Food With Integrity

Welcome to our farm! Jim and I are so excited to share our passion for amazing food with you. Gardner Family Farm is the realization of our goal to help bring people together around regenerative agriculture, good food and wholesome farm experiences.

Jim and I met in college and bonded over our shared passion for sustainable agriculture and our Catholic faith. Jim wanted to create a multi-species regenerative farming system on his family’s beautiful farm while I (Ellen) wanted to educate people about the personal and ecological benefits of regenerative agriculture.

After getting married in November of 2019 we moved down to the farm with the hope of realizing our shared dream “some day”, without committing to a hard deadline.

But God had other plans. The pandemic of 2020 hit everyone like a freight train and suddenly, we were working from home part of the time, expecting a baby, and food security was forefront on many peoples’ minds. The time seemed ripe to begin taking baby steps towards our dream. So…we bought a chicken.

Or rather, we bought 150 chickens, enough to get our feet wet. We struggled with that first batch, trying to figure out temperature control, for the new chicks and then how to pasture chickens effectively, but we did it and sold Gardner Family Farm’s first chickens. It felt incredible and we still had part of the year left so we bought an additional batch of 250.

We knew we wanted to use a pastured system for raising our chickens and future livestock because we wanted a high quality product and we wanted our animals live a natural life. Meat raised on grass is consistently more lean, higher in omega 3 fatty acids and has a more rich and complex flavor.

While it was a small start, we realized that we had the means and motivation to start our farm sooner than we ever could have imagined so we became intentional about moving ourselves forward.

Now, in its’ second year of operation, the farm is beginning to take shape and we couldn’t be more EXCITED to share it with you. Our goal is to provide you with the healthiest and most flavorful meat and eggs possible, teach you interesting homesteading skills while we introduce you to our beautiful animals and this paradise that we call home.