I've shared pretty openly about how shopping from our farm has directly impacted our family, but what you may not see is just how many other local families and businesses your food dollars benefit when you shop with us.
The positive impact our community is huge, and the more our farm has grown we've been able to help many other businesses grow and expand right along with us!
- Our baby chicks and turkey poults are hatched by a family owned hatchery in Cincinnati. Not only do they provide healthy chicks for us, but we don't have to rely on shipping them through the mail - we can go pick them up the day they hatch.
- We purchase our non-GMO feed from a local Amish family. Mark has been mixing the feed for our animals for the past 6 years. We've watched him go from operating out of one small pole building by himself to adding his brother full-time to the business, hiring office staff, a delivery driver, and having to build multiple new buildings to keep up with demand.
- Our feed maker purchases the non-GMO grains for our feeds locally. By purchasing feed from him, we are also supporting other area farmers.
- Our hay is raised by and purchased from local farmers.
- We purchase our basic supplies like new heat lamps for the brooder, buckets, shavings, etc. from a locally owned feed store.
- The piglets we raise into finished hogs are purchased from local farmers. We have a few farms we support to get as many pigs as we need.
- Our beef animals are bred, born and raised without ever leaving our county. We have a farmer friend who owns a herd of grass-fed Angus cattle. He cares for the Mama cows, bull and baby calves, then once the calves are weaning age, we purchase them.
- When it comes time for processing, all 4 processors we use for poultry, beef and pork are local family owned operations.
- Even the custom labels we have put on our chicken products are designed and sold by a family business in Cincinnati!
- Our fencing and building project materials are purchased from locally owned businesses, and we hired local building and concrete crews to help with our barn.
- When we need tires (seriously, there are so many tires around here) or mechanic work done, we have wonderful local businesses who know us and take great care of us.
- Those amazing photos you see of our family and farm were taken by local photographers - either Hollie from Holden Photography or Anna from Anamedia.
- Our soaps and tallow balms are made with Twisted Violet Homestead in Hillsboro and Butterhide in Jackson, both women owned small businesses.
- The chai tea, canned goods and kombucha you see in our store are made by Red Holler Homestead in Chillicothe and Fair Ridge Farms in Hillsboro, both local crafters who share our vision for a sustainable local food system.
- Our taxes are done by a local accountant, we bank locally, we use local lenders when we've needed financing, and we partner with other local small businesses for our needs whenever possible.
- The dollars we earn by selling our products allow us to purchase food we don’t produce for ourselves from other local farms.
I've probably even missed some of the directions your dollars move out into the community after purchasing from us, but I hope this helps you see just how big of an impact you're making!
One of these days I'll go even bigger picture into the price of farm land, supply and demand plus pressure from developers and foreign investors, but that's probably a little much for this post. :)
Thank you for being a part of what we're doing. We are so incredibly grateful for your support, and allowing us to support the growth of so many other small businesses in our community too.
If you’re not part of our community yet, we would love to have you! Add your name and email address below and you’ll be in. And don’t worry - you can expect emails like this about every week or two, we’re too busy to spam your inbox with nonsense!