Kristin Stebbins and her husband Jastin didn’t know much about Alabama when they moved here three years ago. What they did know was that they wanted to continue the small family farm tradition they’d both grown up with in their Columbia River hometown of Rainier, Oregon.

Now they’re operating a busy meat, egg and dairy farm in western Limestone County, alongside a new startup delivery service for locally sourced food — all built from nearby word-of-mouth buzz and the broader instant reach of the internet.

Until recently, Limestone County locals knew Stebbins Family Farm as a place not only for fresh eggs and other home-grown goodies, but for catching a firsthand field-trip glimpse of how a small family farm operates. But Kristen has since scaled back on the farm’s field trip schedule to make way for a new idea that could be even bigger: the Farmer Co-op (farmerco-op.com), a consortium of twelve north Alabama farmers and makers who supply an online storefront with a tidy variety of locally-made goods.

“I call our people ‘farmers’ and ‘makers,’ because we’ve got more than meat and produce. We’ve got sourdough bread; we’ve got barbecue sauce,” says Kristen. A peek at the Farmer Co-op website reveals even an even longer list of locally produced food items; grocery-style goods that go well beyond the mere basics. There are coffee beans and microgreens; flowers, fresh shrimp and more.

For shoppers, the real appeal lies in the convenience that the Farmer Co-op aims to bring to shopping for locally raised food. Once a week (or even monthly or biweekly, depending on your preference), a Farmer Co-op package arrives fresh at participating customers’ doorsteps — no leaving the house required. Having begun the co-op earlier this year, it’s still new enough that Kristen herself is serving as the operation’s delivery driver, covering multiple north Alabama counties every week in an all-day itinerary that ensures shoppers receive every ounce of their online order.

“We’ve got almost 2,500 followers on social media,” says Kristen. “That isn’t tons, right? But, our reach is wild. When I posted on our farm Facebook page for the first time about the Farmer Co-op, it reached almost a hundred thousand people. When I saw that, I said, ‘Well, I guess it’s real now!’”

Producing milk, eggs (including duck eggs) and poultry, Stebbins Family Farm has become an integral part of feeding Kristen’s community in the three short years since the family moved to Limestone County and started getting their hands dirty — but, she says, that’s because “it feeds my family first.”

“At the end of the day, the goal of our farm is to feed our family,” she says. “If all of our customers disappeared today, I still have to be able to maintain whatever systems I have here to feed ‘us.’”

The Stebbins’ four children ((Michael, Hannah, Ben and Ryan) range in age from 11 to 18, and the family’s five-acre farm relies on their daily contributions. “Hannah and I typically milk in the mornings, and then she and I do a lot of the processing,” says Kristen. “She’s kind of my right-hand person!”

Kristen and Jastin both grew up on small family farms back home in their native Oregon. “My folks are on 17 acres; his were on ten or twelve,” she says. “One of the biggest parts of what we did was raising food for our families — and that’s what we’re doing with our family here.”

Are there challenges to learning how farming works differently between the Pacific Northwest and the Deep South?

“Oh, yeah — everything. I mean literally everything!” laughs Kristen with a working farmer’s weariness. “It is unimaginably hard to farm in the Southeast! We’re like a Petri dish, because everything grows really well where it’s hot and humid. Bacterias, viruses, parasites, every kind of weird bug you could imagine — I mean, it all grows really, really well here. That affects the animals. And we have learned some really tough lessons because of that.”

Even in the face of nature’s unique local obstacles, no one in the Stebbins family regrets their big move to north Alabama  — or choosing the farming life now that they’re here. Describing how the Farmer Co-op came into being, Kristen reverts easily into the same enthusiasm she felt for the project when the idea first got off the ground.

“We were just driving around, and were like, ‘Man — wouldn’t it be cool if we could be like the old fashioned milk trucks … but be more than a milk truck? We could deliver our chicken and our eggs. We could even do more than that. I wanted to find a better and maybe more cost effective way to get our products to customers — to see a few farms work together. Because that way, we could create an entire ‘box.’ That was our initial idea: A ‘box’ of food that people could have delivered to their door.”

Only two months into its freshly hatched existence, the Farmer Co-op already delivers across a coverage area that extends across north Alabama, including Athens, Madison and Huntsville. And from Anderson to Arab to Albertville to Athens, the twelve area farms and makers who supply the online storefront hail from within that same footprint.

Follow the Stebbins Family Farm on Facebook, or take a bigger bite and check out the Farmer Co-op and its full range of Alabama-produced foods. You can find the co-op online at farmerco-op.com.