Know Where Your Food Comes From by Visiting Farms and Buying Local

For the last few weeks, we’ve been staying at Earthen Heart Farm in Bangor, Michigan for our second wwoof experience. We’ve had a great time here, helping Julian get his operation running for the summer, but one of our favorite things is that we have also gotten to explore his network of other farmers. Julian is all about building community and he regularly works with other farmers in the area. My husband has been over to another farm to help plant apple trees. We have connected with the Eater’s Guild to buy goat milk for yogurt, as well as to tour their operation. Most recently, we visited the Peterson’s Pig Farm where Steve and Jan Peterson were kind enough to give us a full tour.

 

 

We got to visit all of the pigs including the sows with piglets, the sows who are not pregnant or nursing and the boars. All of the pigs at his farm have plenty of room to run and root, as well as access to food and water all day and night. The Petersons have raised pigs for 35 years. Recently they have begun to sell quite a bit of their pigs to the Neiman Ranch, which supplies high end grocery stores like Whole Foods and restaurants like Chipotle.

 

 

This was the first time we visited a farm that has this wide of a distribution. As a consumer, I take care to buy sustainable meat and produce and to buy as locally as I can. However, I can’t always buy directly from a farm, especially now that I don’t have the freezer space to buy in bulk. Buying at the grocery store is hard for me because I want to make the good choices for my family, but I never know how much truth there is behind those labels. Even though my family doesn’t eat pork, this farm visit opened my eyes to the importance of getting out to these farms and meeting the people who supply the food that comes into places like Whole Foods. By talking to Steve, I learned about exactly what the company asks of him as a supplier and got a clearer understanding about what some of those labels in the supermarket mean. This may have been our first farm visit to a farm like this, but it sure won’t be our last. I want my family to become more and more aware of where our food comes from. As consumers of meat and vegetables, we owe it to ourselves to get out to the farms and ask questions, talk to the farmers, and know where our food is coming from.

Living in a Field Trip

The other day my son told me, “Hey mom, you know living at the farm is like being on a field trip all the time!” 

In a lot of ways, he’s right.  My boys have seen things and learned about topics often only introduced on field trips.  For example:

They can tell you the history behind this shoe:

 

They know how to use these to preserve food:

 

They gather eggs from chickens and pet the turkeys:

 

They have learned about starting plants from seeds, fertilizing and weeding:

 

They eat dinner twice a week surrounded by butter churns and cast iron skillets:

 

They have wandered through these woods, playing in the creek, looking at plants and searching for bugs:

 

They have learned what to do if the cows charge at them:

 

They have learned how to chop and carry wood for the fireplace:

 

All of these are lessons often taught only during field trips with school or scouts.  Instead of waiting for a special occasion, my kids have had the opportunity to live here, explore, and talk with experts every day.  We are so blessed that the owners of Thus Far Farm, Mary and Bill, have not only given our children the opportunity to explore, but they have been ready and willing to explain and answer questions.  Living a field trip is one of the best things I’ve ever done for my kids!

 

 

WWOOFing Explained & Farm Fresh Eggs

For the past month we have been wwoofing at Thus Far Farm here in Westminster, South Carolina.  I have gotten the question “What is wwoofing?” a lot, so I thought I would go ahead and answer it to start with.  WWOOF stands for World Wide Organization of Organic Farmers.  There are wwoof farms all over the world and in many parts of the world people regularly visit wwoof farms as a type of vacation, taking a week out of their every day city life to work on a farm.  When you wwoof, you agree to come and work on a farm in exchange for room and board.  Most often this means that the farmer provides you with a room, access to a bathroom and some of your meals.  This is a possibility here at Thus Farm Farm, as they have an amazing farm house with extra rooms available upstairs.

 

However, as we have brought our home with us, we stay in our RV and they provide us with a place to park as well as electricity and water hookup.  Feeding a family of 5 is a steep order, but they do provide us with some food, including two dinners a week and many, many farm fresh eggs which we have used to make many delicious meals including these yummy baked eggs with a sautéed mushroom base and ricotta cheese.  Super simple recipe, just sautee mushrooms with onions and place at the bottom of a greased muffin tin.  Add cheeses and then crack and egg and bake for 15 minutes.  Delicious!

The couple who runs Thus Far Farm, Mary and Bill McGinn, are amazing people who have encouraged my children to participate in many farm tasks, including letting our 3 year old help collecting eggs.

 

 

We are feeling very blessed to have this great opportunity here at Thus Far Farm.  Good food, fresh air, nice people, what else can you ask for?

Our Plan for 2015 – How we plan to live rent free for a year!

During the past six months, we have been living in our RV, but we have stayed close to “home”.  I bet some of you are saying, wait wasn’t Morocco your home last year?  Yeah it was, so I guess I should say “where our home was before we moved to Morocco”.  Yesterday, we launched our official “adventure” to travel the US in our RV.  Confused yet?  Here’s some background:

 

- From 2004 to 2011, we lived in north Georgia. 

- From 2011 to 2014, we lived in Casablanca, Morocco.

- In June of 2014, we returned to the United States and purchased our RV.

 

Better now?  Good!

 

 

So, now that we have launched, what’s in store? Here’s our plan for 2015:

 

January – March – WWOOFing at Thus Far Farm in Westminster, South Carolina.

 

 

 

April – WWOOFing at Earthen Heart Farm in Bangor, Michigan.

 

 

 

May – WWOOFing at Soul Farmasee in Fairfield, Iowa.

 

June – September 15th – Working at Crooked Creek Campground in Black Hills, South Dakota.

 

 

 

September 15th – Dec 23 – Working in Amazon’s Camper Force, either in Kansas or Nevada – hopefully Nevada.

 

 

 

This is our plan, but by this point in my life, I am well aware that plans twist and change in lots of interesting ways.  So, we’ll see where life leads us in reality.  However, if this plan is fulfilled in means that we will pay no campsite fees for the entire year of 2015, allowing us to chuck that money at our ever present student loans.  It also means that during the second part of the year we will earn a salary on top of having a free campsite.  Adding this to what we earn from our various business enterprises gives me hope that I may see even see some of those student loans eliminated by the end of this business year.  To see more about our business enterprises, check out our newly updated “How do we afford this lifestyle?” page.

 

While this plan works well for us from a financial standpoint, it also gives us some amazing opportunities to meet fabulous people, see fabulous sights and enjoy fabulous experience.  Since life is so much about the journey than arriving at the endpoint debt free, this is where my focus is going to be!