Hello, and thank you for visiting Your Farm online!  We are Your Farmers, Kevin and Laura Channell.  We are so grateful to be farming this beautiful piece of farmland.  We count it a privilege for both of us to be able to farm full time and strive to be good stewards of this land.  We hope you enjoy our story of how Your Farm came into being. 

We both grew up in the same town in Indiana.  Our families came from farming backgrounds.  Kevin’s grandparents were involved in grain production and dairy.  Laura’s grandparents had a small diverse family farm and great-grandparents owned a large orchard.  We grew up hearing stories about the farms from our parents, but neither of us thought of farming for a career.     

We graduated from Indiana University in Bloomington with degrees not related to agriculture.  Soon after we were married, we began to discuss the possibilities of working together and starting a farm.  We longed for a more agrarian lifestyle. We read books about organic farming and took a Master Gardeners course through our local extension.  We researched online about how to get hands-on experience working on a farm.  We landed on NOFA-VT’s organic farming apprenticeship program and found a good match at a farm in Argyle, NY.  We finished fixing up an old house in an historic area, put it on the market, quit our jobs, put our things in storage and headed east to work and learn.  

We learned so much that first season and we couldn’t wait to find a farm to start working.  As the winter was ending and looked as if we would not find land, we decided to apprentice for another farm in Brunswick, ME.  While in Maine, we considered looking for land to farm in the Northeast.  We had spent time in Vermont as NOFA-VT apprentices touring other farms and going to workshops.  So, we looked for work in Vermont to see about relocating.  Kevin got a job in Woodstock and we moved to Vermont.      

Two weeks after moving to Vermont, we resumed the land search and found some farmland in Fairlee for sale.  We took a drive to see the property and knew it was a good opportunity.  We purchased the farm in March of 2006 as an empty hay field.  We had lots of work ahead, but were overjoyed and thankful to find a home for Your Farm.  You can read more about the beginnings of the farm on the Your Farm page.

The red wagon in our logo is a real antique harvest wagon we found for sale on a country road one day driving through Indiana.  We both loved it’s antique qualities, rustic charm and symbolic meaning.  The wagon reminds us of a way of farming that has slowly disappeared with time.  We are aiming to preserve the sustainable aspects of the old agrarian way of land husbandry.  

The farm name, Your Farm, is a reminder to us that we do not own the land.  It is a gift and we are stewards of this gift.  Wendell Berry states, ” It is a gift because the people who are to possess it, did not create it…We must not use the world as though we created it.”   The land will be here much longer than ourselves and we’d like the next generation to inherit it in better condition because of our work here.  The name also means that we are serving others with our labor and the food we harvest.  We love to know the people we are growing for and we love for our customers to know who is growing their food and how it is raised!

“The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.”  Psalm 24:1