PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHELLE MAGDALENA
On this hillside in Cachagua, there is so much to look at: brilliant green grass, wildflowers everywhere, magnificent oak trees and a neighbor’s donkeys grazing peacefully in a faraway pasture. And yet, Jordan Champagne is searching for something more elusive—her two cows.
“Gayatri! Malati!” Champagne calls, and calls again, but to no avail. On this particular day, the dairy cows are nowhere to be seen, probably full of grass and napping in a secret spot on this warm afternoon. But it is a fine day to get a sense of Bhakti Farms, a passion project for Jordan and her husband Todd Champagne, which is all about nurturing land, animals and people.
“It’s all about simple living and higher thinking,” says Jordan as we walk one of the narrow trails around the property, still looking for the cows and giving me a tour along the way.
“We’re doing away with the clutter of everyday life,” she says, pointing out the “sunrise bench,” a meditation area carved into a hillside that is her favorite place to start her day. The colorful riot of native wildflowers along the trail includes shooting stars, lupine and baby blue eyes, the palette changing as the earth warms into summer. Seasonal streams run freely from all the spring rain, and the quiet is only occasionally punctuated by birdsong.
The Champagnes are best known to the local food community as the founders of Happy Girl Kitchen, which is both a popular brand of preserves and the name of their vegetarian café in Pacific Grove. Now Jordan and Todd are developing a nonprofit farm to serve as a unique educational center and gathering place among the rolling hills south of Carmel Valley.
The Champagnes have long been advocates and teachers of the do-it-yourself food lifestyle, devoted to putting up food the old-fashioned way, as demonstrated in their line of jarred pickles, jams and jellies. They learned these skills decades ago working on small farms in Norway, Sweden and Vermont, where preserving food was a necessity due to the short summer growing seasons.
The couple established Happy Girl Kitchen in Aromas in 2002, and opened their Pacific Grove café dedicated to organic, simple and sustainable foods, and also as a space to teach others to preserve food. Jordan has continued to spread her knowledge through workshops for all ages as well as her longtime Edible Monterey Bay column, “The Preservationist,” and her 2020 cookbook, It Starts With Fruit: Simple Techniques and Delicious Recipes for Jams, Marmalades and Preserves (Chronicle Books, $29.95).
In Hinduism, cattle are sacred, and as you might expect, there is a lot of loving devotion directed at the resident cows of Bhakti Farms.
Now the Champagnes are working to provide an additional kind of nourishment, for mind, body and soul.
Five years ago, they bought 26 acres on Cachagua Road and began the long process of reclaiming it as farmstead, clearing the longneglected property of thousands of pounds of crushed metal, old carpeting and construction debris.
The couple rehabilitated an old farmhouse there and made it their home. Now, with the help of several employees who live on the property, they’re continuing to improve the site, with buildings that include a brand-new dairy room for milking and processing, a 30-foot yurt and a glamping platform. Plans call for planting a fruit orchard, as well as measures to combat French broom, an invasive plant that plagues many areas of the Central Coast.
Bhakti Farms became a nonprofit last year with the intent of being a land-based learning community that combines the Hindu tradition of bhakti with principles of sustainable living. Jordan is a member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness of Silicon Valley (ISKCON) and has been studying the philosophy of bhakti yoga for 25 years, a spiritual practice centered on loving devotion.
“I feel in a way that my whole life has led up to this,” she says. “I feel very fortunate to have done a lot of healing in my life through meditation, food choices, being in nature and other lifestyle choices. I have had to do a lot of healing of generational trauma and I have gathered and regularly used many tools to do that. The most important tools come from the ancient Vedic wisdom of the bhakti tradition.”
Vedic philosophy teaches how to transform qualities like anger, envy and greed into gratitude, compassion and nonviolence, she says, and finding one’s path to serving others comes through meditation and other practices.
In Hinduism, cattle are sacred, and as you might expect, there is a lot of loving devotion directed at the resident cows of Bhakti Farms. “I’ve been so content ever since we got the cows,” says Jordan, who lavishes attention on them, often petting and hugging them. In addition to grazing on the farm, the cows get to eat fruit and vegetable pulp left over from daily juice extractions, as well as veggie scraps and day-old scones from Happy Girl Kitchen.
The cows are kept there according to a practice of nonviolence known as ahimsa. “We will take care of them for their whole lives,” she says, adding that she hopes to eventually be able to hold workshops on how to make cheese, yogurt and buttermilk. She also intends to add to the herd, ideally rescued farm animals, which would comprise an animal sanctuary.
The educational aspect of the farm is taking several forms. Currently, it’s being used for gatherings and workshops for the ISKCON community, including meditation and yoga retreats, mainly held in the yurt and on its surrounding deck.
The Champagnes are also planning to open the farm to Cachagua and Carmel Valley locals by hosting farm days once a month, and have invited the Carmel Unified School District to send summer school students to visit the farm on field trips and for pickle making classes.
“Whether it is coming out and hugging the cows, pulling invasive vegetation, moving rocks, pushing your kid on a swing overlooking the valley, playing in the creek and eating great food, whatever it is it can all be healing and inspiring and confidence building, especially for kids who are disconnected from nature or their food choices,” says Jordan. “We have groups of kids starting to come out and having those impactful lifechanging moments. I have seen this for years in our summer culinary camps at Happy Girl and now it is so great to see it out on the land.”
It’s important for Bhakti Farms to be a resource for these communities, Jordan says, because people living in the modern era can benefit from reconnecting with nature and the land.
“On a recent interview that went viral on the Dr. Chatterjee podcast, Dr. Gabor Maté said, ‘Play is so important and joy is so important. We can always keep playing in the enchanted forest,’” notes Jordan. “Why did that get so much attention? We forget to play in the enchanted forest! We hope that Bhakti Farms can remind people of that.”
Bhakti Farms • bhaktifarms.org
About the author
Kathryn McKenzie, who grew up in Santa Cruz and now lives on a Christmas tree farm in north Monterey County, writes about the environment, sustainable living and health for numerous publications and websites. She is the co-author of “Humbled: How California’s Monterey Bay Escaped Industrial Ruin.”
