The Farm

Oxen and horses do the farm’s heavy work: they plow and haul in the fields and move logs out of the woodlot. They eat most of the hay the farm grows, and their manure goes back onto the fields as fertilizer.

The farm works three teams of oxen: Rough and Tough and Chase and Rubble, both Devons, and Buck and Blaze, Brown Swiss and Holstein crosses.

The Barden Barn, named for a horse logger, is the horse barn, and oxen workshops meet in the Grano Barn. Visitors can watch a team at work during the logging demonstrations listed on the events calendar.

Sixty-five acres of hay are cut twice a year, in late spring and late summer, baled, and stored in the Grano Barn. Most of it feeds the draft animals.

Corn is ground at the grist mill into feed and corn flour. For a time, a small share went to Cold Garden Spirits in Canterbury for a corn whiskey. Flax is grown for the fiber studios, where students learn to dress it and spin it into linen. Vegetables, melons, and fruit grow in hoop houses and open ground for the CSA, alongside older trees that include heritage apples.

The farm saves seed, rotates crops, and returns the animals’ manure to the soil.

Hogs and chickens are raised outdoors and fed corn and other feed grown on the farm. The farm plans to add beef and to offer its own bacon and sausage, and to bring meat into the CSA as production grows.

The farm’s woods have supplied the sawmill for more than 250 years. They are managed mainly for white pine and hemlock by foresters Jeffery Coombs and Jake Bronnenberg, who have looked after them for about twenty years.

The firewood for the stoves and furnaces is cut and hauled with oxen and horses. After a commercial harvest in 2020, a hundred white oak seedlings were planted. White oak resists rot even when it is wet and dry over and over, which makes it the wood for water-powered machinery and the cores of the dams. The farm hopes to plant hickory next, for ox yoke hoops.