About Us (updated 01/09/08)

The Treichler family: We are Randy, Chris, Jack, Anna and Sam, and Randy's mother Mary. We moved to Star Hollow Farm in 1992, and turned what had been a summer getaway farm for the previous owners into an organic produce farm. The house we live in was built in about 1840, and the land was granted to the first settlers here from Wm. Penn's sons well before the Revolution.

Randy (the farmer): I did not grow up on a farm, but have been interested in agriculture and farming since I was a kid and visited my uncle's small Pennsylvania farm back in 1964. I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, but left the same week I graduated from high school. I studied agriculture at Iowa State, UC Davis, and Cornell; International Studies at San Francisco State; and did miscellaneous studies at Cal Berkeley and elsewhere. Mixed in with all that studying I travelled to 30-plus countries on four continents. After getting a masters in International Agricultural Development at Davis I got a job in Colombia, SA working for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). When we left to go down, our son Jack was two and daugther Anna was 3 months old. There we travelled extensively in Colombia, and also visited Ecuador and Brazil. Coming back to the states after two years abroad, we decided to try out my life's dream of becoming a farmer, and thought it would be good to test the water by interning at a successful organic small farm – Jim and Moie Crawford's New Morning Farm. It went so well that within a month or two, we began looking for farms in their neighborhood, where the fledgling Tuscarora Organic Growers Co-op was actively looking for more growers and I had Jim nearby, if I needed help. Sixteen years later, we're still here. It's not an easy life and the pay isn't what it should be, but I'm home six days a week, we work together as a family, eat very well, and I like my job!