Often, a dish is only as good as its ingredients.
Thankfully, a number of farms across the U.S. and beyond are focused on growing high-quality produce — often by using regenerative methods that prioritize soil health — before it makes its way to our plates.
Some farms take an extra step to incorporate food into the experience they offer their customers and the community around them, such as farm-to-table dinners and cooking classes.
Here, we spotlight just a few of the farms and farmers making meaningful contributions to their local food scene, from a California orchard to a celebrity chef-backed farm in the Canadian countryside.
Fort Erie, Ontario
photographs by Kelsey Vansickle
@bluegoosefarm



1. THE TINY BUT MIGHTY BLUE GOOSE FARM IS ONLY AN ACRE BUT OPTIMIZED FOR GROWING HIGH-QUALITY FOOD.
2. THE BLUE GOOSE ICON.
3. PRODUCE FROM BLUE GOOSE LANDS ON THE MENUs OF TORONTO’S FINEST RESTAURANTS LIKE MATHESON’S PRIME SEAFOOD PALACE.
Keenan McVey spent 13 years working in restaurants in Toronto before he moved to the Ontario countryside to become a farmer, partnering with chef and actor Matty Matheson to open Blue Goose Farm in Fort Erie. Four years later, the chef-turned-farmer tells The Rooted Journal he’s never cooked better in his life.
“I’ve definitely become the cook I always wanted to be,” McVey says. “It took me getting out of restaurants and starting a farm to be able to achieve that goal which is kind of funny.”
McVey and Matheson — who most people know from the acclaimed FX series, “The Bear” — met on the Toronto restaurant scene, and began working together after McVey visited Matheson’s Fort Erie property in the summer of 2019. “I was blown away,” McVey says. “It’s a beautiful landscape — a big forest in the back and then there’s just this one big open field — and I said to him, ‘Why don’t you have a farm here?’” To that, Matheson told him: “All right, then you do it.”
McVey had a little agricultural experience, having worked at a few farms in his early 20s and had entertained the idea of farming again one day. He didn’t know that day would come so soon.
It was 2020, and while it wasn’t the best year to start a business, looking back, McVey says it was “a blessing in disguise,” since he didn’t have experience with farming at a larger scale and now had some time to learn. “We built a little 3,000 square foot garden, which we call ‘The Little Goose,’” McVey says, noting that the garden now serves as a flower patch managed by his wife Ashley. “That was where I learned all the techniques,” he says, adding that the mistakes he made there were “huge lessons” to him and meant he didn’t have to take any big risks.


1. MCVEY HARVESTS TOMATOES.
2. OFTEN, SUPPORTING PRODUCE IS PICTURE PERFECT AND CAN BE FEATURED AS A DISH BY ITSELF.
The farm has approximately an acre of cultivated land — which may not sound like a lot, McVey says, but everything at Blue Goose is hand tended by a small crew.
“It’s very minimal intervention. There’s no tractor or any gas-powered tools used on the farm. Everything is done on a human scale,” he says. The farm crew is just a handful of people, though McVey says the team may grow slightly depending on demand. Blue Goose has also expanded its footprint slightly in recent months, with a new farm shop in Crystal Beach that opened in June, giving further access to the farm’s produce beyond its pop-up farmers’ markets (Blue Goose Farm itself is closed to the public).
Working on a smaller patch of land, McVey says interplanting and relay cropping help maximize the farm’s output while keeping the soil healthy. The crew also nurtures the soil by applying compost and avoiding tilling.
Such efforts appear to have made a difference in the quality of the produce grown at Blue Goose Farm — which appears on the menus at some of Toronto’s finest restaurants, including Matheson’s Prime Seafood Palace.
Even ingredients like spring onions, often a supporting act in a dish, have turned out so beautifully they can shine on their own. A recent batch, for example, turned out to be “unbelievably flavorful, so juicy, sweet and nuanced,” McVey says, adding that they’re “completely different” to typical scallions. “We just sliced them up and cooked them slowly in butter and had them over a piece of fish and it’s like a standalone ingredient,” he says. “Whereas if I was to get a scallion from the supplier, it’s just something to add body and a bit of color to a dish.”
Although the farm has gotten more attention in recent years thanks to Matheson’s fame, Blue Goose remains a humble operation that’s all about growing high-quality food. For McVey, the farm’s future remains focused on “a love for food and cooking” — and community. He hopes the farm can stay true to its origins as it grows and continue to “inspire others to cook, and treat themselves well and treat the soil well, treat the planet well.” After all, he says, “it’s all full circle.”
Philo, California
photographs by Lucille Lawrence
@philoapplefarm



