Become a Patron When I was a teenager, my mom had a prescient friend who traveled to New Orleans with her. An aspiring jazz sax player myself, I longed to go with them, but had to stay home and go to school. While wandering down Bourbon Street one lazy afternoon, they came upon a young woman on … Read More >
The Radical Homemaker
Warning: Blending authenticity with joy may arouse contempt.
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Place an online order for your chickens and turkeys to be picked up on the farm this spring.
Welcome.
In 1979, Mom and Dad plunked their ideals and $40,000 down on some of the poorest farmland in one of the poorest counties in New York State. They dreamed of living off that land, of their children living off that land. And from the first night I laid my head down to rest on Sap Bush Hollow Farm as a child, I never wanted anything else. As I grew to adulthood and began a family of my own, I realized that this little farm was more than just a pastoral dream. It was an antidote to industrial food, climate change, harried living and social injustices. But how was one little grassfed livestock farm high in the mountains going to support two families? I looked to my Appalachian neighbors, who had lived well up here for generations, with little to no cash. If they could do it, so could we. We would simply have to learn to make what we couldn’t buy. I would become the radical homemaker.
I thought it was just a sensible choice. I didn’t know it would spark a revolution.
Thanks for dropping in. Feel free to look around and see what life is like for three generations of my family as we live, bicker, laugh, feast, farm and love high up here in these frost covered hills of Schoharie County, New York.
— Shannon Hayes, The Radical Homemaker
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Sap Bush Hollow Farm
Learn more about the farm where I grew up, one of the nation’s pioneering grassfed livestock farms. View our price lists, get directions, and find out when we’re open.
Kabobs: Full flavored, Juicy, and Righteously NOT TENDER
The heat of summer inspires meat lovers everywhere to cast aside their pots and pans for the sake of connecting more primitively with their food. Grills light up across the nation, and flames lick at burgers and tender cuts of rib eye steaks, sirloins, porterhouses, t-bones, and filet mignon, … Read More >
Truth & Dreams
My graduate school advisors would not clear me to begin my research on Schoharie County agriculture before I could proficiently discuss the nature of truth. Was I a positivist, one who believes that truth can be known, most often through quantification, and therefore predicted and controlled? Or … Read More >
The Learning Curtain
“I’m just sick of learning. I’ve learned enough. There’s no way I’m going to college.” “Or would you rather be a mule?” I sing the refrain to the old song quietly as I wipe down the kitchen counters and move some dishes over to the sink where Bob stands washing. I’m a big believer in … Read More >
