Charlottesville Food

by Casey Ireland

  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.”66 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.

  Joel Slezak and Erica Hellen. Photo by Kevin Haney.

  HOMESTEADING AND THE SELF-SUSTAINING ENTERPRISE

  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.”67 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.”69 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.

  THE MANY FACES—AND FOUNDERS—OF SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

  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.71 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.73 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.”74

  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.”75 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.”76 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?’”78 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.

  Gail Hobbs-Page with her farm dogs. Photo by Casey Ireland.

  Whether young or old, transplants or natives, farmers in the Charlottesville MSA have maintained a tradition of Virginia agricultural excellence that began with Jefferson’s own horticultural dabbling. Both the quality of the land and the intellectual fertility of the city itself have created a hospitable climate for modern—and old-fashioned—farms. The area has been host to a variety of national and localized trends, whether the prolonged success of the family farm or the old-is-new allure of homesteading. Chickens, pigs and cattle grow more naturally, enhance the landscape more fully and just plain taste better under a free-ranging plan guided by permaculture and sustainability. Connecting farming as an occupation with family life has been a major concern for local farmers, whether they are just starting out or have incorporated business and family for generations. Inquiring, developing, advancing and innovating are the marks of a central Virginia farmer, one who chooses agriculture as both a career and a lifestyle.

  A notion of food as inspiring togetherness, whether at the table, in the community or within the family, starts on the farm before it gets to the kitchen. Marbled cuts of beef, crisp greens, plump figs and ripe cheeses offer meals in themselves and exude flavors that represent seasons, terroir and the hands of an individual. Before an ingredient gets to the City Market or grocery store, a farmer has planted, raised, grown or tended it with both practicality and ideology. Given that a cook is only as good as his ingredien
ts and a gourmet store is only as luxurious as its products, the farm has proven to be a crucial first step in forming a regional culinary heritage. The variety, quality and uniqueness of Virginia’s agricultural output is only matched by the treatment these products get by restaurateurs and retailers.

  Chapter 3

  Food Hubs

  Getting Regional Ingredients to the Home Cook

  THE LOCAVORES OF CHARLOTTESVILLE

  After Timbercreek Organics has cured its salty-sweet prosciutto at Kite’s and Gail Hobbs-Page has finished packaging a creamy round of Bloomsbury cheese, an extra step is needed before the home cook can transform these ingredients into something magical. Even if the farmers or producers themselves sell their own products, such direct marketing to the customer requires them to put on a new hat: that of the retailer. From vegetable stands in parking lots on Preston Avenue to the endless treasure-trove of local international grocer Foods of All Nations, consumers can purchase a variety of different Charlottesville food products at a variety of price points from retail settings as unique as they are delightful.

  At every stall of locally produced goods at the City Market and behind the glass at cheese counters, butchers and wine stores resides an expert—or at least someone with a good story to tell about a product. The clerk at the Organic Butcher may tell you how to cook a challenging cut of pork, while another at Mona Lisa Pasta offers suggestions for a sauce to top hand-cut squid ink pappardelle. People in Charlottesville may shop at Whole Foods, Harris Teeter and Kroger to get necessities, but it is the locally owned and run grocery retailers who earn the most committed following. These shops appeal to Charlottesville’s love of community; they provide the old-fashioned pleasure of walking into a shop and being recognized by name. It’s an offering of a particularly juicy plum, a sample of cheese or an after-hours wine tasting that makes Charlottesville’s food retailers so successful and so well loved.