Groton Family Farm - LocalHarvest

This is the first entry in a new blog among a trillion other blogs. It will attempt to cronicle the goings on at the Groton Family Farm in Groton , CT. with as few words as possible. I will try to make it interesting and informative, avoiding too much rambling, bad language, personal perseverations, or petty complaints. The blog will mostly be for my own benefit so feel free to skip on to the next blog. I am not very good at meditating or thinking things through so I will be using this blog to gain my own personal encouragement and direction.

To be brief, the Groton Family Farm was started by happenstance. Not, perhaps, the best way to start a business. In fact I did not start this project as a business. Our family, or rather my five brothers and sisters, brought our ailing and failing parents down from their big, or should I say huge, house in Brookline, MA to the old homestead in Groton, CT where my father was born. This was the house in which my father was actually born in 1918, and in which his father was born in the late 1800's, and where his father's father moved after the Civil war, when he bought it from a relative who's family owned since it was built in 1784.
I digress. So we brought our parents down here for their last years as they were blessed with either Alzheimer's (father) or Parkinson's dementia (mother). The additional purpose was to turn this old family homestead with 5 acres of tillable land and a big barn into a small farm working farm for the sole purpose of getting the taxes reduced. This was four years ago. Dad has since died and Mom is still hanging in there, god bless her, and the farm now has grown to 400 free range, pasture raised eggs laying hens, nine Shetland sheep, and a 3/4 acre vegetable garden. For these last four years I have worked with a healthy negative cash flow. I am now at the point where I have got to figure out how to make this place sustainable instead of loosing gobs of money, I need to make the farm pay for itself as well as generate a little profit. And thus, the reason for this blog. Maybe I can figure this out as I write as I don't seem to be able to figure it out in my head. I will try to make each entry as brief as possible and not be totally self-oriented but to offer some tidbits to those who might be interested in trying this crazy business themselves. I still believe this way of life is well worth it on many levels, in spite of the low valleys and the high peaks.