Gratitude & Sources
When you purchase directly from small farms, you’re indirectly supporting a myriad number of other local, regional, and national businesses & organizations.
We’re grateful for all of the people who make farmers markets happen and facilitate farm direct purchases for farmers and customers alike: farmers market staff, volunteers, boards, and donors. We’re especially grateful for the people who run the Hollywood Farmers Market. The Hollywood Farmers Market is just one of a handful of Portland-metro area markets that has a reduced stall fee for beginning farmers. While it may seem nominal, it has an outsized positive impact on our mental well-being on market days where our harvest is small!
We’re grateful for access to certified organic feed for our chickens, sourced by the nice people at The Farm Store in Forest Grove. These days our farm’s largest inputs are organic poultry feed from BAR Ale (Williams, CA) and Easy Pick shavings from Jim Thorp Lumber Products (Yoncalla, OR). We are grateful for the ability to have our chickens protected from predators by solar powered poly-netting from Premier1 Supplies (Washington, IA).
On the vegetable side of things, we are so grateful for small scale seed companies, which work with other small farms to maintain and improve access to biologically diverse crops and flowers that are grown organically and are open pollinated. Most especially the ones we place orders with almost every year: Uprising Organics (Bellingham, WA), Adaptive Seeds (Sweet Home, OR), Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (Mineral, VA), Native Seeds/SEARCH (Tucson, AZ). We’re also grateful for larger seed companies providing certified organic seed for farmers including Johnny’s Seeds and High Mowing Seeds (Wolcott, VA). Bulk certified organic cover crop seed can be hard to find, and we’re grateful for the offering provided by Welter Seed & Honey Co (Onslow, IA).
We’re grateful for the ability to work our sloped fields along the contour with lightweight equipment and our feet on the ground, using our BCS Tractor & its many implements mostly sourced from Earth Tools, Inc. (Owentown, KY). Our Rinaldi R2 Power Harrow is particularly prized.
When we’ve applied bulk organic fertilizer in our fields, we’ve mostly relied on Pro Pell It products (bone meal, blood meal, and crab meal) from Marion Ag (St. Paul, OR) or other products from Concentrates, Inc. (Milwaukie, OR). While we are hoping to shift closer and closer to a more closed circle system, only using our own poultry manure based compost, access to bulk organic fertilizer which can address our soil’s existing deficiencies without furthering its excesses has been indispensable, and we are grateful for it.
We’re grateful for the work of the following non-profits, and if you’re not familiar, we hope that you’ll check them out:
Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation
Perennial Hill, LLC 