Community Supported Agriculture for the Upper Valley of New Hampshire and Vermont

Join the Farm

Chuck Wooster grew up far from the land and wandered around in exile until 1995 when, fleeing a desk job in Boston, he apprenticed for a year at Caretaker Farm in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Caretaker was one of the first organic farms and one of the first CSAs in the U.S., and by the time the harvest was over, Chuck was smitten. In 2000, he started Sunrise Farm CSA with his brother Bruce (who has since gone on to start Picadilly Farm in Winchester, New Hampshire, with his wife Jenny.)

Though Sunrise continues to grow and thrive, Chuck has maintained a variety of other interests, including working as an associate editor at Northern Woodlands magazine in Corinth, Vermont, as the editor of The Outside Story: local writers explore the nature of New Hampshire and Vermont (Northern Woodlands, 2007); and the author of Living With Sheep (Lyons Press, 2005) and Living with Pigs (Lyons Press, 2008.) After the sun goes down, Chuck is a member of the Selectboard in Hartford, Vermont.

Norah Lake grew up exploring the gardens and forests of southern Vermont, but her passion for working the land really began with her gardening experience as a high school student at the Putney School, where students grow much of the food consumed in the dining hall. In college, Norah delved into her interest in the natural world by majoring in Environmental Studies but continued to focus on sustainable agriculture both at home in the garden and farther afield with trips to Southern Africa and Latin America. After graduating, she spent a season managing the Dartmouth Organic Farm, where she expanded the small CSA to 30 shareholders and worked to incorporate the farm more deeply into the Dartmouth student experience. She is now excited to be a business partner at Sunrise, after several seasons of popping in and out and watching the farm grow from a distance. In her first full-time season on the farm, Norah has set up Sunrise’s first active beehive and hopes to continue to encourage our community of pollinators. She is also working on developing the fiber side of our sheep operation, with hopes of eventually offering skeins of our own Navajo Churro yarn for knitting, as well as woven products from her loom. This winter, Norah will be working for a local handweaver in Putney, Vermont, when she isn’t out on her cross country skies or cooking up the stored bounty of this season’s harvest.

In addition to Chuck and Norah, who run the business as partners, regular Sunrise farmhands include:

Rachael Cohen was not born in Vermont; however, she was lucky enough to have moved here before she learned to talk, so she avoided a New Jersey accent and other ills of surburbia. Her family ran a ski lodge in an old farmhouse in central Vermont for part of her early childhood, where Rachael helped her mom grow and put by much of the food for the guests and family, and later moved to a camp without electricity deep in the Green Mountains. After gallavanting across the country for awhile (she has a Bachelor of Arts in English from Cornell University and a Master of Science in Environmental Education from the Audubon Expedition Institute/Lesley College, both degrees invaluable for farm hands), Rachael realized that every place she visited compared unfavorably to Vermont and came home. When she’s not digging potatoes, she is a freelance editor specializing in environmental and regional studies. She also teaches literature and creative writing for the University of Michigan’s New England Literature Program held each spring at a camp in Maine - so she misses the planting season - as well as facilitating book discussions at the Hartland Public Library. Her lab/rottie/beagle/terrier mix, Asparagus, better know as Goose, would be ecstatic to be visited at her tie-out by the veggie cleaning station beside the barn.

Carl Demrow lives at Seldom Summer Farm in Washington, Vermont, and has supplied the Sunrise community with eggs for years. He also raises turkeys, keeps bees, and makes maple syrup.  Carl is a regular member of the slaughtering crew at Sunrise and has pitched in on a number of carpentry projects over the years.