OUR STORY

In 2019 my wife and I started asking ourselves, what does retirement life look like? And before we knew it, we moved from the suburbs to the country on a 20-acre farm.

Why do two people with no prior farm experience buy a farm?

​

It's an exciting story. Leading up to 2019, we started seeing our interests change, and we weren't living a fulfilling life. Our attention turned to downsizing and moving to the beach. Before committing to a radical lifestyle change by moving from a 4 bedroom home to a 2 bedroom condo, we set out on a pilgrimage to experience condo and beach life.

 

In the age of Airbnb and VRBO, finding a rental for a month anywhere is easy, and that's what we did. We started out in San Destin, FL, on a high rise on the beach. It only took three days before realizing that living in a high-rise condo on the beach was not for us.

​

We shifted gears and found a rental on the famed 30A highway in Florida. This was nicer, but there were cracks in the foundation immediately. The home wasn't on the beach, for starters, requiring a half a mile walk to get there. Also, while the beach house was lovely, we couldn't help but feel that we were still living in the suburbs, only hotter, getting sand in our shorts, and having no view of the water. Therefore, living along 30A was a no-go. 

​

We tried a condo on a golf course in San Destin, not giving up on the beach life, but on the bay side instead. It almost did the trick for us, but living in a condo along a golf course has its own perils. Namely, most people are terrible at golf, and any home on the golf course is a target. We had enough after the 5th day of hearing golf balls ricochet off the condo. The beach life was not panning out, and it was time to try something radical.

​

Since moving to TN, we've taken a few trips to Ashville, NC, and visited the Biltmore Estate. We absolutely love the town and the surrounding mountains. And with that knowledge, we rented a place in the mountains for the next adventure. We didn't land in Ashville but in Blueridge in northern Georgia in a 7-bedroom "cabin."

​

The cabin was the last cabin 2 miles down a gravel road and up a mountainside. We stayed there for a month, and during that time, we saw only 3 other people, except when we went into town. As it turned out, we wanted the quiet seclusion of mountain life and having trees as neighbors, and we fell madly in love. We found our happy place.

​

We headed back home with the plan to sell our home and purchase a condo in downtown Nashville and a mountainside cabin in the Smoky Mountains. We looked. And looked. And looked some more. We started to suspect our plan when every condo we looked at in Nashville that we could afford was only 750sf. We didn't think we could make that work with three dogs and two people.

​

We got radical again, abandoned the idea of two homes, drew a 50-mile circle around Nashville, and started looking for a home on acreage that would give us the same secluded feel we had in the cabin. 

​

And before we knew it, we found 20 acres in Culleoka, just south of Columbia, that checked all the boxes for what we were looking for. With 20-acres at our disposal, we turned our sites on how to leverage the land and make it work for us and started researching and decided to give small farming with a focus on direct to consumer a go.