“Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark,
but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.”
- Wendell Berry
Our first child was born on the summer solstice in 2021. Holding her fragile life in our hands, Danielle and I felt a pressing need to secure a clean, healthy, nutrient-dense food source to ensure her (and our) optimum health and longevity.
Like any parents, we want the very best for our little one and in our opinion, that all starts with food because “You are what you eat.” In fact, you are what you eat eats.
Not long before Nova was born, we became aware of the incessant consumption of beautiful Pennsylvania farmland by out-of-town developers - constantly bulldozing historic farms for quick profits made up of cul-de-sacs and cookie-cutter homes. Once those farms are developed into subdivisions, they will never be farmland again - ever.
A notion was born in us - that we could simultaneously steward this bucolic piece of land while also creating nutrient-dense food security for our family in these times of increasing economic unrest and design an alternative life for our growing family - one focused on the cultivation of all eight forms of capital, not just a financial, material bottom line.
We quickly fell down a rabbit hole of research and education around Permaculture, Key Line Design, EcoSocial Design, Regenerative Agriculture, Holistic Management, Blue Zones, Animal Husbandry, No-Till Gardening, Traditional Homesteading, and Ancestral/Primal Health and Nutrition.
We quickly learned a great deal about where our food comes from and how the twisted industrial food supply system actually works. Our eyes were opened to the type of life we were blindly accepting as “normal” just because “the Joneses” all around us were living it. We found ourselves visiting farms like Polyface and studying with mentors like Joel Salatin, Jean-Martin Fortier, Jim Gerish, Ray Archuletta, Richard Perkins, and Erin Benzakein.
Before long we were standing on a green hill one misty spring morning overlooking historic Ridgemeade Farmstead with notebook in hand and grand plans in mind.
We built 2 large raised bed gardens, one for vegetables and one flowers, and added 50 laying chickens, 150 meat chickens, 42 turkeys, 7 pigs, and 2 goats - all out on pasture and managed Holistically. In no time at all we were sharing our diverse bounty with family, friends, and our community and that’s when we knew - we could build Ridgemeade into unique and meaningful life for our family.
