Our Story

The fields we work now at Cedar Mountain have been in continuous agricultural production at least since the 1770s. That is some incredible resilience! When we arrived on this old Vermont dairy farm in 1999 and surveyed the rather beat-up acreage we were assuming stewardship of, the question we asked ourselves was, “Can we make a living off this land and at the same time engage in a soil-building program?” The great question all of us face as farmers is whether or not there is truly such a thing as “sustainable agriculture.” It is a question every farmer has wrestled with to some degree for the last 10,000 years. It is our Holy Grail and we need to discover the answer now more than ever.

As farmers who work with draft horses and maintain a dairy cow herd, we are operating on the premise that livestock are the essential component to land restoration and maintenance of a healthy farm system. The second major component to building soil on our farm is the use of cover crops. Composted manures from our horses and dairy cows along with cover crops feed the land. We do not use chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Cover crop seed is accounted for as a fertilizer expense within the farm budget.

We grow 26 varieties of vegetables and herbs on 1 acre. Managing the garden primarily for direct to the public sales allows us to plant a wider variety of produce.

We are using no dig methods, which we switched over to in 2020. Our beds are made with the horses, using our composted cow manure. Each path is mulched with local bark and wood chips. We are irrigating our garden from a man made pond which collects water from the springs on our hillside. The pond is lined with the clay that was already there. No materials were brought in to make the pond.