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Living

Our daily bread: A new crop of farmers, millers, and bakers is working to restore Virginia’s local grain economy

When Will Brockenbrough walks across the sloping, wide-planked floors of his grain mill in Nelson County, he’s stepping through 225 years of history. Built in 1794, the mill was then a crucial link in the local farm economy, using water power derived from the Piney River to stone-grind grain from nearby fields. On this late-spring day, big swaths of irises bloom along the millrace, giving the tall wooden building an especially picturesque air.

But Woodson’s Mill, as it’s been known since Dr. Julian B. Woodson expanded it around 1900, isn’t just a museum piece. Fresh flour dusting the floor, and Shop-Vacs for cleaning it up, attest to the fact that this mill is a going concern—and Brockenbrough is trying to restore something of its importance within the Virginia food scene.

“We’re the middleman,” he says, “between grower and baker”—or, in many cases, chef. A neighbor down the road grows Bloody Butcher corn—an heirloom variety with a distinctive red color—for Woodson’s Mill to grind into grits, popular in area restaurants. The mill sells yellow grits, whole wheat flour, and buckwheat flour, too.

Yet, despite the fact that grain forms the foundation of the average American diet, Virginia’s grain economy is mostly invisible to the consumer. Every Virginian is used to seeing cornfields in summer, but the majority of that corn is destined to become livestock feed. Meanwhile, many of us wouldn’t know a wheat or rye field if we spotted one. Most of the flour we eat—and we eat a lot of it, in everything from bread to pizza crust to croissants to birthday cake—is likely grown far to the west, in places like Kansas or Alberta. As American agriculture shifted, in the mid-20th century, from the family farm to a more industrial agriculture model, growing grain became an enterprise defined by large machinery, hybrid plant varieties, and long-distance transport.

It was during that shift—in 1963—that Woodson’s Mill shut down. With its reopening in 2012, Brockenbrough entered a local food economy focused instead on organic, artisanal, direct-to-consumer products. Think heirloom tomatoes at the farmer’s market, or goat cheese produced a dozen miles from the store where you buy it. “If it weren’t for that interest in local food, we wouldn’t be doing it,” says Brockenbrough.

Will Brockenbrough reopened the historic Woodson’s Mill in 2012, restoring a crucial link in Virginia’s grain economy. Photo: John Robinson

For all the energy of the local food revival, though, grains have been a conspicuous missing link. As part of its Buy Fresh Buy Local campaign, the Piedmont Environmental Council has printed a brochure listing local food producers since 2005; this year’s version includes vegetables, fruit, meat, dairy, eggs, and “specialty products” (including handwoven linen)—but no category for grains. “We haven’t had requests to add it and have very few producers saying they grow grains, says PEC’s Jessica Palmer. “If there is more of a demand from our producers, we would definitely look at adding that category.”

In part, the invisibility of local grains is due to the fact that grains require more processing than most crops before people can eat them. Milling is itself a multi-step process, and the old building at Woodson’s Mill houses a number of defunct machines, like a grain burnisher and a middlings purifier, that attest to the complexity of the operation. “Very few people are interested” in milling their own grains, says Pete Sisti, who grows organic wheat on his farm in Powhatan.

And while home cooks certainly use a lot of flour, they typically think of it as a staple, not something they want to pay a premium for. (Direct to the consumer, Woodson’s Mill whole wheat flour goes for $8 per two-pound bag.)

The real market, Sisti says, is bakeries. Picture Virginia growers selling grain in bulk to local mills (Sisti’s wholesale price is $35-50 per 50-pound bag), who then sell flour to local bakeries, who can tout the local origins of their artisan breads and pastries. That’s the recipe for a healthy Virginia grain economy.

Hidden in plain sight

If Heather Coiner gets her wish, that scenario might be on the verge of coming true. Coiner, whose wood-fired oven turns out sourdough loaves and many other treats at Little Hat Creek Farm in Roseland, began pulling together a group of grain growers, millers, and bakers about a year ago, calling the new organization the Common Grain Alliance.

