The Dorr Family Farm

Today I'm talking with Amy and James at The Dorr Family Farm.

 

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00:00
You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Amy at Dorr Family Farm in Whitefield, New Hampshire.  Good evening, Amy.  Again, I'm all confused on time. Sorry.  How are you?  I'm good. How are you? I'm good. You said your husband is there and I of course blanked his name already. Yeah, have James, my husband James with me.

00:29
James is with us too. So we have a couple to talk to tonight.  Have you guys been getting a ton of rain? Yeah, way too much.  Today too?  A little bit. Okay. All right.  My folks live in Maine and they have done nothing but  tell me how much rain they have gotten this spring. So I assumed  with you being in New Hampshire that it would be the same thing. Yeah, it's been, the ground is really wet.

00:58
We still have the remnants of vernal pools that are usually not still present this time of year.  A little bit. Trying to get into it a little more. Well, this year must be hard because it's taken my dad 10 plus years to put in  this garden this year. That's how it feels anyway.  Okay, so I looked at your Facebook page and Door Family Farm has been around for a long time.

01:28
So tell me about yourself and what you guys do. So yeah, this place has been here for a really long time. We've been here 13 years. So the farm has been in my husband's family for now eight generations. And it started out in the 1800s. My husband's, let's see, great.

01:57
Great. Many greats. Many great. Grandfather settled here from Canada and just started like a small, he was alone and he had a little shack and he just, you know, worked the land and the house that stands today was built in the 1800s as well as the barn. And we just kind of ended up here. It wasn't in the plans.

02:28
That happens. hear that a lot. Yeah. Are you from New Hampshire? Well, I was born in Massachusetts, but I lived in New Hampshire most of my life. Moved here when I was about five years old. Okay. I'm just not picking up on any New England accent at all. And I was like, maybe she didn't grow up in New Hampshire, but okay.

02:54
Okay, so what do you guys do at the farm? It's a farm, so I'm assuming it supports itself? Well, it definitely doesn't support itself. Oh, no. No. So we hold full-time jobs. I'm a nurse and James is an independent IT consultant. The farm once did support itself. It has gone...

03:22
through many different changes over the years.  At one point it was a strawberry farm  and at another point it was a potato farm.  Before that it was a dairy farm.  So it's always been a farm of some sort.  And when we came here, it was not in the plans and we sort of ended up here  through happenstance. The house

03:52
has been in the family for generations and it  was about to be sold.  We didn't want that to happen, so we bought it.  We moved here with no plan.  We've consistently  raised chickens the entire time we've been here. That's been the constant. At  one time, this place  provided all the food for the families that were here.

04:21
And we'd like to  tap into that and get back to some of that. Okay. Awesome.  And I think I saw something about a hip camp. You guys offer that? Yes. Yep. So we rent campsites on the property in the field and woods area in the back.  And it's just kind of a little very minimal effort thing that we offer.  And we've been doing it for a few years now.  This year has started off kind of slow.

04:50
I think things are weird, but  last year we were able to pay almost all of our property taxes with our hip camp income. So I feel like that's  a win.

05:02
Okay. So for people who don't know,  hip camp is sort of like Airbnb only for camping, right? Exactly. Yeah. And it's like rustic, undeveloped camping. So  you're not going to get a fancy bath house or a pool.  We rent to a lot of people who arrive on bicycle, actually, traveling across the Cross New Hampshire Trail,  which starts in Woodsville, New Hampshire, goes to Bethel, Maine.  So we just hosted one the other night. We rarely ever see them.  It's kind of a...

05:33
just a really private, rustic camping experience.  So  we came up with that as a way to kind of utilize the land because it's just kind of sitting here and it's very minimal effort. And sometimes we meet some really neat people, but a lot of times we never see them, which is great.  So it's easy. It's almost passive income. Exactly. Yeah, very much so. I'm a big fan of passive income.

06:02
I am. think that  if you can provide a service that doesn't require a whole lot of effort on your part,  you should do it.  definitely. I agree. That's why we started it. I kind of talked my husband into it.  Yeah, the closest we have to passive income here is we have a farm stand on our property right off of the driveway. Yeah.  And I have a Venmo  QR code thing out on  the bulletin board out there.

