Our Story
A Forward
By Jenn's daughter, Sara
Jenn’s life path, passion for high quality gastronomic experiences, and numerous kismet moments, led her to follow her dream of building her very own farm from the ground up.
Almost one hundred years ago, her grandfather also cultivated a family farm in the Catskill mountains of upstate New York. Even in the 1930’s Great Grandpa Jacob was motivated by escaping the overwhelming hustle and bustle of Manhattan for a better quality of life just as my mom was.
As I dug into the family history, I found myself longing for a conversation with my great grandparents to better understand their legacy, before realizing that the answers were already apparent here and now.
There’s an innate human desire to be close to nature, to eat real food, to have community, and to be connected to what’s in front of you. Farming gives you all of that.
Jenn’s story and Jacob’s story are one in the same in that way, and everyone holds a piece of that story within them too.
It’s a cool spring afternoon and the sun is shining as bright as it will the whole day, illuminating rows of greenery and budding bushes.
My mom walks past each plant checking how they are doing, while she lets the dogs run around and climb the mountain of mulch. She smiles ear to ear, rejoicing from the inside out, seeing all the signs of thriving vegetation.
What sets farming apart is the ability to witness a full life cycle unfold right before your eyes. It’s quite literally where the idea of the “fruit of your labor” originates from. You follow an intentional set of steps, working with the rhythms of nature, and over time, life emerges where there was once only potential.
There is an embodied moment to moment experience of being outside showered in light, attuned to the ambient signs of life in the trees and grass: the birds chirp their songs, the cicadas’ rattling is relatively constant, and crickets chime in every so often.
Working the land, hands in the soil that smells of cool, chalky, earthy decomposition, you integrate into the cycle of nature that we are so often forced to disconnect from.
Food is a fundamental and basic human needs, and when people are entirely removed from the process the food takes to get to the table, they miss out on the benefits of participating in that journey, whether they grow it themselves or know the person who grew it.
Early Life
Taste guided by inner truth
Jenn Peters grew up in the Northeast Bronx in a 33-story apartment building, physically far removed from the ground and from the source of the food she ate. As a child, she was a very picky eater, navigating the pressure to eat more and to move outside her preferences.
When eating is shaped by outside expectation rather than inner cues, it can create distance from one’s intuition, rather than autonomy, presence, and enjoyment.
Jenn’s childhood friendship with next door neighbor, Elena and her family, helped to positively transform that for her. After school, Jenn would hang out with Elena at her home, where she was able to cook, taste, and explore food without pressure, forming her own preferences and trusting her own experience.
Through Elena’s family, Jenn was introduced to a wider world of culture and experience, from museums and films to the opera. At the same time, she was drawn to something more nature oriented, spending time strawberry and tomato picking in the summer and apple picking in the fall.
These moments offered an early connection to land and to the origins of food, planting a seed that would continue to grow throughout her life
Early Twenties and Thirties
Career
Jenn’s path continued to unfold in college, where she initially entered as an undecided student at a liberal arts school at Binghamton. Guided by curiosity, she explored a range of subjects, eventually discovering environmental studies.
Despite growing up far removed from the natural world, she found herself deeply drawn to it. What began as an unexpected interest quickly became a defining one, shaped in part by a professor who brought the subject to life.
At the same time, that awareness came with weight. Studying environmental issues in the mid to late 1980's meant confronting the realities of pollution, politics, and a growing sense that the earth was being harmed without enough care or attention. That tension deepened her connection to the subject and led her to pursue an internship at the Waterman Conservation Education Center in Appalachian, New York, an opportunity made possible when her mom and dad bought her a car so she could get there.
Her early career would take her in a different direction, but one that remained closely tied to these same underlying ideas. After returning to New York City, she became the Director of Student Services at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan.
Through her role, she was able to take classes and immerse herself in the world of cooking, gaining access to the education she had always been drawn to while contributing to the institution in a meaningful way.
It was there that her understanding of food began to take shape more fully. She came to see that food is not separate from the environment, but deeply connected to it.
A passion for cooking, she realized, begins long before the kitchen. It starts with how ingredients are grown, sourced, and cared for. One of the chef instructors shared a philosophy that stayed with her: the best food begins with the finest, freshest ingredients, with as little as possible done to them.
What once felt like separate paths began to converge, forming a foundation for how she would come to understand food, nature, and their relationship to one another.
Encore Career
Dreams Become Reality
Even as a mother, Jenn understood the importance of nourishing her family with real, whole foods. Produce was always a staple at the table, and she made an effort to ensure her children experienced food not just as something to eat, but something to engage with. She took them fruit picking throughout the seasons, and along with her parents, the family spent time staying on farms, experiences that continued to fuel her passion for agriculture.
At the time, she was working as a career and internship counselor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, commuting hours each day into Manhattan. Then the pandemic turned everybodies’ world upside down. With work becoming remote, she was no longer spending over three hours a day commuting, and she began putting that time into expanding her home garden.
In the summer of 2020, without the daily routine of commuting, her attention returned to what she was drawn to all along: growing the best food. At first, the vision felt big, even unrealistic, but she persisted. She imagined purchasing land in the South, building a small home for herself and her husband, creating a space to share with family and friends, and starting an organic farm.
There was hesitation in sharing that dream. Big visions can feel vulnerable, especially when they exist before the ball gets rolling, but as someone who had spent years guiding others through career transitions, she turned that same process inward. Step by step, she began to bring the idea to life.
She researched, took classes, and immersed herself in learning, spending years doing hands-on experience working on farms in both New Jersey and North Carolina. She surrounded herself with the language and movement of regenerative agriculture through films like Kiss the Ground (2020) and The Biggest Little Farm.
When it came time to decide what to grow, she returned to something simple and intuitive: grow what you love to eat. For her, that meant fruit, especially berries. That instinct became her guide, just as it had in other moments of her life, leading her forward in a way that felt both authentic and true.