$10 delivery fee with FREE shipping on orders over $159 - Shop Now!

Chemical-Free Farming, Direct Marketing, and Community

posted on

March 3, 2025

email1.jpg

John Fisher gave a presentation at the annual Grazer's Conference in Lancaster last week. I thought I'd share it with you here. If you don't know him and his brother Alvin Fisher, this will give you a good idea about what they have been up to the last 2 1/2 decades.

Their conviction to growing clean foods for a healthier planet is deep. 

It's a vision. It's a prayer. It's a way of life. 

Paradise Pastures

  • 100% Grass Fed Raw Dairy
  • 100% Grass Fed Beef & Lamb
  • Pasture-Raised Poultry & Hogs
  • Healthy Baked Goods & More 
  • Custom Butchering

History of Direct Marketing

  • Direct Marking - a way of life since the Creation thru mid-20th Century
  • Food was sold to the consumer directly by the farmer or passed thru short supply chains
  • Most food was consumed within 20 miles from where it was produced
  • Farms were diverse
  • Manure from animals was essential to provide fertility for grain and vegetable crops
  • Hogs were raised on skim milk and other waste products

What Changed?

The Industrial Revolution
 

  • Leftover chemicals were used in agriculture
  • Manufacturing Infrastructure and knowledge developed for the war effort, now was put to use building trucks, tractors, and other farm machinery
  • Ignorance - Greed - Corruption
  • Government Policy

The Results

  • Less Nutritious Food
  • Food disconnected from its source
  • Ever-increasing regulation resulting in fewer farmers and processors
  • Food processing and marketing ending up in the hands of giant corporations
  • Ever-increasing amounts of harmful artificial ingredients
  • By the 1990s, food was traveling an average of 1,500 miles to get to the table.
     
email2.jpg

Our Personal Journey – Part 1

  • Born on a dairy farm tinkering with raising poultry as an early teenager
  • Dad had an interest in health due to his personal struggles
  • Dad got sick every Spring after spraying chemicals
  • Heard Joel Salatin speak in 1995 or ‘96, bought his book, and began raising pastured poultry
  • The family farm transitioned to organic by 2001
  • Met Sally Fallon and the Weston A. Price Foundation (2002)

Our Personal Journey – Part 2

  • Began marketing grass fed beef, pork, and laying hens
  • Bought a few Jersey cows and began offering raw dairy to our customers
  • Started delivering to a nutritionist on Long Island in 2002 and then to her clients around 2003
  • Worked in two different red meat butcher shops during the Winter
  • Attended every educational event possible during this time

Start Up Infrastructure 2000 – 2009 (pt. 1)

  • Butchered the first batch of 40 chickens by hand for personal use
  • Rented chicken butchering facilities from friends for several occasions
  • Found a set of used poultry equipment and set it up in an old corn shed
  • Bought a small 8’x12’ walk-in freezer (later upgrading to a reefer trailer)
  • Set up a retail store in old 10’x 24’ milk house (half- cooler; half-store) 

Start Up Infrastructure 2000 – 2009 (pt. 2)

  • Used and old hog barn to brood chickens in the Summer and house layers and hogs in the Winter
  • Raised Pastured poultry on Dad’s dairy pastured
  • Used a small portion of the milk from Dad’s dairy herd for direct sales while he continued to sell the rest to Organic Valley until 2010
  • Made butter, yogurt, cottage cheese and other fresh dairy products in Dad’s milk house and basement
  • Rented an 18-acre pasture from a cousin next door to farm

Building Infrastructure

  • Married Verna Mae on October 27th, 2009
  • Move to the house across the road on January 18th, 2010
  • Broke ground for our dream family on March 1st, 2010
  • Building was built to house a butcher shop, cold storage, order fulfillment, and retail sales on the upper floor
  • Lower floor housed cheesemaking, fresh dairy processing , and baking
  • Bought used equipment where ever we could to equip the business 

Building the Team

  • Hired our first full-time butcher (2010)
  • Started custom butchering (2011)
  • Hired additional employees to assist with butchering, sales, order fulfillment, and farming over the next several years
  • Hired a full-time cheesemaker and separated the cheese business (2011)
  • Worked with Kenny Friedman (marketing agent) for our main customer group Nourishing Long Island
  • Continued work with, Brother Alvin, the dairyman, buying his milk and reselling it
  • John Troyor and Sons in Canastota, NY custom grazed most of our beef 
email3.jpeg

Paradise Pastures at Its Peak

  • 35-40 Dairy Cows
  • 30-40 Grass Finished Beef
  • 40-60 Pastured Pigs
  • 800 Pastured Layers
  • 8000 Pastured Broilers
  • 500 Pastured Turkeys
  • 4-5 Full-time and 4-6 Part-time employees; processing more for others

