Nestled in the western corner of the state, far from the busy eastern suburbs, Hunterdon County is a modern-day glimpse of the New Jersey of yesteryear. Many farms dot this pastoral landscape. But among the county’s 30,000 acres of preserved farmland, there is one farmstead that stands out.
Enormous hydrangeas and ornamental bushes flank the driveway of the 1775-era house. The small stream that runs through the property is lined with silver maples that are tapped for syrup in winter. Holly, chestnut, black walnut, and oak create a towering canopy. Hundred-year-old apple and pear trees, no longer bearing fruit, serve as a reminder of the property’s history. Gardens are not planted in rows, but rather woven within the forested landscape. Carrots, tomatoes, peppers, and greens grow alongside flowers, herbs, strawberries, and fig trees.
Out in the verdant green fields, sheep follow draft horses, guinea fowl hunt for ticks, and ducks and geese devour slugs and snails. Native pollinators buzz around perennial flower beds. Horse trails wind through the woods, and ponds provide havens for frogs, salamanders, and snakes.
Noble Intentions, Wrong Location
Ferraro-Fanning always had an eye for the beautiful. An art major in college, she longed for the art trips that bussed her from Wisconsin to New York.“My personality was more in line with the East Coast than the Midwest. Farming was not on my radar,” she said.
After graduating in 2004, Ferraro-Fanning and her husband, Shawn, moved to New Jersey and started a family. They set themselves up on a three-quarters-acre plot in the eastern suburbs. A lifelong lover of ornamental gardening, Ferraro-Fanning planted perennial and annual flower beds, as well as a small vegetable patch in her compact yard.
Around the same time, she began a successful graphic design business that put her art degree to good use and provided a steady income. The only problem? It kept her locked to her desk.
“I hated being behind a computer. I started canceling meetings so I could get outside and work on my garden,” she said. She felt increasingly unsatisfied, taking solace in her flowers and vegetables.
“I went through a big identity shift,” she said. “I thought, ‘How am I supposed to balance deadlines, care for my baby, and be outside with my child more?’”
Then, she had an idea: “‘What if I trade in my paycheck for [growing] as much organic food as possible?’” she thought. “That snowballed into this whole lifestyle shift.”
Ferraro-Fanning soon found this new lifestyle addictive. She replaced her ornamental plants with edible ones, and she got ducks for eggs. As a vegetarian, she focused on the vegetables she could grow on her small plot. In 2013, she closed her design business and dedicated herself full-time to growing her own food. She found contentment in the work.
“Then Santa brought goats for Christmas, and the city felt we weren’t a good fit anymore,” she said.
Thanks to various zoning laws and complaints from neighbors, the family had to get rid of their goats. But it wasn’t enough.
“I remember the zoning guy saying: ‘What you’re trying to do is very noble, but you’re just not in the right location for it,’” Ferraro-Fanning said.
In 2016, they packed up, sold their house, and headed west to an old, 6-acre plot in rural Hunterdon County, New Jersey.
Putting a Name to Her Practice
The historic property came with its fair share of challenges. The ground was hard clay, and the only animal inhabitants were rats.Ferraro-Fanning brought in cover crops and livestock to begin improving the land. She again started with ducks for eggs, but this time, she had a new idea.
“I became really intrigued by this idea that I could get ducks to not just give us eggs, but also to go through my garden spaces and eat slugs and snails,” she said. “I thought, ‘That is so cool! What else can I do?’”
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As the cover crops began to yield softer, healthier soil for her vegetables and fruit trees, and the ducks got control of the pest population, a connected web weaving together gardener, plants, and animals began to form in her mind. What she’d implemented were the primary stages of permaculture, a regenerative agricultural practice that mimics natural patterns found in the surrounding ecosystem. It’s a practice that stresses biodiversity, resiliency, self-sufficiency, and sustainability, without harming the surrounding landscape.
“When I started, I didn’t know it had a name. I just dubbed myself a holistic homesteader,” Ferraro-Fanning said. Only after finding other homesteaders on social media did she realize her intuition had led her to the practice.
She decided to earn a permaculture design certificate through a course at Cornell University, taught by instructor Michael Burns, co-founder of the Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute. When she showed him her plans for her farm, he was surprised. She wanted to introduce an animal not commonly associated with permaculture: draft horses.
