Chemical-free. Grown year-round in Marion County, Iowa.
Fresh from our farm to you.
Blue Gate Farm is the small farming operation of Jill Beebout and Sean Skeehan, located in rural Marion County, Iowa, on land that has been in Jill’s family for generations.
For more than 20 years, we’ve been growing good food here with a pretty simple philosophy: we feed the land at least as well as we feed our customers.
That philosophy shapes how we farm. We grow our vegetables, fruits, herbs and flowers chemical-free, without synthetic pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers. We even choose not to use the chemical sprays and treatments that are permitted under Organic certification.
But what we don’t use is only part of the story.
We work to build healthy soil, encourage biodiversity and create a farm that becomes more resilient over time. Composting, crop rotation, cover crops, integrated pest management, flowers for pollinators, prairie restoration, and responsible management of our timber and wetlands are all part of caring for this piece of land.
And for us, a healthy farm is about people, too.
We believe good food should help create connection: between people and the land where their food is grown, between farmers and the people they feed, and within the communities we all call home.
That’s why we’ve worked to make buying directly from a local farm both personal and practical, whether you order exactly what you want through VegEmail, join us for a season through our Bounty Box farm membership, or bring some of the farm’s beauty home through BLOOMS.
Along the way, we also preserve some of what we grow in our farm-made jams and seasonings, create with the fibers we raise and dye, and find new ways to make the most of what this land gives us.
More than two decades in, Blue Gate Farm continues to grow and change. But the goal remains much the same: care for the land, grow really good food, and make it easy for our neighbors to bring a little bit of this farm home.
