Our Growing Practices

How We Farm

Our passion for farming is embedded in our passion to care for our environment and provide healthy organic food for our community.

Every day at Stout Oak Farm, we’re working to build healthy soils, grow healthy crops, promote biodiversity, and support a balanced farm ecosystem.

All of our vegetables, herbs, flowers, and seedlings are Certified Organic by MOFGA. Additionally, our farm is Certified by the Real Organic Project.

In a world with too many toxic chemicals, we have made a commitment to manage our land with 100% organic methods. This means we never use herbicides, synthetic fertilizers, or synthetic pesticides on our farm.

We choose to use ecologically sound farming practices, demonstrating our commitment to enhancing soil health, using resources efficiently, creating a safe work environment for ourselves and our crew, and growing safe healthy food.

We couldn’t do this work without our community. Thank you for your support of Stout Oak Farm, and for choosing food that makes a positive difference for our planet.

Everything We Grow is Certified Organic

We’re Certified Organic by MOFGA Certification Services, formed by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association in order to provide USDA-accredited organic certification services to farmers. Our farm completes an annual certification and inspection process in order to verify our compliance with the USDA’s National Organic Standards.

& Certified by the Real Organic Project

We also have a second certification from the Real Organic Project. The Real Organic Project was started by farmers to protect the meaning of organic. This certification assures that we grow food in soil, not hydrponically – and underscores our belief that healthy soil creates nutritious food, healthy people, and a healthy environment.

Healthy Soils Grow Healthy Food

To build healthy soils, we use a wide variety of strategies including cover cropping, compost, and organic soil amendments. We spread a lot of compost, both made on farm and from our neighbors at Seacoast Soils, which adds organic matter and nutrients. We also grow cover crops every year in our field rotations. Cover crops mine for minerals, keep microbial activity going, suppress weeds, and add a lot more organic matter to the soil. The straw mulch we use breaks down over the seasons to add even more organic matter. Silage tarps are another strategy we employ to keep ground covered so that the soils don’t erode while suppressing weeds and minimizing tillage.

We grow all of our seedlings and microgreens in a biologically active, compost-based potting mix from Vermont Compost Company.

No Plastic Mulch

We don’t use single-use plastic mulch, although it is often used on vegetable farms like ours. Using plastic mulch means throwing away thousands of feet of single-use plastic at the end of every season. While it’s allowed under organic regulations and we understand why many farms use it (it takes a lot of time and labor to weed crops without it), we’re committed to reducing plastics everywhere we can. Making good use of resources is one of our guiding principles.

Instead we use a variety of hand tools – and our actual hands – to plant, weed, and harvest all of the vegetables. While it is labor intensive, it also results in very high quality vegetables grown with minimal fossil fuel inputs.

Solar Energy

Stout Oak Farm has solar power! We worked with ReVision Energy in 2017 to install 40 solar panels on our old dairy barn and we are now producing over 82% of the electricity we use on the farm. We’ve recently made needed infrastructure improvements to the farm house roof and electrical systems to open the door for more solar power, too.

See how much electricity our farm’s system is producing today, and across its lifetime.

Our farm systems are set up to reduce our use of fossil fuels. We grow everything under natural light. We heat our Greenhouse as minimally as we can, and don’t heat at all during the coldest months of the year. Our growing systems are primarily human scale and human powered (and those humans are powered by organic vegetables ;).

Biodiversity + Land Stewardship

As current stewards of this historic farm, we are committed to taking good care of the land, at the same time we are providing delicious, healthy food for our community. Since 2012, the farm’s sloping fields, woodlands, and wetlands have been protected by an agricultural conservation easement through Southeast Land Trust of NH.

Stout Oak Farm intentionally works to support a balanced farm ecosystem and increase biodiversity. We plant lots of pollinator host plants and native species throughout the farm. This land is now host to so many species of birds, insects, and plenty of wildlife, too, between the fields, woodlands, and marshlands we care for. Sometimes it means we’re working around Killdeer nests, and that’s just how we like it.