About our Family
Welcome to Mentink Family Farms! We are Cory and Angie Mentink and our primary purpose is to honor and glorify God in all we do. We have ten children: Alena, Kailey, Caleb, Aiden, Annika, Asher, Abigail, Lillian, Josiah, and Zachariah. We are a Christian family and we homeschool, raise a wide variety of animals, and we grow and make most of our food from scratch. We make most of our skin care and cleaning products too. In the winter of 2021, my husband left his full-time job working with computers to have more time to dedicate to our organic farm and grow his electrical business. I worked as a Registered Nurse before staying home with our children in 2006. I cherish the extra time with my husband and children and love serving my family and helping people to obtain a more natural lifestyle.
Our kids love growing up on the farm, having people over, playing together, reading, learning new skills, helping in the kitchen, and helping with the animals. We couldn’t ask for a better team to work and have fun with! Cory and I enjoy spending time as a family, reading, fellowship with other believers, and living a simpler lifestyle. We love to learn new skills, experiment with new ideas, and keep striving to find a better more efficient way of doing things.
Our journey with real food and homemade skin care started about 2006 after a Nourishing Traditions class. Some of us had been experiencing some health problems, and until that class, we had never considered that what we were eating, putting on our skin, or that the toxins in our environment could be to blame. We started doing more research and examining our food, cleaning, and hygiene products more carefully. I was really surprised by how many of my items had a poison label on them or numerous ingredients I couldn’t pronounce. This began a slow conversion to the lifestyle we are enjoying today.
About Our Natural Skin Care Business
We started making soap back in 2011 for our family. We loved it and started giving it as gifts and sharing it with anyone that wanted to try it. They loved the soap too and requested to buy it. We weren’t sure about having a business, but we appreciated hearing the stories of how it was helping people with cracked/bleeding hands, eczema, and dry skin, and they loved knowing what they were putting on their bodies. We started making additional skin care items for ourselves and found that people loved these too. I have added salve, facial cream, lip balm, and most recently tooth powder. Because of the encouragement of friends and family, and our desire to help people attain more natural products, our business, Mentink Family Farms, developed. Our primary purpose is to honor and glorify God in all we do and to be a blessing and encouragement to others through our business.
Our Beyond Organic Farm Products
We are blessed to be the third generation living on about 60 acres and renting more outside of Stromsburg, Nebraska. Before we got married, my husband and I made one thing very clear: we did not want to farm. We didn’t want the commitment or heavy demands of agricultural life. But God had other plans! In the spring of 2002, during our first year of marriage, we planted our very first garden. It was completely unsuccessful. Nothing went the way we planned, and it would have been easy to quit right there, but we didn’t give up. We tried again the next year, and little by little, each season’s harvest got better.
Because of our health struggles and new knowledge of food as medicine, we slowly transitioned to organic food in 2006. I had a hard time finding the quality I wanted. After learning about fraud and loose labeling laws in the industry, I became convinced that the only way to know what we were eating was to do it ourselves or find trusted local farmers. For this reason, in 2007, we added laying hens to our 3-acre farm. The flavor and color of those egg yolks from our pastured hens completely changed our hearts and gave us a deep love and desire for farming. We began growing more food in our beyond organic garden and slowly adding more animals for our own use.
As people witnessed how we were growing and raising our own food and tasted the difference, we started getting a lot of requests to grow things for them. This was how our farm business developed. Our customers have become like family, and we are dedicated to serving them with the most nutrient-dense, flavorful food possible. Because we want to keep our high standards, we currently have a waiting list for most of our farm products. We have and hope to continue expanding this, so please reach out to be added to our waiting list.
We currently sell Grass Finished Lamb, Pastured Eggs, Pastured Broilers, and Heritage Pasture Raised Pork. We are just starting to ship some of these products. We are growing our treatment free hives for honey, grass-finished beef, fruits and vegetables, and ancient grains. We also have goats, ducks, guineas, turkeys, and a horse (for fun). We continue to grow and learn more about integrating permaculture design and regenerative processes into our gardens, orchards, fields, and pastures. We like to imitate the work of Joel Salatin, Gabe Brown, Richard Perkins, Stefan Sobkowiak, and Paul Gautschi to name a few.
Since 2002, we have kept our land and yard entirely chemical-free. Our goal is simple: raise superior, nutrient-dense foods while healing the soil, keeping prices fair, and staying fully transparent. We grow debt-free and take no government subsidies or welfare of any kind, ensuring our farm and family stays independent and our prices stay low. Thank you for visiting—check back often for updates!