Today we’d like to introduce you to A.C. Ivory and Joseph Shumway. Them and their team share their story with us below:
Color Ridge Farm & Creamery is owned by husbands A.C. Ivory and Joseph Shumway. The small 1-acre farm is located in Bicknell, Utah and the creamery is in the neighboring town of Torrey–a gateway community to Capitol Reef National Park.
We met through our work at Ancestry in 2010 but were just good friends until 2019 when our friendship started becoming more and we soon found ourselves falling in love and yearning to build a new life together. We married in 2021 close to Zion National Park and the time, we lived in North Salt Lake but knew we wanted to find a new home somewhere in the red rock deserts of Southern Utah. We loved the Capitol Reef area and considered it as one of the places to call home. Shortly after our wedding, the Universe opened some beautiful doors for us and we felt called to make Wayne County our home; and despite an aggressive and difficult housing market, our little 1-acre farm and 1911 farmhouse became available at the perfect time. We like to think it wanted us!
Joseph has a deep farming background with his family’s 6-generation dairy farm in Star Valley, Wyoming, but it was very new for A.C. (having grown up in the Salt Lake area and always considered himself a “city boy”). However, ever since the COVID pandemic, we both felt a need to leave the city and find a place where we could have a small farm, grow our own food, and contribute to a small community. Our lives in Wayne County have offered us everything we could have ever imagined and more!
Not long after settling into our new home, we could sense the need for a good ice cream shop in the community, and in January 2022, the idea started really taking shape in our minds. In 2015, Joseph helped his family shift their farm from a conventional dairy to an organic/regenerative one with an on-farm creamery and the farm moved completely to farm-to-table with ice cream as a principle product. In fact, Shumway Farms was featured in “Food and Wine Magazine” in 2021 as the best place to get ice cream in Wyoming! Needless to say, Joseph is a gifted ice cream maker, and so it just made sense for us to put that skill and knowledge to use. So, we decided as part of farm business to create an ice cream shop that we could also use as an outlet for our other farm products and as a platform to educate people about regenerative, earth-honoring agriculture.
Our first-year farming in the high-desert climate of south-central Utah was certainly a learning curve, but all things considered, we had a very successful first year with our gardens yielding amazing amounts of produce. We also have a 20-tree fruit orchard with a variety of trees, 15 egg-laying chickens, and our newest addition are three baby male alpacas! Our ice cream shop opened July 1, 2022, and also proved a huge success for its first season and we were blown away with the response from both our local community and the many tourists who came to visit the area.
As we move into our second-year farming and operating the creamery, we are very excited with the momentum of the business and the new ideas we get to incorporate in 2023! We will be expanding our gardens, making improvements to the farm infrastructure (such as adding rainwater catchment and grey water system), offering new farm products at our shop, and expanding our offerings at the ice cream shop!
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
One of our biggest struggles has been learning how to work with the seasonality of the tourist traffic. We were surprised to find the season lasting clear into November but were then tempted to close our ice cream shop over the winter since the area becomes pretty dead. However, we had so many local residents beg us to stay open, so we decided to try two evenings a week, and so far, it has been a good amount of time to remain open. We live in an incredibly remote area (only 2,700 residents in the county) and so running a business can be tricky if you don’t also rely on seasonal tourism.
We also experienced challenges in getting our gardens planted “on time” since they were so overgrown with grass and weeds when we bought the place. It took us much longer to prep the gardens than expected. Then, we had some learning curves with growing certain species and learning to work with the local climate in general. We have to be very mindful of potential frosts even into early June (sitting at 7,000 ft elevation) but our fall season seems to extend well enough that even later planting allowed us to have a successful first season overall. We’re really grateful to other local gardeners and farmers who have offered their wisdom and experience to help us!
As you know, we’re big fans of Color Ridge Farm & Creamery. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
Color Ridge Farm & Creamery is an organic, regenerative micro-farm committed to earth-honoring agricultural practices that give back and contribute to the health of our local lands, community, and the planet at large. The farm focuses on the production of fruits, vegetables, flowers, herbs, and eggs and will soon offer alpaca wool products. At the creamery, we make fresh, small-batch, artisanal ice cream, and frozen desserts. We also use the shop as a place where we can sell our farm products. We pride ourselves on making unique ice cream flavors (like juniper berry, lavender honey, ginger rose, lemon poppy seed, for example). Our ice cream shop has become an excellent venue to help educate people about regenerative agriculture and shifting our habits as humans to living in a more harmonious, co-creative relationship with Mother Earth. At our creamery, we are committed to minimal waste (using compostable cartons and no plastics, for instance), and that, along with our incredible, unique ice cream flavors, has been something we are becoming known for as a brand.
Contact Info:
- Website: colorridge.com
- Instagram: colorridge.farm
- Facebook: colorridge.farm
Image Credits
A.C. Ivory
Joseph Shumway
