My husband and I are inspired by the Catholic Worker movement and started this farm so we can share the joys and challenges of farm life with others.

I started joking about becoming a farmer when I was in college—I used to say to myself, “I just want to be a farmer!” as if it would be a simpler life. I worked for a non-profit in rural Panama over the summers and was so inspired by the deep connection that the indigenous people there have to the land and by their strong sense of community. My work involved identifying and treating water quality issues, but the more we talked to the locals and did our research, the more obvious it became that the source of the problem was degraded cropland and pasture from increasingly industrialized farms upstream. This inspired me to get my MS in Agroecology at OSU to study more sustainable land management practices.

After grad school, I worked in organic certification for a few years. I loved the mission and the people but I just couldn't sit at a desk for 40 hours a week so I started looking for farming jobs. An amazing opportunity came up to manage the food pantry farm for a group of Dominican sisters. Shepherd's Corner is a place that beautifully integrated the Catholic faith with ecology, and I loved working with volunteers of all backgrounds and ages. When my husband and I got engaged, we started looking for land of our own to carry on a similar mission and here we are.

Most parts of our land are not suitable for annual agriculture due to slope and soil type. For that reason, we are in the process of re-introducing pasture animals to the land, and planting perennial fruit trees and berries that require less tillage and hold the soil in place better than vegetable crops.