About Us
Founded in 2021, The Good Food Farm was birthed out of a partnership between farm owners, Dick and Patty Simon and farmer, Andrew Johnson. A shared understanding that our existing food system is really good at creating cheap, transportable food, but fails to produce nutrient dense, nourishing food is what inspires us. We are on a mission to do something different - that is, to partner with nature to grow food that is nutrient dense, and truly nourishing. Not only that, we are developing symbiotic, human scale systems to make this food affordable so that we can get it into the hands of as many people as possible. Check out our practices to see how we're doing this.
Farm manager, Andrew Johnson, grew up in southern Minnesota. Though surrounded by industrial agriculture, he never imagined farming as a career path for himself. While getting a degree in industrial and systems engineering at the University of Southern California, he wrote a paper about Los Angeles' food system. This paper, and the research which supported it, planted a seed of interest and got him asking how he might be a part of improving the food system. Upon graduation, Andrew took his "dream" job as an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Thinking he'd be there for 3-5 years so he could save up and buy a farm, it wasn't but eight months into his engineering job when the pandemic hit. Andrew quit his job, left Los Angeles, and decided to dive into farming full-time. Before arriving in Massachusetts, he worked on and managed a couple of organic no-till veggie farms in Michigan and Connecticut.
Our assistant farm manager Ben Howell came to us as our first WWOOFer in early 2022, eager to help shift food systems in a more local, sustainable direction. An engineer by training, he has taken great joy in helping to get the farm started and officially joined the staff this November! A great lover of nature, he completed a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in 2020. The adventure helped nurture a passion for sustainability and resilience in the face of global challenges, and led him straight to us. We're happy to have him along for the ride!