Native Offerings Farm
We follow organic standards, which prohibit the use of synthetic pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and fertilizers. Following standards assures you that genetically modified crops and organisms will not end up in your food and consumables.
We believe healthy soils produce healthy plants and employ ecological practices such as composting, cover cropping, mulching and crop rotation. We look at the farm as an ecosystem that we directly impact and want to encourage and enhance diversity instead of limiting it.
Native Offerings Farm isn’t only a business; it is a place. When we moved here in 2002, this farm was a dairy farm that had been in the Clark family for five generations. The farm is situated in a long valley in Cattaraugus County that was once full of dairy farms, now there are only a few and we are the only large scale producer of vegetables here. We are 9 miles to the northwest of the town of Ellicottville and the majority of our farm lies in the town of Otto. We have 180 acres of slightly rolling land. Some of it is good pasture and hay land but the reason we bought it was because it has about 15 acres of soil that is sandy loam; great for vegetable production. It’s in these fields that we farm using sound ecological principles that rely on soil fertility, biological controls and crop rotations. The farm has a year round flowing, class 1 trout fishing stream running through it from which we are allowed to irrigate. The barns and house were in relatively good shape and we could moved right away. Our CSA started in 1997 and was up and running by the time we moved in.
We started Buffalo Organics CSA in East Aurora on the Roelofs’ Arden Farm after vegetable farming with a friend in Trumansburg. That was in 1997, the year we were married. The house on this farm was built in the 1800’s and we used the cool, stone basement for storing vegetables our first year here. The farm wasn’t on the market in 2002 and actually could have been used as a site for a school but was voted down by the area residents. It wasn’t long after we bought the place that neighbors came up to us and explained that they were so happy that the land remained in farming. That was a good sign! We knew we had made the right choice in moving here! We originally thought we’d settle in Erie county but when we were searching all of Erie county for tillable, fertile farm land we came up against hurdles that most aspiring farmers will run into. The most pressing was that good farmland is also good for development. Which meant that we were priced out of buying that land.
Moving to this land presented some concerns, one of which is that we are in zone 5, even some areas here are zone 4. We have a two-week variance in temperature as compared to Buffalo and Eden, which is zone 6. Meaning, we can get a frost two weeks earlier than Buffalo in the fall and two weeks later in the spring.
So why farm here? Our first visit to the farm was telling. Stewart took his shovel to the cornfield behind the house and dug. It was then that a light went on for him; he had carefully and diligently found a place that could make the business of farming work. It had good tillable ground, fresh water and barns. I fell in love with the house, barns and surrounding hills. We thought it might be hard to truck our products into the city, which was our main market outlet. But our over 25 year CSA kept us intimately connected with our customers and many of them adjusted to the move to this beautiful place with us. Now, we focus on improving the land that we farm on and keeping our customers happy. We’ve farmed using organic methods since we’ve been here and wouldn’t farm any other way. We’ve planted over 4000 trees, fixed water drainage, and limed the soils and continually work with a soil lab to remineralize the ground that we work. We restored our vegetable storage and production barn after a fire burned the old dairy structure to the ground in 2019 (with the help of many, many hands).
You may be learning about us for the first time. We are Stewart and Deb Ritchie. We provide an alternative to agribusiness, our customers know exactly where and how their food and consumables are grown.
We do not exist solely to sell vegetables and our farm is ever evolving. Since 2018 in addition to vegetables we have been growing canna. We started with hemp production and now we have a NYS Adult Use Micro License that allows us cultivation, processing, distribution and retail sales. We’re excited to bring our brick and mortar to fruition at 11 Martha St. in Ellicottille this coming spring. The EVL farm shop will be a place where all of our ecologically grown grow products will be sold.
Our ideas and values will continue with this new business. We support healthy living and conscience consumption. We promote education and understanding of rural issues and ecological agriculture regardless of the crop produced. We support other ecologically friendly businesses. The end result of cooperation is stronger communities. We need each other. It is difficult to farm without the farm support system and without the support of customers who value what we do. There is also the priceless value of good advice, friendship, networking and valuing the extremely diverse talents of one’s community.
We have become part of the rural fabric of this little piece of countryside and are happy to live and to continue to farm here.
