Harvesting New Ideas: Ambitious Maverick Farms promotes local food - and the future of farming
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VALLE CRUCIS - When is a farm more than a farm?
When it sets out to harvest farmers as much as crops.
Maverick Farms in Watauga County is just such a farm. Its founders are ostensibly in the vegetable business, but their broader vision encompasses tourism, environmentalism, education and economic development.
In 2004, Hillary Wilson, Alice Brooke Wilson, Sara Safransky, Leo Gaev and Tom Philpott started Maverick Farms.
The Wilson sisters’ parents, Bill Wilson and Carolyn Ashburn, own the land. Bill Wilson had farmed the property, formerly Springhouse Farm, for more than 30 years, first with tobacco and then vegetables. As he neared retirement, he faced financial pressures to sell the farm.
“It’s one of the big problems for farmers that they don’t have health insurance and retirement plans,” Alice Brooke Wilson said. “That’s why farms get sold.”
The Wilsons’ parents didn’t have to sell because the five partners leased the farm.
From the beginning, they knew they wanted a different kind of farm, a desire reflected in the name Maverick. “We thought about it as a kind of laboratory,” Philpott said. “We had an idea that we would be an educational group, as part of a broader community that educates people about where food comes from.”
The Wilson sisters grew up on the farm, and the others had spent time working on organic farms in Italy, but they were hardly seasoned pros.
“The truth is when we started, we knew more about cooking than we did about farming,” Philpott said.
“We were all into sustainable food and questioning the industrial food system. We naively showed up and started doing stuff.”
The partners planted their first crops in March 2004. They started having farm dinners to show off the glory of fresh local food. They began selling food at the Watauga County Farmers Market in Boone. They started a Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA, program in which people contract for weekly portions of the farm’s harvest.
They offer cooking classes to teach the pleasures of the table, and they have lodging for people who want to vacation at a working farm. And they’ve started an internship program to train would-be farmers who feel as passionately about local food as they do.
They also decided to make the farm nonprofit, in part so they could apply for sustainable-agriculture grants. Safransky said that Maverick just got its 501(c) federal nonprofit status. So far, the farm has used grant money to start building a passive solar greenhouse that uses retained heat from water barrels as a cheaper alternative to solar panels.
Safransky said that the farm is so far breaking even - but without paying the partners salaries. “That’s why we wanted the 501(c),” she said. “We’re going to need funding. Right now, our second jobs are subsidizing the farm.”
She said that having so many different programs may not be the best business model. “But this is a training program.”
Maverick Farms is 65 acres, much of which is steep and wooded. They supplement by leasing some prime bottomland nearby. The partners cultivate a total of 3 acres with garlic, salad greens, collards, squash, tomatoes, carrots - just about everything that Mother Nature will allow them to grow.
They also keep chickens for eggs and have lots raspberry bushes growing a stone’s throw from the farmhouse. They have made honey from their own bees, and plan to do so again. And they are considering raising hogs, which would provide meat as well as manure to help naturally fertilize the crops.
When they have a farm dinner, the meat and much of the other food that they don’t produce comes from area farms.
For their CSA program, they have bartered shares to help get the greenhouse built, and offered working shares to help make it more affordable - and to get people engaged in farm life.
Similarly, overnight guests are encouraged to get their hands in the dirt for a reduced rate. “It’s a way to be not just a consumer, but a co-producer,” Philpott said.
Overnight stays in the farmhouse run $120 for a large room for two people, and $40 for a small room with a single bed. A third medium-size room is available on a limited basis for $100. The cost includes breakfast. Lunch and dinner can be added for $30 more a person.
The partners at Maverick also offer community workdays, soliciting volunteers from the community to help out with plantings and other chores. They have even arranged for students from Appalachian State University’s sustainable-agriculture program to get credit for working on the farm.
All told, Safransky said, they’ve had 19 interns or “work exchangers,” 12 of whom have gone to work on other farms or in jobs that involve sustainable agriculture.
The CSA program costs $500, plus six hours of work during the season for about 20 weekly boxes of food. A working share for $250 requires seven hours a month of work in exchange for the same amount of food.
Maverick started with 11 CSA customers and now is up to 25. Besides its farmers-market sales, it also sells to a few area restaurants.