“When I first started baking,” she says, “it was in southern Ontario and there were mills there that produced flour, so it seemed quite natural to use those flours in my bread. In Virginia I found it much more difficult to source local flour.”

She noticed, too, the absence of grains in the thriving local food culture here. “It’s very apparent that grains are not part of the conversation,” she says. “As Evrim Dogu from Sub Rosa Bakery [another CGA member, based in Richmond] put it, ‘They’re hidden in plain sight.’ Everybody talks about vegetables, meat, dairy, all those components, but who’s talking about where the staple foods come from?”

CGA is trying to enter that breach. Conceived of as a regional mid-Atlantic group and encompassing the breadth of the grain industry, its aim is to raise the profile of local grains and build the network of grain professionals. At their meetings, CGA members plan marketing strategies but, equally importantly, they sell each other sacks of grain and flour.

“Every time we meet, there are increasing pounds of grain exchanged,” says Coiner. She herself used to source much of her flour from North Carolina. “I’ve replaced all that with grain from three different sources from within my network here. This year I’m buying well over 50 percent of my flour locally.”

Heather Coiner (at left) of Little Hat Creek Farm bakes sourdough loaves and other treats using area grains. After having difficulty sourcing local flour, she founded the Common Grain Alliance to connect farmers, millers, and bakers. Photo: John Robinson

At Charlottesville’s Albemarle Baking Company, founder Gerry Newman is trying to move toward more local sourcing, too. Though he does make specialty items from Virginia wheat, the bulk of his flours come from King Arthur—milled in North Carolina, grown in the upper Midwest and Canada.

“I’d like to buy all our flours here,” he says. “We’d be supporting our local grain economy, and it has less of a carbon footprint.” Through CGA, he’s made a connection with Roanoke-based Deep Roots Milling, where sixth-generation miller Charlie Wade mills wheat from a nearby farm. “We’re shooting toward supporting that farmer and eventually making them our source,” he says.

Predictability across seasons can be a barrier to sourcing local flour, says Patrick Evans at MarieBette bakery, which is not part of CGA. “Consistency is the main thing holding us back,” he says. “I would be open to using local whenever I could.”

Care and attention

Before CGA was founded, grain professionals had to hunt far and wide to find each other. Jeff Bloem opened Murphy & Rude Malting Co. in 2017, malting grains to sell to local breweries like Random Row and South Street. He uses only Virginia-grown grain, and says that before opening his business, he spent five years driving around the state to build a network of growers who could supply the high-quality grains he needs. “It’s incredibly difficult to figure out who is farming small grains,” he says.

He met some farmers at events held by the Virginia Grain Producers Association, but that organization is mostly a lobbying group focused on the needs of high-volume commodity grain growers—often meaning those ubiquitous cornfields you see from the road. By comparison, CGA members are more oriented toward the local-food values we’ve all come to know: organic, non-GMO, heirloom, artisanal.

Because such operations are craft-based, they demand considerable investments of time and attention. It’s not just that grain professionals are scattered far and wide. It’s that the relationship between, say, farmer and baker takes time to dial in, so that both businesses can benefit.

Albemarle Baking Company’s Gerry Newman makes a country bread with flour from Grapewood Farm on the Northern Neck, and is trying to move toward more local sourcing. Photo: John Robinson

For example, Newman has been buying some flour from Grapewood Farm on the Northern Neck to make a country bread that ABC offers twice a week. “It’s a full percent weaker in gluten,” he says. “You notice a difference in strength. It took some time, and a lot of bread we didn’t sell, to get it right. There was the same commitment from the farmer—he said ‘I’ll give it to you until you get it right.’”

Local grains require a labor of love, says Coiner. “They carry all the variability and character you might expect from a single origin unblended product. That’s both good and bad,” she says. “You get taste characteristics and nutrition and flavor that you could never get from a commodified flour, but you also get unpredictability in terms of fermentation rate, or over- or underactive enzymes you have to compensate for. It’s not for a fainthearted baker.”

