Meet The Farmers

Patrick Padden

Patrick Padden is educator in our Permaculture Design Certificate Course and he and Stephanie run the Permaculture Work Study Program at Sunrise Ranch. He is a counselor for Camp Sunrise. He has been with The Farm for 4 seasons as an intern and a manager.

Patrick holds a certificate in permaculture education, a B.A. in Philosophy from Colorado State University, and a passion for realizing new systems that allow us to live in harmony with the natural world.

Stephanie Powers

Stephanie Powers has an extensive background with youth education and in her four years residing at Sunrise Ranch, she has run the Child Care program for children that live on the Ranch. She also initiated and directed a state licensed summer camp, Camp Sunrise with Patrick Padden. She is currently administrating Farm and Youth Programs on the Ranch, which in addition to the previously mentioned programs, also includes permaculture programs and Farm Field Trips. With Patrick, she is proudly raising her two children, 1 year old Charlotte, and 6 year old Josiah in community life at Sunrise Ranch.

Susannah Noyes

Susannah Noyes is our Garden Co-Manager and spends half of her time in the Sunrise kitchen preserving the harvest and making fantastic baked goods. She grew up on a farm in western New York and has been farming all her life. Most recently she farmed for 6 years in Costa Rica and then raised pastured poultry and vegetables back in New York. She is looking forward to bringing in bushels of happy produce for ranch residents and conference guests. Susannah also runs Divine Nature Tours, a company that offers spiritual retreats in Costa Rica.

Darla Bradford

She was the first child to be raised off her family’s farm located in the central west mountains of Colorado. When Darla began to dream about reviving her family’s farm to raise healthy and humanely treated meats and sell them direct to the public, she started looking around for other successful small producers to be mentors. She began her relationship with Sunrise Ranch in the summer of 2010 when she volunteered at the Fort Collins farmers’ markets.

She dearly loved working with the public and being able to provide customers with our healthy 100% grassfed and finished beef, so when the opportunity arose for her to work in our farm office as the beef sales and farmers’ market manager, she eagerly jumped at the chance. It has been a natural fit for her and us since.