This is Sandhill Farm. We share food. We want your help to share our food. Or more to the point. We want your money to share more food with folks experiencing food insecurity.

The Sandhill Project is a community-supported agricultural enterprise based on a farm-share sales model. These sales allow the farm to raise poultry, pork, lamb, and beef for distribution to individuals and groups engaged in the realities of food insecurity. In 2026, Sandhill donated two hundred fifty lbs. of ground beef from whole, which was funded with the generous contribution of more than twelve hundred dollars by JeanAnne Wahl-Piotrowski, a community supporter of the farm. Sandhill also shared five halves of full-sized hogs, three 18-month-old sheep, five turkeys, and 20 boilers this year. Our egg sharing reached 100 dozen free of charge, full-size chicken eggs.

Additionally, Sandhill had five constituents learning processing and butchering skills for pork and lamb. In five years, Sandhill has generated two successful first-time homesteading efforts, provided work for eight different farmworkers over five years, and taught these community members skills related to milking, calving, butchering, herd health, rationing, and pasture maintenance. Such skill development not only allows for first-time farming competency but also prepares our part-time employees to fill local dairy farm positions, greenhouse positions, and find full-time work at larger farms beyond entry-level positions.

While we understand the positive impact such sharing can have on families, there are other important aspects of eliminating food insecurity in Michigan that require a more consistent revenue stream with an opportunity for significant growth through reaching a larger market.

Sandhill is taking a major step that we are quite prepared for and has community support that will only grow as marketing begins. We understand that community gardens, pastured poultry, wheelchair accessible growing areas will not only allow families to grow food for their own table, but also share with neighbors, and create profitable enterprises that will benefit from sharing support from Sandhill’s planned revenue stream. The expansion of a herd-share dairy farm into a small pasteurized dairy farm.

Independent gardeners who go through the workshops offered by Sandhill will have an opportunity to join a growers’ cooperative that will make it easier to harvest, market, transport, and create jobs and a stable local food economy that will be repeatable, first in other Hastings locations, and then elsewhere in the county. This necessitates a further value-added component, the completion of a USDA meat processing room that will allow trained individuals to butcher and market farm-to-table pork, lamb, and poultry at local points of sale.

The majority of our problem-solving in Sandhill’s commitment to ending food insecurity has been identified as a significantly larger-scale revenue stream. It is Sandhill that will offer the first and ongoing garden and cash-crop land. Sandhill will also address the matter of unhealthy and inhumane models of meat production. Beyond gardening for profit, pastured poultry workshops will guide first-time farmers through the process of raising and harvesting Cornish-Cross broilers for their own table, their neighbors, and for profit.