Dear Everyone,

We at Riddle Farm would like to express our deep gratitude to ABTech's Student Business Incubator Program for giving us the means and know-how to begin our family-farming journey successfully! Half-way through the grant year, we have managed to secure and settle into our beautiful three-acres in Marshall, buy seeds, hogs and a solar electric fence. Not bad for two good-friends/single-parents who met in one of Asheville's community gardens and decided to take our lives into own own hands.

Riddle Farm wants to help lead the Transition Movement in this area by becoming a self-sustaining group of family units that grows its own food, makes its own entertainment, and teaches the greater community how to live closer to the cycles of being.  We don't want to separate ourselves off from society or do anything to be thought of as a cult.  This is a way of life that can serve everyone and their mental health.  We think communities like this are and should continue to pop up like mushroom rings as remaining petroleum reserves begin to prove less and less profitable. The village model is much healthier.   It's really our time.  

So, next on the farm list is chickens, then goats and a guard dog, then mushroom logs in the spring, then trout ponds and ducks in the summer.  As soon as we get our farm truck and trailer, (which we could use a little bit more help with...your Kickstarter pledge makes a great Christmas gift, by the way! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1083993042/family-farm-restoration-project) we will be able to start doing petroleum-free landscaping services in our area.  Goats love to eat kudzu and just about any other weed, and pigs will happily till and fertilize you a garden in no time flat.  That way we can help other people get their backyard gardens started without all the backbreaking labor.  We would like to do everything we can to make the Transition to a downscaled, local economy the enjoyable thing to do.

Our heritage hogs, goats (eventually cheese) and poultry will be for sale at farmers markets, The Butcher's Block and fine restaurants in the area.  Also, we will grow mushroom logs, fruit, veggies and forest herbs. We want to make our farm as much like an ecosystem as possible, giving everything back to the whole.  That is why nature has been around for so long.  We like farming this way, because it means being intermediaries between nature and society.  Everyone has to eat.  Food connects us to all other life on a very basic level.  And thus it's a great way to educate the community how to take its power back into its own hands. 

Please contact us if you'd like to learn more about or even become a part of Riddle Farm:
riddle_farm@yahoo.com
www.riddlefarm.net

And to find out more about ABTech's wonderful Student Business Incubator Program, go to http://www1.abtech.edu/content/student-business-incubator/Student-Business-Incubator-Program

Sincerely,

Jessica Thistlegrove,
Student of the Sustainable Technologies Program at ABTech
and Member-Manager of Riddle Farm LLC