Our Farm

Delpine Farms is a family run farm with a mission to provide fresh nutritious food to our surrounding communities of Meagher and Wheatland Counties. The farm is located where the Little Belt Mountains meet the Castle Mountains, just outside the Lewis and Clark National Forest. While the road into the forest may sometimes seem busy, we feel so fortunate to live and work where so many travel so far for a weekend taste of our every day scenery.

Our Farm has a robust flock of laying hens producing vibrant eggs while they rotate on pasture in a mobile coop with their Livestock Guardian Goose, Henrik. We work with Mountain West Ag Services in Garneill, MT to provide them a fresh milled balanced feed to supplement their mixed diet of grasses, bugs, compost scraps and a special treat of some occasional spent brewery grains. We move the hens and their coop around our farm and property so they can poop, mow and scratch the landscape, giving it new life. They produce some of the best eggs we have ever had and we love sharing those with our customers and hearing the amazing feedback. We consider them to be pasture raised, which can mean different things on different farms, but what it means to us is that we can provide eggs that taste and look amazing because they are higher in vitamin A, vitamin E and omega-3 fatty acids, as well as lower in cholesterol and saturated fats.

Our Farm has been expanding the vegetable garden every year for the past few years and has evolved from a large home garden into a plentiful market garden. We are growing vegetables on approximately 1 acre of intensively planted crops. We want to grow and farm in an ecologically responsible way, building soil health to grow healthy plants, to produce nutritious food. We could take our harvests to Billings, Bozeman, Helena, or any number of larger cities with established Farmers Markets where certain populations are willing to pay a premium, but that would not be in line with our mission. We want to grow this food to feed our community. We believe our community ALSO deserves the best, and not at premium prices. We want anyone in our remote communities who is interested in feeding their family fresh healthy food, to be able to do so.

Our Farm is also focused on plant and crop diversity, attracting beneficial insects with a mix of fruit trees and shrubs, annuals, perennials and native plants, grasses and flowers. We will farm with nature instead of against it. We will not use any herbicides or pesticides, organic or otherwise. We would consider our direction to be regenerative ecological agriculture, and a whole long list of other definitive terms, but what we want to do more than anything is grow nutrient rich plants that help our bodies and our land, thrive.

Our Roots

We are Jeff and Shauna Eagleton and if you asked us in 2015 where we would be today, we could never have dreamed this all up. But to cut right to where the farming began, Jeff was injured very badly in a vehicle accident in December 2018. During his long recovery of sitting in his favorite recliner, watching the snow fall and fall and fall, bored of daytime TV, he started reading one of Shauna’s “maybe someday” vegetable farming books, The Lean Farm, by Ben Hartman. Shauna was in the kitchen, the kids running a muck. Jeff deep into his reading tells Shauna “I think we can do this”. That statement sparked quite a few conversations. We already had the land, sitting idle. We had come to some sort of a crossroads professionally, trying to decide which of the 10 roads in front of us was “the one”. We were already self employed and needed to decide where and how to best spend our time. It was no longer worth trying to pursue what might appear to be the most lucrative. In 2016, we had moved to Martinsdale, giving up very stable, solid careers, that were also very unsatisfying to the soul. It was becoming clear to us both that loving what we do, and having a passion for it was more satisfying than the 401k. We also assessed our options and the ones that kept us BOTH closer to this home, family and land that we love, was certainly the most appealing. What started as a wild idea, ended up being the motivation for Jeff to tackle his physical therapy, and brought the whole family together, closer than ever, making it the obvious path for us.

While we both have enjoyed our time working in our family garden, what Delpine Farms has evolved into has much more meaning to us. It helped us open our eyes to the lack of fresh food resources so many people have access to in our community. We might feed ourselves, but our kids would still go to school with a whole community of kids that may not know what a fresh carrot tastes like. We realized that the produce many of us have access to is far from local, and light years from fresh. For those reasons, many in our community do not cook with or prepare fresh vegetables on a regular basis. We want to help our friends and neighbors learn how to integrate real whole foods into their everyday lives and help in our own small way, build a stronger, healthier community for our children, their friends and their future community.

The Farm has also opened our eyes to alternative farming methods that can help build up the land instead of degrade it for our own purposes. We have become students, excited to absorb everything we can from books, videos, podcasts and conferences. We find ourselves discussing biology at the dinner table, plant breeding over coffee, listening to amazing interviews of different farming systems from around the world, while we drive to town. There is no other way we would want to be spending our time and we are excited to see where this journey will take us.