Keys to Success - Paradise Pastures

  • Great Employees - Dedicated Customers – Focus on Customer’s Needs
  • Willing to adapt to meet customer’s requests
  • Great friends in the emerging movement who were willing to share their experiences
  • A family tolerant of my craziness
  • Events like the Grazing Conference, PASA Conference, and more
  • Sticking through the tough learning curve and learning from mistakes
  • Be willing to do things poorly at first

Things We Could Have Done Better

  • Listening to and addressing employee concerns and complaints
  • Better financial planning
  • Adding more management structure to the business
  • Be quicker to delegate
  • Delegate more intentionally

Moving On

  • Burke’s Garden Farm (2015)
  • Sold the retail business (2017)
  • Sold the butcher business (2018)
  • Moved to Burke’s Garden, VA (May 2018)
  • Alpine Heritage Creamery continues to operate in partnership with and under the direction of Brother Alvin
email4.jpeg

Alpine Heritage Creamery

  • Licensed cheesemaking business producing raw milk cheeses aged at least 60-days
  • Co-owned by brothers John Lee Fisher and Alvin D. Fisher
  • Employs 2-3 full-time and several part-time employees
  • Created primarily to turn milk from Alvin’s A2A2 100% Grass Fed Jersey herd into top quality cheeses
  • Provides Custom cheesemaking to other farms

History - Alpine Heritage Creamery

  • We shared the cost of hiring an old Swiss cheesemaker named Eldore Haney to teach Eli King and us the basics at Eli’s (2006)
  • We made several batches of cheese at Eli’s every year thru 2009
  • We began making cheese at our own facility (2010)
  • Our first vat - old 300-gal flat-bottom Jamesway bulk milk tank with no agitators
  • After hand-stirring for 1 ½ years, we added a stationary agitator system
  • We formed Alpine Heritage Creamery as a separate entity (2012)
  • Alvin Fisher and Ben Glick, the cheesemaker, became partners 
  • Ben became the new business’s first full-time employee at that time
  • We added a slightly used 5,000 lb. vat with stationary agitators

Keys to Success - Alpine Heritage Creamery

  • Great partners in business
  • Quality milk from Alvin’s herd
  • Bringing in good consultants to teach us
  • Using custom cheesemaking to more fully utilize our resources
  • Attending cheese conferences and educational events
email5.jpeg

Starting Over - Burke's Garden Farm

  • 100% Grass Fed Beef
  • 100% Grass Fed Lamb
  • Pastured Pork
  • Pastured Poultry
  • Raw Dairy Herd-share

Burke's Garden Farm

  • 200 +  Cow - Calf Pairs
  • 100 – 200 weaned calves bought in each year
  • Producing 250 – 400 grass finished beeves per year
  • 400 ewes producing grass fed lambs
  • Selling to Simply Grassfed and numerous other direct marketers.

Simply Grass Fed

  • Formed in 2021 to sell grass fed meats from Burke’s garden Farm and Cheeses from Alpine Heritage Creamery
  • Selling on-line
  • Selling from a small farm market at Burke’s Garden Farm and Alpine Heritage Creamery
  • Current weekly sales:  $5,000 – $6,000 shipping out of Lancaster, PA
  • Due to labor shortage, we out-sourced our marketing, customer service, and fulfillment.
email6.jpg

Challenges - Simply Grass Fed

  • We are using our third independent contractor for customer service, sales, and marketing
  • We are on our third fulfillment center as the second center was expensive and did a poor job of inventory management
  • The second center was 5-hours away and hard to really keep an eye on inventory
  • Services that are out-sourced must be paid regardless of what stage of development you are in the business
     

Upsides - Simply Grass Fed

  • Both parties who are now providing us with essential services are doing well at this time
  • Sales are growing steadily
  • Cheese sales are especially strong
  • Great potential for expansion as we are currently only retailing a small percentage of what our farms produce

Lessons Learned - Simply Grass Fed

  • No place has better shipping connections than Lancaster
  • Pallet shipping is available and reasonably priced anywhere in the U.S.
  • UPS and FedEx one and two-day shipping zones are much larger when shipping out of Lancaster area
  • Inventory is harder to manage when you can’t check on it regularly.
  • Out-sourcing services are expensive
  • Working out of multiple locations increases logistical costs significantly
email7.jpg

Our Vision for the Future

  • To be part of a small conservative Christian community dedicated to agriculture and building a market and brand together
  • To have a diverse group of interdependent enterprises working together on one land base and marketing thru common channels
  • Farming enterprises could include cows, sheep and/or goat dairies, pastured poultry, woodland pork, grass fed beef, grass fed lamb, maple syrup, honey, produce, and more
  • Our enterprises could include dairy and meat processing, and more
  • Marketing channels could include a farm market, online store, farmer’s markets, and more

Current Trends

  • Raw milk is just now catching the attention of the general public. Expect demand to continue to surge
  • People want a relationship with the people growing their food
  • A portion of the population will likely react to trends toward on-line shopping and be attracted to farm markets where they can establish a relationship with real farms
  • The unintended consequence of government action is often greater than the intended

