Much has changed over the two decades since Christa Alexander and her husband, Mark Fasching, founded Jericho Settlers Farm on land around her childhood home on Barber Farm Road. Alexander grew up eating fresh vegetables from her parents’ extensive gardens. When she started cooking for herself after college, she recalled, “I was appalled by the quality of food in the grocery store.”
Twenty-three years after the couple established their farm, bags of its “awesome arugula” and “crazy good cucumbers” are stocked in independent grocery stores and featured on restaurant menus throughout Chittenden County and in Waterbury. Alexander, 51, and Fasching, 57, have built a solid business that grosses just more than $1 million annually — a figure they readily share at farming conferences, along with lessons learned.
Alexander’s driving force remains “feeding people good food in a way that takes care of the land and workers,” she said. But how the couple do that today looks very different from their farm’s origin as a diversified livestock, vegetable and flower operation selling largely through farmers markets and community-supported agriculture shares. What they grow and how they grow it, who works on the farm, and their mix of customers have all evolved.
To survive and thrive, Alexander said, “We have undiversified.”
Jericho Settlers now raises only organic vegetables and cultivates many of its crops under cover in 18 hoop houses — six of which can be heated — “to grow as much as we can as early as we can.” That cocoon of protection extends the harvest, too. “We’ve been able to have tomatoes until November and are working on pushing that out,” Alexander said.
“The product they grow is stunning.” Dean Thuma
Jericho Settlers’ season-extension practices and responsiveness make things simpler for its restaurant customers, according to the Farmhouse Group‘s purchasing director, Dean Thuma. Thuma now sources ingredients for the group’s five Chittenden County restaurants, but he started working with the farm more than a decade ago as chef at the Farmhouse Tap & Grill in Burlington.
The Farmhouse Group and Jericho Settlers “have grown in tandem,” Thuma said. “Their ability to keep up and scale with us helps make our business work. Their quality and consistency make it easy.”
Should he need to call at the last minute for an extra 100 pounds of tomatoes, Thuma said, “Christa makes it work every time.” Plus, he added, “The product they grow is stunning.”
On June 4, the Jericho Settlers crew had just harvested the year’s first fat heirloom tomatoes in shades of crimson, purple and marigold and moved on to picking cucumbers from trellised vines stretching eight feet toward the plastic roof. In another hoop house, filled with bushy, vibrant foliage speckled with fragrant white flowers, Alexander pulled a handful of new potatoes from the soil. The crop was almost ready to go on her weekly list for buyers.
In addition to their two acres of hoop houses, Alexander and Fasching farm roughly 20 acres in Richmond and Jericho. Both parcels border the Winooski River and have flooded badly the past two summers.
“Thank goodness we weren’t starting out when it happened,” Alexander said.
“What saved our butt is the home farm,” her husband added.
The farm’s restaurant accounts were critical allies in the periods surrounding the floods. The Skinny Pancake group bought a preflood emergency harvest of parsley and turned it into pesto, which it sold back at cost to Jericho Settlers for its winter CSA. Many other restaurants changed menu items to feature fast-growing microgreens and pea shoots, which the farm planted after other crops were lost.
Jericho Settlers’ business has stabilized over the past five years to about 75 percent wholesale orders and 25 percent direct-to-consumer purchases through its farmstand and 150-member CSA. During their early years, Alexander and Fasching juggled several summer farmers markets. The last one they quit was Burlington’s — in 2015, to spend more time with their two kids.
A couple of years later, in their continued quest for work-life balance, the couple made another major decision. After struggling to establish a reliable, consistent labor force, in 2017 they hired their first employees from Jamaica through the federal H-2A visa program designed for seasonal agricultural jobs. Long a mainstay of Vermont’s orchard industry, H-2A workers have been increasingly employed by a broad range of farmers across the state — and the U.S.
Heads down in their busiest time of year, Alexander and Fasching don’t have much energy to dwell on the turbulence of federal policies under President Donald Trump, such as U.S. Department of Agriculture funding cuts. They are waiting to hear about their pending Natural Resources Conservation Service applications and frustrated by a hefty tariff they will likely need to pay on a piece of Spanish-built trellising equipment coming through Canada this summer.
So far, the seasonal agricultural worker program seems safe, despite migrant labor crackdowns and revocation of some international visas. That is a relief, Alexander said. Without their H-2A employees, Jericho Settlers would really be hamstrung. “If they mess with that program,” Alexander said, “no one in this country will eat.”
Jericho Settlers employs six men from Jamaica, most of whom return yearly from mid-March to mid-December. Orian Rowe and Roman Campbell were harvesting cucumbers with Alexander in early June. Both are in their fourth season at the farm.
Campbell said he has a yam and plantain farm at home but works in the U.S. because “it’s a better opportunity.” Rowe said simply, “I come here to feed my family.”
Rowe runs the wash-and-pack facility, and Campbell has become the resident hoop house expert, Alexander said. While the farm has had some strong U.S.-born employees, she said, they tended to be young and move on after one or two seasons. The Jamaican crew consists of “skilled people who know the farm,” she said. “The business could not get profitable without that.”
Alexander spends hours poring over spreadsheets, analyzing costs and revenue streams. Within the farm’s 26 restaurant accounts, which deliver almost 20 percent of its income, she has noticed some trends. Sales to longtime Burlington customers — such as the original Farmhouse location, Hen of the Wood and Honey Road — have been fairly steady over the past three years, despite downtown’s well-publicized challenges. At the same time, farm-to-table action in the suburbs is ramping up. The number of Jericho Settlers’ restaurant accounts in Essex, Williston and Richmond has doubled over that period, Alexander noted.
Burlington remains a valuable market, and Alexander said she appreciates that “in hard times, the restaurants are still true to their mission” of buying local. Her team’s deliveries through the ongoing construction gauntlet are “definitely more challenging,” she said.
By contrast, the suburban route Alexander handled on June 6 went smoothly. After helping to fill a Burlington-bound van with carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, basil, arugula and mesclun mix, she Tetris-ed a smaller load of boxes, bags and totes into her Kia hatchback for a delivery run through Williston, South Burlington and Essex.
Among Williston’s big-box stores, Alexander made the farm’s second delivery ever to the recently opened Farmhouse Tap & Grill at Finney Crossing, where Jericho Settlers’ heirloom tomatoes and cucumbers would later grace a salad with local feta and crispy quinoa. Tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini went to the Farmhouse Group’s Guild Tavern in South Burlington for a similar salad and a grilled and fresh vegetable farmer’s plate served with edamame hummus.
At Essex’s Leo & Co. café and market, executive chef Brian Woychowski was busy prepping oyster mushrooms when Alexander arrived with bags of mesclun, baby bok choy, carrots, parsley and scallions, plus boxes of cucumbers, zucchini and heirloom tomatoes.
Asked what he would make with the season’s first heirloom tomatoes, Woychowski said, “I’m just happy they’re here. I’ll be throwing them on everything.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Long-Lived Local | How Jericho Settlers Farm has adapted to build a viable farm-to-table business”
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This article appears in The Food Issue 2025.
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