Our Farm Philosophy at HIDDEN ACRES ORCHARDS

We envision this farm as a place where soil, plants, animals, and people belong to one another, each depending upon the health of the whole. Our work is not simply to grow a crop, but to tend the relationships that make a farm fertile, resilient, and worth passing on.

The word organic once spoke plainly to many of these ideas. Today, however, it is also a regulated term. A farm wishing to sell its produce as organic must submit to certification through a federally approved organization. We have chosen not to pursue that certification.

This is not because we believe the standards of our food should be lower. Quite the opposite. We have become wary of allowing a label to stand in for the more difficult question of how food was actually grown. 

As organic agriculture has grown into an industry and a marketing category, it has inevitably traveled some distance from the simple idea from which it began: that healthy food ought to come from healthy soil, tended with care and with as little harm as possible.

Our aim is therefore not to grow toward a label, but toward a healthier farm.

We would prefer a world in which a farmer and a customer could know one another well enough that trust mattered more than certification. Perhaps that is an old-fashioned notion. But agriculture has always depended upon relationships, between farmer and soil, animal and pasture, blossom and bee, and ultimately between the people who grow food and the people who eat it.

The biodynamic tradition has given us useful language for something we have long believed: that a farm should be regarded as a living whole rather than a collection of separate enterprises. Its principles of soil fertility, diversity, biological life, livestock, and careful observation continue to influence the way we think about this place.

We do not expect to seek biodynamic certification either. There is more than enough work in simply trying to become better farmers.

We will probably spend the rest of our lives learning how to care for this piece of ground. We do not expect ever to finish that education. The soil will teach us, the seasons will correct us, and experience will continually remind us how much we do not know.

Our promise is not a label. It is to keep paying attention, to keep learning, and to leave this land healthier than we found it.