Charlottesville Food (6 page)

The Homestead Creamery milk truck.
Photo by Nancy Overton
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Families remain Donnie Montgomery's ideal—and actual—customer base, just as the business itself reflects his interest in preserving his inherited occupation. “I think some of the younger families have realized that they've gotten away from the farm long enough that their children don't understand how food is produced,” Montgomery hypothesizes.
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“I think it intrigues a lot of them that they can teach their children [about] that.” The local food movement has provided considerable business for Homestead Creamery, as families interested in seeing exactly where their food comes from can take a trip to the facility for a day. The creamery's petting zoo, open house structure and welcoming country store create a wholesome, approachable experience that's attractive to people from six to sixty. Homestead Creamery's delivery business, a four-truck system that carries fresh, creamy milk to over one thousand families within an hour's drive, has an air of nostalgic Americana and promotes familial togetherness in its own way. Parents can spend less time grocery shopping and more at home with their kids, who are eager to drain the bottle and leave the empty glass out for the milkman to magically refill it the next morning or week.

To Montgomery, the allure of family business and family-based marketing is directly related to the benefit of community-forming: around dinner tables, or bowls of ice cream, people become connected and nourished. Montgomery notes the specific atmosphere of an ice cream shop as particularly dreamy, finding that “if you compared it to some businesses, usually when you come into an ice cream shop, you're coming in to relax or have fun.” At Homestead Creamery, the concept of an ice cream social is still alive and relevant. One scoop of Lemon Crunch ice cream or a frozen take-home chicken potpie made from scratch with local chicken and eggs makes even the most worn-out urbanite feel comforted.

However, it doesn't require three generations' worth of practice to start and maintain a well-run family farming enterprise. Zach and Sara Miller of Timbercreek Organics have managed to create a thriving cattle, pig and poultry farm out of a former quarter horse training business. A drive to Timbercreek's meandering property on Garth Road in Charlottesville involves a good deal of free-roaming pigs, rolling green pastures and the tail-wagging of a couple farm dogs. Off the farm, Timbercreek has a much more luxe appeal. At Feast!, a local high-end grocery store, buyers can request translucent red slices of Timbercreek prosciutto, aged nearby at Kite's Hams in Wolftown, to pair with a variety of menus; rich, grass-fed beef from their farm appears around town everywhere from gourmet burger joints to high-class Italian restaurants. Yet for such a successful operation doing good business in a well-saturated market, the Millers appear to have started their farm on little more than excitement and curiosity.

When asked what experience or skill set with farming he possessed before starting Timbercreek, Zach Miller's enthusiastic response was, “None!” Armed with only a Joel Salatin book and a general interest in sustainability, Miller and his wife, Sara, started Timbercreek in 2007 as a fully integrated business. The integration comes in the form of carefully delineated and rotating spaces for cattle, poultry and pigs. Beef and poultry are linked through grazing and field prep, whereas the pigs use parts of the farm that don't fit perfectly in an evenly divided setting. The pigs rooting around in wired-in segments along the farm's driveway are as intentionally placed as the fields for cattle. A sense of harmony and closeness marks the Timbercreek operation as the kind of farm one dreams of nostalgically.

The concept of biomimicry is a crucial underpinning of the design of the farm's physical spaces as well as the choice in animals and plants to fill up those spaces. No animal species at Timbercreek can grow successfully without the others, based on the way the Millers cultivate their animals. Biomimicry “studies nature's best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems,” according to biologist and sustainability consultant Janine Benyus.
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Though this discipline has been applied to everything from the Coca-Cola Company to Colombian coffee farms, biomimicry has achieved headway on these several acres of prime Virginia farmland. The ecological interactions between landscape and animal species eliminate the need for pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers or antibiotics. Miller says their cattle provide the farm's most successful product, as the grass-fed and finished beef serves valuable ecological functions on the farm.

The Millers and the success of Timbercreek Farm are a variance on a current widespread trend in farming: the advent of the young farmer. As a response to the mechanization of farming practices that occurred in the 1970s, many new farmers are primarily interested in alternate forms of agricultural processes. Those who are just entering the agriculture industry—rather than growing up in it—often fall into the “young farmer” bracket of forty-and-under. Young to middle age, relative inexperience and general enthusiasm underpin their study and utilization of almost radically traditional methods of animal husbandry and horticulture on their operations. This particular bracket of newcomers includes both young adult farmers and those who have chosen agriculture after different career paths proved unsatisfying. Drawing inspiration from sources as varied as Joel Salatin's individualistic sustainability to medieval modes of efficiency, these young farmers, referred to as “greenhorns,” often start with big ideas and little capital. Acquiring land is a challenge, as is learning the ropes of an industry before the wildlife roots out the succulent pleasures of pasture-penned chickens. The young farmers who are able to combine hard work and good fortune with quickly adaptable methods have fast become heavy-hitters in the local agriculture scene.

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To the Millers as well as many other young farmers, a business in agriculture offers both a career and a lifestyle choice. Often, the decision to farm for a living involves a rejection of a more corporatized American job structure with set hours and a predictable schedule, albeit with paid vacations. To Zach Miller, “you can have a lucrative profession or you can have a job that comes with a type of lifestyle that you don't have any reason to want to leave.” In order to make Timbercreek an institution, the Millers understand the necessity of being physically rooted to their farm and land. Like the Century Farms before them or third-generation farmer Donnie Montgomery, the Millers view farming as a family operation and value it, in part, for this reason. A visit to Timbercreek Organics often means interacting with the Millers' toddlers, whose presence on the farm is as much a given as the Millers themselves. Zach states with pride that Timbercreek “is a family project.” He acknowledges that “it has to be a viable business for us to survive” but notes that “we also recognize the importance of lifestyle it creates for us.”
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The farming lifestyle, with its natural-seeming promotion of close bonding among individuals as well as between individuals and the land, has drawn more than locals to make a home and a business on a Virginia farm. Oklahoma-raised Erica Hellen, another young farmer who runs Free Union Grass Farm with her fiancé, Joel Slezak, settled into Free Union, Virginia, via an internship at Joel Salatin's monolith of an operation, Polyface Farms. In her late twenties with a laid-back attitude and a nose stud, Hellen looks more like a California surfer than a poultry and cattle farmer from Tulsa. If the close-knit family unit of the Millers offers one case study of young farmers, Hellen and her partner's nonchalant ease and cool-kid vibe lend an entirely unexpected face to another side of agriculture in Virginia.

