How naturopathic medicine, permaculture, biodynamics, and organic growing practices shape the farm’s work in Peoa
When voles showed up at Healing Seeds, the instinct wasn’t to poison them.
Dr. Babbie Stern, the naturopathic physician behind the Peoa-based farm, described what happened instead: patience, observation, and, over time, hawks, eagles, and foxes. The predators followed the prey. Balance returned on its own.
“It’s a way of sharing with nature,” Stern said.
That small story contains most of what you need to know about how Healing Seeds operates. The farm, which has grown into a multifaceted project spanning regenerative agriculture, botanical medicine, community education, and wellness offerings, is built on a conviction that natural systems already know what they’re doing. The work is to stop overriding them — in the field and in the body.
Stern was trained in naturopathic medicine and classical Chinese medicine before turning to land-based work. The shift wasn’t a departure. It was a deepening of the same idea.
“You can’t separate the health of the Earth from the health of her people,” Stern said. “The health of the soil is directly connected to the ecological health of our bodies.”
That connection is the root system beneath everything at Healing Seeds. If people are eating food grown with chemical inputs, Stern said, healing becomes harder. So the farm grows without them — organic seed, no pesticides, no chemical inputs on any of the produce or botanicals. The commitment is to true organic practice, even though the word itself, Stern noted, has been stretched thin by industrial-scale operations and a certification process that can be prohibitively costly for small farms.
What Healing Seeds adds to organic principles is a permaculture sensibility — a way of reading ecosystems rather than fighting them. When aphids appear in the greenhouse, the team brings in beneficial organisms that prey on them rather than reaching for a spray. When a problem surfaces, the first question isn’t how to eliminate it, but what role it plays.
The farm also draws on biodynamic agriculture, rooted in the work of Rudolf Steiner, which emphasizes timing, energy, and seasonal rhythms. At Healing Seeds, that includes working with lunar cycles and seasonal preparations designed to support plant vitality. Stern described these practices not as rigid doctrine, but as part of a more attentive relationship with the land. She said the farm has seen stronger plant responses when those rhythms are honored.
None of this sits in separate compartments. The regenerative approach — building soil fertility, biodiversity, and resilience rather than depleting them through monocropping — is the frame that holds everything together. Permaculture informs how the farm reads its environment.
Biodynamics informs when and how it acts. Organic practice defines what it will and won’t use. And naturopathic medicine provides the reason all of it matters: because the body heals better when what sustains it is whole.
For Stern, the doctor’s role mirrors that of the farmer. It’s not about fixing another person, she said, but about helping them remember their own wholeness and the body’s built-in intelligence. Prevention is central. So is reducing the burden created by poor food systems and chronic chemical exposure.
That philosophy extends to how Healing Seeds invites people in. Whether someone is harvesting a salad, walking the fields where herbs are grown, or seeing where a tincture or calendula salve begins, the point is contact — direct, tangible contact with the source of what sustains us.
“When we’re grounded and connected in ourselves,” Stern said, “we allow ourselves to become intimate with another being, whether that’s human or plant or animal.”
Stern also spoke about what she calls “alchemical healing” — work concerned with transformation, with how people move through trauma, shadow, and emotion toward greater wholeness. It’s the inner dimension of the same project: the land heals through attention and relationship, and so do people.
But even in its most expansive moments, the mission at Healing Seeds comes back to something lived and specific.
“Our hope is that with everything we do at Healing Seeds,” Stern said, “we are carrying this knowledge.”
What that knowledge looks like, in practice, is a farm where the voles are not the enemy and the soil is not just dirt — where healing begins not with intervention, but with presence, attention, and the ground beneath your feet.