Mahaffey Farms

When you buy produce from us, you can rest assured that it’s naturally grown in living soil and 100% chemical free.

Here’s how we do it…

Since the beginning, we decided to grow the kind of foods that we’d want to eat ourselves:  Clean, healthy food grown with no harmful additives or chemicals.  While we endeavor to be a Regenerative farm, when it comes to our market gardens (annual crops) it’s impossible to create a regenerative system that includes tilling the soil.  This is why we keep the scale of gardens small and concentrate on being as “sustainable” as possible.

Sustainable agriculture is about closing loops in the nutrient cycle.  We want to avoid inputs from outside the farm.  At least that is what we are trying to do, and it’s a challenge to develop a truly natural closed system.  At this time we may not be able to get everything we need from our land alone, but we are improving methods every season.  Capturing nutrients from our omnivorous animal production systems (poultry, pigs) to utilize in vegetable production is the primary strategy…  Even this strategy involves the off farm input from the feed and wood chips.  Fortunately, this is the most effective/efficient use of the waste materials from these systems.  Zero waste.  It’s part of our Holistic approach to agriculture.

Another long term strategy is the transition to perennial food crops.  These systems include tree crops, vines, bushes, brambles, and perennial vegetables (like asparagus).  The goal of getting our staple foods from perennial systems is the ultimate in regenerative agriculture.

We do not use herbicides, and are able to accomplish this by using hand tools and a small-cultivation tractor.

For fertilization, we use cover crops, composted manures, organic certified/approved minerals/materials, and our pond water irrigation system.  That is all we use – there are no chemical fertilizers.

We rarely have to perform pest control, but when we do, we either remove invading insects by hand or use natural products such as Neem Oil, natural bacteria, insecticidal soap, or diatomaceous earth.  Ultimately insect problems tell us our management is out of balance with nature…  Our primary approach to pests is to investigate the real cause(s) of the problem and correct the production methods.

Our efforts to grow vegetables “sustainably” is ongoing and will continue to improve.  The important thing here is quality.  We are committed to offering only the best produce to our customers.