In their never-ending quest to reduce their carbon footprint, in April of 2010 Alison Gannett and her partner, Jason Trimm, moved to Holy Terror Farm, an 1889 75-acre homestead in a hidden river valley near Paonia, Colorado.
They grow over 300 chemical-free varieties of heirloom vegetables, fruits, nuts, berries, grains and beans. They raise Scottish Highland beef cows, rare-breed chickens, pastured pigs, and have Akbash livestock guardian dogs to keep the mountain lions, bears, skunks and raccoons away from the animals and orchards.
They try to grow and raise almost all their own food. What they don’t preserve, dry, can, freeze, over winter in the cold frames/high tunnels, or store in the root cellar, they sell on the non-profit online farmer’s market LocalFarmsFirst.org that we founded in 2009 – now with over 50 local chemical-free growers.
They do most of the soil preparations for gardens by hand and with their pigs, rotate their cows daily, use their chickens to fertilize and clean the orchards, save all their own seed, grow their own hay, render lard for oil and fat, make their own cheese, juices, butter and wood-fired or solar-ovened bread, and hand harvest and thresh their own grains.
They also have a distillery permit to make their own fuel, as well as providing the entertaining and tasty old spirit, AppleJack.
