BOOTSTRAP @ FORAGER FARM – WHY I BECAME A FARMER
By Hannah Moser of Forager Farm When I was young I wanted to be many things: an architect, magazine editor, zoologist, but a farmer was not one of them. The closest idea of a farmer I had was my grandpa. I knew he had cattle, and a barn, and a lot of farming equipment, but […]
BOOTSTRAP @ WILD RIDGE FARM – WHY I'M A FARMER
By Alissa of Wild Ridge Farm I am a farmer because of the way it makes me feel at the end of the day. The physical exhaustion that my muscles carry into sleep, the weary contentment of finished labor lulling my brain to stillness. Some days I farm solely for the satisfaction that weeding can […]
BOOTSTRAP @ LEMONADE SPRINGS FARM – WELCOME TO OUR 2014 SEASON
By Seth Douglas of Lemonade Springs Farm Lemonade Springs Farm is run by myself, Seth, and my partner, Kathleen. We are in our second full season. The farm is located in Watsonville, California, about a mile inland in the heart of the central coast’s commercial strawberry growing country. We are reclaiming five acres of old […]
BOOTSTRAP @ FORAGER FARM – WELCOME TO THE 2014 SEASON!
By Hannah Moser of Forager Farm My name is Hannah Sargent and I am a marketer turned farmer turned marketing-farmer. My fiancé Jonathon Moser and I own and run Forager Farm, a vegetable CSA in central North Dakota and are in our first season! We are on a mission to revive our food culture by providing […]
Announcing the 2014 Bootstrap Writer Series Winners!
We are excited to announce the start to the Bootstrap Writing Series of 2014! This year we’ve selected four farmers from across the country who are in the early stages of starting their farms to share their season with the NYFC community. Each writer will be writing an piece once per month through the rest […]
Bootstrap @ Chaseholm Farm – Reflections on My First Season
Last post! Before I had started farming I used to think about writing in a notebook or generally documenting my first steps so that I could see back and know what I had done and how to make it better. But once I started I was so busy and so worried I was forgetting something […]
Bootstrap @ Chaseholm Farm – Reflections on Policy
Hi All, it’s a rainy day in the Hudson Valley and the cows are inside, we made our rotation last until 10/27 in our first season. Not bad…but room for improvement. Today’s post is about policy issues and regulations and how they affect my farm. One of the clearest ways is in my ability to […]
BOOTSTRAP @ NORTH COUNTRY CREAMERY – DEVELOPING A MARKETING PLAN
By Ashlee Kleinhammer of North Country Creamery This year we took a multi-prong approach to marketing. I was striving toward an ideal that we would sell most of our products through a CSA. We managed to serve around a dozen members locally, and twenty-eight members through Juniper Hill Farms’ Farmigo share (a CSA service […]
BOOTSTRAP @ BLUE SAGE FARM – DEVELOPING A MARKETING PLAN:
By Laura Sluder Farmer’s markets have been the mainstay of my marketing plan for the past 9 years. They are a great way to get a small farm up and running with some cash flow but there are downsides to farmer’s markets. For one, they are usually only open in the summer but farm expenses […]
BOOTSTRAP @ CHASEHOLM FARM – REFLECTIONS ON MARKETING
By Sarah Lyons Chase of Chaseholm Farm This is post is coming at a good time for the farm, we were approved for raw milk sales last week and concrete was poured in our future tiny farm store. Getting into dairy farming from cheese making was like taking a step further behind the scenes, further […]