1. A COTTAGE AMONG THE APPLE TREES.
2. SINCE 1984, THE LAND AND THE BUILDINGS HAVE BEEN INTEGRATED TOGETHER.
3. GOATS DINE ON ORGANIC FEED TO REPLENISH THE SOIL.
Many restaurants rely on organic farms for their produce. But in a way, The Apple Farm, an organic farm in California’s Anderson Valley, was grown out of a restaurant.
Karen Bates, the daughter of Don and Sally Schmitt — the original owners of the prestigious Napa Valley restaurant, The French Laundry — had come across the farm with her husband Tim and her brother on a trip to the region in the mid-1980s, and encouraged her parents to visit the property.
“We were the ones who had the urge to move on from Napa Valley,” Karen tells The Rooted Journal, adding that they had seen “the direction that Napa Valley was going” and “wanted to remove ourselves from that.”
When the Schmitts visited the farm with a realtor, they were taken by the beauty of the land and called Karen and Tim to ask if they’d like to become apple farmers. They said yes, and moved to Philo to become the new proprietors of The Apple Farm, while Don and Sally continued running The French Laundry.
At the time, in 1984, Karen says, “Anderson Valley was not really on the map.” But thanks to her parents’ restaurant business, they were able to transfer much of their customer base to The Apple Farm. A decade later, when the Schmitts sold The French Laundry to Chef Thomas Keller in 1994, they moved to the farm. Sally began offering cooking classes that became a hit with guests — a tradition that Karen continues today with occasional “Stay & Cook” experiences for overnight visitors interested in preparing a farm-to-table meal.


1. COTTAGES ARE AVAILABLE TO RENT AS PART OF THE FARM’S STAY & COOK EXPERIENCES.
2. THE KITCHEN AT THE APPLE FARM.
While Don and Sally have both passed, and their kids aren’t kids anymore, the farm remains a family operation with Karen and Tim raising their children (also no longer kids) on the land. To date, four generations have called the farm home. And now, two of Karen and Tim’s daughters, Sophia and Rita, along with Rita’s husband Jerzy, work at The Apple Farm. “We’re all very much established on the land here, living and working here as if we will be here forever,” Karen says.
As the farm has become embedded with the Bates family, food is still very much part of the farm’s DNA as it was when the family bought the property 40 years ago. The farm remains one of The French Laundry’s partners, with the farm delivering apples there. And the farm’s largest wholesale partner, Veritable Vegetable — a women-owned organic produce supplier based in San Francisco — distributes its fruit to restaurants and stores around the Bay Area.
On the farm itself, there are also plenty of opportunities for visitors to enjoy farm-to-table produce. In addition to Stay & Cook experiences, there are Saturday Suppers, a monthly dinner held on the second Saturday of each month from March through October with a menu made up of produce grown on the property and supplemented by what’s otherwise available locally and seasonally. The farm also has a farmstand where it sells apples, pears, and fresh cider during harvest season (July through November) and its processed foods during the rest of the year.
These offerings, along with the cottages onsite that are available for guests to rent, are vital in funding the family’s efforts on the farm.
When the Bateses got there in 1984, the land needed a lot of work and over the years Karen, Tim, and their family committed to organic farming to benefit the health of the farm. Over the years, they’ve adopted certain biodynamic practices including applying biodynamic preparations to the soil to maintain its health. And today, the team makes compost and mixes organic cow manure with its kitchen and animal waste (the farm has goats and chickens raised on organic feed) that it uses to replenish the soil.
Karen says following a closed-loop system like this is “a great goal” when it comes to making day-to-day decisions on the job. “Just keeping that framework in mind,” she adds, “I think it’s a really good guiding principle.”
Cape May, New Jersey
photographs by Carly Piersole
@beachplumfarm



