Hi, We’re the Marrows—the local farmers you know and trust. We want to provide you with a variety of great-tasting fresh produce and local meat.
Our farm is located in the Bitterroot Valley, nestled into a calm little river bottom niche, where Three Mile Creek flows into the Bitterroot River. We are so thankful to farm eight acres surrounded by cottonwoods and willows, and the river running through it draped by the mountains in the background. Wildlife is abundant and we keep pinching ourselves wondering if we really do live in such a wonderful place.
Inspired fourteen years ago with our very first garden, we fell in love with growing and raising our own food. The first garden was a little four-by-four patch of tomato starts given to us by my father-in-law. The next was twelve by twelve, and then the entire yard front and back was given over to production (the neighbors thought we were crazy for having chickens in our suburban backyard, but they knew we really had lost it when we had a garden in the front yard!) Planting fruit trees, and raising chickens for meat, I started to think what if we could grow all our own food?
We aim to harvest eight to twelve kinds of vegetables every week. Chicken, beef, pork, and lamb will be available in the fall.
At the same time with our growing family, number two had just been born, we were becoming aware of the quality of food we bought. Was it healthy? Was it safe? Was it grown in a sustainable way? It certainly didn’t taste as fresh as what we grew and raised ourselves, and the lack of flavor was striking. The desire for not just safe, but truly healthy fresh food and being passionate about raising it, led us to start our own farm. We want to provide great-tasting fresh produce and meat, grown regeneratively for our neighbors.
Fast forward fourteen years and we are truly a family farm as our name suggests. My beautiful wife and I are blessed with eight lovely children—six boys and two girls. We think the farm and country life is a great way to raise kids. What better way to provide for our family than by working from home, and being able to teach our kids about work ethic, business, and life?
We believe food should taste good
Food should not only taste good but be healthy and safe to eat, free from harmful and artificial chemicals—we grow beyond organic. To grow food this way, we start with the soil. Just as all life, including people, live symbiotically with many other organisms, plants live symbiotically with bacteria, fungi, and many other microbes living in the soil to receive the nutrition they need to thrive. In a healthy natural biome, you will see diversity and a perfect balance that makes it strong, healthy, and resilient. Conversely, if there isn’t balance or diversity you will have a weak, unhealthy, and frail ecosystem. We believe the same is true for all crops and livestock. We start at the ground level and focus on feeding the living soil to make it full of biodiversity which in turn feeds healthy nutrient-rich plants that then feed us! The regenerative methods we use to feed the soil and bring about the greatest diversity are: interplanting (growing more than one type of plant in the same space or companion planting); cover cropping (growing a thick stand of plants in between crop plantings to protect the soil and build organic matter in the soil); crop rotation (never growing the same type of annual plant in the same spot twice in a row); composting (all extra crop residues and animal wastes are composted to add organic matter and more importantly living organisms back into the soil; seed inoculation (we use natural beneficial microbes that aid seed germination and support a healthy young seedling); foliar sprays (we spray beneficial microbes and natural plant available nutrients directly onto leaves and fruit to boost healthy growth and prevent disease); and rotational grazing with our livestock (always moving animals to fresh pasture, and allowing sufficient time for the pasture to recover and re-grow before grazing it again).
Our region has a short growing season, so most fresh produce is shipped in from far away for half of the year. We are actively pursuing growing more storage crops that will keep through the winter months when properly stored. We are also building a berry and fruit orchard—fruit trees take a while to grow, so check back soon.