“Drew is providing the community with healthy, humanely raised, sustainable food. He’s going literally directly from the farm to the fork. He’s minimizing the carbon footprint by not having the animal shipped six times. He’s minimizing the stress to the animals by having them go directly from our farm to the processor. He’s minimizing all of the inputs on our side of it, because he’s growing our own hay that goes straight from the field into their tummies.”
—Amy Ross Manko, Drew’s mother
Why did you become a farmer?
DM: I’m a sixth-generation farmer and have worked on the farm my whole life. After high school, I decided to take a gap year before college and run the farm for a year. My first day as the farm manager I said okay we’ve got all these extra wethers and we’re sending them off to auction and selling and barely breaking even, what if instead, we decided to sell directly to restaurants to see if it would be more profitable. Washington PA has a huge history of lamb farming and so that is a factor in our decision to do heritage and rare-breed lambs.
How would you describe your farming philosophy?
DM: Much like the city of Portland—you just have to stay weird. I like to pull out this quote from Thomas Jefferson, “those that work the land are truly chosen by God.” What we do is weird, but weird works.