Ghostwood Farm

Changes

We have been here at Ghostwood Farm for almost seven years now. We incorporated right away, though we took the easiest possible route. Legally, the farm itself is what is known as a single member LLC, which means that doing  our taxes is easy: We just include farm expenditures and income in our personal tax return. 

The farm has never made a profit, in any year (and CERTAINLY not over all years). In 2016, we were about $450 in the red (our best year!). However, we donated about $2000 worth of food to charities last year. That charitable aspect has become more and more important to us as we have developed over the past few years.

It appears that we have decided to become far more intentional about alleviating food insecurity (and increasing food independence) in southern Indiana by moving forward with incorporating as a 501(c)3 non-profit public service corporation. 

As we move forward into this process, I will be writing here more. I will explain why we are taking this step and explaining how our approach has evolved (and will evolve) as we focus more fully on feeding people. I will talk about the process from my perspective as a complete beginner. Hopefully, I won’t have to talk about how awful the experience is!

For now, I will just say that we will be exploring partnerships with existing charities that have been dealing with hunger for decades. We think we can fill a unique niche here by dedicating our production to supplying local nonprofits with high-quality and (what we hope will be) dependable food and garden plants for distribution, as well as an important educational component to help people understand where food comes from, how they can grow their own, and, possibly, the environmental effects of different food choices. 

I have reached out to friends who have contacts in the nonprofit world and I will gratefully continue to count on the support of those who have been through this process. I am excited and terrified, but mostly really really hopeful that changing our organizational structure  (fairly radically) will allow us to greatly expand the positive impact we can have on our community.

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