This post is for anyone interested in coming to our farm for a farmstay, to live with us for a little while, share meals with us, and help with whatever farm or homestead tasks and projects we have to do.
We make our dollar living farming, mainly selling vegetables but also a little beef, some orchard fruits and nuts, mushrooms, and other farm products... almost entirely direct-market (farmers market, CSA...), but we're at least as focused on the self-sufficient part of our living. We're extremely (by modern American standards) self-sufficient in food. Over the last few years we've averaged under $500/year on purchased food for our whole family of 8. We grow/forage all of the vegetables we eat, all our fruits, all of our nuts, wild and cultivated mushrooms, all of our dry beans/peas, the heirloom corn we use for all of our tortillas and hominy and cornbread, all of our wheat, all of our honey; we raise goats and cattle for all of our dairy (milk, soft and hard/aged cheeses, yogurt, ice cream…) as well as for meat; we raise various poultry and occasional hogs; we process our own rennet, salt cure our own pork; our butter and animal fats provide all our cooking fats. If you come for a farmstay with us, you’ll not only have the chance to be involved in growing and producing and preserving these different things, but we also share all our meals together with our visitors, so you'll get to eat exceptionally homegrown-organic meals every day, too.
To the extent that we're able we're very willing to trade profit (which isn't great with small farms to start with) for the sake of things like being able to eat our own food (as opposed to just growing the most profitable things and buying the rest of our diet from mass-market sources), avoiding disposable plastics, not outsourcing things to conventional farms (even if they're allowed under the USDA organic rules, like buying poultry from conventional hatcheries) that we can do in more responsible ways, etc. So, for example, we do things like picking up lots of acorns (mainly by hand) to feed pigs through the months when there aren't acorns on the ground and to be able to raise hogs without any purchased feed. We save a majority of the garden seeds we plant, well over 100 different open-pollinated/heirloom varieties, and propagate almost all of the fruit trees and other perennials we grow. We grow a couple hundred different varieties of several dozen different species of fruit and nut trees (and bushes and vines...) We grow bamboo for stakes and trellises and countless other uses. We harvest grass seed for our own use. We manage our forest areas for lumber, posts, and some random uses like hickory bark for chair bottoms, oak splints for homemade baskets, wood for carving spoons, making our own axe handles... We render fats to make our own bath and laundry soap. We've built a small roundwood log cabin with trees from our own land with wood joinery (saddle notches for the walls, pegged lap joints for the rafters, etc.) done with hand tools, but still need to make windows and a door... chink between the logs... We've since bought a small bandsaw mill and have lots more building and other woodworking-type projects that we'd like to prioritize in the next few years.
We're not offering any kind of employment or pay, and we're not asking for any money from our visitors either. We don't have any employees, and we don't depend on guests to do any of the things we do. What we have to offer is very different from any kind of employment on the one hand and also very different from a bed and breakfast on the other hand. What we mainly have to offer is an opportunity to try out and experience our way of farming and making a living and the food and the work that goes along with it. And alongside that as much as time allows we're happy to show and teach people how to do things we're doing that our visitors are interested in learning about. We enjoy hosting visitors mainly for the opportunities
