Farmers Kerry Gawalt and Stephen Leslie have been working together since 1992. They met at Hawthorne Valley Farm in rural upstate New York. During the last sixteen years, they have grown vegetables, worked horses and mules and milked cows in Montana, New York, Idaho, New Hampshire and Vermont. This will be their ninth season in Hartland, farming 35 acres of Cobb Hill Co-Housing's land.
As you may already know, Cedar Mountain Farm is part of both a larger collection of land-based enterprises, and part of a larger project in community living known as Cobb Hill Co-housing.
Cobb Hill began as a vision put forth by Dartmouth professor, environmental activist, and writer Donella Meadows (1941-2001). The goal was to create a farm-based neighborhood of environmentally sound homes where people could be intimately involved in farming and community on a daily basis. The houses were built on the hillside in order to preserve the fertile bottomland for agriculture, and the development rights were sold in order to protect the agricultural and forestry land in perpetuity.
Each member of Cobb Hill brings particular strengths and interests in terms of interacting with the land. From this has sprung a variety of farm-related enterprises, each of which is owned by a small group of individuals. Our current list of enterprises includes Cedar Mountain Farm (owned and operated by Stephen and Kerry), Cobb Hill Cheese, Cobb Hill syrup, Cobb Hill Icelandics (sheep), as well as meat and laying hens, and honey bees.
The operations are in many ways interrelated: the manure from the cows fertilizes our market garden and pastures, the milk from the cows is sold to make to local cheese companys-Cobb Hill Cheese and Grafton Cheddar,and to customers who can pruchase raw milk in their own bottle, the whey (a byproduct of the cheese making operation) is fed to neighbor's livestock, and the honey goes thickly on a slice of Zach's fresh baked bread. Many of these products come together at the Cobb Hill Farmstand, which is open on Wednesday and Friday afternoons.
