Holler Farm is a 106-acre homestead and small market farm located in Oxford, New York, in the Southern Tier. We have 2 acres in intensive vegetable production, 10 acres in pasture, 25 acres in hay (currently cut by a neighboring dairy farm), a 30-acre woodlot, a mushroom laying yard, and 2 wildlife ponds.

For the 2012 season, Holler Farm is offering a full-season homesteading residency for a hard-working, committed, future homesteader with a serious desire to learn. You will experience the full range of seasonal homesteading activities from maple sugaring, fire wood production, and mushroom inoculation in early spring; planning and tending the gardens and row crops throughout the growing season; preserving and storage of the harvest; to pressing apples and pears for sweet and hard cider in the fall.

We use manual, tractor, and draft horse power. We currently have three draft horses (two Percherons and one Belgian) and work both team and single. Horses are used for log skidding, plowing, discing, cultivating, crop irrigation, pasture clipping, potato hilling and digging, mowing, and pulling wagons.

You will help us to prepare growing plots, seed, transplant, cultivate, water, and harvest a wide range of annual and perennial vegetables, herbs, flowers, fruit, and mushrooms for home consumption, storage, and a local farmers’ market; harvest wild foods sustainably; cultivate mushrooms in a hemlock streamside laying yard; milk the dairy cow; handle egg production; produce small-batch maple syrup, mead, and apple cider; bake sourdough bread; run a homestead dairy kitchen; prepare gorgeous fresh meals for our nourishment; care for livestock (draft horses, dairy cow, calves, honey bees, Indian Runner ducks, chickens); manage the woodlot for firewood and timber; train and supervise occasional farm volunteers; and maintain the farmstead (grounds, barn, fencing, and equipment maintenance, farm blacksmithing). Alongside our homesteading residency we run an artist residency program and occasional on-farm workshops (timber framing, papermaking, etc.).

Nearby activities include hiking trails, swimming holes, tubing/rafting on the Chenango River, on-farm horseback riding, and field trips to neighboring organic farms. We are a 3.5-hour drive from New York City, and about an hour from Ithaca, Binghamton, and Oneonta. There is a bus to Oxford from New York City or Philadelphia. We speak English, German, and Japanese. Holler is a Bavarian term for elderberry, a plant long relied upon for a range of medicinal, cultural, and culinary uses.