CSA by signing up to be a neighborhood captain. Our goal is to bring fresh, local produced vegetables and meats to as many people as possible. One of our niches is convenience. By distributing our veggies, meats and eggs in your neighborhood you help us and save money:

Sign up 5 new members and get 15% of your total membership.

10 new members and get 30% off

15+ new members and get 50% off

This is a great way to connect with your community, save money and eat well. Contact us for more information if you're interested in this oppertunity.

Last year we re-booted our CSA program. This effort would not have been such a success without the help of our good friends Leah and Rob Skiff and Common Roots. We held our pick-ups in the South Burlington High School parking lot. This year we got a call from Healthy Living Market asking if we'd be interested in doing the pick-up in their parking lot. For a number of reasons this makes sense. First, it's a great store; our members can augment their vegetable pick-up with grocery shopping. Second, they have a clean bathroom. Third, it helps our relationship with one of our most important wholesale accounts. In addition to a Healthy Living drop we are adding neighborhood pick-ups and an on-farm pick-up. We'll have pick-ups in Starksboro, Bristol, and three spots in South Burlington (Healthy Living, Orchard neighborhood, Vermont National neighborhood). If you are interested in hosting a pick-up in your neighborhood, give us a shout!

When we started our farm journey fifteen years ago we were obsessed with soil. We read everything about it, played in it all day long, got together with friends at night and talked soil. Since we started farming in the Burlington Intervale, the soil was amazing. Rich sandy loam that grew everything you threw at it. When we arrived in Starksboro it was a wake up call. Rocks, gravel, ledge, and depleted soils were the new reality. We've adapted but it's taken time, and now a new vision is emerging. What we've learned after all these years is that the answer is grass. Vermont grows great grass, it's always been a pastoral state. How to take advantage after years of dirt farming? Our new farm vision starts with grass, add lambs because they mow grass, rotate on poultry (layers and broilers) to fertilize the ground, follow the next year with winter squash. Since we peel butternut squash we feed the seeds to pigs, which imparts a distinct flavoring (the best pork is finished with a seed crop, think Spanish pigs and acorns). So there it is grass+lambs+poultry+winter squash=great pork.

Food awareness is everywhere you turn these days, as a result one of the fastest growing trends in agriculture is connecting the consumer directly to the producer. 12,500 farms in the U.S. ran CSA's last year. Community Supported Fisheries is an exciting new addition to the mix. Originally started in Rockland,Maine (great town by the way) by the Port Clyde Fresh Catch Fishery, this is an idea whose time seems to have arrived. Consider a similar effort launched in Boston. Organized by the Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Association, MIT Sea Grant and the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, initial hopes were for 50 members to start; 750 Bostonian's joined the first year and 500 more are on a waiting list. The politics of food are complicated but fishing politics are really complicated. What's good and what's right? Small, local, regional, fresh caught are all buzz words but what does it all mean? The Port Clyde Fresh Catch has partnered with the Island Institute and initiated some strong conservation measures, especially in the area of shrimping. However CSF's do not as a rule regulate catching procedures. One of the main controversies is the type of species being offered, a number of which are listed on various red list maintained by such groups as Blue Ocean Institute and the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program because of concerns about over-fishing, habitat impacts and mercury. The author Samuel Fromartz (Organic INC.) is taking a different approach with his SeaSA. Basically, a buyer's club he intends to source only sustainable fish, regardless of the carbon footprint. An obvious example is fresh caught salmon from Alaska. You can read more about this effort by visiting his excellent blog ChewsWise. We are excited about these developments and will keep a watchful eye as this idea progresses. We intend to offer exciting add-ons to our CSA and Meat CSA such as Doe's Leap goat cheese and Kefir, Vermont Coffee Co. coffee, etc. Why not fish someday?

Micheal Pollan said it best when he observed "you are what you eat, eats". When we first started raising pigs we used to feed them scraps that the local supermarket would save for us. Funny thing is pigs are just kids in that they prefer doughnuts to veggies. We were disappointed with the meat that year. We now strictly control the pigs diet. We feed them 3-5# of conventional grain per day, provide them with unlimited access to high quality pasture, and augment with vegetables from our certified organic vegetable farm. Fall and winter our farm peels butternut squash as a major component of our business. The best pork in the world is finished on a seed crop, if affects the fatty acids and imparts distinct flavoring. In Spain they finish pigs with acorns, Southern farmers "hog down" their peanut fields, we use butternut seeds from our processing facility. Ever since we've changed feeding practices we've noticed huge improvements in flavor. A friend recently told us our pork is the best he's ever had, which of course is a huge complement.

What's the best sandwich ever? B.L.T right. You can imagine we were quite proud the first time we ever made this sandwich with our bacon, our lettuce, our tomatoes. Later we switched from lettuce to arugula and started calling them B.A.T.S (bacon, arugula, tomato). For reasons to long for this post Eric and Louissa were in Boston this weekend. When we travel we eat, B+G Oysters was recommended to us by our good friend Maura at Penney Cluse Cafe. Great spot, highly recommended and the Lobster B.L.T. was a revelation (why didn't we think of that). Stay tuned for more on Lobster B.A.T's. 

To say that it's been a weird weather year would be quite an understatement. Some of the warmest weather of the year was in April, the monsoon rains of June and July were challenging to say the least, August was nice, but cold. November had one of the longest stretches of beautiful weather we've ever seen in Vermont. Today the 4th of December it snowed, not much, but it did snow. The great thing about snow after a long challenging farm year is that it covers up everything you don't want to see anymore. All the messes, unfinished projects, rutted driveway are blanketed. Besides it's really cool to see pigs roaming around in their snow coated paddock.

Step one in our future pig breeding program! We spent the day traveling to New Hampshire to acquire our first port a hut. These simple metal structures will serve as shelters for our pigs instead of a permanent barn. Today's purchase was a 8'*14' structure on skids. It will be used for feeder pigs. Keenann has her sites set on breeding Large Black hogs, the plan is to acquire a boar and several gilts. We will also cross the Large Black with Tamworth/Berkshire mixes. Once the breeding program is up in going we will use port a hut farrowing huts for the sows. Eric is trying to visualize how to use a port a hut as an eggmobile for pastured egg production. More on these projects to follow.