What We Do
Earthkeep Farmcommon is a 583-acre farm operating under a perpetual conservation easement in Charlotte, Vermont. The varied topography of the farm includes fields, forests, streams, ponds, wetlands, pasture, crop land, and a Farmstead campus. Our unique business architecture, a shared 'farmcommon' serving both the non-profit Vermont Regenerative Agriculture Center and the for-profit Earthkeep Farmers' Collective, are a proving ground for a new models of farming. Building partnerships with over a dozen like minded VT and National NGOs, and collaborations with UVM, & VAAFM, we are deploying practices that can enable agriculture to mitigate climate change, restore tired working landscapes, increase biodiversity and invigorate our community's relationships to local food, farmers and the working landscape.
The Farmcommon is home to the Vermont Regenerative Agriculture Center, and it is also home to the Earthkeep Farmer Collective. The Farmer Collective, are farmer-producers involved in diverse farming activities and food production, including farming shrimp, cultivating hemp, grain growing for a fermentory, bakery and malthouse, vegetable, fruit and botanicals production for craft beverage bases, and direct farm to shopping bag markets. Annual and perennial flower production, sheep grazing, composting, and more are happening at the Farm.
Earthkeep represents a new model of farm, nonprofit, and higher education, hosting and supporting farmer/producers working together to bolster farming, nature, and economy by working year-round across 5 food sectors (vegetable, fruit, dairy, grain, protein) to put into practice sustainable and replicable models.
From a hill overlooking Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks in one direction and the Green Mountains in the other, Earthkeep Farmcommon models a former commodity dairy farm that allows multiple farmers to work together, helping to diversify Vermont farming, using regenerative practices.