Andy and Haley Billipp are new farmers on a very old farm.

Andy grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from UMass Amherst with a degree in outdoor writing. While studying, he spent his summers wrangling on ranches in Montana. After college he moved to Boulder, Colorado with dreams of rock climbing fame. He worked for recycled building materials non-profit called ReSource, and met a lot of nice folks who were into hunting and fishing. He also was inspired by his love of good tools and weaponry to learn blacksmithing, and is now a maker of fine chef knives, which can be viewed and ordered through his company Billipp Knives.

Haley grew up in Rhode Island, coming to Eddy Farm on holidays to visit her grandparents, who were venerable people. She learned a lot about growing from her mother Lucy who kept huge productive gardens at their family home. She went to Yale and studied graphic design, but also took a year abroad to study traditional Swedish woodworking in Dalarna, Sweden. After college she moved to Boulder, Colorado (aha!) and worked at the Culinary School of the Rockies, where she learned that everything her mother ever taught her about cooking was correct. She also met a lot of local farmers who supplied the school, and a lot about the restaurant industry.

Andy and Haley have known each other since they were tiny, as their mothers and fathers were good friends. They met up after five years’ gap in Boulder when they both moved there after college. They soon moved in together to a little house on the Colorado plain and began hunting and growing all the food they ate. They learned to preserve and butcher and grow, and when Lucy offered them a place at the farm in Connecticut, they knew it was the next logical step for the kind of land based life they wanted to live, and here they are!

In August of 2014, their daughter Marian was born, and in October of 2015 their son Karl joined her. What a fun place to grow up!