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Our Story
Sometimes it seems like about 90% of the reason why we are out here is that Sally and I share a passion for food. Put simply--we love to eat. And living here gives us a chance to eat the freshest, healthiest and most delicious food, from the most local source: our own back yard. From our kitchen garden that produces fresh vegetables and berries in season, to our small orchard, to our pasture-raised meats, our lives here are filled with the quest to enjoy great eating. But any story of who we are and how we came to be here is bound to me a more complicated mish-mash of factors than just wanting to eat well. What follows is an attempt to condense that tale a bit for you, and to introduce you more fully to us, and the source of your food.
When I was a student at Kenyon College, I came out of a combined Religion/Sociology class one day overwhelmed with anxiety that there just didn’t seem to be any place in the world where I could live out the values of family, community, stewardship, peaceableness, faith, and creativity that had been at the heart of my upbringing on the plains of Kansas. (And of course it seemed like food and eating were at the heart of so many of the childhood events which shaped those values—from nightly family dinners to church potlucks). It should have come as no surprise to me me that day that the image which formed in my head, and which I couldn’t seem to shake, was that of a great big hog wallowing in a barnyard. It gave a great chuckle to my Chicago-born-and-bred classmate when I proclaimed in almost agonized frustration, “I just want to raise a PIG!” But in that image something clicked for me. It sounds goofy, I know, but in the persistence of that image, it became clear to me that day that the confluence of all my experiences, talents, and interests were leading me to farming. I let that image gestate for about a week before I called my then girlfriend, Sally, back at KU in Lawrence, Kansas. With some trepidation that this might be the conversation that ended our relationship, I laid out my vision for a simple life on a small farm, raising a family, eating food from our own land. To my delight she responded “I think that sounds great! Go for it!” And though now, after years of marriage and well into this adventure, she claims to have no recollection of that conversation, thus began our odyssey into the world of farming. After we had been married a little over a year we moved to Boys Town, Nebraska in the suburbs of Omaha to live and work with kids in need. All during our seven-and-a-half years there we kept the dream of someday getting that little place back home in Kansas to settle down and raise a family and great food. The time in Omaha allowed us to do rewarding work while developing some other interests which would help build that dream when the time came. Sally got to do some graduate design work at the University of Nebraska, part-time, for a few semesters. She began to hone her computer skills and started laying the groundwork for her current work in advertising and marketing doing User Experience Design and Digital Production. I got to start gardening the plots available to employees at the Boys Town farm. I began to learn some construction and technical skills at a local community college. And I had my first introduction to strawbale and timberframe housebuilding, and to pasture-based farming. We also started our family when our son, Burke Abraham was born in August of 2000, and when we informally adopted Loretta Delp, one of our longtime Boys Town residents, when she graduated from high school in May of 2001. In 1999, while still at Boys Town, we began to search in earnest for a place to begin our farm dream by looking at acreages in Jefferson County, Kansas, a part of the state I was familiar with from my days of bicycle racing in the Lawrence area after college. We fell in love with our little 63 acre place on first sight. It was the first place we looked at, and after viewing a dozen or so other properties, we came back to this place and knew it was for us.
In November of 2002, after 9 months of juggling full-time work with the kids at Boys Town and commuting on days off to Kansas to work on building our strawbale, timberframe farmhouse, we decided it was finally time to move back to Kansas and devote ourselves to working on the farm full-time. We spent a month with Granny and Pop Holman. Then several months in a rental in Oskaloosa. Then a few months with my brother Tim, his wife Lisa, and their kids, in Topeka. A little more than a year after leaving Omaha, we finally moved into the (mostly) finished basement of the farmhouse where we lived cozily, Little-House-on-the-Prairie style in one room, for almost two years. Sally has mostly worked outside the home, except for a blessed few months that her job allowed for working from home. I’ve mostly been lucky enough to stay home with our kids, continuing to work on the house and develop the farm. Since then we have continued to build on our dream, learning new skills, beginning to work with livestock, starting a home business, and expanding our family with the addition of Finley Caroline in 2005. You know, we have run into a lot of pessimism about farming and getting into farming--“from scratch”, so to speak, as we have—as we have followed this adventure. And one idea that I kept running into as we spent so many years getting ready to farm was that it was not a romantic business—that it was all just hard work and low pay. Neither Sally nor I grew up farming, having been raised almost our entire lives in Salina, Kansas, so we had no idea what to expect. We have come into this adventure with all kinds of idyllic and romantic notions. And we have perhaps had a naïve picture of what it should be as we have gone along. But one thing that we have pretty much discovered is that whoever told us that there is no romance in farming is just dead wrong. So far, it has been a beautiful blast! We’ve had hard days, hard weeks, even a few hard months, but on the whole it has also been pretty much the challenging, creative, exciting, interesting, and loveable experience we had dreamed about. And as long as the food is this good, what’s not to love. It’s romance on a full stomach.
