Our Farm Story

Four Oaks Farm is a small market garden tucked into the southern edge of Raymore, Missouri. I'm Farmer Liz — I handle the growing, harvesting, planting, and everything that happens between seed and sale. My husband Shawn built the infrastructure that makes it all possible: high tunnels, over 750 square feet of raised beds, water and power systems, and our compost setup. We're also lucky to have a dedicated volunteer who has been lending her hands since spring 2023 — showing up through the seasons to help with everything from spring prep and summer harvesting to fall planting and winter crop cleanup.

We grow using organic methods — no synthetic fertilizers, no pesticides, no shortcuts — though we're not a certified organic operation. What that means in practice is that every carrot, herb, berry, and egg is grown the way we'd want our own food grown. We care about what goes into the soil, what goes onto the plants, and what ends up on your table. It's not a marketing position — it's just how we farm.

Healthy soil is at the heart of everything we do — it's what grows healthy plants, and healthy plants take care of themselves in ways that chemicals never could. Our primary soil input is compost, a large portion of which we make right here on the farm. We're also working with a pre-biotic liquid soil amendment that supports microbial life in the soil, and we're in the early stages of developing a cover crop plan to further build organic matter and soil structure over time.

When it comes to pest management, we work with nature rather than against it. The farm is planted with a diverse mix of flowers and we're actively developing a hedgerow to provide habitat for beneficial insects — the predators that keep pest populations in check naturally. In the warm season we have a healthy population of those beneficials already at work, and when a specific pest shows up in numbers, we bring in targeted predators rather than reaching for a spray. We almost never spray — even organic-approved options — because we have honeybees on the farm and their health, along with the health of every other beneficial insect in the system, comes first.

The honeybees have been part of Four Oaks Farm since spring 2023, when a local beekeeper reached out looking for a home for his hives. It turned out to be a natural fit — the bees get a pesticide-free farm full of flowering crops and habitat, and we get pollination and the kind of ecosystem balance that makes the whole operation work better. The apiary is growing, with more hives expected to arrive this spring.

Our high tunnels let us grow well beyond what the traditional season allows. The large double-layer tunnel — with an air bladder between the two layers of plastic for added insulation — is where we grow tomatoes and sweet peppers in summer and shelter our winter greens through the cold months. The smaller single-layer tunnel with roll-up sides houses our hot peppers in summer and gets an early start on cold-hardy crops like cabbage, carrots, and onions in late winter and early spring. Together they give us a nearly year-round growing season in a climate that would otherwise shut things down for months at a time.

Our produce is available through GrownBy for farm pickup right here in Raymore and Market Wagon for Thursday delivery across the Kansas City Metro. We're also proud members of Missouri Grown and LocalHarvest — two communities that share our belief that local food and the people who grow it are worth knowing. If you've ever wanted to know your farmer, we're pretty easy to find.

We're building something here — a place where neighbors can know exactly where their food comes from and who grew it.