It holds farm dinners, prepared by Philpott and Safransky, about one weekend a quarter, usually offered two nights. The next ones will be Aug. 11 and 12. Dinners sometimes are buffets for as many as 70 people for $20 to $25, or sit-down dinners for 30 to 35 people for $40 to $50 a person.
Philpott has taught classes on Italian cooking and a Valentine’s Day menu for two. Philpott has even taught a real-life farm class in which he took everyone out to the fields to see what was ready to harvest as a way to determine the menu.
Classes may run from $40 to $75, depending on the menu. The next ones probably will be this fall.
“We would like to see people rediscover the pleasures of cooking,” Philpott said. “That’s why we do the cooking classes and farm dinners.”
Though Gaev has since left the group, the other four are still going strong with their vision - even though all of them have to struggle to balance school, outside work or both with the seemingly never-ending work on the farm.
“I’m 41 now,” said Philpott, who was a financial journalist before co-founding Maverick Farms. “I do a food column for Grist (an electronic magazine at grist.org devoted to environmental issues). I have another nonfood-related regular freelance writing gig. I have no weekends. (The farm work) hurts my back. And the amount of work wears you down.
“But I’m encouraged by the reception we’ve received, and the interest in local food. I find it inspiring to be part of something that is bigger than just running a small business.”
Philpott is also excited by Maverick’s Farm Incubator and Grower Program, or FIG. The goal of the program is to increase the local food system, producing more farmers to cultivate more acres. Maverick plans to do this in two ways.
The first way is by mentoring would-be farmers through a two-year, live-in internship. Farming, Philpott said, is a trade that must be learned, and many of the people interested in farming, especially the sustainable, organic farming practiced at Maverick, have not had those skills passed down from previous generations.
The first and only intern so far is Alyssa Rudolph, who now serves as the farm manager in her first year of the program. She gets a stipend of $600 a month, plus room and board.
The FIG program aims to teach interns about planting, harvesting, marketing, bookkeeping - everything they need to know to run a farm.
“It’s not a problem finding people who want to be farmers. We get calls all the time,” Safransky said. “But we want to have people who will stay in the area and start their own farms.”
The second part of the FIG program could be described as job placement, and it fits in with Maverick’s goal of increasing the farmland in the area.
Most people who want to farm can’t afford to buy land in the area, Alice Brooke Wilson said, mainly because increased development for second homes has driven up land prices.
Maverick is tackling this problem by looking for landowners who aren’t using their land but don’t want to sell to developers.
Maverick eventually hopes to have two people in the FIG program at all times. Assuming the farm can find land for its interns after two years, the result over several years would be increased sustainable agriculture in the area.
“We’re working on a vision of a robust, healthy local-food economy,” Philpott said. “Most food dollars - like from McDonald’s - are leaving the community. We know that if can capture most of the food dollars, instead of draining the economy, it actually can be part of the engine of the economy.”
Philpott acknowledges that their plans are ambitious. Although he declined to disclose the farm’s revenue, he did say that Maverick produced about 10,000 pounds of produce last year.
“We came in and started doing this at the start of this wave … of consciousness about local food,” he said.
“I still see what needs to be done, and it’s daunting. But I’m really proud of what we’ve achieved.”
■ Michael Hastings can be reached at 727-7394 or at mhastings@wsjournal.com.
If you go
Maverick Farms is at 410 Justus Road, Valle Crucis, 28604.
The farm is not open to the public during regular hours, but visits can be arranged by appointment. Also, the farm will be open as part of the High Country Farm & Garden Tour on Aug. 4 and 5. For more information, including how to get tickets, visit www.carolinafarmstewards.org or call 919-542-2402.
The next farm dinners will be Aug. 11 and 12. The cost is $45, and seating is limited. Reservations should be made in advance. It will feature an Indian menu, which is posted on the farm’s Web site.
Overnight guests are welcome all year, also by reservation.
Maverick Farms sells produce at the Watauga County Farmers Market on Saturday mornings.
For more information about Maverick Farms and its programs, call 828-963-4656, visit www.marverickfarms.com or send e-mail to info@maverickfarms.com.
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