Located 95 miles south
of Louisville, Kentucky, just east of Campbellsville and north of Green River Lake, Bear and Thistle Farm is
centered on 20 acres of hilltop pasture, graced by two small ponds and surrounded by more than 100 acres of eastern mixed
hardwood forest.
This is a farm in the making - a small farm,
not just in size, but in the tradition of small farms of an era gone by, where food is grown with care and the land is both
conserved and utilized to support a complex patchwork of complimentary enterprises. You'll find no monoculture
here, no single crop or kind of animal raised; nor is the goal to make the most profit. Instead, we aim for diversity
of products, preservation of heritage species, good stewardship of the watershed, soil and forest, and participation in a
healthy local economy, all accomplished with few external, non-renewable inputs.
They used to call these self-sufficient farms "subsistence" farms,
which implied a desperate scraping by, doing without, and sacrifice of comforts. They were and are nothing of the sort.
We believe the value of small, independent, diversified
farms is being rediscovered in this time of declining energy and oil supplies, global economic struggles for
food and natural resources, nationwide problems with food safety, and concern for the environment. We have decided to
join the growing numbers of hard-working, innovative, concerned Americans who are called to live the life of a community-based
farmer, thoughtfully caring for a piece of land and adding to the local economy by raising health-giving crops and grass-fed
livestock humanely, in concert with the entire web of life, not in opposition to it.
We welcome you to sit and browse a bit; find out why
we're building this farm, watch it grow from what it is to what it will be, and hopefully someday pay us a visit
in person, as we journey toward living the life we have imagined.
