Living a simple, healthy life that is good for your body, the earth, and humanity can be a great challenge and adventure. Tim and Frances Crowhill Sauder—along with their two youngsters—have been on this adventure the past six years as Fiddle Creek Dairy was birthed and continues to evolve.

Where we came from

Tim grew up in Lancaster county, PA and lived in Alaska, France, Canada and Germany where he learned to farm, before returning to Lancaster for Fiddle Creek Dairy. Frances was born in Lancaster, PA; grew up in Kenya, East Africa; lived in Ohio, California, Indiana, and Virginia; worked on and managed several organic produce farms before returning to Lancaster for Fiddle Creek Dairy.

Fiddle Creek Dairy is a deep collaboration and partnership between farmer-carpenter-plumber-theology reader-roamer Tim, and musician-farmer-wilderness traveler-restorative justice worker-seeker-Frances.

From the beginning of Fiddle Creek Dairy, our minds have been focused on multiple layers of health, and the slow steady steps that will take us there. We continue to restore, clean up and work with this land, as well as tend to Tim’s on-going recovery from cancer.

What We are About

We are a farm family practicing sustainability, making delicious yoghurt and other dairy products, treating our cows and our land in the best way possible. On a deeper level, we are drawing upon wisdom from the roots of our own ancestry (small Mennonite and Amish family farms) and tapping into the wisdom from Indigenous cultures we’ve connected with (Kikuyu, Luo and Massai from Kenya, Lakota, and Haudenosaunee) to find a balanced way of living that is in harmony with life’s systems. This farm, our life-long experiment for integrated living, is our small way to create networks of mutuality and respect within the web of life and offer an alternative to systems of oppression.

In our farm operation, we want to model a way of farming that nurtures health and balance for the land, and the surrounding human community. We are committed to creating products that are nourishing food for the body while simultaneously caring for the the land we have the privilege to live on and respecting all forms of life. Our hope is that Fiddle Creek Farm contributes toward a better world by operating on principles of mutuality and respect, connecting with the local community around us while responding to the larger world we live within.