Meet
Jen + Heathar
Farmers. Dairy Enthusiasts. Rural Advocates.
The Farm Was Always Our Dream
When we met - back in 2011 - our dream was to have a farm. It took us ten years to find the right land and location. We looked everywhere - from Mexico to North Carolina to Florida and finally, back to New Mexico where we originally met and fell in love.
On our 5-acre plot of land, we started with chickens and gardens, then worked our way up to pigs and finally, to dairy cows. We now run a small raw, organic dairy in northern new mexico, producing product to our local community every week.
Meet Jen
I grew up in downtown Phoenix, Arizona in the eighties and nineties. I was a theatre kid, a musician, a lover of the arts and - my life was incredibly urban. I had no idea that the feeling I often felt homesick for was the feeling of being in the natural world. The first “nature” that I remember being in contact with were the orange trees my grandmother grew in her backyard.
As soon as I graduated from college, I flew to the most beautiful organic farm I could find in Maui. I spent the next three years traveling around the world and farming in Hawaii, Costa Rica and New Zealand until eventually, I found my way back to New Mexico where I met Heathar and began to forge my dream of living on the land with someone else.
While Heathar and I searched for home and land, I spent my time working in the holistic health world. I studied astrology, holistic midwifery, massage therapy and most recently, depth psychotherapy - I have an MA in counseling psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute.
Since purchasing our farm in 2022, I have chosen to immerse myself full time into studying plants, flowers and feminist ecology. I also spend my time writing about our experiences on the farm and feel passionately about documenting what it means to live rurally and to be an advocate of the natural world.
Meet Heathar
I was raised on a farm in the backwoods of upstate New York (to most people’s surprise, not all of New York is Manhattan - the majority of the land in New York is actually agricultural and mountainous land). My childhood consisted of cutting wood from our forest to heat our home in the winter, tending the gardens, making sure the beef cattle didn’t escape, feeding the pigs leftover milk and helping my mom in the kitchen (my mom is a very small Sicilian kitchen wizard). I was also a hardcore athlete and played Division One basketball.
I thought I was going to be an athlete all my life. But, in my early 20’s I experienced a life changing car accident that resulted in a TBI (traumatic brain injury). As a result, my body could no longer perform in the physical, rigorous way that it once did. This led me down the alternative healing path to find ways that my body could feel better. I devoured alternative health education, got a BA in nutrition, studied ancestral foods, attended acupuncture school and received a PhD in homeopathy.
Today, I spend much of my time in the pasture with our cows, in the kitchen making ancestral foods grown on our land and produced by our cows and I have a full time homeopathic healing practice where I help people overcome acute and chronic illness.
You can learn more about my work at www.heatharshepard.com or by visiting me on IG:@ eat_heal_farm