Murphy's Grass Farm
Chautauqua County, New York

About the farm

Doug Murphy + family bought the farm at auction on a snowy October day in 2000. The farm was 325 acres of raw pasture and woods, with an out-dated milking barn. That winter it snowed 350 inches.

In 2005 Doug designed and built a new milking parlor, updating the methods used to manage cows coming in and out of the barn to be milked.

After 3 transition years of hard work restoring the land and fixing fences (about 10 miles of fence in total...) the farm was certified organic by OEFFA in 2007.

In 2019 the Murphys purchased the property next door, including Nettle Hill, and expanded the farm to 475 acres total.

Doug + Dana

Doug and Dana are graduates of the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. After college, Dana worked at the Wooster Daily Record and Akron Beacon Journal. Doug began farming, first outside of Wooster, then in Big Prairie, Ohio.

Doug started medical school at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1991. He is board certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine. After 16 years of service with VA hospitals in Cleveland and Erie, Pa., he retired in 2014. He currently works part-time as an emergency room physician.

Doug was one of the earliest members of the Ohio Ecological Food + Farming Association and has spoken at the OEFFA conference in 2013 and 2019.

Dana belongs to two book clubs and is an ESL tutor at the Shaker Heights Public Library.

Son Patrick is a 2010 graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He works as a precision machinest and also is our right-hand man at the farm.

Julia, a 2012 graduate of the College of Wooster, is an avid gardener and manages the farm's Cleveland beef sales. She works full-time in Cleveland at Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

Daniel learned how to drive the tractor when he was a teenager but now he's busy with his pediatric residency in Madison, WI.

*|Murphy's Grass Farm|*