Full Circle
It’s funny how things sometimes come full circle.
When we began this farm-stead journey we were stepping out on a limb. I [Kate] was leaving a career that I was passionate about for entrepreneurship that I was feeling called into. I wanted to find a way to support other families in the realm of wholistic, real-food, nourishment and non-toxic living. Together, we wanted to be able to dig in the dirt with our kids and spend time with them. We wanted to build something together, as a family. We wanted to do something that made us feel alive.
We started with a few trays of potting soil, some seeds and a couple of small raised bed and garden areas. With green enough thumbs and confidence on our side, we expanded our gardening repertoire and got creative with how to add animals into the mix. Along came our laying flock - educators in their own right - showing us their natural tendencies, preferences, and the weight and deep, deep orange color of a yolk from an un-hindered chicken in her happiest element. Our next step was our broiler (meat) chickens. Out on pasture moving from paddock to paddock shaded from the heat of the day and secured from predators by the shelter of their chicken tractor they’d graze on grass, the alpine strawberries, and the steady feast of insects that happened across the pasture straight into their path. When you sit back and watch nature, there’s a lot you can learn. And that’s where we’ve found ourselves.
We took a year-plus-long sabbatical from the grocery store and instead chose to become members of Essex Farm’s full-diet CSA [check out Kristin’s book: The Dirty Life - you’ll be ready to move to Essex!]. We’d have the occasional trip to the grocery store, but most every meal was fully grown right here in NY state within 100 miles of our corner of the world. The food was as fresh as can be when you’re not growing/raising it yourself, and full-scale nutrient density like we’d never previously experienced. For a family of foodies, it was a dream. This sabbatical, we also went lighter on the variety of things we had going at our farmstead. Our garden was much smaller, we had fewer chickens, etc - but more time to read, think, and evaluate. What do we really want our farm to be?
What did we find? We want it to be for the love of people.
We have been gifted these sets of, seemingly random, skills that seem to be coming full circle.
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When I left my corporate career for entrepreneurship we took a giant leap of faith. I began working one on one with women seeking encouragement and knowledge and guidance on how to nourish themselves and their families. With background in agriculture, we understood how foods get to be what we consume, and what makes them chock full of nutrition - or lacking thereof.
What I didn’t anticipate was the amount of clients I would walk alongside who were struggling with auto-immune disorder. These beautiful individuals inspired me to take an even deeper dive into what I knew about nourishment and expand it to our environment. What we eat, breathe, wear… We’d quietly been making our own soaps for years - but decided to launch them to our community when we saw that they could be of use to others as they sought to detoxify their lives.
As I worked with more clients, sharing recipes or cooking tips/tricks - I’d hear the repeated request “can you just (come help me) make these?” - well sweet friends - NOURISHED by On Point Farm is our offering to you. It’s the culmination of my knowledge of nourishment, paired with our ruthless determination to keep it clean of anything not health-building (toxins, endocrine disruptors, heavy metals, etc), and our determination as a farm to give you all of that with nutrient density. We’ve based everything (except our sourdoughs + oatmeal) around bone broth to add-in all of the healing nourishment that only gelatinous bone broth can provide. And, we’ve packaged it in glass that you can thaw, and reheat in and then reuse!
So, as you poke around our website these days - you might notice a new tab that’s “Nourish + Love” and also some event tickets for sale in our store. This is because we’ve come full circle. Counseling clients on nourishment and non toxic living is so intertwined with what we do on our farm that it feels too strange to continue to maintain separate siloed websites.
Nourish + Love Nutrition Counseling was the step of entrepreneurship that breathed life into what our farmstead would become. We think it’s finally time that the two become united as the partners they are.
As we’ve built On Point Farm, and continue to, our passion for health remains the same - and hopefully now, you get more of a lens into who we are and how laundry soap, chickens and bone broth hot chocolate can possibly be related.
Here’s to the love of people. May you find opportunity to nourish your whole self into a life of vibrant vitality - we want it for ourselves and we want it for you too!