Bloem echoes the challenge of building farmer relationships. “Are they willing to absorb the risk of growing malting-quality small grains, which is different than growing for the mill?” he says. “I have particular specs I need the farmer to hit. Even finding a farmer that could grow [that] doesn’t mean they will.”

Fields of plenty

Pete Sisti stands outside the barn at his farm in Powhatan County. Around him ripple the 250 acres he inherited from his parents: swaths of forest between undulating fields, many of them currently covered in white clover. His parents’ old farmhouse—and their gravesites—are within sight, but right now Sisti is looking around at all the equipment he uses to grow wheat here.

Pete Sisti of Greater Richmond Grains has been growing grains since 2013, on land his parents and grandparents also farmed in Powhatan County. Photo: John Robinson

There are two tractors, a vintage 1970s-era combine, two steel silos, a conveyor, an “Agri-Vac” that moves grain from the silo into a hopper inside the barn, a powerful fan to dry wheat that’s too moist, a bush hog, a planter, large tanks of organic fish-emulsion fertilizer and rainwater, a dump truck, and a van that’s currently running so its air-conditioner can chill the 40 bags of wheat, weighing 50 pounds each—that’s one entire ton, if you’re counting—that he just took out of cold storage.

That list doesn’t even count the machinery kept inside the white barn—noisy devices that remove impurities and sort the wheat into various grades. One of these is an Italian-made grain cleaner that Sisti traveled to Germany to source. Brown paper bags, heavy with grain, are piled here and there.

Sisti has been growing grains only since 2013—an enterprise that he manages around his other career selling software. As he demonstrates machinery and inspects wheat berries, noting subtle differences in size and quality, it’s apparent that being a wheat farmer demands not only a large capital investment but a considerable knowledge base. “Having a mentor is so important,” he says.

After several years of experimenting, he’s now settled on a rotation plan in which he’ll grow winter wheat on 30 acres at a time, planting in September and harvesting in June. This year’s crop is almost ready to harvest, a soft ocean of green beginning to turn gold. On the edge of the field, Sisti bends one stalk to show how each plant will soon nod its seedhead down toward the ground, signaling that it’s time for him to come through with the combine.

This particular field occupies the front yard of a trim, new house. The home was built on one of three 10-acre parcels that Sisti sold to pay for his parents’ care as they struggled with Parkinson’s disease and dementia in the last years of their lives. Holding onto this land—which his grandparents also farmed—means a lot to him, and organic wheat farming is part of his plan to do so.

Coiner says that’s one big reason to encourage a local grain economy for human consumption—it means a lot more income for farmers than growing animal feed. “It can be a significant boost of income to keep people on their farms and maintain the rural landscape,” she says. “It’s a diversification. When you think of the crisis in the dairy industry right now, milk prices have plummeted. Dairy farmers could be growing wheat or rye on their land and selling to the food market without too much trouble, if there was end processing support and demand for it.”

Start with demand

That ton of wheat chilling inside Sisti’s van will soon be delivered to a couple of different CGA members, including miller Charlie Wade. “The majority of my business is coming from fellow members,” says Sisti, whose largest customer is Dogu’s Sub Rosa Bakery. He offers a discount on wheat to CGA businesses.

Bloem, too, is reaping the benefit of networking through the group. “Working with Deep Roots Milling, we just sprouted 150 pounds of wheat in batches, with wheat from another CGA member farmer,” he says. “I’m able to help the miller, who down the road helps me by milling a product of mine into a flour form for me to sell to my customers. It’s a scratch-each-other’s-back situation.”

Coiner says the CGA hopes, eventually, to organize cooperative infrastructure—grain processing equipment, cold storage, and so on—that could be used by multiple members. For now, though, building a market is a key goal.

