About Us

The road to healthy, guilt-free food is paved in grass

My name is Kevin Smith and I am a first generation farmer. My wife Kate and I started The Pasture Stand here in the beautiful town of Walworth, NY with the amazing support of our family and friends. Our goal is to provide the most delicious food possible that is both healthier than conventionally farmed food and grown using land-healing, regenerative practices.

This page has been by far the most difficult to write because I need to concisely explain why we started a farm. There are so many reasons: I love to cook (and eat), I want to provide healthy food for my family and friends, and I’ve found my true purpose and passion in raising and growing animals and plants. Looking back, it’s clear there were influences in my life even as a little kid. Some of my fondest memories growing up were playing in my grandparents’ gardens. My mom’s parents grew food for cooking wonderful Italian meals. Taste, color, texture, and freshness were paramount. My Papa always said, “God made dirt, and dirt don’t hurt.” My dad’s parents grew food for preservation (canning), filling the winter larder, and the lost art of frugality. They had beautiful heirloom apple trees and the most delicious canned peaches. We harvested, butchered, and processed our own venison. I was fortunate enough to grow up around gardeners, hunters (thanks Dad), fresh food, and great home cooks (thanks Mom).

With that said my first real exposure to farms occurred in college at Cornell University. It just so happens this is one of the best agriculture schools in the country. I’m kicking myself now because at the time I had very little interest in farming. But being exposed to it peripherally day in and day out, I did end up taking an elective agriculture course one semester. Part of the class included field trips to nearby, “state-of-the-art” farms. During these farm visits we saw tanks full of thousands of gallons of pesticides, cows standing on concrete ankle high in their own manure, and row-after-row of corn and soy. While the class was eye opening, and certainly a realistic portrayal of our food system, I was disappointed. Agriculture seemed so mechanized, unsanitary, and depressing. It was such a stark divergence from the pastoral scene on food labels and especially from my grandparents’ gardens.

This experience always nagged at me and I started keeping a close eye on food-related news topics. Over time I realized our society is constantly bombarded with messages in the media about how cow farts are warming the planet, corn derivatives are ingredients in everything, milk is full of hormones, pesticides cause cancer, rampant antibiotic use is causing superbugs, depression and diabetes are linked to modern diets, and food labels stating “organic,” “free-range,” and “antibiotic-free” are pure marketing tools that mean virtually nothing.

A couple years ago it got to the point where Kate and I started questioning every bite we took. We constantly discussed the unknown, likely sordid origins of our food. So much for romantic dinners (sorry Kate). Some nights we just needed to bury our heads in the sand. “Don’t worry about the fact the chicken was slimy and mushy or the local grocery store just recalled all the lettuce. The lettuce in the fridge at home is probably fine, right? Our grocery stores are better than those other ones, so it won’t affect us.” “Don’t worry that the honey is just flavored corn and rice syrup. Don’t worry that the tomatoes didn’t quite ripen in time in their argon gas-filled shipping containers.” This isn’t even the tip of the iceberg here. In 2018 the FDA recalled over 20 million pounds of meat alone – mostly for contamination with disease. This stuff will drive you mad. Maybe even mad enough that even though you love meat, you’ll try to be vegan (that didn’t last a week in our house).

Eventually I reached my breaking point. I needed to know more. And suffice it to say, the more I researched the worse things seemed. Typically, the more you investigate a story, you start to realize that either the participants are mostly good with just a few bad apples, or the other side of the story also has compelling reasons, but they weren’t equally represented. But not when it comes to food. Our food system is seriously, unequivocally, without question, absolutely, positively, irrefutably broken.

So, I figured I would opt out of the “system” and go all hippy, granola, off-grid and grow all my own plants, hunt for all my own meat, and hug all the trees. I ruined countless family meals telling everyone how their food was really grown and how we needed to find another way.

Right around this time, I stumbled across the award-winning documentary, “Food Inc.” This film highlighted not only the problems with industrial agriculture, but more importantly, it introduced the solution – small, innovative, and transparent farming operations implementing regenerative agriculture. I started my research all over again, this time delving into regenerative farming books by Joel Salatin, Barbara Kingsolver, Elliot Coleman, Greg Judy, and others.

Regenerative agriculture’s tenants are designed on building a healthy soil and grass stand. It uses nature-based practices such as composting, animal pasture rotations, solar power, no-till gardens, low animal density, no antibiotics, no artificial fertilizers or pesticides, and habitats designed to allow animals to express their true behaviors (i.e. chickens scratch, turkeys forage, and ruminants graze). Not only that, but wildlife is encouraged and even used as a metric for how well the farm is flourishing.

The published research on regenerative farming shows staggering results. Production efficiencies are high. The food is more nutritious, tastes better, and is free from harmful residues. Water is captured and the erosion of topsoil eliminated. And finally, frequent livestock rotations on grass pastures, followed by long periods of rest, builds soil. This in turn sequesters more water and carbon than the system uses and produces, respectively. That means two things: (1) This style of farming does not contribute to, and even helps reverse, greenhouse gas emissions and (2) We can once again eat meat guilt-free. In fact, we can’t afford to not eat meat raised this way.

The only problem with regenerative agriculture is there aren’t enough farmers doing it! So, after months of careful, intense planning, I quit my job and started farming full-time. We decided on creating a farm with transparent operations so people could see how their food was raised firsthand. We decided to be self-funded and not accept any taxpayer-funded subsidies or grants. And we decided if we weren’t comfortable feeding the food we grew to our own family, then we wouldn’t sell it to our customers.

Some folks like to claim that you can't feed the world with this style of agriculture. Not only do we heartily disagree, we believe regenerative agriculture must be the way we forge ahead if we want a farming legacy we can be proud of.

Please join us in providing healthy, delicious, and land-healing food to our community!

If you’d like to learn more, check out a piece published in 585 Magazine that goes into further details about how and why we started a farm: http://www.585mag.com/March-2020/The-Chickens-and-the-Eggs

Thank you,

Kevin and Kate

The Pasture Stand

PS Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions on our Contact page! We’d love to chat. In fact, before I started farming Kate and I would regularly attend the public market and we would always feel like the farmers were too busy to sit down and tell us about their farm. We wanted to know more but it was difficult to find that connection. That’s not the case with us so please let us know if you have any questions or feedback.