Hickory Nut Gap Meats

Hickory Nut Gap Meats

by | Dec 15, 2021

Hickory Nut Gap Meats

Jamie Ager, Hickory Nut Gap Meats. Credit: Bren Photography

“

There are so many variabilities in farming that you can get all stressed out. Part of being a successful farmer is probably just your head space as it relates to these things. But the fact that we’re having more unpredictable weather creates a low level of constant worry that can be taxing on the spirit.  —  Jamie Ager

Jamie & Amy Ager

Hickory Nut Gap Meats

Website: https://www.hickorynutgap.com

Southeast Region | Fairview, North Carolina

Main Product: Livestock

Scale: 400 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Shift to regenerative grazing multispecies pastured production, direct markets, growers’ network.

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Regeneratively Raised Meat and Building a Brand with Jamie Ager, Founder, Farmer, and CEO at Hickory Nut Gap

Regenerative Grazing Hickory Nut Gap Farms

JAMIE AGER ON REGENERATIVE FARMING & DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER SALES AT HICKORY NUT GAP FARM & MEATS

Hickory Nut Gap Annual Farmer Meeting Accelerates Drive Toward Regenerative Agriculture

Amy and Jamie Ager and their three children, Cyrus, Nolin and Levi, are the fourth and fifth generations to grow food at Hickory Nut Gap, a 600-acre farm located on an old droving road in the Southern Appalachian Mountains just southeast of Asheville, North Carolina. Like many mountain farms in the region, Hickory Nut Gap has been home to a diversity of enterprises over more than a century of operation. Growing up on the farm, Jamie helped his family milk cows and raise beef cattle, hogs, poultry and apples.

Despite his parents’ efforts to steer him away from a life of farming, Jamie had his eye on the family’s old dairy barns as he thought about his future. “The farm was needing a new thing,” says Jamie. “I saw an opportunity to differentiate ourselves and be able to make a living here.” Just over 20 years ago and fresh out of college, Jamie and his wife Amy transitioned the farm to a rotational grazing operation and founded Hickory Nut Gap Meats.

In those early years, Jamie focused on farm management while Amy worked to develop regional wholesale and retail markets for their pastured meat products. When they could no longer meet the growing demand for meats produced on their own farm, Jamie reached out to other livestock farmers in the region to help. Today, Hickory Nut Gap Meats supplies a diverse line of pasture-raised products to local and regional, direct and wholesale markets centered in the Southern Appalachians and supports a network of more than 30 family farms growing 100 percent grass-finished beef and pasture-raised pork in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky.

Want to read more? You can find the full version of this story in the Second Edition of Resilient Agriculture, available for purchase here.

Fair Share Farm

Fair Share Farm

by | Dec 15, 2021

Fair Share Farm

Rebecca Graff and Tom Ruggieri, Fair Share Farm. Credit: Fair Share Farm

“

This year may have been an average year in the end, but what really happened was that we had a big rain event and then no rain for a month and then another big rain event, so we got 12 inches in July and then nothing in August and September. So, if you just look at the average, it looks like an average year, but we basically seem to be fluctuating from drought to flood and back again.

Rebecca Graff & Tom Ruggieri

Fair Share Farm

Website: http://www.fairsharefarm.com/

Midwest Region | Kearney, MO

Main Product: Vegetables

Scale: 10 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Carbon farming, vegetable ferments, Master Line earthworks.

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Focus on Food Fermentation at Fair Share Farm

Growing Growers: Fair Share Farm 

Feast TV: Fair Share Farm 

Irrigation at Fair Share Farm 

Soil Health Practices at Fair Share Farm Presentation 

Cover Crops and Reduced Tillage on a Vegetable Farm with Thomas Ruggieri 

 

Rebecca Graff and Tom Ruggieri own and operate Fair Share Farm, a diversified vegetable farm located in rural Clay County, Missouri. Together they manage about ten acres of annual and perennial vegetables and fruits, culinary herbs and a large flock of laying hens to feed people in the Kansas City metro area. They market fresh vegetables, fruits and eggs from their farm through a CSA and produce vegetable ferments for direct wholesale and farmers market sales. They also coordinate with other producers in their area to offer meat, cheese and bread options to their CSA members. This farm-based food hub/food circle model allows them to provide a more diverse group of products to their CSA while also cultivating a diverse network of local food production capacity.

