We're Pope County's founding CSA farm offering spring/ summer veggie subscription boxes, USDA licens Now offering locally grown fall garden mums & pumpkins!
167 State Highway 146 East
Golconda, IL
62938
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Our journey in agriculture began shortly after the birth of our first child in 2009 although gardening and animals had always been part of life before this point. In 2009 we started out our family and farming adventures with a small garden and six chickens in an HOA subdivision in Indiana. We quickly outgrew our property on all fronts. The chickens reproduced, the garden expanded, our family size grew and are dreams of country life became impossible to ignore.
Beginning farmers have a unique sets of struggles in startup, especially first generation farmers. Banks don’t like to lend for agriculture ventures if you don’t have loads of previous experience. Farmland and housing is quite expensive! If you want to just take a personal mortgage out to begin farming the bank computes acreage, house value, zoning, location and often times the land you’d set out to mortgage isn’t something they can do conventionally.
We farm shopped and explored all sorts of financing options for quite some time with no success in Indiana. Eventually, we reached a point where we knew we were going to need to be willing to take risks in order to even have a shot of making our dreams come true. Our risk taking landed us in Southern Illinois to be mentored as farm hands who were working towards land ownership. We left the city, quit our jobs, lost health insurance coverage, sold our house and went to help an older farmer who promised and education and opportunity for us to build our farm. Sadly, we were taken advantage of and promises were never fulfilled. We endured the hardest, poorest 3, most uncertain years of our lives being mentored.
When the mentorship had run it’s course we set off to farm on our own. We had grown to love the Southern Illinois and knew we wanted to stay. However, we faced a new set of risks and uncertainty relocating our home and budding farm operation.
