Barn Raising for Local, Organic Farm
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Traditionally, a barn-raising has been a community-wide event with community members coming together to build a barn on a neighbor’s farm. We are inviting community members and those interested in our regenerative agriculture farm journey to help financially build the barn. Any amount we raise offsets the debt to build the barn.
I am Casey-Mae McGinley, owner of Good Soil Farm, LLC in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where my husband, children, and I run a Catholic Regenerative Agriculture Farm! What does that mean exactly? It means that we strive to regenerate our community, our soil, our ecosystem, and our food in such a way that improves the health of our whole community–and in that community we include everyone down to the smallest microbes in the soil! We do all this because we believe it is the best way to improve the health of the people we feed as well as the health of the earth.
We call ourselves a Catholic farm because we see the methods we use to farm–no-till market gardening, intensive rotational pasture management, permaculture methods, to name a few–as following Catholic teaching on respecting the nature of things and their orders of relation, and we see that by respecting the nature and relations of creatures we all win.
Why farm? I have always had the American dream of being a new Laura Ingalls, but when my husband was in college he desired to understand Christ’s agricultural parables better. SO he started a garden. He loved it. Then, when we were newly married and he was in grad school getting a masters of Theology learning about the nature and relations of creatures, we first learned about Joel Salatin, the farmer who follows the nature of the animal on his farm in Virginia. This made us want to do more. Let’s grow a garden! Let’s have chickens and rotate them on pasture! Let’s have grass-fed sheep (and this will also give us more insight into the parable of the Good Shepherd)! Let’s grow everything we can think of!
During that time, Stephen also underwent chemotherapy for diffuse, large b-cell lymphoma. Two months after he finished chemotherapy and graduated in the same week, we welcomed our first child. After all this, we learned the vital role of nutrient-dense food for health. Naturally, we wanted to find a way to provide that healthy food for our family and for others.
After starting a garden that grew to take up most of our suburban lot in Bowie, Maryland (S-section!), we started volunteering at Claggett Farm in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Future Harvest Chesapeake Alliance of Sustainable Agriculture connected us with them. The first year, Stephen volunteered on CSA vegetable harvest day and the second year he worked with the sheep and the cattle. The year after our second child was born, I brought our two young children along while I helped wash vegetables and set up the CSA stand. Although Stephen had been secretly hoping that one day a week would quench his desire to farm, it only made it grow. So what next?
At the beginning of the 2016 season, we decided to pray a novena to St. Isidore the Farmer. This inspiring novena encouraged us to make the leap. Stephen quit his full-time youth ministry job, we sold our house, and we started to look for land. We were confident that God had planned a special farm for us and that we only had to find it. It took much prayer, patience, and searching, but He led us to this place for sure!
For the past six years, we have been stewards of our land, which was truly a Godsend. When we realized we wanted to live and farm in Emmitsburg, we put in bids on every farm property available. There weren’t many on the market, so we exhausted those options pretty quickly.
So we decided to write letters to property owners. Maybe someone was about to put their land on the market, Maybe someone would lease land to us. We looked up owner contact info on the public tax assessment website, which revealed to us that the Daughters of Charity, the order of religious sisters that St. Elizabeth Ann Seton founded in Emmitsburg owned a good bit of land just outside town. So that was the first letter we wrote.
We never wrote another letter, because within two weeks, they gave us a call! They loved our vision for a Catholic farm. While they could not sell us the land we identified in the letter, they had a few other parcels we could look at! Wow! This was amazing!
Stephen met with the facilities manager to look at the properties and picked out the one on Keysville Road. It had the best soil when he did the shovel test, had been in hay for a few years, rather than corn or soy, and had the best lay of the land. He also analyzed the soil using the NRCS soil survey and it was rated good soil. But even better than all that was that it was a triangle shape (Trinity!), with a Cross going through it made up of woods–and through the horizontal beam of the Cross runs St. Mary’s Run, the stream that starts in the Grotto, and flows east to Tom’s Creek–and has four fields, which we named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John!
Now all this has more than just symbolic significance! The woods had provided a haven for biodiversity, which we wanted to encourage for a healthy farm. The stream has beautiful, clear water, and is perfect for streamwalks and even has a swimming hole! And the four fields have allowed us to take things a little at a time and grow into the farm as we learn. Additionally, that the farm was in hay for at least six years, meant that transitioning to organic, regenerative agriculture practices would go more smoothly. It meant that there would be little to no pesticide residue. It meant that through hard work, we could start bearing good fruit right away.
Over the past 6 years, we have started a vegetable CSA (community supported agriculture: members pay in the beginning of the year and get a weekly share of the vegetables that we grow and harvest for them), we have raised hens on pasture for laying eggs to eat and sell, we have raised chickens on pasture for good, healthy meat to eat and sell, we have started and grown a grass-fed flock of sheep that we raise and sell for meat, we have raised free-range guineas to help control ticks, we have gotten a wonderful farm dog and a great farm cat, and we are currently raising our first flock of pastured turkeys for Thanksgiving!
On the family side, during those six years, we have moved from a rental house where the septic failed and we had to move out quickly, to an 800-square-foot cottage, to a 26-foot-long camper while our house was being built. We are writing a book with stories from our camper dwelling! This was all quite an adventure, especially as we had added our third child in 2017 and our fourth in 2020, just before the shutdown! Now we have a fifth child–the first to be born while we lived on the farm!
It has been a crazy, wild adventure, and now we are ready to build a barn!
Our barn will provide us with much-needed storage for tools, equipment, hay, and feed. There will be a porch along the front where our CSA members will pick up their shares (much improved from the pop-up tents we've used in the past). The north-facing porch will be where we process our meat birds on-farm under federal regulations. The barn will also be an organic part of our farm educational experiences. For years we have been working with elementary schools, high schools, and the Mount undergrads and Seminary to teach regenerative agriculture and the Catholic philosophical and theological assumptions that it is premised upon. The barn will improve the experience of the farm for all who visit!
Thanks so much for your help with building our barn--we are still a young farm and are grateful for your help! Check out our website for more information about our farm: goodsoilfarmllc.com.
Hot off the presses! We recently partnered with the Mount Seminary Propaedeutic Year to help their formation: https://news.msmary.edu/2023/08/mount-st-marys-seminary-welcomes-men-to-propaedeutic-stage-of-formation.html
You can also check out an article we have written:
and a podcast Stephen has been interviewed in:
Here is an article written about us by a former student of Stephen’s:
More news! The barn is almost complete! But there is still time to help us! Thanks so much!
Organizer
Casey-Mae McGinley
Organizer
Emmitsburg, MD