We want our farm to be your farm, quite literally speaking.

We’re launching a project with the goal of establishing a thriving regenerative farm long after we are gone.

We’re forming a farmer-owned cooperative and looking for prospective member-owners to join us.

Put simply, we’re looking for folks:
– who have a passion for feeding their community
– who want to live, work, and play in the Adirondacks
– who want to engage in a sharing economy and reap the benefits that a worker-owned cooperative offers.

This agricultural cooperative is about access to farmland, affordable housing opportunities, and a shared business.

A model for farm succession

While we did engage with land trusts over conservation easements as a way to protect and preserve farmland by reducing the market value for future farmers, once established, you are forever locked into whatever agreement was made.

The crux was simply this: “who am I to decide the fate of this land in perpetuity?” There are forces in this world, climate disruption comes to mind, that will pay little heed to the easements and covenants that have been so diligently inked with the best intentions for the future. Landscapes can and will change over time.

So we have 80 acres here and as two people, we’ve known that we alone cannot fully bring about the plethora of foods and ecological diversity that our soils have to offer the eaters of Essex County.

The question we would get is, “why don’t you hire people?”

As someone who had left a prior corporate career to work for themselves and start something new on our own, having employees never felt right either.

I know this is what many farms do, but I didn’t want to swap one corporate culture for another that just happened to be producing food.

Being relatively new myself to this food and farming genre, what stuck in my craw was having someone work full-time for an hourly wage knowing full well they could be doing this for themselves as their own boss.

So other than a few instances of family members helping out part-time when Kimmy had shoulder surgery, we’ve been just two peas in a pod for the majority of the almost 10 years we’ve been doing this.

It was until I started thinking about farm succession planning, which CCE Essex has a good deal of helpful resources on, that something clicked.

There’s a third way to make this happen.

• a way to bring new faces on the farm to live, work, and play
• a way to help us eventually transition out in the future
• and a way to feed more of Essex County

And that’s through a farmer/worker-owned cooperative.

You can learn more about our farm cooperative here

…and help us spread the word to prospective members.

Thanks again,
Dan & Kimmy