Woods Family Farm, 2800 Cooper Foster Park Road in Vermilion, is a small, family-owned and operated farm that runs on a pasture-raised system and offers items in a roadside stand 24 hours a day.
Julene Woods, owner of Woods Family Farm, said the roadside stand, which is more like a little building, has electricity that allows a refrigerator and freezer to be hooked up for meat and online orders waiting to be picked up.
Woods husband, Brett, built the structure and the farm opened it for business in spring 2022, she said, and wanted to focus on accommodating people who cannot pick items up during normal business hours but still want quality food.
“People can come and just swing by the freezer and grab their order at any time,” Woods said. “It is the honor system.”
Meat products found in the stand include home-grown chicken and turkey, and other food items like honey, syrup and black walnut syrup, according to Woods.
The farm does accept online orders, as well as for halves and whole pigs.
“They can just go in there and do their convenient shopping,” Woods said.
Although it is a farm stand, the family wants to keep that face-to-face interaction with customers who visit, she said.
“We don’t want it to be just the stand and we stay away,” Woods said. “We have our regulars, and if we see them out there, we go out there and chit-chat and they pretty much expect us to come out there if we’re home.”
Woods said her family — with children Emmarose, Carter and Katelyn — started out with goats in 2016 as 4-H projects, and made the switch in 2019 to run their farm based on another farm in Virginia, focusing on pasture-raised systems.
In line with the family’s faith in which the farm is based on, this practice helps sustainability in the environment and provides a more natural quality of life for livestock, Woods said.
“You’re giving back to the land because then those animals are stirring up the different seeds that have been dormant,” she said. “It’s really enriching the land rather than killing the land.”
As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, Woods said she saw a rise in people wanting to shop locally for items, specifically food, because they wanted to ensure where it was coming from, which reflects one main goal of the farm: to connect the community with their food.
This practice helps to show just exactly how the animals live, she said.
“The biggest thing is, it’s not about how many customers we can get, but it’s how we can connect people with their food,” she said.
Woods said the farm especially values other local farms and gardens, and the work that can be done together to connect each other with customers, sometimes in need of specific items that Woods Family Farm doesn’t have.
“We’re really big about community; we’re really big on making this pleasant for the community, but also being able to give our time and giving back to the community,” she said. “The farm community is amazing around here.”
Woods said she started a listing of farms and gardens in the area, each with different specialties, in hopes to post it for followers to have access to locally made items, she said.
“It’s not competitive; it’s about connecting people with their food and connecting people with the farms,” Woods said.
