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.
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.
Farming for the community and providing the best food we can offer to you is our only business. We grow varieties noted for their culinary and nutritional value. Because every meal begins with your eyes, we enjoy growing beautiful vegetables. We believe a healthy diet is essential to superior health and longevity.
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 the 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 (with the help of many, many hands).
You are supporting our family and strengthening our local community.
Some of our customers have been with us since we started in 1997 — we were the first CSA in Erie County. You may be learning about us for the first time. We are Stewart and Deb Ritchie. We provide an alternative to agribusiness, consumers (shareholders, etc.) know exactly where and how their food is grown.
We do not exist solely to sell vegetables. One of the greatest rewards of operating your own business is creativity. You can apply your ideas and your values to your business. We try to encourage and support other ecologically friendly businesses. The end result of cooperation is a stronger farming community. We need each other. It is difficult to farm without the farm support system. This includes having parts, feed, equipment, and other agriculture suppliers close by. It includes being able to share, custom hire, and borrow equipment. There is also the priceless value of good advice and friendship.
We have become part of the rural fabric of this little piece of countryside and are happy to live and farm here.
