Great to see you!
We are the Bell Family
Being the steward of this land is the greatest gift and has become our life work. In this little nook of the world, up a hill from the banks of the Willamette River in Oregon's rich valley, we call this space home and are so grateful for this opportunity. After years of searching for the right place to fit our lifestyle, blending our need to be close to Donald's work, near our family and community, while also wanting enough land to cultivate a certain land-based lifestyle and stretch our wings.... here we have landed in the Spring of 2023. We couldn't be more excited about this endeavor, setting roots in this place, and living all of our dreams of growing a beautiful bounty.
OUR STORY
It all started with a love for great food and an insatiable infatuation with growing things.
On Moonsong Farm the goal is a sustainable production of beautiful foods, herbs, and medicines for our family as well as the animals we care for, with a long term goal of creating a food forest. We ascribe to many approaches, and pull on knowledge from many 'camps' of thought in the world of natural food farming and land stewardship.
Primarily we rely on principles from permaculture and no-till, regenerative practices. We believe in feeding this land, rehabilitating the parts that were neglected or misused, building soil and returning nutrients that are harvested for our use. We do not have any formal certifications because as you may know, that is an arduous and sometimes very costly process to go through as a small family farm, but we are what we like to say "beyond organic". We simply do not use any chemicals or additives, even those approved in organic farming systems. Instead we build nutrients through compost, collecting materials from our local resources (like seaweed from the sea) and chipping fallen wood into our orchards and compost piles. We make biodynamic preparations using herbs and plants we grow. The beautiful thing about a system like this is that it is a full loop; we don't create any organic waste here, everything has a purpose in the cycle and gets put back in.
About our hens and eggs
We never imagined being animal farmers in all of the years leading up to buying this land. However, circumstances were unusual and we agreed to adopt some of the animals that the previous owners had here. That included a small herd of goats and a few hens. We really fell in love with the animals and our goal is to always provide the best quality of life possible if animals are going to be part of our farm. We ended up extending our flock and building them a beautiful house in the orchard. It's undeniable that hens can play a very beneficial role in a farm cycle. They are excellent foragers for insects and they do a great job keeping the grubs to a minimum around the orchard. They also work so hard all day scratching around, turning the top one inch of soil helping to incorporate the mulch & leaves that we scatter to add nutrients into the soil bank. So they really help in a no-dig system where we don't want to disturb the soil and its microbes down deep, but want to avoid compaction at the surface.
One of the bountiful gifts of having chickens and ducks on the farm are beautiful eggs. We mix our own organic feed that we also pre-sprout for maximum nutrient availability for the girls. They have full autonomy, free ranging all day (they could walk to NYC if they wanted to), and at night they have a cozy coop to be safe from predators in. All of our girls have a name, a profile in our hen book, and are special members in our farm family.