meet our family
Ronnie Bowling
Ronnie is in charge of our livestock operation. He has won many awards for his livestock and forage management. He is passionate about rotational grazing, soil health, and animal husbandry. He often uses innovate gardening techniques to raise a garden year round. He also spends a lot of his time caring for fruit trees and bee keeping. He and Gloria are the powerhouses behind our delectable blueberries. When he isn’t taking care of animals, he can be found sharing the joy of farm life and working on farm projects with his two granddaughters, aged 9 and 6.
Gloria Bowling
Gloria takes care of our livestock and blueberries. She is especially skilled with baby animals and is often found bottle feeding lambs or goat kids that need a little extra help. When she isn’t in the pasture or blueberry patch, she can be found putting up food from the garden, cooking, reading, and spending time with her Granddaughters, aged 9 and 6.
Will Bowling
Some of Will’s earliest memories revolve around home gardening. He has a true passion for animal husbandry, soil health, and agroforestry. With a background in wildlife management, he is always striving to make Old Homeplace Farm more sustainable and to work in concert with the natural environment. When he isn’t farming, he can be found reading about farming, business, or nature. Oh wait- I think that means he is always farming!
Maggie Bowling
Maggie is in charge of our vegetable production, as well as product sales and delivery. Before becoming a full time farmer, she worked at Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County, coordinating the Grow Appalachia Project for four seasons. Maggie was raised on a certified organic vegetable farm, where she learned at a young age that farming is a process of continual learning (which is now one of the reasons she loves this vocation). When she isn’t covered in dirt from head to toe in the field, you can find her kayaking Goose Creek and the South Fork of the Kentucky River, reading, or cooking. She always says that she pretty much only thinks about food- about raising it, about cooking it, or about eating it!
our farming practices
We believe:
Your family deserves wholesome, delicious food at a fair price.
Food can - and should - be produced in a way that takes care of the land from which it comes.
Food should bring us pleasure. Any day can be improved by sharing a good meal with great people!
Local food promotes consumer choice, community vitality, and environmental benefits. These are good things.
Your enjoyment of Old Homeplace Farm products is important to us. Very important. Let us know how we can make your experience better!
These beliefs drive our farming philosophy. As it turns out, these beliefs also mesh wonderfully with our conviction to run an ecologically responsible farm. Learn more about some of our specific practices below.
rotational grazing
In nature, herds of herbivores constantly travel across the landscape to avoid predators and access new food sources. We mimic this system using rotational grazing.
Rotational grazing simply means we move the animals through our pastures in a managed fashion to ensure that our animals receive fresh pasture every day. This constant supply of fresh pasture provides excellent nutrition to our animals, which is the key that allows us to produce high-quality grass fed meat.
Rotational grazing is also good for the land. The relatively long rest periods associated with rotational grazing means that the pasture plants have ample time to recover after being grazed. In fact, our pastures seem to improve with each passing year!
multispecies grazing
Healthy natural systems always incorporate multiple species in the same area. This is possible because each species uses its habitat in a slightly different manner from all other species, a practice known as niche selection.
We imitate this arrangement at Old Homeplace Farm by welcoming cows, goats, sheep, pigs and chickens onto the farm. This means that we are better able to manage the forages that naturally grow in our permanent pastures.
This means we rarely need to bushhog any more, since our "weeds" are now goat and sheep feed!
All ruminant livestock species (cows, sheep, and goats) can thrive on a forage-only diet. In fact, a growing body of research shows that ruminants are healthier when they don't eat grain. This being the natural order of things, we never give our ruminants any grain supplementation. Our animals don't grow quite as fast without grain, but we think the wait is worth it!
Pigs and chickens aren't ruminants, so they need grain supplementation in addition to their pasture ration. As a comparison, you or I could not live on a diet of only iceberg lettuce...our digestive systems just can't squeeze all our needed nutrients from iceberg lettuce. The digestive tracts of pigs and chickens are somewhat similar to our own in this regard. As a result, we provide our non-ruminant animals with corn. Of course, the pigs and chickens also eat a wide variety of pasture species in addition to their grains.
composting
We consider animal manure an opportunity rather than a liability. We keep our animals on pasture as much as possible, but sometimes adverse weather leads us to feed hay in the barn.
Before moving the animals into the barn we create a thick bed of wood shavings and hay to catch their manure. This serves a dual purpose: it makes the barn much more pleasant for the animals, and it captures the nutrients in manure.
When spring arrives we move this used bedding to our composting area. It takes several months to fully compost this material, but at the end we find ourselves in possession of the finest soil amendment imaginable. What's more, the water quality in Goose Creek is never diminished from massive additions of raw manure to our fields. To our reckoning, everybody wins!
honeybees
We keep several hives of our own honeybees at Old Homeplace Farm (as well as hives managed by Meadow Branch Farm) . Their invaluable pollination services certainly help our vegetable fields and our home orchard reach their full potential, but they also assist our goal of pasture improvement and maintenance. The bees work diligently off of the white clover bloom in our fields, of which there is always a fresh supply from spring through fall thanks to constant reinvigoration from rotational grazing plan.
Of course, the by-product of this pollination service has its own sweet rewards!
naturally raised vegetables
We adhere to all of the policies and guides put into place by the National Organic Program. The abbreviated version is this: we strive to maintain a healthy soil with a thriving biota and high levels of organic matter. This adherence to healthy soil biology, coupled with the use of crop rotation and cover crops, allows us to maintain healthy crops without using synthetic pesticides or chemical fertilizers.
We are not certified organic at this time. We feel the biggest benefit of organic certification is to serve as a "stamp of approval" to customers who do not have the opportunity to really know the farmer whose product they are purchasing. This is probably important to a farmer selling his products in a supermarket. However, we're small enough that we get to know all of our customers personally, and count them as friends. In fact, this friendship is our favorite part of providing food to our community! We hope this mutual respect can serve in place of the red tape of government-sanctioned organic certification. It is a privilege to provide healthy food to friends, and you can be assured we will never violate this trust.
farm history
In the mid 1800’s, Squire Hensley moved his family to a farmstead in Clay County, Kentucky. No written record exists of the family's crops or livestock, but we imagine that Squire's farm was like most other Kentucky farms of that period: highly diversified and remarkably self-sufficient.
Squire was blessed with children, and eventually raised 7 daughters. His generosity and love of family prompted him to give each daughter a farm from the original property. Squire's love for the land ran deep, however, and family history tells us that after turning the farm over to his children he directed them to "Take care of the old homeplace."
His generous gift provided Squire's children a good start in life, but it also served to fragment the original property among many heirs. In May 2004 the Bowling family received the opportunity to combine two of these disjointed tracts. Gloria Bowling (Squire's great-granddaughter) already owned about 30 acres of the original farm. Incidentally, one of her cousins owned 90 adjoining acres that included Squire's original house site. The Bowlings purchased the adjoining 90 acres, resulting in the 120 acre farm that we affectionately know as the "The Old Homeplace." Somehow, we think Squire would approve.
In the summer of 2013, Will (Gloria's son, and Squire's great-great-grandson) got the opportunity to purchase 55 more acres of Squire's original farm. He did so, and one more piece of the Old Homeplace came home!
We call Ronnie and Gloria’s farm Old Homeplace Farm and Will and Maggie’s farm River Bend Farm (Old Homeplace Farm #2). You can see their locations on the FIND US PAGE.
“Locally grown meats and veggies - from our Homeplace to yours!”