Vegetables And Mushrooms
We focus on growing heirloom and uncommon varieties of vegetables. Although a perfect looking tomato might feel safe and familiar, just wait until you try an ugly heirloom tomato! So much of the diversity on vegetable farms has been boiled down to just a handful of varieties that have been manipulated for the longest shelf life, ease of processing, and highest yield. Flavor and nutrition simply don't play a role in the equation from the standpoint of grocery stores and many restaurants.
Because we only sell to local markets, shelf life isn't nearly as much of a concern to us. Flavor, nutrition, and beauty are what we focus on expressing in our vegetables. We achieve this through focussing first on soil health - disturbing the soil as little as possible, balancing soil nutrients with organic fertilizers, and building organic matter in the soil by rotating the land we use for growing vegetables with perennial pasture that we graze our pigs and chickens on. This rotation utilizes the ecological role of animals to consume plants in the pasture and disperse their manure, which cycle nutrients, increase rainfall infiltration, and build soil by sequestering carbon from the atmosphere at staggering rates. If soil science and agroecology are as interesting to you as they are to us you should consider reading, "The Biological Farmer" by Gary Zimmer from Wisconsin or "Farm As Ecosystem" by Jerry Brunetti.
We grow several kinds of gourmet mushrooms by inoculating wheat straw and hardwood chips with mycelium (the growing portion of the mushroom) that we culture ourselves. We grow these indoors so that we can have them available bug-free year round. We are experimenting with feeding the spent mushroom-straw mixture to the pigs as there is research that shows that the enzymes and other nutrients in the mushroom-straw can benefit a pig's diet. This is an important part of reducing our dependance on grain to feed to our pigs.