MEET YOUR FARMER
FARMER MATTHEW & FORGOTTEN FLAVORS
Farmer Matthew Willenbring is the heart and soul of Forgotten Flavors Farm.
3 GENERATION Family farm
Regenerative Farming
Farmed with love
Welcome to forgotten flavors. I'm Farmer Matthew.
Sixteen years ago, we operated a conventional farm using industrial agricultural practices. However, after a family health crisis four years ago, we became convinced of our need to radically change our farming practices and philosophies, and the ways we saw food produced.
From that point, we embarked on a journey to building a regenerative, pasture-focused farm based on transparency with an open door to the public, providing ultra-quality, high animal welfare, truly pasture-raised, beyond organic, soy-free chicken and eggs.
I would love the opportunity to become your farmer and bring regenerative agriculture to your kitchen!
Our Approach to farming
Forgotten Flavors is a 200-acre, pasture-based farming operation located in Central Minnesota. We are a small, family-based farm, and raise all our animals outside on diverse pastures. If you visited our farm, you would quickly come to notice that we are surrounded by thousands of acres of monoculture corn and soybeans. So, what we are doing on our farm is something incredibly unique and different—and we believe for good reason. As farmers, we understand that how we treat our soils and how we raise our plants and animals, will ultimately have a direct affect on the physical and mental health of those that consume our products of farming choices.
Our mission at Forgotten Flavors is to produce nutrient-dense foods that are the result of taking care of our land and animals in ways that we believe reflect our Creator’s divine intelligence, purpose, and design. If you look back just a few decades ago, we did not have or use synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, or GMO-seeds. We did not have all the drugs, antibiotics, and synthetic growth hormones that we do today. It is often said that agriculture has changed more in the last 50 years than it had in the past 5000.
Getting Back to nature's template
Our goal at Forgotten Flavors is to focus back in on the basics–getting back to Nature’s templates for producing food—essentially by following a biomimicry on our farm. So, in essence, what we have done is take the land and convert it back to pasture with a broad array of perennial plants, like what our area would have been, and we allow our animals to graze, migrate and move from area to area.
We strive to always provide our pastures the critical time they need to rest and fully recover. By doing so, we are building our soil nutrient levels and fertility, increasing our soil life and diversity, and capturing carbon at significant rates from the atmosphere.
Our large ruminant cattle graze our pastures first. The cattle are then followed by chickens—broilers and laying hens—that we have in portable houses or coops that we move throughout the pastures as the cattle graze. Just as the wild birds in nature, our chickens serve a beneficial role for the overall ecology of our farm.
So, we think that this is a way of following a sustainable template—a plan or design if you will—of producing a wholesome and ultra-quality food that at the end of the day, everyone is better off for having participated in.
Bringing Food to your table is our calling
The vocation of bringing food to your table is not just a business to us. We see it as a personal calling and responsibility that we take very seriously.
We are glad you are here and would love the opportunity to get you re-introduced to flavors in foods that you too, have perhaps forgotten.
We are glad you are here and would love the opportunity to get you re-introduced to flavors in foods that you too, have perhaps forgotten.