💡 ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Chloe Drew and Jennica Giroux are twin sisters who run Mother Earth Farm in Indiana County, Pennsylvania. Jennica spent about a decade in financial services before leaving for good in 2023. Chloe trained as an elementary educator, never took the classroom job, and founded the Indiana Outdoor School instead.
The farm has been three different businesses since 2013, and a wet spring that flooded their best growing plot forced another change last year. Neither sister treats that as a setback. They talk about how each of them figured out what she wanted, why volunteering was the thing that answered it, how to eat local without shaming people who can't afford to, and what a community can reasonably ask of its elected officials when a data center shows up.
🌐 Connect with Chloe and Jennica
Mother Earth Farm: https://www.motherearthfarmpa.com
Indiana Outdoor School: https://indianaoutdoorschool.weebly.com
Upcoming events: https://www.motherearthfarmpa.com/events
Orders and questions: motherearthfarmpa@gmail.com
📅 Coming up at the farm
Nature Escape, an outdoor education day for women 18 and over, in September.
Fall field trips, plus a few remaining homeschool, preschool, and kindergarten spots at the Outdoor School.
📘 Mentioned in this episode
Chevy Chase Community Center in Indiana, which takes fresh produce donations: https://chevychasecenter.org
Indiana County Farmers Market, Saturdays through October: https://indianafarmmarket.org
Pennsylvania Women's Agricultural Network: https://agsci.psu.edu/wagn
Soil Sisters, the book Chloe credits with the idea of farming alongside other women: https://newsociety.com/book/soil-sisters
📣 On the data center
Concerned Residents of Western PA: https://www.concernedresidentsofwesternpa.com
🎯 KEY TAKEAWAYS
🔹 Volunteering is a zero-risk way to find out what actually interests you, and both sisters trace their working lives back to an hour given away.
🔹 Jennica's exit from finance took the better part of a decade, moving from full-time to part-time to gone.
🔹 The farm has been three different businesses since 2013, and none of the changes were a failure.
🔹 How someone feeds their family is an access issue, not a character issue.
🔹 Kids who plant kale will eat kale, even the ones who won't touch a vegetable at home.
🔹 The Indiana Outdoor School runs without a set schedule or an agenda, at the lowest field trip rate in the county.
TOPICS
COMMUNITY & CONNECTIONS
LIFE TRANSITIONS
STRATEGIC THINKING
I📄
Read the Full Transcript
Prefer to read? The complete episode transcript is available here.
