Sanctuary One at Double Oak Farm is the first care farm in Southern Oregon. The mission of Sanctuary One is to provide a refuge for animals and a healing place for people while promoting environmental stewardship.
Double Oak Farm abuts thousands of acres of national forest,
with a scenic hiking trail leading up into the Siskiyou Mountains.
Care farms are real working farms where people, animals, and the earth work together for mutual healing. They are well established in Great Britain and northern Europe, but are new to the U.S.. We serve as a community role model of the farming for health concept and hope to inspire others to rehabilitate the nation's numerous failing family farms into a multi-purpose community resource.
Double Oak Farm is located on 55 scenic acres alongside the Applegate
River in the Upper Applegate Valley. It has a large irrigated pasture, a lovingly restored historic barn, and plenty of room
for spacious animal habitats.
Mule Creek, a pristine spring-fed creek with steelhead trout and rare salamanders in it, runs alongside the acreage.
We've named the farm in honor of a pair of magnificent
Oregon White Oak trees growing at heart of the land.
Sanctuary One has two main programs: an animal sanctuary that rescues abused and neglected farm animals and endangered pets, too; and the Upper Applegate Community Garden, a large-scale organic gardening program that will grow food for the Applegate Food Bank. The animal sanctuary is already up and running; the community garden is currently in the initial stages of implementation. The animal sanctuary is run by Sansa and Joe Collins, who between them have many years of management and animal-welfare expertise. The community garden will be managed by Gene Griffith, an engineer with expertise in permaculture who has studied with a world-renowned teacher of sustainable farming.
We help heal people of all ages by providing them with an opportunity to volunteer in animal therapy and horticultural therapy activities. Working with animals and gardening has been widely shown to lower blood pressure, ease depression and stress, and help lonely people establish therapeutic relationships. Because it takes time and effort to train people to work safely around animals and farm equipment, we require volunteers to make a commitment to serve for a reasonable amount of time.
Sanctuary One also serves the community as an invaluable agricultural service-learning site for local school children. Sanctuary One is a real working farm and as such has the ability to offer schools a unique, low-cost field trip in a safe but exciting environment for children. The combination of interacting with a variety of farm animals in a natural environment while developing healthful and practical life skills such as how to garden, how to use tools, basic carpentry, humane animal care responsibilities, how to comprehend life cycles and food webs, etc. can be a truly transformational experience for students, many of whom have never had an opportunity to experience simple pleasures like planting a seed, harvesting a fresh vegetable, building something with their own hands, or getting to know a friendly farm animal.
