Gopher Broke Farm is what happens when a hobby takes over your life. We’ve been growing our own food on our homestead tucked away in the very northeast corner of Hyde Park at the end of a dirt road since the 1970s. We raised four kids on homegrown pork, chicken, and beef, and the bounty of our huge garden.One of them, our oldest daughter. Molly, stuck around and now lives with her husband, Dan, and their two kids, Olive and Hank, on six acres we gave them in a house that George built for them.

We didn’t start out to be farmers. George ran a successful construction company while the kids were small. Jane was an Independent Midwife, attending home births throughout northeastern Vermont. A few years after the birth of our youngest daughter, she embarked on a decade-long odyssey that began with her freshman year at Johnson State College and ended with her graduation from UVM College of Medicine on her 40th birthday. She did her residency in Scottsdale, AZ and then returned to practice Family Medicine, in Lincolnville, ME, on Penobscot Bay. After seven years as a small town doctor we became snowbirds, spending our summers living in an RV parked on our former Vermont homestead which we were renting to our youngest son Ben, and our youngest daughter, Ciree, while working the garden. Winters, we migrated back to Arizona where Jane worked in rural emergency rooms and on the Navajo and Apache Reservations and George wrote books and articles about renovating old houses. And we spent a few winters in Santa Barbara, California, where George built a new house for their oldest son, Seth, and his family. We generally spent most of January driving westward, along the Gulf Coast and late April heading back home in time for spring planting. After Fall harvest we’d stay around to tend to our other business – selling Christmas trees in New York City (which George first started doing in 1974).

About the time that rising gas prices began to make us question the sustainability of our bicoastal lifestyle, we found ourselves increasingly homesick for the old homestead. Jane was also becoming increasingly disillusioned with the practice of medicine in the age of managed care and insurance company chicanery and so we sold the RV and moved back home for good in the spring of 2007. In the midst of rehabilitating our overgrown fields and expanding and improving our gardens, and setting out 100 peony plants for the cut-flower trade, Jane began raising a small flock of chickens for eggs and fifty or so birds for meat. George built her what can only be described as an “artisan” coop. (He has a tendency to get carried away with his “projects.”) By winter, our pullets were laying and we were enjoying the taste of home-grown chicken.

The following spring, we decided to go into the poultry business. We tried to be prudent about our new venture, starting off small and cautiously enough so that we could experiment with the best ways to raise our birds and develop a market. We also serendipitously acquired thirty-five laying hens to augment our original flock of fifteen and so now we were in the egg business as well. Ultimately we raised and processed and sold about 400 chickens, 50 ducks, and 20 turkeys. Our customers told us that our birds were just about the tastiest and most tender of any they had ever eaten. Encouraged by our initial success we are now committed to raising all the birds current regulations permit (up to 1000).

Our goal is to grow our farming operation to the level at which it can support us throughout the summer and fall, that is between Christmas tree seasons. Because we don’t need to derive our entire year’s income from farming, we can stay small enough to give our birds and other livestock all they attention and care they require and deserve and to provide them with the best possible life while they’re with us.

Gopher Broke Farm is a labor or love, or, more realistically, perhaps, a testimony to the power of folly. Our land was worn out when George bought it back in 1974. There were no buildings on the property and the fields were reverting to hardhack and swamp alder savannah.The apple trees, overtopped by burgeoning hardwoods, were starved of sunlight. Some portions of our land could be charitably described as a forty-five degree swamp. But we’ve ditched and drained and bush-hogged the fields, built a pond, opened up the apples, and fenced pastures, and built houses for ourselves and our animals. We’ve planted our gardens and berry patch and are working to improve the soil and eventually grow most of our forage and winter food for our animals.

For what it’s worth, we aren’t certified organic, but we do follow organic practices in managing our land, crops, and livestock.   We believe that healthy soil is the basis of a healthy community, a community of plants, animals, and people. We are committed to sustainable agricultural practices and use no chemical fertilizer, herbicides or pesticides on our crops or medicated feeds for our animals. We recycle the manure from our horses and beef cattle and poultry and the ashes from our woodstove into our gardens and chip the branches from the trees we cut to make mulch for our berries, asparagus beds, and flower gardens. Our hens are glad to recycle our kitchen scraps. We compost the offal from our meat birds. We try to be good stewards of the land and to live simply and directly, celebrating with our family the bounty and pleasure of lives lived in harmony with the seasons. Our hope and purpose is to fashion from our scruffy little corner of the world a place of beauty and peace.