Welcome to our Family Farmstead
You’re here because you want to feed your family higher quality and better tasting meat
Hey guys, I'm Farmer Erica.
Welcome to Benoit Family Farmstead — 37 acres in Centralia, Missouri, where my husband Jared and I are raising four kids, with baby #5 due in August, a whole lot of hogs, cattle, and chickens, and (most days) our sanity.
We moved to this land in 2015 from Erica’s Grandma Keeling, not really knowing where it'd take us. We dreamed of being homesteaders and raising our own food. By 2017 we'd started farming and selling to the public — no fancy business plan, no investors, just two people who wanted to raise good meat the right way and figured the rest out as we went. Almost a decade later, we're still figuring it out. That's farming for you.
How we got here
Jared handles the day-to-day operations — feeding, fencing, the stuff that keeps a farm running. I handle the business side, the marketing, the emails you get on Saturday mornings, and (lately) a lot of appointments, because baby #5 doesn't care that it's also chicken-processing season.
Our kids are out here right alongside us. They're homeschooled, which means "school" some days looks like sorting eggs, feeding calves, or running their own sweet corn stand in the summer. If you've bought corn from a kid at our farm store, that's them — and yes, they keep the profits. Good life lesson.
What we raise, and why
We raise hogs, beef cattle (our own Dexter herd, right here on our pasture), and chickens — pasture-raised, no shortcuts. We also partner with Shelton Farms and Yund Farms, two Missouri operations we trust, to keep up with beef demand. We started out selling bulk pork by the whole and half hog, and that's still our bread and butter. Word got around, people liked what they tasted, and here we are.
We're not going to lecture you about what's wrong with the grocery store meat aisle. We'll just say this: we raise our animals the way we'd want meat raised for our own family's table, because that's exactly what it is. If you want to know more about how — feed, pasture, processing — ask us. We love talking about it. We just won't corner you about it.
The farm store
We opened our on-farm store in June of 2025 — Saturdays, 10am to 2pm — where you can walk in and pick out individual cuts instead of committing to a whole freezer's worth. Watching regulars turn into friends has been one of the best parts of this whole chapter.
Bo, our farm dog, will probably greet you before we do. He takes his job seriously.
Bulk pork, beef, and chicken subscriptions
If you want to stock a freezer, that's where we started and still what we do best — whole and half hogs, and whole, half, or quarter beef. We'll walk you through cuts, sizing, and pickup — no experience necessary. We also run a chicken subscription if you want dinner handled without thinking about it.
What that means for you
Here's the thing about knowing exactly how your meat was raised: it just tastes better. Not "healthy food" better — actually better, the kind of better your family notices at dinner. That's the whole reason people drive out from town for this instead of grabbing something at the store.
It also means you get things you can't get anywhere else — cuts we hold back specifically for the store, bulk pricing that makes stocking a freezer make sense, and a chicken subscription so you're never scrambling on a Tuesday. And if you've got questions — how much freezer space you'll need, what to do with a cut you've never cooked — you're not googling it, you're just asking us.
Come say hi
Whether you're stocking up for the year or just grabbing dinner for Saturday night, we'd love to see you out here — kids, corn stand, and Bo included.
— Farmer Erica