1. A THRIVING FARM THANKS TO REGENERATIVE PRACTICES.
2. CHRISTINA ALBERT WITH ONE OF THE PRIZED CHICKENS THEY “ROTATE EVERY DAY TO WORK THEIR MAGIC.”
3. BEACH PLUM’S BARN WHICH HOUSES A FARM SHOP.
Christina Albert was living in Philadelphia and pregnant with her second child when she watched “Food Inc.”
“It changed my life,” she tells The Rooted Journal of the 2008 documentary, which gave a scathing look at America’s corporate food industry. “I had no idea about the food system and what was going on.”
Wanting to learn more about where the food she and her family were eating came from, Albert took a hands-on approach by turning a vacant lot in her South Philly neighborhood into a community garden. Then, when her husband’s work took them to Pittsburgh, Albert got a job with Whole Foods and contributed to a community garden sponsored by the grocery store, teaching kids how to garden. “I was like, I really need to get paid to do this,” she says.
Later, after over a decade spent working in insurance, Albert wound up doing just that, working on an organic farm in New Jersey. When it went out of business, she says, “I just drove down the parkway and knocked on every farm’s door.” Then, she got to Beach Plum Farm. “I had a job 15 minutes later,” Albert says.
Now director of agriculture at Beach Plum Farm, Albert oversees the daily farming operations at the sprawling Cape May property, which include regenerative agricultural practices such as composting and integrating animals to improve soil health.
“We move our chickens every day, and then every year they’re rotated to another field to work their magic,” Albert says. The chickens serve an important purpose as they fertilize the soil with their urine and dung and peck away pests. Albert adds that the farm’s pigs are rotated every 30 days: “Behind them is left vacant for 30 days, and in front of them is left vacant for 30 days to give all the land time to recover.”
“I like to tell our guests that everything here is working,” she adds. “So we’re feeding the chickens and the pigs, and the chickens and pigs, they’re going to turn around and feed us. This is the beauty and the simplicity of the relationship.”
Even farm visitors are part of the cyclical system it depends on. The farm has six cottages available to book as vacation rentals, and hosts a farm-to-table dinner series with menus made up of produce grown on the property. There’s also a farm shop in Beach Plum’s barn, where visitors can pick up fresh produce, and Albert herself gives tours to educate the public about the farm. “Every time someone shops here or stays in a cottage, or comes to a dinner, those resources go to support these agricultural efforts,” she says.
The local community helps too, by providing a steady supply of compost; the farm partners with the municipality of Cape May which Albert says brings “truckloads and truckloads of free compost” from their neighbors. Meanwhile, the farm’s kitchen often feeds food waste to the chickens and pigs to reduce their consumption needs. Albert adds that the farm team composts a lot of the manure from its hens once it’s aged and applies it to the soil with a manure spreader — another example of how the farm operates within a closed-loop system.
The farm’s regenerative practices have helped repair the health of the soil so far. “We can see the evidence of that in the plants and the vivaciousness of the plants,” Albert says, adding that the tomatoes and the farm’s other “yields have certainly improved.”
It’s important to the farm to provide high-quality produce to its guests, but also to the local restaurants it supplies. “You can taste the difference between something that was just picked and something that has kinda sat on the shelf at a grocery store for a long time,” Albert says. She adds that often she hears from guests that “once you have a fresh egg, it’s hard to go back.”
While Albert acknowledges that buying organic may not always be affordable for every meal, she encourages people to consider it for special occasions. She adds that it “does make a difference on your table and does say something about being part of your local community and supporting your local farmers.”