About

The Story of Shire Hound Farms…

On behalf of my wife Tara and I, we would like to welcome you to Shire Hound Farms.

Wendell Berry wrote, “the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.” Since our humble beginnings in 2015, we have worked diligently to fulfill the concepts of earth care, people care, and fair share.

When looking for a place to call home, we really had two general requirements, land and a pond. Tara found a location in Martinsville, Ohio. I was not generally optimistic about living in Martinsville, but I agreed to go look at the house. When we arrived at the house, we walked in the front door, through the kitchen, and outside to the dock of the pond. We took a minute to survey the rolling hills and immediately felt the connection to the land. This was home.

Part of the reason for purchasing the property was to live by the Greek concept of xenia; a reciprocal relationship between host and guest. Just as nature extends hospitality to us as strangers we return the hospitality to nature and humans.

For the first two years much of the land was not developed. We were kept busy by our careers in higher education. A chance walk in the woods encountering North American pawpaws led me to reconnect with a childhood spent growing up in the woods learning to live off the land from my grandparents. Quickly the North American pawpaw would find a home on our property and would become an anchor species. Not long after the initial pawpaw planting I would make a decision to leave my career in sports medicine. Again, Wendell sums this up well, “There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.” I was at a crossroads, one that would birth the formation of Shire Hound Farms and our path of eco not ego.

Since leaving my job in higher education, we have slowly turned the rolling hills of Shire Hound Farm into a burgeoning food forest filled with mostly native fruit and nut trees. We have several large gardens around the property, and a continuously growing workforce of poultry and livestock to keep things under control at the farm.

So where does the name Shire Hound come from? Well, there were several mature apple trees on the property when we purchased the land. So originally we played with variations of Affalon; deriving from the welsh word for apple. Pairing with the concept of xenia, we almost became Affalon Xenia Farms, but it just didn’t feel right. So we played with versions of words that mean orchard, woods, etc. We really like The Shire, yes we are book nerds, but felt ‘The Shire’ overdone. What you also need to know is we deeply love our rescue dogs: Eowyn the Irish wolfhound, Moriarty (Ari for short) the great dane-pitbull mix, and Redbeard the one-eyed pitbull. Then one day my sister called and said if we ever started a brewery we should call it Shire Hound Brewing. A few weeks later while hanging out with some songwriter friends we mentioned the idea of Shire Hound Brewing; after musing for a moment, the friend said ‘hmmm, Shire Hound Farm has quite the ring to it.’ Ever since, our place has been known as Shire Hound Farms.

We are happy to have all of you alongside us in this journey into an ecologically integrated living.

Alex & Tara Rhinehart