Crooked Beak Acres, LLC

Honestly, this vision started when I was a teenager. I spent much of my time on my Aunt’s dairy farm in Holmes County, Ohio surrounded by Amish communities. I believe this is where I fell in love with draft horses. The clipity-clop of the horse’s hooves on the pavement moving hay wagons from one field to another; hearing the rattle of the equipment and the jingle of the chains on the traces as the teams plow through the fields… what memories those were. I learned to ride by jumping on my Aunt’s pony Joey, bareback and racing off across the yard; falling off and getting back on to do the same thing…over and over again. Little did I know this love of horses would lead me to our current ventures. John and I purchased a little farm several years ago in Kentucky and brought my two drafts, Rusty and Duke, with us from North Carolina. Now, although I have been in and around farms just about my whole life I have never “farmed” by myself. John was raised in the city, and had never seen a draft horse, nor had he been exposed to farm life. We joke about him being “the city farmer” because he is the perfect example. He grew up on a surfboard in southern California and nowhere near a farm. Together, I believe we know enough to get ourselves in a pickle (as the saying goes). It wasn’t long before we added more horses, Mike, Mark, Sampson, Pete and Blitzen. One of our goals here is to be self-sustainable. As a moderate prepper family, we believe in the ability to support ourselves if the need arises. This also includes the ability of the farm is to support itself, financially; and then to eventually become profitable. We had a beautiful old dairy barn on the homestead and intended on turning it back into a working dairy. Starting with some beautiful bottle calves, we learned life’s lessons the hard way. We purchased some bottle calves thinking we could raise them and maybe sell a couple. Little did we know, they were quite sick and had to bring in the local vet. We worked with him extensively (about every other day) and managed to save 7 of the 9 we started with. After a couple weeks and a clean bill of health, I received the dreaded call while out running errands… “Your barn is on fire!” my neighbor stated. I rushed home to find our barn completely gone. We lost all of our belongings, our calves, and some chickens. Completely devastated, we decided not to continue with cows at this time and our journey with growing produce with our horses started. Our goal is to supply our community with the freshest products that we can. In the Spring of 2022, we uprooted our little Kentucky farm and moved down to West Tennessee. Please join us in our blog and grow with us. Thank you for visiting our site and we hope you enjoy our laughter while we learn skills that are not found very often.