The idea for Autumn’s Harvest Farm was born in 2001 when Tim and Sarah Haws went on their first date.

“It was on our first or second date, and Sarah was telling me how she always wanted to hatch chickens,” Tim explains. “She told me how she used to take eggs out of her family’s refrigerator and put them in a drawer.”

Zach Miller grew up on his grandfather’s farm in Charlottesville, Virginia when it was still a “gentleman’s farm” for racehorses. But Zach and his parents wanted to take the family legacy in a new direction. Zach wanted to see the farm—his childhood home—preserved as a profitable model of an alternative to industrial agriculture. That meant great-tasting steaks, healthy grasses, and a land stewardship that could continue long into the future.

A few hours north of Philadelphia are the Pocono Mountains. Well-known on the East Coast for luxury resorts, a NASCAR track, and some of the best camping in the U.S., the Poconos are also where you can find millennial farmer Nolan Thevenet raising heritage-breed hogs deep in the woods.

In 2010, at age 21, Stryker Farm’s owner Nolan Thevenet decided to drop out of college and follow his dream of working outside and being a farmer. Though his friends and family were at first freaked out by his foreclosure on a "normal" professional career, he reassured them with jokes, saying “What could possibly go wrong?”

After 12 years working in restaurant kitchens as a chef, Jeremy Storey found himself in Chicago, working the front of the house at Alinea, a Michelin-starred restaurant known as the foremost home in North America for the rarified cuisine known as molecular gastronomy. From his vantage point in the dining room, Jeremy watched purveyors -- farmers, fishermen, and hunters -- walk through the doors in the morning, fresh off the fields, boat, or woods, holding boxes of their finest findings for the chefs’ perusal. Though he’d landed arguably one of the better jobs in the country as far as the restaurant world goes, Jeremy couldn’t help but envy those producers.