From studying similar initiatives in other regions, Coiner says, “The main lesson we learned is you have to start with the demand, and the supply will follow. You’re not going to get any farmer saying ‘Sure, I’ll grow 100 acres of grain’ without knowing it’s going to be sold. We’re starting with bakers and consumers.” A nonbinding “baker’s pledge” has CGA bakers aiming to purchase at least 10 percent of their grain and flour from within the network this year. “It’s modest,” she says. “Some are already doing more, but it’s driving home the point that it’s you, bakers, who are going to make the difference.”

Of course, consumers have to be on board too, willing to pay the higher cost of small-batch local grain. Coiner says that if people are willing to ante up for high-quality local meat and eggs, they’ll do so for grain-based foods, too—and she knows because she’s already established a customer base for her breads. “People who are buying from me at the farmers market are shopping there not because it’s convenient or inexpensive,” she says. “They want to give money to local farmers, and they value community. They’re able to spend their dollars in line with their values.”

Bloem points out that besides a smaller carbon footprint and that warm-and-fuzzy community feeling, there are other benefits too: “If we can, within the boundaries of Virginia, grow what we need, it’s not sensical to me to ship the stuff in from a thousand miles away, and we can keep all of that tax revenue within the state,” he says.

Miller Steve Roberts at Woodson’s Mill. Photo: John Robinson

New growth

Back at Woodson’s Mill, black and white photos of previous owners stare out from the office walls, a reminder of its long lineage.  Brockenbrough says he knows of just two idle periods in the mill’s entire history. “Our miller has been involved for 35 years,” he says. “It’s an 18th-century mill, milling 19th-century grains.”

Coiner says that lineage isn’t lost, though it may be hard to see. In her view, the infrastructure for a grain economy is still around—just barely out of sight—throughout Virginia. “It wasn’t that long ago that small- to mid-size farms were growing grain, storing and milling it around here,” she says. “The mills, silos, that old combine sitting in somebody’s barn, are still there.”

It’s worth noting that many CGA members—and all of them quoted in this story, except Albemarle Baking Company—are businesses founded within the last decade. If they’re part of a wave of new interest in local grains, they have energy and enthusiasm on their side. Coiner knows they’ll need it.

“We talk about this a lot,” she says. “What are we doing, trying to take on the grain economy? But you have to start somewhere.”


Looking for local?

If you want to buy wheat direct from the farmer and grind it yourself, Greater Richmond Grains—Pete Sisti’s farm—has a website where you can purchase 50-pound bags: grgrains.com.

Woodson’s Mill, in Piney River, sells its products through a number of local stores like Foods Of All Nations and J.M. Stock; get a complete list at woodsonsmill.com, where you can also order online. The mill welcomes visits from the public the first Saturday of each month in summertime, 10am-4pm.

Wade’s Mill in Raphine is also open for visits, Wednesday through Sunday, 10am-5pm. You can buy products on-site, online, and at several local shops including Greenwood Gourmet Grocery.

Flour from Deep Roots Milling is available at MarieBette and at restaurants and retailers in Blacksburg, Harrisonburg, Richmond, and Roanoke.

Lots of Charlottesville-area bakeries are using local flour. Little Hat Creek Farm sells breads and pastries at Charlottesville City Market, Nelson Farmers’ Market, and several retail stores; more info at  littlehatcreek.wordpress.com.

Albemarle Baking Company’s goods may be found at a number of local stores and, of course, at its own location in the Main Street Market.

Althea Bread specializes in breads made from local and ancient grains; sample them at the City Market or at Farmers in the Park (in Meade Park on Wednesday afternoons).

Learn more about the Common Grain Alliance and its members at commongrainalliance.org.

Categories
Living

The producers: Meet the locals who are taking the plunge into farming

Why did the farmer win an award? Because she was outstanding in her field.

Well—all jesting aside—probably not. If she was anything like the real farmers of Albemarle and neighboring counties, she was just as likely to be found working a job in town as spending time on her land. And when she was in the field, she probably had little or no time to stand still. As for the award? The average local farmer would be happy just to come out in the black.