06:31
and we have a little container for cash  and people pull in, they get eggs, they get veggies, they get candles or soap or lip balms and they leave. Yeah. And I love it because it's like a little surprise at the end of the day when we go out to see who bought what, you know? Yeah. Yeah. We also have a little farm stand, mostly just eggs. So, but I would like to move into more things, but it takes time.  Yeah. Yes, it does.

07:00
Speaking of time, my husband just  spent an hour, I can't talk tonight, don't know what's up,  spent an hour picking black raspberries in our tree line.  And  I'm going to be making a black raspberry pie tomorrow from wild black raspberry bushes that we didn't have to pay for. am so excited about this. That's That is excellent. Yeah, like  we have a blueberry patch that has been here forever and same thing. It's like you walk out the back door and it's just right there.

07:30
It's awesome. It's not blueberry season yet, right?  No, not yet. Not yet. Another couple weeks? Yeah. Yeah.  Yup. I ate a lot of blueberry cake in my day when I was growing up in Maine because we had blueberries everywhere. Yeah.  Okay. So  I understand you both have full-time jobs,  but  do you have dreams for the farm? I mean, have you talked about what you would like to expand into?

08:00
Yeah. So like my vision is I've always,  when we moved here,  first of all, there  used to be a lot more land here.  Over the years, a lot was subdivided and sold off.  So we have a remaining five acre parcel  with the original barn and farmhouse,  which five acres is still a pretty usable amount of land.  So my  thought since we arrived here is that I wanted to be able to

08:28
use the land and kind of be home more  and try to find a way to make a living off of it.  Well, is it wooded or is it pasture or what is it? Yeah. So it's about,  it's probably,  yeah, it's about three quarters pasture and about  a quarter of it is wooded. Okay.  Well,

08:55
Do you want some ideas from a lady who spends a lot of time talking to people who have farms and homesteads?  Sure.  Okay. If you have a lot of woods, I assume you have a lot of underbrush in your woods. We do. Yeah.  Goats are great for that. They will eat  all the low lying bushes  instead of grass. They don't love grass.  Goats are a great, great thing because you can use them for meat.

09:24
You can use them for milk and the milk you can make cheese. You can drink the milk. You can make  goat butter from the  milk fat  and you can make goat milk. So they're like the perfect animal for the situation you're in. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely, know some people that have goats and I think that the time requirement and having to be home is kind of tough.  So Mary, this is James.

09:53
So four legged, four legged farm animals are not in our future.  Oh no.  We like to go away and we like to do things. I think part of the vision of this farm is going to be,  you know, something that's a little more self-sustainable,  a little more intelligent. You know, there's a lot of small craft things you can do.  And,  and with animals,  they require that you're here, you know, all the time.

10:22
And we have a little system set up for our chickens where they can sustain for a few days. you know, it's challenging running a farm in 2025 because you're not as necessary to the community. don't think as people fit, know, the perception of how necessary you are is different than it was, let's say, 100 years ago. So we're still trying to figure out where we fit in with this whole thing.

10:51
And that's the challenge. Amy likes to  bring people here.  And I'm completely opposite.  I like people coming to my farm stand, and that's it.  Property.  But Amy brings people  and she's trying a bunch of different things as well. And I guess the point comes in that it's just to be innovative is the only way to really sustain something like this because the old models that we

11:20
know of are gone  for a lot of us. including your farm where it's, you know, it's, difficult,  especially with, you know, her being a nurse and I'm a systems engineer.  And I hear quite a bit, but it's still, challenging to be here and, you know, deal with all the other nuances of life and your work. So those are our challenges in this farm.  And we're at some point, hopefully we're going to figure out what, that looks like for us.

11:50
I understand completely. That's why I started a podcast so I could talk to people who were doing all the things that I would like to be doing, but we don't have room on our little homestead.  Oh, got it.  So we have a friend who drives around with a,  um,  Amy helps out with these events and the common. And one of them was there was a vendors. can't, I think it was a fall event  and this woman

12:14
My daughter had to go to her house to get her goats because her car broke down and she had like a little petting station. So, my daughter had what? Six goats in her little Subaru. since then she's,  I think, raised her flock a little bit bigger. And  so she goes around and  she hires them out to eat patches of  sumac or poison ivy or whatever's out there.

12:44
And that's just showing you how people have to be super innovative in 2025 to run a farm and actually make enough money to at least sustain it. You know, with those services. absolutely. And I wasn't saying you need to get goats because I would love to have goats. I shutter it for every time somebody says...

