Grazy Days Family Farm
A mother & daughter regenerative eco-farm in Frederick County, MD
raising 100% grass-fed lamb
and practicing EFL - Equine Facilitated (experiential) Learning.
Interested in one of our offerings but don't live so close? There's a ton to do up here, so come on out and make a day of it. Click below for more info on gorgeous hikes, fun breweries and wineries, good eats and nearby historical destinations:
"To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want."
- Wendell Berry
We believe that it is both possible and necessary to bring gratitude, love, and respect to our relationships with the land that sustains us and with the plants and animals that share this land with us. Our partnerships with our fellow beings here on the farm take many forms. Our dogs mostly give and receive affection, although they do help some with certain jobs. Our horses, too, are mostly engaged in emotional relationships with us, though also with our Equine Facilitated Learning practice and occasional riding. Our sheep; garden plants; and orchard shrubs and trees have an essential role: they feed us and our customers. In exchange, we do as humans always did until modern times: we protect, feed, and love them so that they can do whatever work their spirits came here to do in peace, as long as they are with us, rather than struggle to get by.
It is tempting to think that the best way to protect this land would be to let it grow up in a wild splendor of thorn bushes and, eventually, forest. However, we humans need to eat, and if we only purchase from the corporate industrial food complex, some other area is being destroyed by factory farms, pesticide sprays and soil-mining tillage. So we keep the bulk of our farm in food production, while listening to the desires of the land and its occupants and continuously improving our methods. That means, for example, planting a native forest in the fields bordering the creek; giving the blueberries our gratitude even in the months they don’t fruit; holding a ceremony of solemn appreciation for the sheep that are headed for the freezer; nurturing small nut trees throughout our pastures; and giving the horses as holistic, free, and rich a habitat as possible.
As part of our effort to continuously improve our farm by increasing the diversity and productivity of the ecology and our financial sustainability as well, we are in the process of planting much of our farm in chestnut trees. In the spring of 2020 we planted 48 Chinese Chestnuts bred for nut production on three acres. in 2023 we received a grant from MDAs Maryland Healthy Soils Competitive Fund, in conjunction with the good folks at SilvoCulture.org to plant twelve more acres of our pasture in these gorgeous, productive trees, which were installed in November, along with daffodils to deter voles and indigo bush and honey locusts to provide nitrogen.
The US imports a tremendous amount of these nuts and is the only country in the world that can grow them but doesn't have a commercial industry to do so, according to the folks at chestnuthilltreefarm.com. Once the trees have enough of a head start, we plan to graze our sheep in those same pastures, a practice known as silvopasture. Plants and animals complement and feed each other and growing both lamb and nuts on the same land makes so much sense. Also, growing food in a perennial (plants that live many years) system decreases the amount of food that needs to be grown with destructive annual (plowing, spraying) practices.
The pic of the littlest trees are ours. The others are from the USDA and Chestnut Hill Farm.
Our products are not in stores. We sell from the farm by appointment, and you are welcome to contact us by email, phone, or text to arrange a visit. We are happy to show you around while you are here if you wish and if time permits (Preferably by prior arrangement). For those of you who see us at our various weekly events (kids' lessons, etc), we are happy to bring your order with us.
Here is a clip of some of our Katahdin hair sheep grazing in the early summer. They are called "hair sheep" to distuingish them from wool sheep, who have been bred to produce wool and who must be sheared annually. Hair sheep, in contrast, shed their (still somewhat wooly) hair when the weather gets warm, just like other animals. You will see chunks of their hair in this video as they were right in the middle of shedding.
"It’s basic human nature to create us-versus-them scenarios and to project our fears onto objects other than the real problems. It’s time we realize that governments, multinational corporations, and the media all benefit from our current food system and food tribe infighting. The problem is, we as humans, don’t. When we fight about different facets of what the ideal diet is, big food wins every time.
The real threat to human health and the planet is industrially produced food. We should all agree on this and find a way to move forward, allowing people to choose which version of a real food diet works best for their bodies.
We’re all in this together, in more ways than one. The meat vs. no meat debate is defeating both camps and allows big ag to win. Now that we’re seeing bottlenecks and breakdowns in the system, hopefully we can all agree that real, unprocessed, whole foods, nutrient-dense foods grown as locally as possible is something we should all be fighting for."
