After four years in Avoca, Hazel Hill Farm relocated in 2019 to rural Arena, WI, just outside of Spring Green. Hazel Hill Farm and The Birdhouse Inn share 55 beautiful acres of mixed hardwoods and stunning view of the Wisconsin River Valley. The pigs and chickens do not seem to care about the latter.
About the Farm
Hazel Hill Farm is the result of a series of befuddling decisions made by Emily Martorano. After earning a degree in Anthropology from Harvard in 2010, she found herself in a series of strange jobs in Chicago. Foreseeing no time like the present, she bought herself a one-way ticket to Rome in the fall of 2011. Devoid of any funds to speak of, she decided to WWOOF around - that is, work on organic farms in exchange for room and board. Sometime between harvesting grapes and olives Tuscany, mucking out chickens on Scotland’s Black Isle, planting trees in Cork, and milking cows in Piemonte, her mind turned from memorizing Eliot to dreaming about what her own farm would look like.
2012 found her breeding goats and making cheese in Maine. She spent her first full season interning on a large vegetable CSA in western Connecticut in 2013, and in 2014 She returned to her ancestral midwest to apprentice with Boerson Farm in Princeton, WI. There she spent two seasons helping to grow organic vegetables for a small CSA and caring for a herd of pastured pork, grass-fed beef, etc.
Family brought Emily to Avoca in fall of 2015, where her aunt and uncle agreed to rent her an old farmhouse and a few acres to put into practice what she’d learned along the way. Starting with vegetables, a laying flock, and a few pigs, she soon became known as the “garlic girl” at the Spring Green market.
In 2019, she made another leap and purchased 55 acres and a one-of-a-kind house on a hill. She moved the pigs and chickens and mushroom logs and many many cookbooks 20 miles northeast and opened a bed and breakfast with her partner Ana Maria. The wooded hills meant sadly little garlic, but lots of opportunities for more mushrooms in the near future.