13:09
Yeah, and with our farm, just, you know, every time somebody mentions four-legged animals, I'm just like, I panic inside because it makes me feel like I'd be just, I wouldn't be able to leave. I wouldn't be able to go away with my family, go to a music festival, go camping for a weekend, because of the animal. So that's our challenge with that. Yeah.

13:32
Okay, then gardens are probably out too because you kind of can't leave a garden for a week at a time when it's high growing season.  Which is partially true. also, I'm  working on irrigation and learning about irrigation right now  because we got a lot of water on our property.  so that is partially true, but  it's also,  you know, we don't go away for that long.

14:00
I don't like going away for that long. We usually go away for a couple, few days. You know, there's always somebody, one of my children here who can water.  and, and, as if we did bigger gardens,  um, and they started to evolve into just larger entities. Yeah, that would be, that would definitely be challenging. Uh, at that point we're kind of tied to the property of the summer.  Um, you know, just watching for pests or whatever. Um, you know, just have to be a part of it all the time. So absolutely.

14:30
Yep.  We don't go anywhere here because  we're tied to the farm because of the chickens and the dog and the barn cats and the garden.  And luckily when we bought this place, one of the prerequisites when we were looking for our forever place was that it had to be a place we didn't want to leave.  And we found it and we love it and we just don't leave. mean,

14:55
I, we went to my mom's 75th birthday party, like in 2021, and my son stayed here and took care of the chickens and the cats and the dog. And we were only gone for four days, like, like two, five days, four days of two days of hard driving a day and a half there and two days back from Minnesota to Maine. Wow. Yep.

15:22
Yep. And I tried everything I could to get out of going to her birthday party because I knew it was going to be  nuts.  And then all of a sudden I was like, no, we need to go. Like in my heart, I knew we had to be there. so we went.  okay. So tell me about your  house because houses that old don't really last as long as yours have. So tell me about your 1800s. Yeah. So that's a really good question.  I

15:49
I attribute the fact that the house is still standing  to the  strength and grit and perseverance of everyone who has lived here. We've been doing work on the house over the past 13 years and when you start peeling back the layers, you can see where people put a lot of care into things.  I think the fact that the same family has always been here  makes it really special.

16:19
They don't make houses like this anymore.  On that note, when we purchased the house, when we first got here, we were just trying to wrap our heads around this kind of property, which took a long time.  There was a large pine tree off the back of the barn that was growing  and it was hanging over the backside of the barn and it had created some rot.

16:47
Then we started to notice water coming in in the attic of our house. So we decided if we're going to keep this house and we're going to do this, we need to put new roofs on both structures. our first major construction  project was putting a metal roof on both buildings.  and,  but, you know, otherwise the house is really built well. There's there's it's good bones.  We've had to insulate it. There was no insulation in the house when we moved in.

17:16
We've so we've been doing a little bit of work. We're upgrading the electric next next week  And just trying to move through and make our mark on it like the people before us Okay, yes, I have I have some specific questions about your house. I assume it's been built on to  um  it's so  The the house  is it's it's a Victorian

17:45
like folk Victorian farmhouse style.  But there is a back  L that's more of a Cape.  James's aunt passed away a couple years ago and she was able to tell us a lot of stories because she grew up here. And apparently the back section was the original house, which had  been renovated. They added dormers, they raised the roof.  So there's been many different changes and renovations over the years. And it's kind of like

18:15
kind of fun  to learn about it because it's sort of like an archaeological dig. can kind of  look at where the old roof line was on the back section.  right now, James is working on a project trying to  fix the sagging roof in the back section.  But all in all,  you know,  it's nice having the stories  from his aunt because we kind of have a picture of how things came to be.

18:42
She told us the story about how the original house used to be down the hill by the river.  And apparently it was rolled up the hill on logs by Oxen.  Wow. Yeah. Like it's just neat. It's neat. But none of the house has been modernized. I think the most recent renovation was in the  1950s when there's a summer kitchen in the back L  and they built a 1950s Betty Crocker kitchen in the main house in the 50s.

19:12
and a bathroom downstairs. So those are the last renovations or upgrades that have really been done.  Okay, cool.  My house is over 100 years old here in Minnesota  and they remodeled it completely the year before we saw it, we knew it was here.  You would never  know this house is that old. is so, I swear to God, every corner is plump.

