Naming our farm has been over a year in the making. Since moving to our farm in 2017, we (and mostly Patrick) have grown our beef herd, and expanded each year to raise a variety of animals that now include laying hens, meat chickens, turkeys, sheep/lamb, and geese. We love these animals and we love learning every day from them. We are so lucky to have the land and farm facilities to raise animals and share the fruits of our (again, mostly Patrick’s😜) labour with our community. We are thankful for Bernard and Lise in supporting us to do this. Leahy Stock Farm is a successful family farm venture run by Bernard and Lise and we have great role models for building our farm business.
In order for our business to grow and be sustainable, it felt like a good time to do some work on branding and figuring out ways to make ordering from us easier🧐. One of the first steps seemed like deciding on a name and Deanna started daydreaming about this over a year ago. She started going down the rabbit hole and thought about options like the traditional combining of names (e.g. Leahy + Moher = LAMO!?… well that one obviously wouldn’t work😂), and she also like the idea of including nature (e.g. cedar, creek, hills, river, etc.), but none fully jived with us. As we are both of Irish heritage, exploring some Gaelic words was our next dive. We wondered if there could were Gaelic words that capture our values or farm philosophy. At the time, I was reading Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly. It is an awesome book altogether, and it caught me right off the bat with the first chapter on Scarcity and our culture of “Never Enough”. The opposite of scarcity is not abundance… it is “enough”. I felt like our approach in much of our farming is “enough”. We don’t take or add too much to the land and we focus on quality over quantity. Now, interestingly, a word we all know: “galore” (meaning abundance) comes from the Gaelic “go leor”. “Leor” relates to sufficiency.
Not only does it kinda-sorta combine our names 😛, but it’s unique, meaningful, and hopefully easy to remember. Truth be told, it took quite a while for Patrick to come around on the name. It helped though to decide to include “Leahy’s”.
So there you have it, that is how we ended up with Leahy’s Leor Farms! We hope you enjoyed reading.
