Charlottesville Food (7 page)

Joel Slezak and Erica Hellen.
Photo by Kevin Haney
.

H
OMESTEADING AND THE
S
ELF
-S
USTAINING
E
NTERPRISE

Homesteading as a lifestyle choice and economic choice of going back to the land, so to speak, has existed since Roman times. The story of Cincinnatus, who forsakes political glory and worldly riches for his small farm, is not dissimilar from the retreat of George Washington back into Mount Vernon's verdant arms in 1797. Homesteading, as defined by author in self-sufficiency John Seymour, is the decision to “live independently in harmony with the land.”
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Certain skills are required of the self-sufficient homesteader, including the “harnessing [of] natural forms of energy, raising crops and keeping livestock, preserving foodstuffs, making beer and wine, basketry, carpentry, weaving,” among other skills.
⁶⁸

Urban homesteaders grow edible gardens on rooftops in Brooklyn, while more agrarian homesteaders often revamp acres of property into models of land-mindfulness. Charlottesville offers prime real estate for homesteaders via two channels: fertile, workable land and an inquisitive, intellectual environment. Even from the earliest days of Jeffersonian self-sufficiency and the university's founding, the area has been populated with freethinking individuals interested in the connection between food and lifestyle. Charlottesville's locus as an artistically minded and liberal community filled with political refugees, resident artists and activists acts as foundational to the success of homesteading ventures in the area. While farmhouses in Scottsville or big yards on Northwood Avenue may give homesteaders the physical underpinnings of their venture, the can-do mentality promoted by the university and Charlottesville citizens helps give these ideas flight.

Will Richey of the restaurants Revolutionary Soup and the Whiskey Jar is a prime example of a successful modern-day homesteader. Richey; his wife, Lisa; and their two children live in an old blue farmhouse with a tin roof out in Esmont, a twenty-minute drive from downtown Charlottesville. Their two-acre property is studded with fledgling apple trees whose early fruit has been plucked to promote root growth and carefully selected indigenous plants. Friendly pigs squeal around in their pasture pen, while ducks and chickens stake out another edge of the yard. A good-sized pond, bordered by pawpaw trees and wineberry bushes, lies next to a large garden plot chock-filled with tomato vines and asparagus plants grown wild, their long, yarrow-like fronts tickling bare legs. Richey even looks the part of an old-time farmer, with suspenders, a beard and a large gap-toothed grin.

Richey's foundation for homesteading lies with his English degree from the University of Virginia instead of a farming internship or family heritage. Ruskin and Morris are major influences, with their founding of the Arts and Crafts movement and their appreciation of a minimalist medieval aesthetic. Ruskin, Morris and Richey value craftsmanship and doing things by hand in an honest and humble manner—“work for work's sake and craftsmanship for craftsmanship's sake,” as Richey titles it. John Seymour's book
The Self-Sustaining Life and How to Live It
proved invaluable when Richey and his wife actually began structuring their new life and new farm, as “the title itself was what we were looking for: we wanted a self-sustaining life.” The pigs Richey raises go toward feeding both his household and the Whiskey Jar; in several years, he hopes to make his own cider and currently produces enough fruit and vegetables in their garden to provide for the family and a couple farmhands passing through.

When asked what motivated he and Lisa's decision to become homesteaders, Richey simply summarizes his new lifestyle as stemming from “Generation X anti-establishmentarianism.” Early on, Richey rebelled against the Northern Virginia suburban mindset. The beauty of a homesteading lifestyle to the Richeys is that it offers the family “a whole life.” “I'm growing the food that I eat,” Richey notes. “I'm providing for my family. We don't have the typical farmhouse—the land has to look nice, too, we have to do it in an aesthetically pleasing way, and permaculture works with that.” Permaculture, to the Richeys, is an aspect of “everything working together.”

Permaculture factors greatly into the concept of homesteading at Red Row Farm, as well as the operations of Timbercreek Organics and Free Union Grass Farm. As much a design discipline as an agricultural practice, permaculture has becoming an integral part of the face of modern sustainability. The term itself, an integration of
permanent
and
agriculture
, “is an integrated design philosophy that encompasses gardening, architecture, horticulture, ecology, even money management and community design.”
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Waste recycling and the creation of systems that meet their own needs are also basic tenets of permaculture.
⁷⁰
Bill Mollison, launcher of the permaculture movement, also cites “care of the earth,” “care of the people” and “return of surplus” as foundational principles of the design. The daily rotation of cattle at Free Union Grass Farm, the placement of various animal species at different points along the Millers' property and the careful pairing of apple trees with indigenous vegetation at Red Row Farm are all examples of local farmers and thinkers melding thought with practice into sustainable landscapes.

T
HE
M
ANY
F
ACES
—
AND
F
OUNDERS
—
OF
S
USTAINABLE
A
GRICULTURE

Terms like permaculture, organic, sustainable and green have become buzzwords in the modern food industry. They act as rallying cries for new farmers eager to provide healthier alternatives to the products of industrial farming. They offer a recognizable code by which consumers can recognize and differentiate grocery products. These words, however, are relatively recent additions to mainstream discussions of food and food practices.

Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms.
Photo by Jessica Reeder
.

