Gateway Farm is an ambitious, cutting-edge farm project and business located in Plymouth, Michigan.
It is putting into practice a regenerative, permaculture-inspired design that weaves together USDA certified organic market gardening, food forests, land regeneration and re-wilding, and is a demonstration site for these approaches. Gateway Farm is a place of abundance and beauty; a community hub offering nutrient dense food, education, events, sanctuary, and hope for the future.
Acres dedicated to annual organic vegetable production
Acres dedicated to perennial organic crop production & rewilding
Acres dedicated to buildings, pathways, and infrastructure
‘Organic certification means that farmers and businesses have met strict standards for the growing, processing and handling of their products. If you see the USDA Organic seal, the product is certified organic. Organic production emphasizes natural processes and ingredients.’
We are deeply passionate about our Food Forest which is a resilient system encompassing wide varieties of species and cultivars, and which is preserving food heritages.
Food Forests (aka Forest Gardens or Perennial Food Systems) are long-term planned food yielding systems that are also complex polycultures. Food Forests are a move away from simplified industrial agriculture (monocultures) and towards the restoration and remembering of highly skilled farming and gardening relationships and practices.
Gateway Farm Hub is permaculture-inspired, an example site designed to be a large-scale sustainable system.
Permaculture is the design and practice of making sustainable systems - often applied to farm and homesteading systems and perennial foods. Permaculture inspired design means taking a holistic and ethical approach to design that sees the living organic world as of the highest importance.
Regenerative farming looks to build all the elements that make a healthy farm: building soil, seed banks, workers’ well-being, cultural capacity, local economies, catchments, and ecologies. These are the core tenants of Gateway Farm Hub.
Most industrial farming is degenerative – it tends to degenerate soils, our crop heritage, our diets and our health, and the health of our communities and economies and livestock.
We utilize low-tilling so that we can build natural soil processes, improving the health of our soil rather than depleting it.
The soil where the crops are grown is both allowed, and helped, to build naturally. Most farm soils are broken up frequently with rotavators and plows, which when done regularly inhibits natural bacterial and fungal associations and functions.
The organic produce at Gateway Farm Hub is as nutrient dense as you can get because we put so much love into the soil and eco-system!
‘Nutrient-dense foods contain vitamins, minerals, complex carbohydrates, lean protein, and healthy fats.’
Source - National Cancer Institute
We are dedicated to limiting as much waste as possible. For example, our CSA Crop boxes are reused every week, returned to us by our customers!
‘A circular economy entails markets that give incentives to reusing products, rather than scrapping them and then extracting new resources. In such an economy, all forms of waste, such as clothes, scrap metal and obsolete electronics, are returned to the economy or used more efficiently’.
It’s been amazing to see the land here at Gateway Farm Hub come to life through our rewilding encouragement!
‘Rewilding is a progressive approach to conservation. It's about letting nature take care of itself, enabling natural processes to shape land and sea, repair damaged ecosystems and restore degraded landscapes. Through rewilding, wildlife's natural rhythms create wilder, more biodiverse habitats’.
Gateway Farm has invested time and energy into rebuilding ponds, creeks and waterways on the farm.
We recognize the vital importance of repairing riparian zones because of their 'role in soil conservation, their habitat biodiversit