Sometimes it seems like about 90% of the reason why we are out here is that Sally and I share a passion for food. Put simply--we love to eat. And living here gives us a chance to eat the freshest, healthiest and most delicious food, from the most local source: our own back yard. From our kitchen garden that produces fresh vegetables and berries in season, to our small orchard, to our pasture-raised meats, our lives here are filled with the quest to enjoy great eating. But any story of who we are and how we came to be here is bound to me a more complicated mish-mash of factors than just wanting to eat well. What follows is an attempt to condense that tale a bit for you, and to introduce you more fully to us, and the source of your food.
When I was a student at Kenyon College, I came out of a combined Religion/Sociology class one day overwhelmed with anxiety that there just didn’t seem to be any place in the world where I could live out the values of family, community, stewardship, peaceableness, faith, and creativity that had been at the heart of my upbringing on the plains of Kansas. (And of course it seemed like food and eating were at the heart of so many of the childhood events which shaped those values—from nightly family dinners to church potlucks). It should have come as no surprise to me me that day that the image which formed in my head, and which I couldn’t seem to shake, was that of a great big hog wallowing in a barnyard. It gave a great chuckle to my Chicago-born-and-bred classmate when I proclaimed in almost agonized frustration, “I just want to raise a PIG!” But in that image something clicked for me. It sounds goofy, I know, but in the persistence of that image, it became clear to me that day that the confluence of all my experiences, talents, and interests were leading me to farming. I let that image gestate for about a week before I called my then girlfriend, Sally, back at KU in Lawrence, Kansas. With some trepidation that this might be the conversation that ended our relationship, I laid out my vision for a simple life on a small farm, raising a family, eating food from our own land. To my delight she responded “I think that sounds great! Go for it!” And though now, after years of marriage and well into this adventure, she claims to have no recollection of that conversation, thus began our odyssey into the world of farming. After we had been married a little over a year we moved to Boys Town, Nebraska in the suburbs of Omaha to live and work with kids in need. All during our seven-and-a-half years there we kept the dream of someday getting that little place back home in Kansas to settle down and raise a family and great food. The time in Omaha allowed us to do rewarding work while developing some other interests which would help build that dream when the time came. Sally got to do some graduate design work at the University of Nebraska, part-time, for a few semesters. She began to hone her computer skills and started laying the groundwork for her current work in advertising and marketing doing User Experience Design and Digital Production. I got to start gardening the plots available to employees at the Boys Town farm. I began to learn some construction and technical skills at a local community college. And I had my first introduction to strawbale and timberframe housebuilding, and to pasture-based farming. We also started our family when our son, Burke Abraham was born in August of 2000, and when we informally adopted Loretta Delp, one of our longtime Boys Town residents, when she graduated from high school in May of 2001. In 1999, while still at Boys Town, we began to search in earnest for a place to begin our farm dream by looking at acreages in Jefferson County, Kansas, a part of the state I was familiar with from my days of bicycle racing in the Lawrence area after college. We fell in love with our little 63 acre place on first sight. It was the first place we looked at, and after viewing a dozen or so other properties, we came back to this place and knew it was for us.
In November of 2002, after 9 months of juggling full-time work with the kids at Boys Town and commuting on days off to Kansas to work on building our strawbale, timberframe farmhouse, we decided it was finally time to move back to Kansas and devote ourselves to working on the farm full-time. We spent a month with Granny and Pop Holman. Then several months in a rental in Oskaloosa. Then a few months with my brother Tim, his wife Lisa, and their kids, in Topeka. A little more than a year after leaving Omaha, we finally moved into the (mostly) finished basement of the farmhouse where we lived cozily, Little-House-on-the-Prairie style in one room, for almost two years. Sally has mostly worked outside the home, except for a blessed few months that her job allowed for working from home. I’ve mostly been lucky enough to stay home with our kids, continuing to work on the house and develop the farm. Since then we have continued to build on our dream, learning new skills, beginning to work with livestock, starting a home business, and expanding our family with the addition of Finley Caroline in 2005. You know, we have run into a lot of pessimism about farming and getting into farming--“from scratch”, so to speak, as we have—as we have followed this adventure. And one idea that I kept running into as we spent so many years getting ready to farm was that it was not a romantic business—that it was all just hard work and low pay. Neither Sally nor I grew up farming, having been raised almost our entire lives in Salina, Kansas, so we had no idea what to expect. We have come into this adventure with all kinds of idyllic and romantic notions. And we have perhaps had a naïve picture of what it should be as we have gone along. But one thing that we have pretty much discovered is that whoever told us that there is no romance in farming is just dead wrong. So far, it has been a beautiful blast! We’ve had hard days, hard weeks, even a few hard months, but on the whole it has also been pretty much the challenging, creative, exciting, interesting, and loveable experience we had dreamed about. And as long as the food is this good, what’s not to love. It’s romance on a full stomach.