Documentaries like
Food, Inc
. and
Supersize Me
, the vegetarian meanderings of Mark Bittman and food-related news reportage and the success of Michael Pollan's existentially inquisitive
In Defense of Food
have brought issues of sustainable and organic agriculture to the wider American consciousness. Media such as these examples cause us to rethink those lunchtime fast-food splurges or find an alternate to the corporatized and trademarked chicken breasts on sale at big box stores lining the roads. Yet the roots of this movement lie not with the
New York Times
or graduate school classrooms but with the anti-establishmentarian interests of contrarian farmers and thinkers, particularly one straw hat–wearing Virginia native named Joel Salatin.

Joel Salatin and Polyface Farms are almost as recognizable figures as Earthbound Organics or Horizon Dairy. Sustainably raised, pasture-penned Polyface chickens end up roasted in Charlottesville, fried up in Richmond or stewed in Washington, D.C. The farm offers an incredible variety of products, selling eggs, pork, beef, turkeys, rabbits and even lumber to a group of people so devoted that they drive 150 miles for meat.
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The man who famously refused to ship Michael Pollan a steak runs a farm to which he refers as “beyond organic,” a food so clean that a USDA Organic label doesn't begin to capture the quality of its products.
⁷²
Interviewed by the
New York Times
and immortalized on camera in
Food, Inc
. and
Fresh
, Salatin, as a self-described “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic-Farmer,” offers one of the more colorful—and recognizable—figures of modern sustainable agriculture.

Salatin is a second-generation farmer at Polyface, a child of parents who bought the farm in 1961 with the hopes of “healing” the damaged, nutrient-depleted property in the Shenandoah Valley.
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Innovations such as tree-planting for soil protection, pasture pens, “multispecies grazing rotations,” a mobile chicken coop and composting seem like givens today in modern sustainable agricultural outputs but proved positively revolutionary in an age of Nixonian food industrialization. To the workers and owners of Polyface, the farm stands as “America's premier non-industrial food production oasis,” owing part of its success to the belief that “the Creator's design is still the best pattern for the biological world.”
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Even for an operation the size of Polyface, with its processing of twelve thousand broiler chickens yearly, family values remain a crucial foundation for the farm. Salatin relates, “From my earliest memories, I loved the farm.”
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Whether influenced by his grandfather's octagonal chicken coop or his great-uncle's commercial chicken farm, Salatin allows that “some of [his] fondest childhood memories are of seeing…thousands of chickens out on the field.”
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Marked by the same “farming bug” that captured his father, an “incredible innovator,” Salatin has succeeded in creating a business and lifestyle that has been inherited by his own children and, ideally, by theirs as well.
⁷⁷
The author of books such as
Family Friendly Farming
, Salatin views farming as a family venture made to support a group of people genetically tied as well as ideologically connected. Salatin treats his farm as a pulpit, educating consumers on the values of sustainable agriculture as well as the importance of family and an environmentally conscious lifestyle. The innovations and ideas of this particular “lunatic farmer” have shaped the agricultural future of both central Virginia and the United States in inescapable ways; the work of Polyface has excited, energized, confounded and challenged young farmers who intern for Salatin or pick up a copy of one of his many books. Though Erica Hellen may adapt Salatin's pasture pens for her own farm, the foundation of a Polyface-bred sustainable sensibility has proven as invaluable to agriculture in the Charlottesville area as Jefferson's original experiments with vinoculture and English peas.

The intrepid, do-it-yourself spirit of Jefferson, Salatin and countless other farmers in central Virginia appears with a vengeance in Gail Hobbs-Page's Caromont Farm. Her operation, which produced 125,000 pounds of goat's milk and cow's milk cheese in 2012, reflects a Jeffersonian interest in making the down-home into the gourmet. Hobbs-Page started in 2007 with 3,000 pounds of milk in a young upstart dairy; a former head chef at several Charlottesville fine-dining hotspots, she was looking for an opportunity to be in the food industry without having to cook. Influenced by a French cheesemonger in Charlottesville, Hobbs-Page purchased twenty-five acres in Esmont and dairy goats while still cooking professionally, keeping a “goat diary” to keep track of her findings.

In the past six years, Caromont Farm has almost single-handedly developed the cheesemaking industry in Virginia. With fresh chevre sold at Murray's Cheese in New York City and various cheeses making it onto the menu at Sean Brock's restaurant Husk in Charleston, Caromont has become a household name for luxurious and reasonably priced American artisanal cheese. But Hobbs-Page attributes her success less to Jefferson's food heritage and more to the consumers of Charlottesville. “It's the people, really,” Hobbs-Page insists. “I don't think you can put this on Jefferson. We had a pig slaughter here on Saturday, and I looked around and there were four butchers, two winemakers, four photographers, six chefs, and I thought, ‘Where else would that happen?'”
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Her joy in belonging to the community is matched only by her solid reputation as a no-nonsense, dependable producer of quality products accessible to a variety of consumers with a variety of tastes. The influence of European cheesemaking, combined with a personal southern heritage and hands-on experience with fine dining, makes Caromont Farm and Gail Hobbs-Page one of the most distinctly Charlottesvillian agricultural producers in the area.