Free Union Grass Farm is a patchwork operation, knitted together of various properties and various agricultural products into a useful, cohesive whole. Slezak and Hellen raise poultry and cattle, but what truly sets their farm apart is their sustainably raised and processed duck. Though many local farms offer pastured chicken, Hellen found that duck promised to be “the attention-getter that we needed” at their fledgling business. Though thick feathers and a watertight design make ducks harder to process, the lucrativeness of the waterfowl has allowed Hellen and Slezak to save money in other areas. A visit to the Free Union Grass Farms stall at the farmers' market offers one a taste of silky chicken liver pâté or the opportunity to take home some rendered duck fat, perfect for roasting potatoes.

While Joel Salatin's teachings on sustainability led Hellen, like Zach Miller, to agriculture, it is a love of the farming mindset that has kept her here. “It's not just a job,” Hellen insists. “It's not a hobby—there's a tax bracket for those people.” To Hellen and Slezak, farming is their “everything,” both a reason to get going in the morning and the cause of many sleepless nights. “You can never just forget about it or put it away,” Hellen states. “It's important to have the stress, you have to jive with that responsibility.”
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Though coyotes howling at night may keep Hellen and Slezak awake, the devotion Free Union Grass Farm's products have inspired in local restaurants and cooks has made Hellen and Slezak's hard-earned vacation and downtime that much sweeter.

The particular layout and geographic challenges of Free Union Grass Farm are reflective of a widespread issue for start-up farmers: high cost and low accessibility of farmable land. High land prices in Albemarle County offer a hurdle for young farmers to jump over before even getting to the growing stage.
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Hellen and Slezak's operation has used no fewer than four different fields and properties since beginning in 2010. The farm now uses three different fields for raising its animals, operating on a total acreage of forty to fifty acres. Hellen notes, “It's tough in this particular part of the county to access affordable land in large quantities because it's either already owned by someone who's had it in their family forever or it's enormously expensive, or it's owned by some absentee landowner who doesn't really want anyone to use it, or it's in conservation and there are too many stipulations.”

According to Tom Stanley of Virginia Cooperative Extension, “Rented farmland is essential to virtually every full-time farming operation and many part-time Virginia farmers.”
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Even if a farmer finds a landowner willing to lease their land, the actuality of what farming looks like can deter even the most well-intentioned landlord. Hellen has experienced firsthand the disconnect between what a landowner thinks a farm will look like and its physical mapping onto the landscape. “A lot of people in the community who want a happy, sustainable, organic Polyface-style farm also still want it to look like a golf course,” Hellen admits. “That doesn't really always jive.”

So what does an organically grown, sustainable farm look like? For Slezak and Hellen, it's a carefully orchestrated collection of parts and pieces made usable only through trial and error. In order to succeed as a start-up farm against such odds, a business has to be creative with its land use. In the case of Free Union Grass Farm, the result is a patchy network of different fields separated by roads and property lines. Like Timbercreek, Hellen and Slezak's operation relies heavily on rotation, both out of necessity and ideology. Hellen finds that the topographic layout of the property makes some areas better suited for cattle, others for chickens. Rotation at Free Union Grass Farm looks like daily movement of cows and chickens every two to four days. She laughingly tells a story of school buses waiting for Hellen and Slezak to herd cows across the road from one part of the farm to the next. She acknowledges, “It's all dependent on various factors, but every animal feeds every part of the farm at some point during the year.”

Whether it's crop rotation, biomimicry or permaculture, young farmers like the Millers or Joel Slezak and Erica Hellen rely more on ideologies rather than physical accessories. There's no mention of pesticides, hormones, paid workers or other common topics that pertain to modern industrialized farming when talking to these farmers. While pasture pens take work to build, as does raising and processing ducks or cattle, these start-up farmers seem content, if not glad, to do the work themselves, relying on a spare hand or two lent by interns or visiting family. Books seem to be a major resource, as both farms rattle off several titles that have immensely helped their operation. These are small farms, capable of being run by two or three hardworking individuals whose excitement and interest help overcome hardships, long hours and insecure pacts with local wildlife.

Yet there are operations even more compact than Timbercreek Organics or Free Union Grass Farm, farms that still impact and shape the agricultural landscape of central Virginia in integral ways. An even smaller variety of small farmers, homesteaders have begun to appear with more frequency in and around Charlottesville and Albermarle, sometimes right in the backyard of downtown houses. These operations are often family-focused as well and perhaps even more ideologically motivated than other small farms. The goal of the homesteader is to produce wholesome food in a small-scale manner, seeking to avoid the chemicals and corporate overtones of big box stores. Zach Miller finds that part of the community appeal of Timbercreek lies in its adaptability to an even smaller scale of production. Zach notes, “There's been lately interest in homesteaders…our techniques can be scaled down to a couple acres.” Whether it's a couple acres or several yards in one's backyard, homesteading has become a viable option for those interested in creating an alternate food lifestyle without depending on agriculture for their livelihood.