The Ferme d’ORée started as a dream in 2000, somewhere between Nepal and Mexico. A dream that sprang from a desire to live an honest life in harmony with nature and a desire to cultivate the soil while nurturing relationships with family and community.

With permaculture as an inspiration, we named our farm Ferme d’ORée. L’ORée means (forest) edge. Forest edges attract the greatest ecological diversity. We hope that our farm can also function as a cultural edge and attract people from country and city alike.

At some point, we were regenerative farmers avant-la-lettre and we rebelled -as so many now- against industrial agriculture. To be honest, our products were pretty mediocre, our marketing was based on how bad other farmers supposedly were, and our production processes only created a better world in our own minds.

We wanted to be better and we visited many farms. We often found beauty, or horror, where we least expected it.

We determined that

Responsible food, food that really makes a difference, may be more about doing things right, than about doing the right things.

Responsible food must transcend marketing stories and create tangible value for clients (an objectively great product), and come from truly sustainable agriculture (an objectively better production process).

Responsible farmers must dare to question the paradigms of conventional, but also of regenerative or organic farming, and learn from all.

Responsible farmers must actually measure the impact of their actions on their finances, the environment, animal welfare, climate change, farm workers, neighours, consumer health, etc., rather than use an arbitrary belief system to inform their actions. This goes back to the origins of sustainability.

Responsible food: a great product

Responsible food is also about letting go. Maybe some of us think too much about how food is produced and all its consequences, and we forget that food has an important social function: what brings greater joy than to taste delicious foods ands share them with friends and family?

We had to become butchers to learn more about meat. In our own butcher shop, the Atelier d’ORée, we can really see the effects of what we do in the field and help create that exquisite pork chop, that perfectly marbled ribeye, that delicious bacon, or that old world style charcuterie, from our meats.

More details and updates on how we raise our animals can be found in our blog posts on this site.