Farming may be society’s most essential profession, but you’d never know it from looking at the numbers. Nationwide, the average farmer’s age is now 55.6; in Albemarle, that number is 62.3. For decades now, people have worried that as aging farmers retire, there will be no one to replace them, and family farms will disappear or be absorbed by corporate agriculture.

Not everyone agrees that there really is an “aging farmer crisis.” One economist got a lot of press in 2014 for a study that pointed out that the average age of farmers has increased exactly in concert with the average age of the labor force in general. Carl Zulauf even predicted that “the current period of prosperity will lead to an influx of younger farmers.” In 2017, the Washington Post reported that the number of young farmers was growing, largely because college-educated people were decamping from desk jobs to get their hands in the dirt.

Locally, the picture is mixed. The United States Department of Agriculture’s 2012 Census found that in Albemarle, most farmers worked 200 days or more off the farm every year. That makes sense when you consider that the average Albemarle farm lost more than $11,000 that year. In nearby Nelson County, the average farm eked out a $309 profit. Farming, for many people, may be a lifestyle they love or even a family legacy, but it’s also a very uncertain source of income. “The dirty secret of the food movement is that the much-celebrated small-scale farmer isn’t making a living,” wrote Bren Smith in the New York Times in 2014.

Dave Norford, vice president of Albemarle County Farm Bureau’s board, says it’s a major challenge even to get into farming in the first place. “It takes so much capital and experience,” he says. “You have to start out young and small and work your way up to it. It’s not like you jump right in at 21 and you’re all of a sudden a farmer.”

Norford raises cattle and has three teenage sons. “I spent my whole life building my operation to where if they want to take over, hopefully it would be big enough where they would have a fighting chance at making a living,” he says.

Having access to land is a major hurdle for new farmers, especially those without family land, and the wealthy economy in our area is a double-edged sword: There are lucrative markets here, but real estate—especially large tracts of open land—is unaffordable.

Still, between 2007 and 2012, Albemarle more than doubled its young farmer population. The local food movement has put small farms—often organic or artisanal in nature—on the minds of many consumers, and there is an undeniable romance to farming that can cut through the drone of corporate and academic lifestyles. Day after day, there are those among us who get up early to irrigate their tomatoes, bundle kale into bunches, doctor sick lambs, round up calves for auction, fix tractors, mend fence, court chefs, and brave chiggers, sunburn, and all the other physical demands of farming—all to accomplish a type of work that often costs more than it pays, but which the rest of us depend on for our very survival.

Below, meet a few hardy souls who have recently signed up for the job.

Plus bread

It was music that brought Heather Coiner and Ben Stowe together—they met in 2012 at an old-time music festival in West Virginia—but the trajectories that landed them there included another commonality too: They both love producing food.

At the time, Coiner had recently decamped from the academic life (she holds a Ph.D. in plant ecology) and was baking bread instead. “Partway through grad school I had an identity crisis,” she says. “I needed to do something tangible. The pace of academia was too slow.” She started a CSB (community-supported bakery) in Toronto, where she then lived, and delivered bread to customers by bike, contemplating a future in the food movement. Somewhere in Virginia or West Virginia, she thought—near the music scene she was part of.

Meanwhile, Stowe had tried out GED and ESL teaching after finishing college in New York City, and had quickly foreseen the end of that career. “I was proud of the work, but I was going to burn out,” he says. He followed a girlfriend to a farm internship in Wisconsin and, working in the greenhouse and the fields, began to envision a different path. “I was impressed by the quality of life,” he says. “I loved the food. I was working hard and sleeping well.”

He did a few other internships through World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms—a popular program connecting organic farms with short-term workers—and eventually spent two seasons at Waterpenny Farm in Sperryville, learning from experienced farmers who, he notes, “had a middle-class life.”