Blessings,
John Lee Fisher

email8.jpg

chemical free farming

grass fed

grass fed farms

Alpine Heritage Creamery

Burke's Garden Farm

More from the blog

The Greenwashing of Our Foods – Part 2

Last year, I wrote an article titled The Greenwashing of the Organic Food Movement.Click here if you missed it, wish to read it again, or to listen to my podcast with Holistic Hilda. I share many valuable resources that you may want to access.For many years, humans and animals have lived quite robustly without disease, strong and happy on unadulterated animal products and plants in their most natural state. A hundred years ago, there was no such thing as organic because most farms and food were organic.Nowadays, finding food or growing food without chemicals is nearly impossible. We are at war with governments, corporations, media propaganda, and peer pressure. Cancer, auto-immune disease, weak bones, mental disorder, autism, dental cavities, SIDS, Downs-Syndrome, eczema, allergies, depression, diabetes, heart disease, ADHD are epidemic. Every year the AMA announces some new, unnamed unique disease. We have a hard time walking a block, yet alone reproducing.The health of our society and most importantly our children is failing. Disease is epidemic and humans and animals have become dependent on artificial life support from drugs, surgeries, and machines.Click here to listen to my latest podcast with the Appropriate Omnivore. Listen to the Podcast Here I spotlight the allowable exemptions in the USDA organic standards that include chemicals, de-beaking, and irradiation as well as standard practices in the organic produce, grain, meat processing, fishing, and honey bee industry.Did you know that if your organic grains and potatoes won’t sprout, they were likely irradiated?Towards the end, I discuss the current USDA mandated vaccination policy of our American wildlife, the laws in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho that require the vaccination of ALL cattle heifers, and the current air-drop vaccination programs across the U.S. How are shellfish treated? Click Here to watch how our shellfish are “Depurated” ie. sterilized both chemically and with radiation to protect us from harmful microbes. They are bathed in chlorinated, anti-microbial water for 2-3 days and irradiated to kill the bacteria before they ship to your grocery store to ensure we get sanitary, bacteria-free food. What they don’t disclose is that the microbes are there to decompose the toxic chemicals from industry in our waterways. And, their depuration process does NOT remove any heavy metals, petroleum, or chemicals from the shellfish. Thus, it is more likely that if someone was to get sick from seafood, it is from eating the chemical pollutants, not from the fish or the microbes. Scallops without any additives are called "dry-packed", while scallops that are treated with sodium tripolyphosphate (STPP) are called "wet-packed". STPP causes the scallops to absorb moisture prior to the freezing process, thereby increasing their weight. So, buy shellfish directly from the fisher or dry- packed, and don't eat from the Gulf of Mexico, near big cities, or toxic waste dumps like the James River in VA or New Jersey or Boston. Best to procure from PEI, Maine, NC, and a few select places in the Pacific Northwest.Currently, oysters are NOT depurated. So, go with oysters over clams, scallops, or mollusks.Clean food and healthy children or going extinct, however, I’m an “apocaloptimist”. It doesn’t look good, but in the long run, good will prevail.It takes vision, perseverance, courage, and hard work to find and grow food that is actually food.Are you down for the challenge? A healthy future for our children, aligned with the wisdom of nature, depends on us. If you want clean food, Burke’s Garden Farm and Alpine Heritage Creamery are both “Beyond Organic”. All our animals are outdoors getting fresh grass, haylage, grubs, sunshine, fresh air, and fresh water from the creeks and springs in a high-elevation circular valley surrounded by mountains, protected from city or industrial pollution. Simply Grassfed animals DO NOT eat GMO feeds or receive Growth Hormones. All our dairy cows are tested A2/A2 Beta-CaseinAll our cheeses are made with NON-GMO-Pfizer rennets. Click Here to read moreAll our cheeses are raw, never exceeding 102 degrees.Our butcher cleans our meat with either apple cider vinegar or water.We ship our products in biodegradable or recyclable cardboard insulated boxes in the Winter and ship with dry-ice when we can to minimize the plastic gel packs filling up the landfill. Click Here for an updated Healthy Products Resource List. In Optimal Health,Phoenix

Bulk Up on 100% Grass Fed Beef

This Spring has been bountiful with rain and our pastures are lush! This means our animals are also flourishing on green orchard grass, red clover, white clover, fescue, blue grass, dandelion, nettle, violets, burdock, thistle and more!!! Our meat will be as nutrient-dense as ever this year. And, we predict a good hay season to stock up for the Winter.

Our Babes are Back on Grass

Thanks to a warm and wet Spring, our animals are back to rotational grazing on our delicious dark green pastures of orchard grass, clover, dandelion, blue grass, thistle, and other nutritious grasses, legumes, and herbs.