About Our Homestead & Community Building Project

Good Food
The basis for all other activity, food production is a key purpose of our homestead. 

We grow as much as we can to feed ourselves and others.  While we will eventually offer CSA subscriptions to members of our community, we currently donate extra produce to our local food bank and barter it with friends and neighbors.  In the years ahead, climate change due to human-caused global heating will bring increasing volatility in season weather patterns–and that means more food shortages, price spikes, and, ultimately, hunger.  Local food production will become even more important as industrial agriculture and profit-based distribution networks become less reliable.  We started this homestead to get a head start on food security.

Liberal Values
Progressive and/or liberal values inform everything we do at Hesselridge Farm.  Key among these are justice and sustainability.

Justice means more fairness and equity for those historically denied, and it also means holding ourselves and others responsible for the society we have inherited.  At Hesselridge Farm, we continue to seek new ways to work towards justice, including ways to support Native people recovering from genocide and its generational traumas, ways to build solidarity with recent immigrants, including undocumented persons, and strategies for keeping the homestead’s benefits flowing towards others who share the same commitments. 

Sustainability, in this context, means designing and building systems–social and physical–that can reach productive equilibrium in service to our values.  Productive equilibrium means, for example, that our food production and distribution methods can continue in the longer term without much additional effort, once established.  This includes agricultural methods that build good soil without artificial fertilizers or harmful pesticides, education and farm internship programs that help young people grow into capable progressive community members, investment in emissions-free energy and carbon offset infrastructure, and planning based on the best available social and environmental science. 

At Hesselridge Farm, we believe that Liberal Values are Country Values, and we work to uphold them every day.

Progressive Fellowship
Strong liberal communities in rural America need gathering spaces, and our homestead is a great place to get together!  In the months and years ahead, we will continue to invite like-minded friends, family, and other comrades who want to build community and counteract the common presumption that rural culture is inherently conservative, religious, and individualistic.  These notions are myths, and we look forward to becoming a hotbed of left-leaning experimental praxis–in partnership and solidarity with all of our fellows who seek to build a more just, sustainable, and inclusive rural way of life.

We’re just getting started, but there are lots of possibilities in store for this little ten-acre patch.  Think organic vegetable farming, rotational grazing with mini sheep, community organizing events, and much more to come.  We have quite a journey ahead!