Rebecca and Tom met back in 2001, just a year after each had left unsatisfying jobs to look for a better way to support healthy community by working in sustainable agriculture. Their paths crossed at Peacework Farm, an organic vegetable farm in western New York where Rebecca was working as a first-year apprentice. “Tom came out to one of the first member workdays,” Rebecca recalls. “It was mid-May and I had been there just about a month. I admired his leek-trimming skills as we were preparing vegetables for market. We went on our first date a week later. We apprenticed together the following year and we’ve been farming together ever since.”

After another year working as apprentices at the Micheala Farm in southeast Indiana, Rebecca and Tom headed back to Missouri to begin farming on land that has been in Rebecca’s family for four generations. The Graff family farm, like most farms in the area, produced corn, soybeans and cattle using conventional commodity production practices. “I grew up on a farm,” says Rebecca, “but I did not learn how to grow crops of any kind, so it was all new to me when I started my first apprenticeship.” Using holistic farm planning and biological farming practices, Rebecca and Tom worked over the years to create a farm sustained by healthy soils and healthy community.

Want to read more? You can find the full version of this story in the Second Edition of Resilient Agriculture, available for purchase here.

Rid-All Green Partnership

Rid-All Green Partnership

by | Dec 15, 2021

Rid-All Green Partnership

David Hester, Keynah Durdan, Damian Forshe, Randy McShepard and Marc White, Rid-All Green Partnership. Credit: Gary Yasaki.

“

A year ago, we had this polar vortex, when it was minus 40 degrees for a week and a half straight. Then, this year we’re in late November and it’s 60 degrees. Early this year, it rained almost all spring and all early summer. It’s so unpredictable. So we have to be very adaptable to extreme weather changes and, excuse me, it’s sad to say, but we know it’s not going to get any better, it’s going to continue to get worse.

Marc White, Keymah Durdan & David Hester

Rid-All Green Partnership

Website: https://www.greennghetto.org

Midwest Region | Cleveland, OH

Main Product: Vegetables

Scale: 15 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Urban soil/community restoration, 20 social enterprises, improve recovery reserves, growers’ network, carbon farming.

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Soil Brothers – Teaser

Rid-All Green Partnership Uplifts Urban Farming In Cleveland

Rid-All Green Partnership growing food and community in Cleveland’s Kinsman neighborhood

Rid – All Green Partnership

 

From the Public Square in downtown Cleveland, the trip out to the farm is an easy ten minutes by car on a Saturday morning. Head southeast on Ontario St. and continue onto Orange Avenue, then take a slight left onto Woodland Ave. and head due east out of town. Take a right on Kinsman Road, a left onto 81st St., then a right on Otter Ave and you’ve arrived at the Rid-All Green Partnership’s city farm. Although just a short drive from downtown Cleveland, decades of disinvestment have left the Kinsman area so isolated that it was nicknamed The Forgotten Triangle. It’s a problem faced by many post-industrial cities in the Midwest. Factories closed and when the white middle class took flight into the suburbs, they took investment capital, new industries and jobs with them.

The Rid-All farm began as a vision shared by three men who grew up together nearby, left home to find their fortunes in other places and returned to give back to the community that raised them. They came home to transform the land and people that they loved while sharing a gospel of soil: heal the soil, heal the people, heal the community, heal the planet.

“Our thing has been to see how far we can push this,” says Marc White, a founding partner and project manager. “To see how much we can do as urban farmers to help our community. It’s profound to see the effects of what we have created grow and change on a daily basis, year after year, season after season.” Marc’s many years in fashion design inform his work as the farm’s general manager and lead value-added product developer. He uses his design experience to create beautiful landscapes on the farm that produce healthy foods designed to promote the health and beauty of the people that enjoy his Urban Farm Doctor’s line of regenerative superfoods juice and food products.

Want to read more? You can find the full version of this story in the Second Edition of Resilient Agriculture, available for purchase here.

Twin Oaks Community

Twin Oaks Community

by | Dec 15, 2021

Twin Oaks Community

Pam Dawling, Twin Oaks Community. Credit: Twin Oaks Community

“

We’ve tried leaving more things to overwinter because it doesn’t get as cold as it used to, but it’s a bit trial and error because we just never quite know what’s going to happen. Winter weather in Virginia is all over the place. It just seems more that way recently.

Pam Dawling

Twin Oaks Community

Website: https://whiteoakpastures.com

Southeast Region | Louisa, VA

Main Product: Vegetables

Scale: 4 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Add protected growing space, monitoring.

