We have eight children: Alena, Kailey, Caleb, Aiden, Annika, Asher, Abigail, and Lillian. We are a Christian family and we homeschool, raise a wide variety of animals, and we grow and make a lot of our food from scratch. We make most of our skin care and cleaning products too. My husband has a full-time job working with computers, farms organically, and has an electrical business on the side. I wo
rked as a Registered Nurse before staying home with our children in 2006, and I cherish the extra time with my husband and children. My job now includes keeping all the businesses and farm work organized, making and selling skin care and farm products, managing the house, growing and raising as much food as I can, helping with some of the farm work, and teaching and overseeing our kids’ education. Our kids love growing up on the farm, having people over, playing together, reading, learning new skills, helping in the kitchen, and helping with the animals. We couldn’t ask for a better team to work and have fun with! Cory and I enjoy spending time as a family, reading, fellowship with other believers, and living a simpler lifestyle. We love to learn new skills, experiment with new ideas, and keep striving to find a better more efficient way of doing things. Our journey with real food and homemade skin care started about 2006 after a Nourishing Traditions class. Some of us had been experiencing some health problems, and until that class, we had never considered that what we were eating, putting on our skin, or that the toxins in our environment could be to blame. We started doing more research and examining our food, cleaning, and hygiene products more carefully. I was really surprised by how many of my items had a poison label on them or numerous ingredients I couldn’t pronounce. This began a slow conversion to the lifestyle we are enjoying today. About Our Natural Skin Care Business
We started making soap back in 2011 for our family. We loved it and started giving it as gifts and sharing it with anyone that wanted to try it. They loved the soap too and requested to buy it. We weren’t sure about having a business, but we appreciated hearing the stories of how it was helping people with cracked/bleeding hands, eczema, and dry skin, and they loved knowing what they were putting on their bodies. We started making additional skin care items for ourselves and found that people loved these too. I have added salve, lotion bars, facial cream, chapstick, and most recently tooth powder. Because of the encouragement of friends and family, and our desire to help people attain more natural products, our business, Mentink Family Farms, developed. Our primary purpose is to honor and glorify God in all we do and to be a blessing to others through our business. Our Beyond Organic Farm Products
We are blessed to be the third generation living on 35 acres outside of Stromsburg, Nebraska. At the beginning of our marriage we both thought we would never farm! That same year, about 2002, we planted our first unsuccessful garden. We didn’t give up and each year it got better. As we started to slowly convert our conventional food to organic food, I had a really hard time finding the quality of products I desired. I had also started to learn about the fraud and deceitful labeling laws in the organic industry. I was convinced that the only way to know what we were eating was to do most of it ourselves or find local farmers that I could trust in our area to buy from. We loved knowing what we were eating and especially the flavor of our own food. In a quest to add more clean food, we added chickens in about 2007. After this, God really changed our hearts about farming and gave us a love for it! We started growing more food in our beyond organic garden and slowly adding more animals to raise for ourselves. Due to deceitful labeling laws we believe the only way to know what we are eating or putting on our skin is to do most of it ourselves and buy locally. As people witnessed how we were growing and raising our own food and tasted the difference, we started getting a lot of requests to grow things for them. This is how our business developed. We have prayed about how we can bless more people with these same products for years, and with our move from 4 acres to 35 acres back in 2015, we now have extra to sell. We currently sell Grass Finished Lamb, Pastured Eggs, Pastured Broilers, and Heritage Pasture Raised Pork. We are just starting to ship some of these products. We are growing our treatment free hives for honey, grass-finished beef and raw milk, fruits and vegetables, and ancient grains. We also have goats, ducks, guineas, turkeys, and two horses (for fun). We continue to grow and learn more about integrating permaculture design and regenerative processes into our gardens, orchards, fields, and pastures. We like to imitate the work of Joel Salatin, Gabe Brown, Richard Perkins, Stefan Sobkowiak, and Paul Gautschi to name a few. We have been working for the last 14 years to avoid all chemicals, including on our yard. We will continue to practice this same principle. Our goal is to raise superior, beyond organic nutrient-dense products, while improving our land, at the best price we can without sacrificing quality. We will also be transparent in all we do. We are growing our business slowly with no debt in order to keep our prices down and to not be a slave to a debtor. We do not request government subsidies or welfare for our farm or family. This is a personal conviction and we believe tax payers do not need to fund our endeavors. We also believe that what the government funds the government controls. Thanks for visiting our website! Check back often to see what we are doing at the farm!
