Rediscover

Rediscover our Heritage

"Think of your crops like money, because they are." was a quote I pulled from an agricultural magazine recently.  Conventional wisdom says that yield is king because yield equates to money.  Yield or output is one factor that a farmer believes they can improve.  They may not be able to control price, weather, input costs, or fuel prices - but if they work hard enough, select the right breeds, apply the right chemicals, use the most recent technology and equipment, and execute at the right time, they can make improvements to their outputs.  If you can make improvements to your outputs you put more money in your pocket.  If you put more money in your pocket you can grow your operations.  Margins are assumed to be fixed and increasing the size of the farm is the only way to increase profits.  This line of thought, in addition to consistency and uniformity, ease of automated post-processing, and shelf life stability ultimately drive the forces in agriculture industry.
 

A farmer selling a commodity doesn't have many options to break this mold.  However, if a farmer stops thinking of their product as money or a commodity and instead thinks of it as food - as something they would consume, something that their friends, neighbors, and community would eat, then they have just created a market.  In the faceless national commodity market, the farmer doesn't have any leverage besides quantity.  However, in a local market - a farmer can begin to leverage food quality to shape their own competitive market price.  In the new age of internet stores and social media, options are now available to farmers to sell their food that weren't available a generation ago.  If a farmer can add further value to their products by cutting out the middle men and prepare their product for direct consumption their profitability increases.
 

Farms of the past were a diverse ecosystem.  It wasn't uncommon for a single farm to raise small grains, legumes, livestock, poultry, and have orchards.  Farms of the past processed their own food on the farm.  Farms of today have delegated most of this activity (partly due to regulation) therefore someone further down the value chain picks up the profits.  Most farmers today have specialized their farm or ranch to focus on just a few commodities. They may not even consume any of the products they raise.  Not only are farmers specialists instead of generalists, their products are as well.  Breeds are selected not for general multi-purpose capabilities like the heritage breeds of the past - instead they have been selectively bred to enhance special traits preferred by commercial production and processing methods. 

At Living Heritage Farms we desire to utilize heritage breeds not only because they are less management-intensive, more efficient, and more resilient, but because we believe that consumers will also appreciate the higher nutritional values and superior taste that the heritage breeds offer.  Livestock will be encouraged to follow their natural behaviors in their natural environment and eat food they were designed to eat.  Livestock will be a tool to manage plant growth, fertilize the soil, and control weeds.

We also want to demonstrate the use of heritage farm equipment to our customers.  We believe it is important when communicating agriculture to frame it accurately in the context of the past.  This tells the story of "why", and how we arrived to our current state of affairs.