We are a young family with 5 children who started out on a path in 2007 in New Mexico that ultimately led to us starting this farm. It started out with simply learning more about how our food was produced, and choosing to make better choices for our family based on that knowledge. We had always had the desire to grow some of our own food, and now this was even more important to us than ever before. We moved to homesteading on small acreage with a few milk cows, raising our own steers, chickens and gardens. As our family grew and our number of animals grew our acreage began to feel really small! We came to the point where we began asking ourselves if we wanted to continue on just producing small amounts for ourselves, or if we wanted to make this our lifestyle and raise our family in this type of family centered farm business. We loved what we were doing so it was an easy choice for us. The next step (more like a huge leap!) was leaving the career behind in 2013 and moving to an existing holistic ranch in Missouri to expand our experience and skills. We have loved every step of this journey and in 2015 timing and circumstances worked out perfectly to allow us to take over a farm started by my wife’s parents over 40 years ago just outside Prairietown Illinois. We are excited to have this opportunity and the challenge of taking conventionally worked land and transforming it into a place that builds soil and works with nature rather than against it.
Our vision and goal for our farm is to be a place where you can not only purchase wholesome, healthy, nutrient dense, unadulterated food for you and your family, but to also be a place where you can enjoy the beauty of the farm and see the animals and food being raised and cared for to give you the utmost confidence in the product you are buying. In a society full of closed doors, especially where food production is involved, we feel that the only way for the consumer to have full confidence in the food they purchase is to “inspect” the farm that food is raised on themselves. They can then make a confident informed decision on whether to purchase that food or not. We invite all of our customers to be a part of our farm in a way that is seldom afforded to the customer. It is our sincere hope and desire that our customers will come out to enjoy the beauty of the farm, take a walk along the lakes, enjoy a picnic under the island gazebo (yes, we have an island on the lake!), and enjoy the sights and sounds of happy animals grazing in the fields, and hold us as the farmers accountable to high standards of animal husbandry and food production methods. We don’t claim to be perfect, nobody is. But we promise to be completely up front with you about our methods and to inform you of areas in which we have to settle for something less while searching for something better. That is why we chose the name Open Doors, because we truly are opening our doors to you hoping to establish a personal relationship between farmer and customer, with the goal of giving you the highest possible confidence in the quality of the food you choose for you and your families.
We have no plans to become Certified Organic at this point for several reasons. First, there is a lot of legwork to do, relationships to be established, and organic feed suppliers to line up before we could make that jump. We are going to be starting from scratch and simply will not be able to have everything exactly as we would like it from day one.
Second, it is our personal view that the definition of “Organic” has been bought out by corporate interests and has been twisted to mean something that we do not agree with when we think of what it should take to be organic. There are things allowed for under “organic certification” that we certainly do not agree with when it comes to producing clean nutrient dense food.
Third, we have seen first hand how just because something is labeled a certain way or has been “certified”, it does not mean that it was actually produced in a way that we would agree with. Corners can still be cut far to easily without the consumer ever being aware. That is the biggest reason behind our Open Door policy. Becoming certified organic would require paying fees, being burdened with excess paperwork, and having to pass on the increased costs to our customers. Instead, we would prefer to spend our time actually farming and caring for our animals, to be inspected daily by our customers rather than once a year by a certifying agency, and actually establish a working relationship with our customers to give them the full confidence in us and in the food they choose to purchase. Ultimately the consumer drives everything. If we have droves of people coming to us asking us to become certified as “organic”, we will definitely listen. But we think that customers crave a relationship with their farmer more than a simple label on a package. It is our hope to earn the trust of our customers through openness and transparency along with quality products. There was a time when farms and the people who consumed the food that farm produced were much more closely connected, and it is our desire to take our farm back to that time in a sense.
Don’t get us wrong, it is our intention to operate our farm as if it were organic, but it will take time to get there. In the meantime we promise to do the best we can and to be open about where we are falling short so that you can make an informed choice about the food you buy.
OPEN DOORS HERITAGE FARM 