About Us
We are Joe Santos and Maria Gummerson, owners of Santos Family Farm founded in 2014.
Santos Family Farm is situated on an 80 acre parcel just outside the small town of Yamhill, at the northern end of Oregon’s Willamette Valley. It is not a classic farm with wide open fields and pastures. In fact, much of the land is rolling hills with large stands of huge Douglas Fir, Hawthorne, and Ash. We’re in the heart of Oregon wine country, and most of our neighbors are grape vineyards. To us, this is the perfect place to grow vegetables, fruit, flowers, and herbs, raise all sorts of animal friends, and generally spend every cent we’ve ever earned.
Like the farm, we’re not the prototypical farmers. In our younger days, we were the typical Silicon Valley couple. We grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and met through the software startup we both worked at, made some money when it went public, built our dream house, raised a couple of kids, etc. It was great for a while, but after 30 years it was time to do something more concrete, more meaningful, more social. As with so many decisions in our lives, we somehow independently came up with the same idea: let’s start a farm!
Having almost no background in the area, we jumped into the deep end. We started reading everything we could find on the area. At the same time, we started looking at land, visiting places all over the Willamette Valley from apple orchards in Philomath, to cattle ranches in Springville, and finally a somewhat raw (but already certified organic) produce farm in a little town called Yamhill. The last one seemed right for some vague reason and without nearly enough care, we pulled the trigger and bought the farm in the summer of 2014.
Our vision was to turn this raw but beautiful land into a successful small farm, a great place to live, and a fun place to share with our family, friends, and customers. Looking back, we were so naive. Growing high quality produce organically and at scale is hard. Doing it profitably is harder still.
Through the years, we’ve continually expanded the farm business. In year two, we started raising chickens and ducks for eggs. Year three, we started raising birds for meat. In 2020, we rebuilt the old farmhouse and turned it into a farm store as well as an AirBnB. Somewhere along the way, we built up a flock herd of Nigerian Dwarf goats for brush clearing and entertainment. In our latest season, we’ve started growing flowers for bouquets.
As we approach our ten-year anniversary, every once in a while, we sometimes think we’re beginning to get the hang of all this. We’ve learned how to make all these different parts of the farm work in harmony to support each other. We’ve learned how to be more efficient, so that we actually use less land now than when we started. We’ve also learned that the farm life - while certainly not for everyone - is just what we were looking for after all.