In our never-ending quest to reduce our carbon footprint, in April of 2010 Jason Trimm and I moved to Holy Terror Farm, an 1889 75-acre homestead in a hidden river valley near Paonia, Colorado.
We grow over 300 chemical-free varieties of heirloom vegetables, fruits, nuts, berries, grains and beans. We raise Scottish Highland beef cows, rare-breed chickens, pastured pigs, and have Akbash livestock guardian dogs to keep the mountain lions, bears, skunks and raccoons away from the animals and orchards. For photos, check out Holy Terror Farm on Facebook, for tours or farm camps, click here.
What we don’t preserve, dry, can, freeze, over winter in the cold frames/high tunnels, or store in the root cellar, we sell on the non-profit online farmer’s market LocalFarmsFirst.org that we founded in 2009 – now with over 50 local chemical-free growers.
We try to grow and raise almost all our own food – having given up the grocery store in 2010. While we are still extremely dependent on coffee and salt, we try to get a bit more sustainable every year.
We do most the soil preparations for gardens by hand and with our pigs, rotate our cows daily, use our chickens to fertilize and clean the orchards, save all our own seed, grow our own hay, render lard for oil and fat, make our own cheese, juices, , butter and wood-fired or solar-ovened bread, and hand harvest and thresh our own grains.
We’ve also applied for a distillery permit, which will enable ourselves and other farmers to make our own fuel, as well as providing the entertaining and tasty old spirit, AppleJack.