01/02/2025
🍾🥂🎉 Happy New Year everyone!
We thought we’d take this day of “new beginning” to reintroduce ourselves to everyone. Many of you already know our story and have been following our farm for years - thanks for your continued support! Others of you have only recently found us - so this post is for you!
👋 Welcome! We’re the Stewart family. I’m Allison, the head chicken tender of the farm. I used to be a city girl destined to own her own graphic design business until I met my farmer husband, Josh, in 2014.
Josh and his family have owned Deer Run Farm since 1996. It’s been home to several species of farm animals over the years, but the one constant has always been the Red Angus herd. 🐂 The cattle herd started with 4 bred heifers the same year the farm was purchased. It’s grown to its current size of 40 moms, their most recent calves, their 1-1.5 year old weaned calves and 2 herd bulls (usually around 100 or so head at a time).
With a little encouragement, I was successfully able to convince Josh to take the leap and start offering the family’s beef as retail cuts in January of 2016. This is a dream he already had, but needed a little push to do it. By 2017 we had gotten our feet wet with farmers markets and opened up our retail store on the farm.
During this new phase of the farm, I was still working full time as a graphic designer at a local copy shop in town. I had out grown my position and was eagerly looking for the next challenge in my career. At the same time, our neighbors at Whitmore Farm were looking to retire from farming. They had a few different farming operations under their umbrella, but they put their 14 year old chicken hatchery up for sale.
Neither myself nor Josh had a lot of knowledge in chickens. In fact, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you if chickens needed a rooster to produce eggs or not (they don’t - for those of you who were like me once 😂). After a quick walk through of the Whitmore hatchery and learning the business side of things, Josh and I agreed it was something I could do as my full time job and be on the farm everyday.
Fast forward to today, we’ll have been operating Deer Run Farm hatchery for 8 years this coming May. In the last 7.5 years, I’ve learned more than one could ever need to know about chickens. I think of myself as a walking chicken encyclopedia. I’ve shipped chicks to every state in the U.S. and also to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. 🥚 🐣 🐥 🐓 We’ve gone from only offering chicks to offering hatching eggs, juveniles and started pullets too. This past year we hatched just shy of 15,000 chicks! That’s no easy feat for our small family farm when it’s just us along side 1 full time employee and 1 part timer that helps cover the weekend duties.
The growth of our farm over the last decade has been amazing. We even managed to add 2 sows to our farm in 2020/2021 that each have a litter of piglets twice a year. 🐖 🐖 This has helped us to increase our offerings at farmers markets and has allowed us to help feed so many families in our community.
Our focus on the farm has always been to produce the highest quality products by keeping in line with the best farming practices. Land stewardship and animal husbandry have always been at the core of our farming values. To ensure the highest quality is met in our products, all of our animals are born and raised on the farm and fed carefully curated diets that are made on the farm with feeds that are planted, grown and harvested here. Although it’s all a lot of work, we’re proud to offer products that we can confidently say we had a hand in creating from the very beginning the whole way through! ❤️
We’re grateful for all of the opportunities that our little farm has given us and for all of the supportive people it’s put into our lives. Getting to watch our little girl grow up on the farm is pure amazement and amusement. As we continue into this new year and into the years to come we hope to see her grow into her farmer role and eventually continue the third generation on our farm. 👩🌾 After all, all this work is to see the farm succeed and graduate to a new generation!
Cheers to 2025 and all the new adventures and obstacles that it will inevitably have for us! Thank you all for being amazing supporters of our small family farm. We wish everyone all the best blessings 2025 has to offer you! 🥂