Heather Coiner and Ben Stowe’s Little Hat Creek Farm is a farm-bakery combination that “got bread customers before we got regular vegetable customers,” says Coiner. In 2016, the couple completed construction on a 1,000-square-foot bakery building with a wood-fired oven and plenty of space for trays, loaf pans, racks, and work tables. Photo by John Robinson

The couple became a couple more or less simultaneously with starting a business partnership, and the idea of a farm-bakery combination took hold early on. The search for land resulted in “a couple false starts,” says Stowe, before a very lucky break: He connected with Michael and Kathryn Bertoni, the owners of Appalachia Star Farm, an established CSA in Nelson County.

It was a good fit all around. The Bertonis were ready to stop farming after a decade in the business. They too had worked at Waterpenny in the past and knew that Stowe would understand the methods they’d been using. For Stowe and Coiner, the farm was a turn-key operation, complete with farmer’s-market and CSA customers and even, says Coiner, “crops in the ground.” In 2013, they signed a two-year lease and got to work.

Of course, the bakery concept was a major add-on to the business they were taking over, and one that required a name change (Appalachia Star became Little Hat Creek Farm) plus some big investments in infrastructure. Coiner made do with their house oven at first, and in 2016 they finally finished a 1,000-square-foot bakery building with a wood-fired oven. Now, in a gleaming space filled with trays, loaf pans, racks, and work tables, she bakes not only bread but croissants and other pastries—a valuable differentiator for CSA members and at the three farmer’s markets Little Hat Creek attends weekly. “We got bread customers before we got regular vegetable customers,” says Coiner.

When their two-year lease was up, she and Stowe were ready to commit long-term—to each other and to the farm. They got married, bought the property, and kept growing the business. This year, they have three full-time employees, 19 CSA members, and one and a half acres in vegetable production.

Photo by John Robinson

“This size farm would be too small without the bread,” says Stowe, age 34. With the farm-bakery model, they can make more money on a small property, their business is diversified, and they find more wholesale opportunities.

Bouncing their roly-poly 1-year-old twins as they tell their story, they readily acknowledge the long hours their business demands, as well as the juggling act they perform as new parents. But they’re even quicker to name what they love about farming. “You have to remind yourself about the high quality of life,” says Coiner, age 40. “We live where we work, and we’re eating high-quality food. We’re able to make a living for a family of four.”

Cattle drive

Growing up in Chesapeake, the oldest of six siblings, Antonetta Bates never imagined raising cattle. But she knew she loved an-imals, and when her family took camping trips to Sherando Lake, she’d stare out the car window at the cattle farms around Lyndhurst, unknowingly glimpsing a vision of her future.

It would take a while for that future to arrive, though. Not until 2011, when she moved to Earlysville to work as a live-in personal assistant to the owner of a large estate farm, did she find an opportunity to try out the agricultural life. Her employer put her in charge of managing the prop-erty—mowing, haying, maintenance—and offered that, if Bates liked, she could get a pet cow.

Antonetta Bates loves her grazing Angus and Herefords, but each animal is also thought of in numerical terms. Buying a young, pregnant female—a “bred heifer”—costs around $2,000, and that cow might produce a calf a year until she’s about 10 years old. Each calf can be sold at auction at about 7 months old and 500 pounds. Photo by John Robinson

Her first cow was indeed a pet (Annabelle, a Holstein, who died in March at age 6) but also served as the gateway to Bates’ more serious farming endeavors. “What really started me was a local farmer gave me an orphaned Angus heifer,” she remembers. “Then I bought a young bull and a few young calves to breed. Then my boss loaned me money and I bought 25 head and a second bull.” As she puts it, “it snowballed from there.”

She learned as she went, picking up skills from other local farmers and from her vet (“God bless her,” she says, “I can text her pictures and she’ll tell me what to do”). Though she’s also tried raising hogs, sheep, and chickens, cattle have been her main focus.

