CIRCLEVILLE, Ohio – Inspiration from the Grateful Dead’s song “Ripple” explains how Ripple Run Farms acquired its name. “It just has to do with living your life by your design,” Aaron Singerman said. “That’s what we’re trying to build here at the farm. We want a community around our family of health and wellness.”

Kim Singerman said, “My husband is a huge Grateful Dead fan and has been his entire life. At first our business was going to be called Grateful Pastures, but as we were trying to register it we saw an identical farm with the same name in Georgia. We still wanted to keep the Grateful Dead theme behind our name, so I just started Googling the thousands of songs they have and came across their Ripple song.”

The seven-acre farm in Circleville, the initial agriculture endeavor for Kim and Aaron, represents their desire to offer natural alternatives to processed foods.

Health and wellness hit home for both Kim and Aaron following cancer scares and fatalities in their immediate families.

Two years ago, Kim’s mother was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer. She underwent six rounds of chemo and never made it to the seventh round, ending up in the hospital due to side effects. “I think she spent 71 days in the hospital, and she got tested for the BRCA 1 gene – typically if you have that gene you’re likely to get cancer – she tested negative,” Kim said.

“So, I started digging deep into that and I realized that her cancer was most likely lifestyle related.

“I’ll be honest, I grew up eating processed foods in the fast food world because it was easy and convenient,” Kim said “But as I started researching about cancer and the American diet, I realized that something wasn’t right.”

Aaron faced his own battles with stomach ulcers. He was at risk of taking daily medication until he changed his diet following the death of his father from stomach cancer in December 2017.

Kim grew up in Powell, Ohio, by the Columbus Zoo and Aaron is from Cincinnati. Neither ever farmed before purchasing their property in 2023. “We’ve just taught ourselves, Kim said. “We’ve researched, we read, we’ve reached out to other people who are long-time farmers and we’ve been to several farming conferences over the last year and a half and we’re just kind of teaching ourselves as we go.”

Kim’s initial learning endeavor was making sourdough bread. Although she was passionate about making it, she was tentative before she started. “In the Instagram video I was watching, I saw all these people doing sourdough and I wanted to do it so bad, but I was scared and nervous,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was doing – finally just took a leap of faith and did it.”

Sourdough bread was a natural choice because it’s easier to digest and easier in your gut versus traditional yeast bread. “Sourdough is the true form of what bread should be because of the natural fermentation and the slow process to get one single loaf of bread,” she said. “It takes me 24 hours from start to finish. And so, it makes me appreciate the value of the loaf I just made.”

An extremely high grocery bill spawned an interest in raising poultry. “My wife eats a lot of chicken and already started buying organic and pasture-raised poultry,” Aaron said. “I remember going to a grocery store and she’s checking out with enough chicken for a week. I don’t remember the exact number, but it was like $160 worth of chicken.”

Aaron investigated what it would cost to raise and market a chicken. “It costs about eight bucks to raise a chicken from birth to butcher day,” he said. “And then we can get anywhere from a 5- to 10-pound chicken and sell it for $30 to $40 all cut up. I’m like, we’re raising chickens.” The couple already had layer hens when they added the meat chickens, and they’ve recently started diving into turkeys.

Cornish Cross chicks are purchased from a hatchery in manageable quantities and pasture-raised over eight weeks. “Right now, we’re running anywhere from 100 to 300 birds on pasture at a time,” Aaron said. “They go into a meat shaw, which is a movable structure that they can get out of the sun into the shade surrounded by electric netting and they’re moved daily so they’re on the fresh path bed.”

The birds are trucked to Pleasant Valley Poultry and Processing in Baltic, Ohio, a USDA-inspected poultry processing facility. “We take live chickens to them, drop them off, and when we pick them up two to five days later, they are frozen in boxes as you would imagine, like a box of chicken comes from a distributor,” Aaron said. “They’re vacuum sealed, labeled as Ripple Run Farms, and stamped with a USDA-inspected label. We take them home, put them in our commercial-grade freezers, then distribute the chicken via farmers markets, farm pick up, and online sales.”

Ripple Run chicken is not sold in stores, however, there is some consideration about expansion. “We’re starting to get approached by companies that want our chicken and we’re planning to scale our operation by at least two times the size of what we’re doing now, maybe three times the size next year,” Aaron said. “We’re even looking at the possibility of leasing land or purchasing more land to run more poultry than we are currently doing.”

Ripple Run Farms’ main product line is poultry, but it also offers “attraction items” including sourdough bread and sourdough starter, honey, and peppers. His fondness for peppers, and a chance meeting with a local beekeeper developed into a line of hot honey.

In addition to several dozen jalapeno plants, Aaron is growing Carolina reapers and ghost peppers. “That was my dream, it had nothing to do with my wife or anybody else, I like pickled jalapenos and it started there,” he said. “I make my hot honey on the property and we jar and sell it – that’s sort of my green thumb thing.”

According to Aaron, what Ripple Run Farms grows to become is yet to be determined. “You know, God’s always working upstream and we’re not really sure where this is taking us,” he said. “We do have some dreams though.”

Those dreams include several options.

“There’s a gigantic demand for poultry processing in central and southern Ohio,” Aaron said.  “You have to drive two plus hours to take your birds to a state-inspected processor, so we’re looking at what that would cost to have a facility on our property.”

Kim’s vision for a farm store goes well beyond a typical stop-and-shop. “I want it to be more like a community market,” she said. “I want to have products from other farmers and a coffee stand in the mornings for people going to work that want a good cup of coffee.” Currently, she buys coffee beans from her niece in Florida who works with an organic farmer out of Honduras. “She buys the beans, roasts them, and then I buy them from her,” Kim said.

Aaron is exploring agritourism through farm tours and learning opportunities.