It was in the middle of high school that I really started to carve out an interest for myself in and seek experiences in agricultural production of some fruit and veg, some small livestock. I remember having a conversation with my college counselor about “I'm interested in this, like, where should I look?” She mentioned some of the top agricultural schools in the Northeast, like UVM and UNH, but that was where the conversation ended. It wasn't, “This is what these programs will have to offer you...

I remember…doing some chores one day with the pigs and thinking, “I don't need anything other than this. Everything is whole and complete as I do this work here with these animals. –Carrie You start with lambing and move through into lactation and then we start processing and so being able to manage the farm in that integrated way. Being able to really understand the performance of the animals and their health and how that relates to the quality of the milk and then how that milk is transfor...

We might not see the payoff of the things that we're doing here…but the legacy we're leaving for someone to walk in behind us, that's really important.—Sarah For me, especially having a job for so many years where there were a lot of days when you wake up and you go, “Man, I really don't want to go to work today”… that really doesn't happen anymore. I wake up every day ready to go. We're working, we're doing what we love together. You can't beat this. –Kenny Kenny and Sarah are the proud o...

“I think a lot of people seek out farm and food jobs because they're looking for something profound and they don't even know what it's going to be until they get there.”—Rose “Every year on the farm is so different. It really is. It feels every year we have different bandwidth for different things and we're improving all the time and making more bandwidth in some areas and losing it in other areas.”—Emily Emily and Rose both grew up in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts. Their paths cros...

“Raising animals is heavy. Even when it goes really well, it's heavy. And when you have losses, like we have had in the last couple of years, it changes the math -- even the finances of it. Okay, yeah, we lost money because we lost so many hens, but what we also lost sleep and tears and to wake up and go out and have a hundred chickens killed in one night--that happened to us once--and it just is so devastating.”—Hannah “To know that food is not a product that you buy at the store and food is n...

I came into farming really, as I got into it, being like--I'm a grower. That's where I want to grow my expertise; how to be a better caretaker for these animals, how to be more efficient with my time, with the land that we're using. To lean on people who are in processing, lean on them because their resources, their expertise are in processing or on the kosher side, lean on those people who really know what is required for it, bring them in and have them apply their expertise. The growth for me ...

The occasional summer I would go to Arkansas for a few nights when my family would make the trip out there from Dallas, Texas, they would only stay for a short period it was my aunt and uncle's Chicken farm. They were conventional growers for Tyson. It was a fun time out there, but I do remember thinking this is an enormous amount of hard work. My aunt and uncle never get to leave this farm and there's one thing I know for sure. And that's--I don't want to be a farmer.—Vanessa Chickens can't be...

It feels good that we're providing this product for people's nutrition, for their families. They keep coming back to us and appreciating that. We are who we are; we're the face, we talk to them, we have them to our farm for tours. That's what people are looking for.—Beth We both have a full time job figuring out how to move this business forward that that you can't get done if you're picking eggs and putting down bedding in the layer houses or fulfilling orders. Can't do it.—Bruce Be...

I describe farming as really just one long extended expedition. It's very much like a mountaineering expedition where you wake up every day, you're working outside. You have problems, often new problems that crop up at least weekly. It's very much like being in a big mountain expedition where you're constantly working with the weather. You're working with the people on your team. You are focused on a goal. That takes all of your effort that you really have to commit to a hundred percent.—Bruce ...

Watching them [kids] come to the farm; at first, it can be quite challenging. There is definitely an arc of sort of comfortableness just with being outside doing chores, hard manual labor. That takes a minute for a lot of kids to adjust to. But as they adjust, it's so cool to watch them come out of their shells.--Haley Hello my name is Haley Goulet, I am a livestock manager at a community farm and work to educate the public about livestock farming. I am passionate about teaching folks about t...

I remember being seven or eight years old and drawing… having construction paper, big rolls of paper all over the living room floor, drawing pictures of where my cows and my sheep and my chickens would go on my future farm.—Melissa You pick and choose your battles for sure…do we want to focus on cleaning up all of our step-in fence for the sheep and do all the outdoor stuff or are we going to focus on a house that we can bring friends into? So unfortunately, our game nights have taken a hi...

We had bought this house in Brattleboro. We'd bought the truck. We bought the sheep. We bought dogs. We did all of this long before COVID hit, but then we were like, okay, this is our pandemic project.—Kimberly Kimberly and Zan Walker-Gonҫalves were both kids exposed to animals but not raised on farms. As parents, they circled back to growing food and raising the maximum number of livestock their town in Massachusetts would legally allow. Five years ago, they packed up everything and moved...

I've wanted to quit about a hundred gazillion times, a lot- a lot. But I want to do what I love. So that is the key, right? To do what we love. And this is what I love to do. It comes with difficulties and it comes with rewards. I have to be able to handle both and know both. Nicolle Ferrier and family moved from Southern California to central Vermont to experience a more relaxed lifestyle, but soon found themselves creating a farm and business with plenty of excitement. They raise six differ...

There is a legacy throughout my family of having at least one member who served in all major conflicts back to the Revolutionary War. The other side of that coin is they were all farmers, homesteaders and innovators of their time from Eastern Tennessee and Kentucky. In 2009, my wife and I kept grew our first garden in a community growing space in northern Vermont. There was a moment of clarity and renewed sense of purpose after being recently discharged from the Marine Corps with multiple com...

We could actually look into the animal, the live animal, see intramuscular fat and tenderness. We also had these tools, linear measurement tools that we could actually physically measure the animals and began to find almost in any group of cattle the right kind of cattle that would make a delicious piece of meat. Ridge Shinn is the Executive Director of the Northeast Grass-fed Beef Initiative (NGBI). He also is the co-founder and CEO of Big Picture Beef, recently launched to produce Northeast gr...

I'm excited that the pandemic--for all its negativity--also said, “Hey, wait a minute. We need to concentrate on food resiliency”. We need to encourage these small diverse farms because the big operations, the five huge companies that sell 99 % of the meat in this country, failed us. For what reason? The structure, this food system structure failed us. John Roberts was appointed by the Biden Administration to serve as the State Executive Director of the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) in Vermont...

We'd rebuilt the milking parlor, which hadn't been operating. We've done all of this sort of stuff. When we came to close the sale we had two years of numbers to show that we actually knew-vaguely knew--what we were doing. We were off and running. We were here from 1977. We’re still here. We sold the farm, and we kept 10 acres, but we farmed until 2012. John Roberts was appointed by the Biden Administration to serve as the State Executive Director of the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) in Verm...