It’s clear that Bates, age 39, loves her animals, calling them by name and reaching out to stroke their heads when she drives a golf cart among the grazing Angus and Herefords. Yet if these are not to be pets, each animal must be thought of in numerical terms. Buying a young, pregnant female—a “bred heifer”—costs around $2,000; such a cow might produce a calf a year until she’s 10 years old or so, each calf to be sold at auction at about 7 months old and 500 pounds. This year, her herd produced 36 calves.

Antonetta Bates. Photo by John Robinson

Given all the variables—calves that die unexpectedly, beef prices that go up and down (they averaged $3 a pound a few years ago, less than half that at the time of our interview)—cattle farming is a tough business. That’s not even counting the startup costs, which for Bates have been partially waived; her employer provides 70 acres of fenced pasture for her to use, along with equipment. The farm is now for sale, however, and Bates knows her future is uncertain.

Bottom line: “I would need 200 mama cows to make a decent living,” she says. That would require 200 to 400 acres of land, which is prohibitively expensive in Albemarle. Bates is hoping that she can enter a new partnership with a landowner or perhaps a retiring farmer so that she can continue the life she’s come to love.

“I used to wear stiletto heels and get my nails done. Now it’s more like I need a nail brush,” she says. “You’d think farmers were crazy, but it’s truly not about money; it’s the love of the work we do. Ten years ago, I never would have thought I’d put steak on someone’s plate.”

Spirit of inquiry

“We’ve been doing agriculture for 10,000 years,” says Austin Mandryk, “and maybe we don’t know how to do it yet.” He walks among rows of tomatoes at his Atelier Farm in northern Albemarle, checking out the 98 varieties he’s planted this year, partly in a spirit of experimentation: Maybe he’ll learn something about tomatoes that no other farmer yet knows.

His four-and-a-half-acre garden includes hundreds of other crops, from young fruit trees to husk cherries to turmeric to six different kinds of holy basil. He’s even experimenting between the rows, searching for the right combination of cover crops to form a “living mulch” that will prevent erosion and attract good bugs but not out-compete his food crops. “The vision for me is a verdant farm,” he says; he dislikes seeing farms that “look like Mars,” with bare soil between rows.

In his second year (or “beta year,” as he calls it) running Atelier Farm, Mandryk, age 38, is deep into the test phase on many ideas at once. Can he run a year-round CSA? Can he derive most of his income from customers who will drive to the farm, rather than stopping by his farmer’s market stand? Can he gradually shift production so that half the food he grows is from perennial fruit crops?

“Everything’s in flux,” he says, after a lengthy explanation of how he prices his CSA shares. (In brief, they’re $20 per adult per week.) Since the CSA is buffet-style, rather than each member receiving the same bag of veggies, and since some of the things he’s harvesting now could become part of his winter offerings (think frozen berries or dried herbs), the formula of costs and income and value on this farm is fairly complex.

He knows he needs more members—he’s at around 40, but would be more comfortable with 60—but seems to be patient with the process of finding the right people to buy into his vision. Though this is the first time he’s been in business for himself, he’s been working on farms since right after college (when he biked to a farm in Pennsylvania to spend 20 hours a week pulling weeds for free) and has managed several other organic farms around the East and Midwest.

“Farming was never presented as an option” when he was growing up, he says, but he discovered the farming path in college along with a love of being outside—he’s hiked the Appalachian Trail twice—and a devotion to ecology.

In the second year of running Atelier Farm, Austin Mandryk is deep into the test phase on many ideas. He wonders if he can run a year-round CSA or if he can derive most of his income from customers who will drive to the farm, rather than stopping by his farmer’s market stand. He also considers whether or not he can gradually shift production at his four-and-a-half-acre farm, which includes hundreds of crops, from tomatoes to fruit trees to turmeric, so that half the food he grows is from perennial fruit crops. Photo by John Robinson

Atelier Farm rents a corner of the property owned by Mandryk’s sister and her husband. In the two years since Mandryk arrived here, he’s installed a deer fence, built sheds and walk-in coolers and a summer kitchen, created a washing/packing area and an outdoor office and herb dryers, and a place for members to select their week’s veggies, herbs, and flowers. (A onetime creative writing student, he’s also written lyrical blog posts to go along with each week’s CSA shares.) And, of course, he’s grown lots and lots of food.

