Raise it Right Farm: Stop 4 on the Page County Grown Farm Tour 2012

Raise It Right Farm is up in Rileyville, at the north end of Page County.  It is another family-run operation, like so many of the Page County Grown farms, and it was one of the newcomers on the 2012 Farm Tour, along with Survivor Farm.  Here’s the write-up I posted earlier about this farm:

“This is a 10-acre farmstead in northern Page County.  The family of four started with a small backyard garden, added laying hens and honey bees…progressing to livestock – sheep and goats.  They’re raising much of the food they need to get by, and often have extra.  The enterprise has grown this year and they are raising pastured broilers along with everything else.”

There was plenty of do-it-yourself moxie in evidence at this farm.  The broiler tractors are made from recycled airline luggage carriers, for one thing, recovered from Dulles Airport.  They’ve been adapted to a pasture-based operation that is based on Salatin’s Pastured Poultry Profit$ (which was required reading for me while I was on my farm internship last year).

The chickens are processed right here on the farm, which is manageable because of the family-scale of the operation. We also had a look at the goats, and the sheep – which turns out to be the children’s 4H projects.  There were some good looking animals in that barn!

One of the impressive things about this family farm is the story about why there are doing this.  After a few health worries over the last few years, they were talking to the doctor about what might be the source of the problems.  From a series of conversations they developed a hypothesis that some of the issues might be coming from the foods they were eating – some of us are truly allergic and sensitive to the various additives and residual chemicals that are on everyday food items, and this turned out to be a part of what was going on with the family.

So from this they took inspiration to grow their own food, and that is the source of their farm’s name, as well:  Raise It Right.

We didn’t get out to see the honey bees at Raise It Right – we were running short of time on the schedule tour hours.  So we planned our next stop to be Public House Produce in Luray, and we figured we wouldn’t make it to Wisteria Farm and Vineyard due to how late it was getting to be.  We took consolation in the fact that we live near Wisteria, and one of the benefits of being close by is the fact that we can enjoy that farm just about any time. 

So tomorrow’s post will be about Public House Produce, and it will conclude the series on the 2012 Page County Grown Farm Tour.