Filming Something Exciting at Terra Vitae Farms
By Charlotte Isles, Development Associate
On a warm Saturday in June, our Executive Director Harry Rhodes and I made our way about an hour northeast of Chicago to Terra Vitae Farms in Woodstock, Illinois.
There we were joined by a film crew from Leff Communications, a marketing firm in Chicago that has helped us enormously with refreshing our website and other communication efforts.
We were about to start filming something exciting for FACT, unfortunately we can’t share it just yet but please keep an eye out in the next few weeks.
After some much needed coffee we got to work and I began to learn about their operation. Terra Vitae Farms was started by Mike Biver and his wife Colleen. Now three generations live and work on the farm: their four young children and Colleen’s parents Kevin and Kathleen Kelley.
The idea for starting the farm came from Mike’s mom’s health journey. She had been sick for a long time and eventually found out that it was due to food allergies. As a result, they started to look for food that was organic and humanely raised; produce wasn’t too difficult but they found it very hard to find healthy meat products.
Wanting to be part of the solution they began to raise their own animals. At first they just worked on meeting their own needs but every year the farm continued to evolve. They now have about 80 acres of land and raise cows, pigs, goats, broilers and laying hens, sheep, and horses as well as three beautiful livestock guardian dogs. They practice regenerative farming and their goal is to produce the healthiest meat possible with the philosophy ‘Better for You. Better for Them. Better for the Earth’. They sell their meat and eggs at the farm and at two nearby farmer’s markets.
This year they received a Fund-a-Farmer grant from FACT to purchase a large mobile broiler chicken unit to move through their pastures daily. This will increase their chicken’s welfare exponentially and strengthen their ability to scale up their operation. Pasturing provides a clean, reduced-stress environment for the chickens with plenty of fresh air and room to move. This addition to their farm will help increase the farm’s profitability, reduce the pest population, and fertilize the soils.
Apart from some loud chickens that were put out on their pasture, the filming was a success. It was fantastic to witness the farm in action and see how they have developed a thriving ecosystem where all their animals have the ability to live a happy and healthy life. We are very proud to partner with farms such as Terra Vitae that are so committed to raising their animals humanely and to providing healthy and nutritious food for the community.