A small farm
and a long table.

Centennial Park sits in a quiet corner of the Arizona Strip, where the Vermilion Cliffs come down to meet the desert and the irrigation ditches still run by the same lay of the land they did a hundred years ago. It's a good place to grow up. It's a better place to raise food.

In February 2005 we put a fence line in on a stretch of grass south of town and turned out a small herd. We had no business plan. We had a freezer that needed filling and an honest-to-God belief that meat ought to come from an animal that lived a real life. The cattle kept us busy. The chickens came next. Then the hogs. Then the kitchen garden the kids couldn't stay out of. Then a neighbor knocked on the door wanting half a hog for the freezer, and the next neighbor wanted eggs, and that was the day Sunset Farms became something more than a family pantry.

What "self-sufficient" really means here

It's a word people throw around. For us it isn't a finish line. It's a direction we walk in. Some years we hit it on eggs, some years we hit it on tomatoes, some years the freezer is so full we're giving roasts away. Other years a coyote teaches us a hard lesson, or the hay is short, or the well runs slow, and we eat humble. The point isn't perfection. The point is that we keep walking.

Every animal we sell is one we raised from young. Every dozen eggs came out of a coop one of our kids cleaned this morning. Every quart jar in the store has somebody's handwriting on the lid. That's the whole pitch.

Why farm at all

Three reasons, in order.

1. The work is good for people.

Farming is hard. It is also clarifying. It teaches discipline that doesn't come out of a book. It teaches patience that doesn't come out of a podcast. It teaches you to trust the seasons even when the seasons aren't doing what you wanted. We've raised our kids on this land because we wanted them to know what real work looks like, and what real work earns. We don't apologize for that.

2. The food is better for bodies.

There's growing research that locally grown, well-raised food is associated with lower rates of asthma, allergies, and hypertension. We don't pretend to be doctors. We do know our customers tell us they feel different when they cook with our meat than they do when they cook with grocery-store meat. We trust them. They're the ones eating it.

3. The land deserves it.

A piece of ground will tell you what it wants if you slow down enough to listen. We rotate our pastures because the grass is healthier for it. We compost because the soil is hungry for it. We keep our herd small because that's what the water table here can carry. None of that is innovative. All of it is older than we are. We're just trying to be good stewards of what we were lent.

A note on faith and family

We are a faith-rooted family. The farm is a family operation in every sense. Kids fed the lambs, grandparents canned the tomatoes, in-laws built the fence. We were taught that abundance is meant to be shared, and that the right answer to a full pantry is usually to invite somebody over. The store, the website, the pickup window. Those are just modern ways of inviting more people over.

Twenty years in.
What's next.

More garden. More flock. A bigger orchard if the well will hold up. More recipes from our table to yours. We don't aspire to be the biggest farm in Arizona. We just want to be the one our customers tell their grandkids about. If you've made it this far down the page, you're already most of the way there with us. Welcome in.

The Sunset Farms family