About Hawkridge Homestead
What we do
Hawkridge Homestead is a 25 acre heritage farm dedicated to sustainable and organic farming practices. We're passionate about real food that's made with love and nourishes both our bodies and the environment.
From our organically-raised pork, to our free-range organic eggs, to our gourmet preserves made from our harvests, Hawkridge Homestead offers only quality artisanal handmade products that we'd want to eat. That means free from hormones, antibiotics, and preservatives. Our animals are raised on certified organic feeds, and all our preserves are made from organic and local ingredients. It's real food, made by real people who love what they do and the land that gives us this incredible bounty.
Who we are
Hawkridge Homestead is run by US - the Usher-Sweetman family. Neil Usher and Rebecca Sweetman and their two boys moved back to Rebecca's childhood home in the spring of 2016 to turn it back into a vibrant, bountiful, and sustainable heritage farm.
Rebecca is a mother, graphic designer, activist filmmaker, and a gastronomic goddess. She's also the Founding Director of The Paradigm Shift Project, a Canadian non-profit charity that creates educational documentary films and curriculum on global social and environmental justice issues. She grew up galloping through Hawkridge Homestead's 25 organic acres on horseback and motorcycle, before heading back to the city to study sustainable global development at the University of Toronto. Before the ink was dry on her degree, she took off traveling in Asia, managing the campaigns of grassroots environmental non-profits and full-scale humanitarian aid relief programs. Since then, she's worked with 120 NGOs around the world, learned a few new languages, and directed and produced ten documentaries on grassroots solutions to global problems. But whether in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the brothels of Kolkata, the jungles of Sumatra, or the peaks of the Himalayas, great, organic food is always her first priority. She helped found the first Slow Food chapter in Bali, and she's spoken at permaculture design courses and conferences throughout Asia. You can watch her TedX Talk, on what you can do to be the shift, here. Oh, ya, and she's madly in love with Neil Usher.
Neil has been transcending a 15+ year career in logistics management to become a farmer. With extensive knowledge of appropriate technology, water filtration, and sustainable small-scale energy creation, Neil pairs his tech-savvy build-all abilities with his passion for organic and sustainable food systems, the natural environment, and gardening. When not (and often while) ticking off one of the million-and-one things that need doing on a 200-year old farm, Neil is Hawkridge Homestead's master planner and gardener, holding the stewardship vision for the evolution of this sacred land. He's also rivalling his teenage son as chief taste tester in Hawkridge's kitchen. He loves to fish, to paddle, to hike, and be outdoors - almost as much as he loves being a dad.
The History
Purchased by Rebecca's parents, Nick and Sandra Sweetman, in 1995, what is now Hawkridge Homestead is a sacred piece of organic land with rich and deep roots, literally and metaphorically. The magnificent oak tree that towers on the front lawn is just shy of 400 years old.
Originally known as Hawkridge Farm, presumably named after the numerous red-tailed hawks that fly over this limestone ridge, our heritage farmhouse was built in 1848. Its interior has undergone much-needed facelifts over the years, but the original floorboards, bedrock basement, and newspaper-insulated walls still show its tremendous character. Our house is heated by two wood stoves, and our water comes from a spring-fed well. We are continually investing in upgrades for self-suffiency, and look forward to when we can take our house fully off the grid.
Our historic bank barn is a beautiful marvel of construction from a bygone era, with not a single nail holding its 50+ feet hayloft beams together, all with wood from trees that would have been felled on the property. Its floor was poured in cement in 1929, and we're not sure just how long it was standing before that investment was made. Its 3-foot thick limestone walls are from stones found on the property. Our barn and its paddocks have been home to just about every kind of farm animal we can imagine, and definitely various wild creatures, too, including rare and threatened species of owls. We know it was used for dairy cattle likely in the 1950s-1960s, and it has been home to many horses, sheep, and even a donkey, although pigs were kept in a separate piggery near the barn which we now use as a drive shed. It now houses our organic Tamworth pigs, and is the winter residence of our free-range organic flock of chickens and guinea fowl.
The artist's studio on the property was what drew Rebecca's parents here in 1995. As stained glass artists, the studio suited their purposes perfectly, having been used by glassblowers previously, and a painter before that. Converted from a coach house to a studio likely somewhere between 1950-1960, this two and a half storey building cascades with natural light. We have great plans for this building, and hopefully will be able to unveil its new purpose sometime next spring/summer. (Stay tuned by signing up for our newsletter below!)
Our 15 acres of hardwood forest are a marvel in every season, and harbour a great number of deer, migrating birds, and other species. There are many trees over 200 years old throughout the woods, and a sustainable supply of firewood can be found just from trees that fall of their own accord. We invite you to come take a walk with us and enjoy its natural beauty; however, hunting is strictly prohibited on all our land.