Garth and Edmund Brown, Homesteading Brothers at Cairncrest Farm
Name: Garth Brown
Occupation: Farmer
Place of Residence: West Winfield, New York
Background and Personal History: Garth Brown lives with his wife, Alanna, and daughter, Arden, on a farm near West Winfield, N.Y. After graduating from Columbia University in 2006, he spent several years on the North Fork of Long Island where he worked for a coffee roaster and on an oyster farm. He and Alanna apprenticed with cheesemakers in France before beginning their current venture with his brother, Edmund, and Edmund’s wife, Normandy.
Garth now raises beef and pork for sale with an aim of minimizing inputs in both by using rotational grazing and readily available byproducts of local food production.
Current Projects: Living (almost) exclusively from the farm for a calendar year, figuring out how to raise pigs with minimal grain.
Name: Edmund Brown
Occupation: Farmer
Place of Residence: West Winfield, New York
Background and Personal History: Edmund Brown homesteads and farms near West Winfield, New York. In pursuit of lifelong interests in the great outdoors and food production, he hiked the Appalachian Trail and interned on a diversified biodynamic farm in Germany. He received an AA in resource management from Sterling College in 2002 before changing course to pursue a career as a registered nurse. After years of hospital work, he realized his deep interest in working outdoors was too strong to ignore. He teamed up with his brother in 2010 found Cairncrest Farm, which is devoted to producing exceptional meat in an environmentally sound manner.
He is currently building a passive solar, cob and timber-frame home. He has a long-term experiment testing whether bamboo will work as a base forage for winter grazing in his location. And he is developing a pork production system that will use very little or no grain in the pigs’ rations.
He is married to Normandy Alden, and they have two beautiful children.
More Places to Find Garth and Edmund on the Web:
