Canter Hill Farm Malvern, PA From Field to Families

How we grow   |  What we sell  | CSA 2010 | Hours & Contact  | Farm Day 5/23

Welcome to Canter Hill Farm Jeannette and Wayne Grabe reinvented Canter Hill Farm just over a year ago, with the goal of knowing where and how our own family food was grown.  We founded the farm on a simple premise:    Before chemicals and labs got involved, nature had a workable system.  We will  learn about it, respect it and try to conform to it, and we will naturally and successfully be able to be beyond organic in our food supply.    New to farming, we had no pre-conceived ideas about raising animals or vegetables, and sought out farmers across the globe (literally) to learn what we did and didn’t want to do.  Specifically, we quickly saw that most food systems raising just one type of offering will find need for external inputs – fertilizers, feed and sadly - sometimes chemicals and antibiotics.  We therefore raise a variety of different animals and each one serves a function to the other animals (and to your table!)  Read more about the symbiotic relationship of each of the animals we raise and crops we grow in the How we Grow section.    Canter Hill Farm, a historical farm dating back to 1809, now serves to provide meat, poultry, produce, fruit and an ever-growing variety of other products to the Chester County Community.  We sell through farmers markets, direct to on-farm purchasers, restaurants and caterers and through both summer and winter CSA programs.  We happily offer our farm as a pickup point for local farmer’s complimentary products in our attempt to make shopping local and fresh easier for you.    You can view the full product line of our and other farm offerings in the What we Sell section.    Finally, we are committed to you both learning about and experiencing the process of growing your own food.  We provide training and sell newly hatched chicks (layers and broilers) to those wishing to raise their own poultry.  About Us Wayne & Jeannette Grabe own and run Canter Hill Farm, although given our recent growth, we will need to expand our team!  (Our teenage daughter, Katherine, definitely helps, but plans to go to school inManhattan, as far from farm life as possible!)  One of the most frequent questions we are asked is: Did you grow up farming?  Absolutely not!  I grew up with 1 cat.  Wayne was raised in South Africa and was a game ranger in the Kruger and Sabi Sands for seven years, so I suppose that made him comfortable dealing with animals!   When we bought the farm, we were committed to raising our own food.  We started with six chickens, two goats and 10 by 10 foot garden.  We quickly found that goats couldn’t mow the lawn nearly as effectively as sheep, so we added a small flock.  Naturally, we then needed sheep dogs, so we bought three (no, we never do anything in small ways) border collies.  The woods nearby were full of ticks, so my husband suggested guinea fowl, a native South African bird and tick eater, which we added to our little flock.  Friends, neighbors and random passers-by began to stop over and ask to try our eggs, and we quickly ran out!  So, we grew our flock and with that came the need to grow their food supply – hence more sheep.  As we sought the solution to our concerns about thin eggshells or using oyster shells where we did not know the origin, we did the natural thing and added a cow – a heritage breed (Dutch belted) – in efforts to support the original lines and simultaneously feed the chickens.  Our whole progression sounds a little like The Old Woman who Swallowed a Fly, but really was an outgrowth of us trying to find natural ways to tackle every challenge.    If you stop by on a Sunday afternoon, we’ll tell you some of the failures and a whole lot of funny stories.  Maybe someday we’ll have time to write them down!          To learn more about our farm or to ask questions, call us at:  610.827.1594 or drop by on a Sunday afternoon. 2138 Valley Hill Road, Malvern, PA