It’s a demanding life. He describes camping in the cornfield to prevent nocturnal theft by a raccoon, reading farming books by flashlight before going to sleep in his tent. Yet he’s trying to make the work sustainable for himself by building it around his own desires. “I want spinach in winter, and frozen berries and dried beans,” he says. “There is a lot to be said for selfless service, but the foundation should be that I do everything I want to do. I grow what I want, and share it.”

The right blend

“I sort of didn’t choose the easy road,” says Katherine Herman, sitting in the new office of her farm, Gathered Threads, in Nelson County. She’s right, in that farming is never easy. But then she’s right again in that her type of farm—a small herb farm that supplies dried herbs, ferments, and other value-added products—might demand even more work than most.

Not only does she grow the herbs (and “grow” implies all the usual sub-verbs, from preparing soil to harvesting) and then, in many cases, dry them, she also makes them into everything from tea blends to salves to bath salts to infused vinegars. There’s packaging. There’s planning. There’s recipe testing. Oh, and there are two small kids.

Herman and her husband, Ralph, are keeping Gathered Threads in motion, here on this remote six-and-a-half-acre property, through ingenuity and hustle. “My husband’s job is paying our bills,” she says frankly. Ralph works long hours driving a truck, then mows the garden perimeter and does building projects around the farm after hours. Katherine tends an acre and a half of herbs and vegetables, usually with kids in tow.

At Gathered Threads in Nelson County, Katherine Herman runs a small herb farm that supplies dried herbs, ferments, and other value-added products to members of her CSA. Herman grows the herbs and, in many cases, dries them and makes them into tea blends, salves, bath salts, and infused vinegars. Photo by John Robinson

Luckily, she has many years of experience as a grower, all the way back to the garden she planted as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania in 2001. Yet Gathered Threads, founded in 2014, is different than the vegetable farms where she did most of her learning; her business draws heavily on her training at Sacred Plant Traditions herb school, as well as her own fermentation experiments, and requires endless creativity in the marketing sphere.

For example, several years after she’d started her herb CSA, the number of shares she was selling had fallen. Members were getting a monthly box of herbs and products, but there weren’t enough members. So this year, Herman decided to offer three different types of herbal CSA: medicinal, culinary, and bath-and-body. Sales went back up—and, of course, so did the complexity of developing and packaging the shares.

After growing up in Portsmouth, Herman studied animal science at Virginia Tech, but her Peace Corps years started her on an agricultural trajectory. “It was nice to grow some of what I ate,” she says. When she returned to the U.S., she looked for a farming position, and ended up managing vegetable farms for about a decade before starting Gathered Threads.

Photo by John Robinson

Herman, age 40, believes in the connection between herbs and daily wellness. “We need herbs instead of  pharmaceuticals,” she says. But selling herbs can be an uphill battle since most people don’t consider them a necessity. This year, Herman offered her herbal and fermented CSA shares directly to customers and also as an add-on at larger vegetable CSAs around Virginia, selling around 90 shares. She has a few wholesale accounts too, and sells at the Nelson farmer’s market, “a good way to network and get exposure,” she says.

If direct-to-consumer sales are the first image one might conjure for a small specialized farm, they may not be the most sustainable for the farmer. Herman sees the future of her business in larger-scale growing and bulk sales. “I want to grow more herbs and get more herbs to people,” she says. “I want to sell quarter-, half-, one-pound bags,” supplying other practitioners or producers.

It’s still a young business, with a solar dryer under construction, the new office half-tiled, and Herman’s baby daughter playing under a tent behind the farmer’s-market table. But in the garden, long rows of comfrey, currants, gooseberries, elderberries, nettles, rosemary, and dozens of others are growing—fragrant and promising.