About Our Farm
Our Story
“When I met Mark, he was farming in central Pennsylvania, and I was living in Manhattan. I loved my city life, but he seduced me with the food. I married him, and we built a family and this unique farm together, on the good soil and clean water at the edge of Lake Champlain. The membership is based on our desire to produce everything that we want to eat, in abundance, in the most responsible and fulfilling way possible.” — Kristin Kimball
Essex Farm has been producing a full diet of meats, eggs, dairy, vegetables, fruits, maple syrup, and more since 2004. Kristin’s books — The Dirty Life and Good Husbandry — tell the story of what it’s really like to conjure food from sun, soil, and work in the Adirondacks.
Your Essex Farm Team
Today, we have a team of over 20 team members working with us to feed over 100 year-round whole-diet CSA members, plus hundreds of other community members and travelers who visit the farm store.
Left to right: James, Izzie, Lotta, Nick, Kathleen, Mark, Anne, Kristin, Joanie, Barbara, Gracie (top), Brooke (bottom), Beth, William, and Charlie. Not pictured: Ben, Ken, Jackie, Satchel, Ted.
Our Mission
We strive to produce an abundance of high-quality food for our members and our neighbors while fostering the health and resiliency of the farm, the farmers, our members, and the community. Our desire is to build an agro-ecosystem that is sustainable economically, environmentally, and socially. We work to make a farm that is better tomorrow than it is today.
We Believe…
If you change the way you eat, you change the way you think.
If you change the way you think, you change the way you act.
Change the way you act, and you’ve changed the world.
Farming Practices and Philosophy
We believe diversity is key to the health of living systems. Our year-round full-diet CSA model is about maximizing the diversity of all the living things on our Adirondack landscape – the myriad plants and animals, wild and domesticated, that call this land home, from the large grazing ruminants to the microbes in our soil. Healthy soil grows healthy plants, healthy plants feed healthy animals, and the synergy of the animals and plants together in a system that mimics nature returns health and biodiversity to the soil. Our taste buds are wired to know what’s good for us. Taste our products, and we feel confident you’ll be hooked.
All of our beef and lamb are grassfed and finished, and our chicken, pork, and eggs are pasture-raised and fed organic grain.
Better Than Organic
We are not certified organic, but we follow or exceed the National Organic Standard, except when it discourages appropriate medical care for the health or wellbeing of our animals. We never use conventional pesticides or herbicides. Any grain we feed our animals is grown here, or certified organic. We oppose the use of non-GMO grain as a cheaper substitute for organic, because of the use of herbicides in non-GMO production. Non-GMO grain is often directly sprayed with glyphosate (Roundup) just before harvest. We don’t want to work with glyphosate, much less eat it.
Climate Impact and Carbon Sequestration
We care deeply about our farm’s impact on the planet. We have spent 2 decades developing our closed-loop food system. Cover crops and tightly managed rotational grazing sequester carbon underground and increase the health and carrying capacity of the soil. Our animals help limit the population of destructive crop pests, contribute fertility directly to the soil, and supercharge our on-farm composting system. And meat, milk and eggs are nutrient-dense foods that feed us through the north country winter.
Reducing Plastic and Food Miles
We use glass and returnable packaging, which is more expensive and labor-intensive than plastics and disposables, but keeps those things out of our landfill. Our members can bring all of their food compost back to the farm, to return fertility to the soil. We teach people how to thrive on whole food, in season, from their home biosphere. And we reduce our members’ food miles to a ridiculously small number, by producing a full diet here, and eliminating the weekly drive to the grocery store.