Financing Our Foodshed (13 page)

She’d hoped to sell all the broilers she had raised, but, after ten weeks of growing, they were still much too small to sell. And they didn’t seem to be getting any bigger. She wasn’t sure if it was the heritage breed she had chosen or her limited skills as a beginning farmer, but next time she intended to choose a breed she knew would produce good-sized broilers in about ten weeks. She just needed $1,500 to try again.

The Sandhills Farm to Table Cooperative in Southern Pines is one of the biggest CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) in the state. At times, there have been over a thousand members receiving weekly boxes of locally grown food. Often the box is all produce, but sometimes it includes locally grown meat. So the Co-op told Kelly they’d be interested in buying about as many 4–5 pound chickens as she could raise.

Because Kelly and Tim had tapped out their savings preparing the farm to accommodate multi-species livestock and purchase necessary equipment and supplies, she needed to connect with a few friends who would help her buy those broilers. She needed to find people who shared her vision. When she wrote asking about a Slow Money loan, she already had a detailed budget and a list of capital requirements as long as your arm.

A few weeks after that first visit, we drove back down to Southern Pines to meet with several local food enthusiasts at the office of one of the founders of the Sandhills Co-op. Kelly talked about her plans. She hoped to buy 150 chickens, 60 ducks, and the necessary feed and supplies to bring them to market. Several women had come to meet her, hoping to be able to help in some way. They were accustomed to getting chickens in their CSA boxes and liked the idea of knowing how and where those birds had been raised.

They wanted to help. Eaters lending to producers. Now, there’s a good idea!

Before the gathering was over, the group had worked out a way to loan Kelly what she needed to restart her broiler business. The next day, Kelly sent an email to her new-found friends:

Perfect. That’s exactly what Slow Money is supposed to be about.

Kelly had learned — through talking to other farmers — that it wasn’t the breed that was her problem, it was her feeding practices. So she stayed with the same breed but upgraded her feeding system to give the birds easier access to their feed. They ate more, and they got bigger.

That season, Kelly raised 500 chickens, 50 ducks, and 36 turkeys.

In December, she ran a special on Turducken. You could get a turkey, a duck, two whole chickens, and a pound of sausage for only $52, plus the cost of the turkey based on its weight. It came with instructions — debone the duck and the chicken, stuff the chicken with the sausage meat, put the chicken inside the duck, put the duck inside the turkey and bake it all together. Apparently, the flavors all mingle, and the result is something special.

Kelly poked around online and found several listserves where people were asking how to make one of these things. She replied and told them about her homegrown, all-natural Turducken special. Soon, she had sold every one she had.

Kelly had also found a processing facility in South Carolina that she really liked. She was impressed the first time she went to visit when the owner handed her an apron and booties and invited her to come in the back and let him show her around. If she had the stomach for it, he said, he was happy to have her watch the entire process from killing to packaging, so she could rest assured it was all done to her liking.

He could handle cows, pigs, goats, turkeys, ducks, chickens — whatever she brought in — and he was open to making any kind of specialty sausage she might invent. They tried spinach, garlic, and even chocolate. He made hot dogs, kielbasa, and bratwurst, and Kelly was pleased she could tell her customers exactly what was in each of them.

Though it was a three and a half hour drive to his operation, Kelly’s mother lived only another half hour away, so she used the trips as an opportunity to stop in for to visit. She would take a load of animals one week and go back and pick them up a couple of weeks later.

When Kayla headed off to college, Kelly decided to join her husband in Maryland. She needed to take a break from farming and
to heal,
unfortunately. She laughed as she told me the story. She had been on her ATV (all-terrain vehicle) chasing a pig, trying to get ahead of it; but as she was looking backward to see where that darn pig was, she ran into a fence post and flipped over. By the time she finally stopped working long enough to have her shoulder tended to, it required surgery. And she’d broken her tailbone as well. So, for a while at least, there would be no lifting of 100 pound feed bags!

Her Slow Money loan has already been paid back, and she’s taking a break — but not for long. She’s busy making plans for her next farming season. Among other things, she wants to add vermiculture and grow more vegetables. She has kept her business license current and is letting a neighbor run his cows on her fields. In exchange, he’s cutting the hay and babysitting Crystal, the llama.

When Tim retires in 2014, they plan to get YKnot Farm back into operation. I hope they do, and I’m sure the Sandhills CSA members will also welcome their return!

When I look back on my first year running Slow Money NC, I see that I was a lot like Kelly and her too-small chickens. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I stumbled along, making mistakes; but here we are, heading toward our two million dollar goal.

Maybe if I could just get the feeding schedule right, we’d get there even quicker.

The next beginning farmer who came our way was Alfred Loeblich III, but this wasn’t his first plant venture.

Alfred is one of the most industrious people I have ever met.
Tired of all the hurricane threats to his house in Galveston, TX, he brought his family to North Carolina in 2006 (thus dodging the flood that did hit their house in 2008). He wanted a place to start over where he could also start a farm. It took three years to find the land, but eventually they bought (at an estate auction) a 42-acre tract with about 12 acres of cleared land in rural Orange County.