19:41
They remodeled it so beautifully. I keep trying to find someone who knows what it looked like before we moved in or before they did the remodel because  there used to be a bedroom downstairs and they remodeled it to where that bedroom is now part of the living room.  And they took some of the space from that little bedroom and made it into a walk-in closet, like storage closet with  hooks for hoes and things.

20:10
It's so weird to me that I walk in and it looks like a brand new house and I know the house is over 100 years old. Yeah. So this place hasn't been altered.  It's in the same footprint and floor plan as it was when it was built,  which is kind of neat.  There's a butler's pantry in the summer kitchen. There's a  root cellar in the basement,  which  came complete with  canned goods dating back to the 60s when we moved.

20:39
Oh my. Yeah, that was a fun cleaning project.  Yeah, it's pretty neat.  Yeah, it was back when people actually cooked and preserved food and did the things that you did then. Yeah, for sure.  It was a simpler way of life. It was not easier, but it was simpler. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so we hope that, I mean, we're...

21:03
We're like around 50, the two of us. Our youngest kid is 14 and we kind of look to the future of like sort of retirement time when we can focus on just being here. And I think that is kind of what we're looking forward to as far as doing more farming kind of stuff. I love the fact that you're doing the hip camp thing because at least then people get to enjoy part of your land. Yeah. And that's why we do it. We get great people.

21:32
It's, you know, it's carry in, carry out, leave no trace and people truly do not leave a trace.  Um,  it's nice. Yeah. All our guests have been very respectful.  Fabulous because you don't want disrespectful guests. would be  terrible. No,  no, no.  Um, I swear I read something on the listing for that, that you guys have bears in New Hampshire.

22:01
Oh, yes.  Yeah, they're black bears. They're, they're, mostly harmless. Yeah, they're more afraid of you than you are, you know.  And we don't  often,  we have dogs, and that kind of deters them. But I did see one a couple weeks ago. I think he was just lost.  That happens.  Yeah, the, have you seen any baby bears at all? Sometimes when you're like driving down the street,  sometimes

22:28
I've seen them, yeah, but not here, not in my place. There's a lot of dogs in this neighborhood, so you generally don't see, you'll see like a youth pass through and it's usually freaking out because the dogs are all barking everywhere.  And bears are terrified of dogs.  But  the problem with the bears is, you know, they might come around at night and you have people that are hip camping, a lot of them are not, and I'm not trying to generalize, but lot of them are usually not experienced campers.

22:55
or experienced with the wilderness of New Hampshire. And so you will attract the black bear if you leave your food out. And that could lead to a potential engagement with an animal that, you know, could make a decision based on its dread on you and it could hurt you or it could damage your things. So we try to deter that. It's mostly to save the bear. mean, because a fed bear is a dead bear.

23:24
Yeah, so I go into great detail in my hip camp listing about bear safety because we get a lot of travelers from the city who aren't quite acclimated to camping on undeveloped land.  So I just like to make sure they know what to expect.  Yes, you always want to hang your food in a bag from a tree branch that the bear can't get to. Exactly. And honestly, I'm not sure that matters because bears can climb trees.  can, yeah.

23:51
Right now, this is a plentiful spring, so there's a lot of things growing in the woods. So bears generally are not looking for those easy meals unless it's just an opportunistic thing.  They're out in the woods, they're eating berries, they're eating the things they're supposed to be eating right now, and it's been such a wet spring that luckily they're not coming out of the woodwork. But if they were hungry, you know, that would bring...  We've had them on our porch before when we were  not putting our trash away properly. That invites them in.

24:21
and we just want to protect them.  Good. I'm glad you want to protect the wildlife because those bears were there long before any humans showed up. So we should work. Definitely. All right, guys. Well, I'm going to actually cut this short because my dog is losing her mind outside. I don't know why.  So  I appreciate your time. Where can people find you?  So right now we just have a Facebook.  It's  the door family farm.

24:50
D-O-R-R. Yeah, just on Facebook.  All right. Well, I really appreciate your time and thank you for talking with me about your old house because I love history and I love old houses. Thanks, And I wish you all the luck in pursuing whatever you want to do with this property because it has so much potential. Thank you so much.  As always, people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com.  You guys have a great night. Thank you. You too. Thanks, Mary. Bye-bye.