About Our Farm
Giant Journey Farm is a 2-acre, diversified family farmstead located in Newfane, VT. Our mission is to provide fresh, delicious food directly to our community while we conscientiously steward our land and livestock.
We believe healthy, ethical food should be affordable (check out our sliding scale option) and we know it can be grown and raised in ways that promote the health of our planet and combat our climate crisis.
At our farm, we grow a range of vegetables, including greens, snap peas, tomatoes, fruits and berries, and we raise chickens, ducks, turkeys, and rabbits both for meat and eggs.
Thank you for supporting local agriculture!
Seren and Rick
The Giantest Journey
Our personal Giant Journey is to create a community invested in equitable sustainable living options, which includes educational opportunities for skill building in youth, inclusion of BIPOC/LGBTQIA+ folks, feeds our most vulnerable, and participates in non-monetary based economies of mutual aid.
Please read our Solidarity Statement and Accountability Plan to find out more about this work. Additionally, you can find a copy of our most recent Annual Report to learn more about our impact.
Join us on this journey by coming to visit our farm or coming to our farm events to help build stronger communities.
Who we are
Giant Journey Farm is owned and operated by Rick Burke and Seren Dias.
Rick has over 20 years commercial farming experience and has specialized in greenhouse crops, animal husbandry, and construction.
Seren has a decade in organic commercial farming and specializes in the geeky side of soil health as well as non-conventional agricultural styles, food justice and sovereignty, and teaching.
We are a WWOOF farm and the Newfane Regenerators for VTers for a New Economy.
Seren and Rick, farmers at Giant Journey Farm
How we farm
Giant Journey Farm is committed to ethical stewardship. All our animals are raised and harvested by us, on our farm, no hormones or antibiotics ever. We take care to ensure near zero waste, and as a no-till farm, we use very little fossil fuels.
At our farm, we never uses pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides that would harm our soil’s microbiome. We rely on predatory insects, cover cropping, companion planting, mulching, rotational grazing, and other tried and true practices to manage our crops, pastures, and livestock.
Why aren’t we certified organic?
The process for certification is a multi-year bureaucratic journey that is cost prohibitive for family farms like ours. Additionally it doesn’t currently align with our core values to stay local first and to use only biologic management tools.
Examples of such methods include buying organic feed that is shipped cross-country, substantially increasing a farm’s footprint, or spraying bell peppers with copper as a disease control method. Neither of these very common organic practices aligns with our values (and they substantially drive up the cost of organic food!).
To learn more about our approach to farming, join us for one of our upcoming workshops and events.
Farming & CSAs
Our farm is supported by the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) model. This model allows small farmers to buy equipment and seeds at the beginning of the season and adds security to the risky nature of life of farming.
And it allows share holders (that’s you if you sign up!) to create deep relationships with local farms while supporting local business and eating the freshest and most local food.
