About Us
For 25 years Wendy Carpenter has been tending to the land handed down to her by her grandfather, devoting herself to a love for growing food and enriching the soil. Over the course of this time Christopher Farm has been transformed from a hobby market garden into a flourishing Organic vegetable operation that supplies the local community with a much loved coalition of nutrition and education. In 2020, Wendy’s son Adrian Hess moved home to join his mother in stewarding the land and feeding the community, and to begin carrying out his own dreams of revitalizing this piece of the earth in East-Central Indiana.
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Christopher Farm became USDA Organic certified through OEFFA in 2017 and joined the Real Organic Project in 2019. But we have always grown our vegetables and flowers without the use of synthetic herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers.
In more recent years, with the growing movement for soil health and the profusion of research around soil biology, we have transitioned our farm into a no-till operation. These methodologies, which extend far beyond the absence of tillage, help us to grow a higher quality, more nutritious product. It also makes our soils (and therefore our whole operation) much more resilient to the impacts and unpredictability of our changing climate, while additionally working to sequester carbon in the earth, making it a system that not only withstands, but also stabilizes and reverses climate change.
We like to think of soil as a community - a diverse group of organisms living together, all with different needs, all fulfilling different roles that collectively form a structure - the one from which we source our food. In a healthy soil there is plenty of food to go around, so resources are shared and traded between organisms, which makes everyone stronger. And much like a human community, things go awry if everybody looks alike and acts alike. So our practices promote as diverse and holistic of a soil microbial community as possible.
Our mission is to shrink the distance between humans and the natural world, and to mitigate and even reverse the impacts of climate change through ecologically minded stewardship practices that promote healthy soil, which in turn feed the health of our community. We strive to educate both our food community, and our farm crew in ways that promote equality and connection to each other and the earth. This means working to be the best possible model of a food production system within an ecosystem as we work to develop and solidify the local and regional foodshed, as it fits into a global context.
