Our Story:

Greetings from Northern Michigan!   We are Matt and Leigh Ann. We have a long history of farming. For Matt, he started helping on the family dairy farm at a very young age. He will tell you he was hitching wagons to tractors and milking cows by age five. Still today, driving a tractor doing field work is his therapy. Leigh Ann’s family had a small hobby farm where they raised meat chickens, a few heads of beef and had a large garden from which they canned and preserved enough food to feed the family. We had the joy of briefly living on and farming 80 acres when we were first married.

Then, life took a turn and Matt’s career brought us to Northern Michigan and the farming dream was put on hold. Finally, after 20 years, we have purchased a farm! This land has not been a farm in a very long time. Good thing we enjoy bringing abandoned fields and buildings back to life! Leigh Ann will be sharing our journey on Facebook and Instagram. We hope you will check it out!

What’s in a name? Who knew that choosing a farm name would be such a challenge! We finally settled on Olde Tools Farm for two reasons. One, we are land rich and cash poor. This means we can only afford to purchase older used farm equipment. Two, we are middle-aged, and some folks think we are “old tools” for starting this large of a project at our age. We added the “e” to “old” to help further emphasize that old time feel.

We are developing two aspects on the farm: 1) traditional agriculture, and 2) cut flowers. Matt focuses on the 40-ish acres of traditional ag stuff and will be responsible for raising future animals (beef, sheep, etc.). While Leigh Ann manages the one-acre of cut flowers and the “girls” (aka laying hens).

We hope you will join us on this adventure of returning life to this old farm!