New Member Spotlight
Canter Hill Farm
From Field to Families
Malvern, Pa
Jeannette and Wayne Grabe reinvented Canter Hill Farm just over a year ago, with the goal of knowing where and how our own family food was grown. We founded the farm on a simple premise:
Before chemicals and labs got involved, nature had a workable system. Let’s learn about it, respect it and try to conform to it, and we’ll naturally and successfully be able to be “beyond organic” in our food supply.
New to farming, we had no pre-conceived ideas about raising animals or vegetables, and sought out farmers across the globe (literally) to learn what we did and didn’t want to do. Specifically, we quickly saw that most food systems raising just one type of offering will find need for external inputs – fertilizers, feed and sadly - sometimes chemicals and antibiotics. We therefore raise a variety of different animals and each one serves a function to the other animals (and to your table!) Read more about the symbiotic relationship of each of the animals we raise and crops we grow in the “How we Grow” section.
Canter Hill Farm, a historical farm dating back to 1809, now serves to provide meat, poultry, produce, fruit and an ever-growing variety of other products to the Chester County Community. We sell through farmer’s markets, direct to on-farm purchasers, restaurants and caterers and through both summer and winter CSA programs. We happily offer our farm as a pickup point for local farmer’s complimentary products in our attempt to make shopping local and fresh easier for you. You can view the full product line of our and other farm’s offerings in the “What we Sell” section.
How we Grow:
Our early learning included both meeting a large number of farmers as well as reading anything we could get our hands on (and not a few failures and mistakes!!) When traditional farmers balked at the idea of eliminating dewormers for their flock of sheep, they learned that chickens and guineas provide a natural pest protection – and it cuts the food bill for the birds! Milk from their cow provides for the chickens’ calcium needs, and they in turn (along with the turkeys and ducks) provide the much-needed nitrogen for the soil of the garden that grows their greens and clover. Through a wonderful network of like-minded growers nationwide, we have found holistic methods to manage just about every challenge we come across.
We appreciate the incredible challenge it is to really KNOW about how your food is raised, and we have tried, section by section, to explain below how each of our animals is cared for – and therefore explain EXACTLY what makes it to your table.