Right after the house was built, Alfred started planting: apples, pears, figs, jujubes, and even edible timber bamboos. He went on to add blackberries, asparagus plants, muscadine grapes, walking onions, and pequin chile peppers.

He turned four 500-gallon plastic shipping containers he had scored from the Piedmont Biofuels plant into rainwater collectors to gravity-feed the various plant experiments in his yard. (He then tastefully encased the totes in mini-sheds painted the same color as the house.)

Starting out, he didn’t have enough produce to sell, but there was a space at the farmers market for a baker, so he started baking bread and selling it. Then he added pastries. Meanwhile, he kept building his farm.

Alfred does a lot with a little, but when he heard about Slow Money NC, he wondered if he could get help paying for the supplies he needed to build an irrigation system for his fruit trees.

Paul Finkel met Alfred at a Slow Money NC gathering in Chapel Hill, and they discussed Alfred’s farm projects. They both had recently retired; Alfred, from teaching at University of Houston, and Paul from financial planning. They were both using their expertise to take on new ventures. Paul was serving on the advisory boards and finance committees for two local organizations that support sustainable farming; he was also writing a one-man play. Alfred was creating a farm and a plant propagating business.

So, on a hot summer day, while the rest of the US fired up their grills, drank beer, and lit off 4th of July fireworks, Paul and I celebrated our independence with a visit to Alfred’s home and beginning farm in Cedar Grove, NC.

After a tour of his young orchard, we sat at the dining room table and talked about fruit trees and plants of all kinds. He got up several times to fetch obscure plant catalogs.

“This one from Oregon may not look like much,” he said of the first catalog, “but it has the best varieties of fruits.” When we started talking citrus, he produced another, glossier catalog full of kumquats, lemons, and kiwis.

“Their plants are more expensive,” Alfred warned, “but the catalog has better pictures. I wrote a paper about these one time,” he said, pointing to a photo of an Indio mandarinquat. “It’s unusual because it’s a citrus fruit you can eat — peel and all.”

“How do you know all that?” I asked innocently. “Because I’m a botanist,” was the reply. And the gap in his story began to fill: Alfred has a PhD in plant biology from University of California at San Diego and a BA degree from University of California at Berkeley. He taught botany courses at Harvard for seven years and at the University of Houston for another thirty. Creating a highly integrated sustainable farm was just an extension of a long career working in the plant kingdom.

He doesn’t remember a time when he wasn’t planting things, he told us. When he was in high school in Orange County, California, he worked in a plant nursery before
and
after school. At home, he raised palms and succulents that he sold wholesale to that same nursery. His pay, he recalls (this was in the 1950s) was $1.00 an hour. Both of his grandparents had gardens, and his maternal grandmother hybridized irises.

Alfred told Paul and me about growing palm trees and huge citrus trees in their yard in Texas. It was painful to hear the long list of mature plants he had raised that had to be left behind when he relocated to North Carolina.

But Alfred was optimistic and ready to try new things. He planned to grow kiwis, for example. Even though they can be grown in this climate, few people in our area do so.

We went back outside to see the Egyptian walking onions he was
starting — lots of them. Again, this was something no one else in the area was growing. He also had rare palm trees just getting started and unusually shaped cacti.

It was a (mostly) edible plant menagerie.

Before we left, Alfred gave me a “mother of thousands,” an unusual succulent plant from Madagascar, and Paul gave Alfred a loan.

When Alfred approached us a second time about getting help (to build a solar greenhouse), his timing was excellent. I had just spoken to a young man in Hillsborough, which was not far up the road from Alfred’s farm. This young man had heard about Slow Money NC and wanted to support a local farmer. He was also getting a garden of his own going, and I suspected Alfred might be a good resource for him. We set up a time to visit Alfred and see his place, and they spent a couple of hours together. Alfred gave him valuable advice about gardening, and they discussed the possibility of him doing some farming on Alfred’s land, with Alfred as a mentor. Alfred got offered a short-term affordable loan, enough to cover at least some of the cost of a greenhouse.

He managed the rest through sheer resourcefulness:

Alfred continued to plant. He added more apples, crabapples, may-haws, medlars, quince, pears, peaches, and plums. He also planted elderberries, blueberries, and raspberries, and several fig varieties. He did all of this with minimal machinery. He was ok with the lack of a tractor, but finally admitted he really needed a tiller to save his back and make his work easier. So, he got a third Slow Money loan to buy a tiller.

The solar-powered greenhouse is up. And he’s using it to grow some unusual plants: three types of palms that survive in the Piedmont, succulents (kalanchoe, agaves, and aloes), and numerous types of cacti. The list of herbs he’s growing is extensive. And there’s still room for “starts” of tomatoes, peppers, and other vegetables.

Alfred’s plants and produce now make up about 80% of his sales, with the baked goods taking a back seat and making up about 20%. Mostly, he sells at the Eno River Farmers Market (with the help of his son) and at the new South Durham Market. But he is also building up his nursery business, propagating plants to sell online to gardeners and to other nurseries.

He built a 144-square foot poultry house for his flock of heritage-breed chickens (Salmon Faverolles), and his bees and beehives are in place, ready to provide pollination and honey.