Horses, Sheep, and Ducks—Oh My!
Most imagine horse farms to be enormous rolling grasslands mapped by fence lines. Six wooded acres might seem an unlikely home for a draft horse—let alone the four she would eventually have.“I’ve always been a horse girl. I thought I was just going to get them for riding,” Ferraro-Fanning said. “But when I combined this passion with a holistic homesteading approach, I thought, ‘What job could I have a horse do?’”
Now, her four horses—Clydesdales Dozer and Nevin, Percheron Matisse, and Belgian draft horse Odin—also act as her muscle. They help her pull logs from the woods, spread compost over the fields, haul in harvest, and rotationally graze their pastures. Sheep follow the horses, eating any shed parasites found in the horse manure. This disrupts the parasite cycle and helps keep the horses healthy. The sheep, a mix of Shetland and Romney, also provide nutrient-dense fertilizer with their own manure. Their wool is processed yearly after shearing. Meanwhile, the ducks, guard geese, and guinea fowl are hard at work keeping slugs, snails, and ticks at bay. The ducks and geese also consume any forage left behind by the sheep and horses.
The result? Abundantly green fields throughout the spring and summer.
Upon seeing the fruit of her efforts, Ferraro-Fanning recalled, the formerly skeptical Burns proudly proclaimed: “Yes! You’re doing it!”
“That was all the validation I needed,” she said. “We’ve created this truly working space and ecosystem that is giving more back to the land than what is being taken.”
Pumpkin Vines and Cedar Trees
Ferraro-Fanning takes much inspiration from a permaculture farm called La Ferme du Bec-Hellouin in Normandy, France. The food forest systems she built into her homestead are directly inspired by those on the French farm.The idea of a food forest is simple, but it goes against modern agricultural practices. Its goal is to mimic the self-sufficiency of a natural forest landscape, which is broken down into layers. The first is the overstory, which are sheltering canopy trees such as oaks and maples. The next layer includes midstory trees, something shorter and with edible fruit, such as apple or pear trees. The third layer is home to understory plants: bushes like elderberries, blueberries, or currants. Last come the forest floor items: flowers, herbs, lettuces, and other ground-dwelling plants. Each plant has multiple functions, such as bearing fruit, encouraging pollinators, and deterring pests.
“A lot of folks don’t realize how well things grow in combination with one another,” said Ferraro-Fanning. One of her favorite examples is her cedar grove pumpkin patch. “It’s pretty cool to see a massive pumpkin hanging from a vine on a cedar tree,” she said. Though pumpkin plants are vines, they don’t cause any harm to the cedar trees. They simply climb to a height they like and grow bigger. The tree’s height allows the pumpkins to grow above the ground, avoiding pests and getting better airflow to prevent rot. There’s also the benefit of added space and control. The pumpkins grow vertically, rather than spreading across an entire section of the yard.
The sight is a reminder that the practices she’s implemented are actually working.
“When we moved here, we didn’t have a lot. If you see the property now, we have a ton of native bird species, perennial trees, insects, butterflies, bees, bats, owls, and even eagles. None of that was here before,” she said. “I know in my heart that has a direct correlation with building a totally natural and organic ecosystem.”
A Healing Relationship
As a certified permaculturist, Ferraro-Fanning now teaches others what she’s learned through her workshops, books, social media channels, and the HOMESTEADucation podcast, co-hosted with fellow homesteader Mandi Pickering.
To share the successes of her permaculture journey fills Ferraro-Fanning with profound joy.
“I truly feel my soul is more in alignment with what human beings are supposed to be doing to this planet: healing it, rather than taking from it,” she said. “It requires time, effort, work, and patience.” Sustainably growing most of her own food has given her more than the mere paycheck she thought she was trading it for.
“I’ve gotten an entire lifestyle. With the amount of the work that I did to enrich my soil, I know that my food is more nutrient-rich than what I could get at a grocery store,” she said.
“The decisions I made changed the earth under my feet. It’s a feeling of pride and accomplishment, mixed with a sincere desire to educate others that this is attainable. We are supposed to be part of the greater ecosystem.”
