Our four farmers are Brian Hughes, Jenny Siebenhaar, Dick Frost, and Matt Hicks.
Brian & Jenny are both native to the Baltimore area.
Brian grew up in Ferndale, in the Linthicum area. His Mom currently lives in Baltimore Highlands. His brother, Mike, is the production manager for Baltimore Magazine. Brian graduated from Andover HS and briefly attended Catonsville Community College intending to study music and computer graphics.
Jenny grew up in Millersville. Her parents, sister and 2 brothers still live in the area. After graduating from Old Mill High School, Jenny attended both the U of Maryland and Anne Arundel Community College intending to study sociology.
Brian and Jenny met while working at the health food store now called Harry's Good Life. While working there, Brian became very curious about organic farms. He wanted to know if they were all that they were cracked up to be. So, he bicycled all the way to a North Carolina food distributor and then all the way across the state to various farms. It is here he got his first taste of both organic farming and working with draft horses.
After returning to the health store, he and Jenny decided to study organic farming in earnest and went to Europe to work on organic farms; first in England, then at Finhorn in Scotland, and finally in southern Spain.
After returning to the states, they continued their education and studied Permaculture design.
Finally they felt ready to begin farming on their own. They took a job establishing the Spoutwood CSA in Pennsylvania.
After 2 successful seasons, they trained replacement farmers for Spoutwood, and came back to Baltimore to help begin the Cromwell Valley CSA.
For Jenny, farming was the first thing that really felt right to her. Both she and Brian are dedicated to living their lives as sustainably as possible. They believe that community and closeness to the land is very important and vital to solving some of the problems in our culture.
Their personal goal is to create a lifestyle that's simpler, less dependent on money and more human powered. At the same time, they want to be able work on tasks they feel are important, like growing healthy food, in a way that builds the soil and protects the environment.
Both Jenny and Brian give presentations on both farm topics and Permaculture design. In addition to her farm work, Jenny is a trained "doula" and has attended about 30 births.
Brian and Jenny, together with Dick and Matt, worked hard to learn organic farming through interning, studying and experimentation. Although there are many challenges in farming, our farmers have proven how resilient and resourceful they can be and still have a lot of fun. Every CSA member should take the opportunity to meet them.
farmers who helped get the Cromwell Valley CSA off the ground in 1998, along with Brian, Jenny and Matt.
Family tradition and the American ideal of self sufficiency has brought Dick Frost back to his farming roots.
Growing up near New Haven, Connecticut, Dick’s family first lived with his grandparents on a small, self sufficient homestead that had a garden, vineyard, fruit trees, chickens and bees. His dad was a self educated man who quit school in the 8th grade. Although his parents struggled financially, his mother’s family’s farm gave his grandparents the means to support themselves.
Later, his parents were "seduced away" from the farm while Dick was still little. But, stories of the depression and the idea that farmers could take better care of themselves in hard times than the industrial poor, had a very strong influence on Dick.
That influence notwithstanding, Dick went on to get a degree in Psychology and worked 25 years in the field. Having trained as a school psychologist, he worked ten years doing clinical work in schools, centers and hospitals. He moved on to work as a school and community development consultant, focusing on organizational and work place issues before concentrating on working with chronic pain suffers in rehabilitation hospitals.
Because of his work with children, Dick observed how hard it was for kids to grow up well balanced with no stable community to support them. His job also gave him insight on our societies lack of support system for people in chronic pain.
He found that the societal problems that manifested themselves in children were systemic problems that needed to be addressed. So Dick decided to change his life and act on his beliefs. He wanted to get away from the "all important" consumer lifestyle to a self sufficient lifestyle that would help develop community – a lifestyle that would show people that they could live well with less.
Dick married his wife, Cindy, right after college. They lived in Connecticut and then Maine. Wherever Dick has lived, he has always had a garden. While living in Maine, he and his family lived on a 16 acre homestead with passive solar heat.
The Frosts moved to York, PA, because Cindy, a nurse, landed a great job in a hospital there. It was in York that Dick met our farmers, Brian and Jenny, after seeing a flyer about Spoutwood CSA.
They began working together to get Spoutwood off the ground. In 1998, he moved to Baltimore, with Brian and Jenny, to help form our Cromwell Valley CSA.
Dick and Cindy, along with their son, Aaron, live in a farmhouse on the Eck property (the Christmas tree farm). All of the Frosts are looking forward to a trip to Maine in July, for a very special event. Dick and Cindy’s daughter, Christine, is getting married!
I hope everyone takes the opportunity to meet Dick. He and his wife have traveled extensively and are a friendly couple. Dick is fun to talk to, has lots of knowledge and interesting stories. He can be quite inspiring about building a positive vision for farming and society.