Our Robinette Story (by Chloe)
My farming journey likely began as a child living in the city helping my mother tend our large vegetable garden. I didn't know it then, but that experience was a tiny seed planted in my heart slowly pulling me toward tending the land.
As a teenager, I worked in landscaping, as a lifeguard, and at a health food store. All keeping me outside and connected to food on some level.
In college, I gravitated toward Geography, Biology, Environmental Studies, and Geology with the hope that maybe I wouldn't have to work in an office for 100% of my career. I even worked on the grounds crew; raking, shoveling snow, and tending to campus plantings.
In my senior year, my friend gave me the book Coming Home to Eat by Gary Paul Nabhan. This book introduced me to eating locally and community-supported agriculture. I was hooked! I immediately began looking for farms to work on right after I graduated (also to avoid the office) and worked on my first farm just outside of Boulder Colorado in the summer of 2003.
After a season working in Colorado, I moved to California and worked for farms at their farmers' market stands and worked on a geology project for the natural history museum.
That summer the farmer I worked for in Colorado emailed me that summer and asked if I could come back to the farm because someone had left and she needed help. I was torn, I felt a true calling and desire to be back on the farm. I told her I couldn't this summer but would be there next year. In 2005 I moved back to Colorado and helped my friend start her own farm for the next 3 seasons.
Alex and I reconnected after knowing each other in college and began dating in 2006. He got to be around the farm but didn't work on the farm and that experience rekindled his love of animals he learned from growing up with a father for a veterinarian.
In 2008 we moved to Vermont where I worked on a farm that used draft power to grow wheat to mill and bake bread and I started a small vegetable subscription that summer. Alex and I were married that year in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.
In 2009 we moved back to Colorado where I worked on the same farm again and grew vegetables and started growing flowers.
We purchased a small herd of cattle and began rotationally grazing them on rented land, Robinette Farms was born!