The farm
The program starts in the soil
You can't run a food-first health center on food from a truck. So we grow it — vegetables, herbs, fruit, and honey — on the land around us, and it changes everything that reaches the table.
What this addresses
A NEWSTART program lives or dies on its food. Guests eat three plant-based meals a day for up to three weeks — if the vegetables are tired and shipped from far away, the whole thing rings hollow, and the winters here make good produce scarce and dear.
Buying it all in would also make sponsored places impossible. Food is the single biggest cost of running the program. Growing our own is how we keep a bed affordable at all.
What we grow, and how
The farm runs year-round. In summer the fields and orchard carry the load; in winter two heated greenhouses keep greens and herbs coming when the valley is under snow.
It's small, careful, low-chemical work — closer to a big market garden than an industrial farm.
Two heated greenhouses
Greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, and herbs right through the Kazakh winter.
An orchard
Apples, apricots, and berries — the fruit the region is famous for. Almaty means “full of apples.”
Open fields
Root vegetables, squash, beans, and grains, grown in rotation.
Bees & herbs
Honey and the medicinal herbs the phytotherapy treatments depend on.
What your gift funds here
The farm is where a gift multiplies — every tenge spent here comes back as meals for years. Specific needs right now:
“People think the secret is some special treatment. It's a tomato picked that morning, thirty metres from the kitchen. Guests taste it and go quiet. That's the whole trick.”
Around the farm
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Contact
Grow the thing that feeds it all
A gift to the farm is a gift to every meal for years to come. Ask us which project needs it most this season.