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Pam Dawling – Twin Oaks Community Farm

A Legendary Farmer that Lives on a Commune

For more than half of her nearly 50 years of farming, Pam Dawling has grown food at Twin Oaks, an intentional community and ecovillage of about a hundred people located in central Virginia near Louisa. Pam managed vegetables and fruit production on the community’s organic farm, which also produces dairy, beef, poultry, honey, herbs, tree fruit, mushrooms, seeds, ornamental flowers and forestry products. The garden produces a diverse mix of vegetables and berries on about 3.5 acres of cultivated fields, raised beds and undercover in a high tunnel. Crop rotation, cover crops, and the application of compost, plus careful attention to season extension have been key production practices in the market garden. In 2017, Pam’s role shifted from manager to support staff at the garden, but she brings her full range of experience at Twin Oaks to this story.

Pam’s early experiences as a member of World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms introduced her to organic farming as a healthy way to live — as well as to the difficulties of solo farming — and sparked her interest in living and working collectively. Growing for a community food supply allowed Pam to center vegetable production on crops with high food value, rather than high market value. She also managed production to include specific crops favored by community members and to meet community needs for vegetables throughout the year. To achieve these goals, Pam focused production on a select group of crops: leafy greens like lettuce, chard and kale that can be grown year-round using some combination of field and protected growing space; summer crops that are equally tasty fresh or processed such as tomatoes, squash, cucumbers and peppers; and root crops like sweet potatoes that are easy to store with minimal processing for use throughout the year.

Want to read more? You can find the full version of this story in the Second Edition of Resilient Agriculture, available for purchase here.

New Forest Farm

New Forest Farm

by | Dec 15, 2021

New Forest Farm

Mark Shepard, New Forest Farm. Credit: Restoration Agriculture Design

“

Since we’ve been here our longest drought was two calendar years where we had snow in winter time, but almost zero measurable rain in the summer. Then in 2018 and 2019, we had twice the annual amounts of rainfall. Seventy-five inches of rain one year to zero inches of rain the next year. That’s a challenge.

Mark Shepard

New Forest Farm

Website: https://newforestfarm.us

Midwest Region | Viroqua, WI

Main Product: Fruits & Nuts

Scale: 106 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Shift to perennial polyculture, integrate annuals and livestock.

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Mark Shepard – Pioneer Agroforestry Farm Tour 

How Mark Shephard’s Farm THRIVES under Sheer. Total. Utter. Neglect. 

Farmer Practices Restoration Agriculture 

When Mark Shepard and his family first visited the land that would become New Forest Farm almost 30 years ago, they looked out over a Midwest landscape of degraded croplands typical of late twentieth century industrial agriculture. Gazing across the treeless property covered in empty corn and hayfields, the Shepard’s could see a different future for the land, one that would heal the land with a special kind of agriculture modeled on nature’s patterns. They could imagine how the landscape could evolve into something that was not a farm or a forest. Something completely new, yet rooted in the ancient wisdom of the place.

Drawing inspiration from native ecological patterns common in the region prior to European colonization, the Shepard family began to carefully place trees, shrubs, vines, canes, grasses, forbs and fungi throughout the 106-acre farm to create healthy plant communities designed to produce food, fuel, medicines, and beauty. Because they needed to produce income while waiting for the perennials to produce marketable products, the farm design also included areas of annual crops like vegetables, hay, small grains and pastured livestock. “We got started by selecting perennial plants that mimicked the oak savanna plant community that we could sell, feed to an animal or eat ourselves,” Mark recalls. “As things have matured through the years, we can afford to do less and less annual cropping. The products that we actually sell haven’t changed much over the years, but the proportions of each have changed through time.”

Today, New Forest Farm is a nationally recognized model for the successful transformation of an industrial grain operation into a commercial-scale, locally-adapted, perennial agriculture system. Hazelnuts, chestnuts, walnuts, apples and elderberries are the primary woody crops on the farm. In the alleys between a diverse mix of trees and shrubs, livestock — cows, pigs, turkeys, sheep, pigs or chickens — graze pastures of mixed fescues, clovers and wild plants grown in rotation with annual vegetables. The farm’s principal products supply regional and national wholesale markets through the Organic Valley cooperative and the American Hazelnut Company. Small volumes of a diverse line of fresh and locally processed fruit, nut and livestock products are sold in local direct markets. The farm has been certified organic since 1995, is entirely solar and wind-powered, and farm equipment can be powered with locally-produced biofuels.

Want to read more? You can find the full version of this story in the Second Edition of Resilient Agriculture, available for purchase here.