Thank you for waiting so patiently!
We’re ready to fill you in on the soul searching that’s been happening behind the scenes that ultimately led us to make the decision to downsize the farm.
It comes back to something we’ve been sharing about right here for years now. But first, let me take you back to the beginning….
12 years ago, over a bottle of wine in our little apartment in Southern California, inspiration hit, and we decided to start a farm together.
We weren’t clear on what we’d grow exactly. But we were sure of two things…
We’d work as hard as possible to raise animals with the utmost care and compassion.
And with a bit of luck on our side, we’d grow food that was so exceptional in quality and flavor that it’d inspire us all to do better, eat better, and feel better.
It’s been a community-wide effort to get us from that little seed of an idea to where we are now – which is where exactly?
The farm has grown steadily and is now feeding over 300 families every year.
Believe it or not, our gross revenue is over 250K per year. This has allowed us to actually pay ourselves to farm (Greg has earned the equivalent of a teacher’s salary for 5 years now) and enabled our farm to support other farms and businesses that are essential to our local food economy.
We’ve incidentally become leaders in our field (excuse the pun), which has led us to all sorts of neat opportunities.
But in the face of all this success, the truth is that we built a machine that runs 24/7, 365 days per year. And to put it simply, the farm just relies on us too much.
We realized we had 3 options…
#1: Stay on the path we’re on, keep burning the candle from both ends and at some point, find ourselves in a state of complete and utter burnout, with the farm imploding.
#2: Invest about $1.3 million (think BIG debt) to scale up the farm to 3-4 times the size it is now – this money would let us buy more land, invest in more infrastructure, and hire more employees so we could have more people on the farm to share in the work.
#3: Downsize like crazy so we can rework the farm into something seasonal and livable.
For the past year or so, as you may have noticed, we’ve been beelining it toward door #2 with the intention of growing – thus, all the updates about us putting in an offer for adjacent farmland and announcing a nationwide shipping program.
At some point along this road, it hit us like a TON of bricks – the big farm with all that liability and all those pigs (imagine 400 pigs in the neighborhood!), with customers as far away as Louisiana and Idaho?
Well, as much good as a farm like that could do in the world, we realized it was not our torch to carry. It wasn’t what got us excited about farming all those years ago, and it certainly didn’t sound appealing to us now. Thank you for waiting so patiently!
This winter, we’ll be taking time and space to reinvent a new future for Stonecrop Farm that works for us, two of its most important stakeholders. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but we know that taking care of ourselves now will pay dividends to the whole community later.
Your Farmers,
Jenney & Greg
PS – We’re already running low on (or sold out of) several popular pork cuts like breakfast sausage and pork chops. Be sure to take the opportunity to stock up on your favorites at the Farm Store now.
PPS – If we’re already sold out of your favorite cuts, keep an eye on our website this fall as we bring back pork from our final remaining pigs. You can check out our Fresh Pork Dates here to see when we’ll add new inventory to our online store.