Daily Update:
We are officially closed for the season, we have taken down the blueberry bird netting and opened it up for nature to enjoy!! Thanks to all of you who have loved picking berries here for so many years and to you who have just found us recently. We have a beautiful field of strawberries for next year, and are looking forward to going back to no reservations and regular hours. We wish you all well, be healthy, enjoy the fruits of your labors and be kind! DMMDLSLAMLRMSDCMDT
Celebrating Three Decades of Organic Agriculture
Thompson-Finch farm has been in Marnie's family for five generations. We, Don and Marnie, have been cultivating this land since 1982. We started out by growing a wide variety of vegetables and selling to local restaraunts and stores. With our first small field of strawberries, we saw that people yearned to pick their own food and to be connected to the earth and what they eat. As the years passed, our strawberry fields grew to 4.5 acres and our orchard to 1.5 acre; we also added 1 acre of blueberries and one-half acre of raspberries. Our dedicated customers now come from New York and the greater New England region. We are proud of our clean fields and orchards and most importantly you, our most valued and honored customers. You are what keeps us going and striving every year to make your visit to our farm a happy and memorable family outing.
Please bring your like-minded friends and continue to enjoy and honor this land that feeds us. And please, do leave your dogs at home when visiting the farm.
Marnie and Don MacLean
Reducing our energy consumption and perhaps becoming a net energy producing farm is one of our long term goals. As our business grew in the last few years we saw a steady increase in our use of energy, so we started to see if we could turn the tide. So far we have been making our own biodiesel fuel for our tractor and truck using waste oil from some restaurants and a school, refrigerated a walk in cooler with an exciting invention that uses a home air conditioner to cool the room using 60% less electricity and heated a greenhouse with wood heat. Now we have added a solar electric system to our home that should produce about 70% of our electricity. We will see if we can get that up to 100% through conservation.
There are some days that when we process used vegetable oil into biodiesel our solar panels are the only source of electricity and we still watch our electric meter spin backwards! Then we run our tractor on the biodiesel to plow, plant, cultivate and irrigate our strawberries! After that the sun in its purest form takes over and ripens them to pure perfection . These are just a few small steps in the right direction... A small step with a smaller footprint!”
Before coming to the farm, always check our update notice
or call 518-329-7578 for the latest picking conditions.