“Let your food be your medicine,” Robby Wooding says, after chomping a handful of stinging nettles.
He offers me a hand full, but I decline. On the tastebuds, I think it would be a bit too prickly. But Wooding rolls the nettles up so they don’t sting. Strolling around the lush farmland that has belonged to his family for 200 years, he makes short cryptic comments.
“It’s highly nutritious,” he continues, “and good for making pesto.” And it is an alternative remedy for allergies.
The stinging nettles are just one of the medicinal herbs that Wooding has grown over 15 years ago for his herbal business. While the business is no longer going, the herbs are still thriving on Wooding’s farm, located down the road and across the Banister river from our place in Halifax County. Goldenseal, a member of the buttercup family used to aid digestion, grows here in the field. Ginseng, panacea for all kinds of ills, may be found in the forest. Wooding won’t reveal the location of the ginseng, a plant that was prized as far back as 196 AD for its curative powers. He makes various tinctures and teas of herbs as his health demands.
Wooding has taken a roundabout route to come home here after trying to survive as an artist in New York City.
“I got out of here [HalIfax] as fast as I could,” after high school he says, as he relaxes in a chair in a country kitchen that looks like his great grandmother might pop in any minute with a tray of biscuits. (She was born in an adjoining room.) In high school he loved abstract art and intent on making it as an artist, he went to Rutgers for a graduate degree.
In New York City for five years, he painted in between jobs in construction But he couldn’t break through the art market. He finally decided to come back to the old homeplace, where his family has successfully raised tobacco and other crops for the last century.
They made a decent income on tobacco before price supports were discontinued. The question was: what could replace tobacco as a money crop? Following his belief in the healing power of plants, Wooding decided to try raising medicinal herbs. “I was trying to get an alternative to tobacco. There was an ad in Progressive Farmer for ginseng,” he recalls. He bought 100,000 plants and sowed them in the forest to begin Southern Herbals. For fifteen years, Wooding’s herbal business attracted a following from Charlottesville and the surrounding area. But the sales did not amount to a living wage; he went back to school to become a nurse.
He worked to keep the farm up, using some old tractors to bush-hog the land. He raised hay for feed but it was a huge undertaking to keep up. Then the farmer who was helping him out retired. He was about to give up, until my cousin told him about Merlin, the same Merlin who helped us to restore our farmland. And then the magic occurred. At least, it seems like magic, when you look out at the lush fields, full of clover, butterflies and bees on a spring day, but in fact, Merlin and his three sons work hard to plow, plant and sell the organic agricultural produce.
With its authentic wood buildings, the farm looks as it did 100 years ago. Wooding does little painting or upkeep on the buildings that somehow still stand.
Tractor shedCorn cribChicken houseA tobacco curing barn in the middle of the clover
It’s taken a few years for this former tobacco farm, which was notorious for depleting the soil, to reach this pinnacle of fertility. For the past month, the farm has sported a rich crop cover of purple vetch, rye grass and red clover dense as an Oriental carpet laid across the rolling hills. Just this week, the cover crops were turned over into in a rich soil mix for soybeans. Next year, they will plant sunflowers, Wooding hopes, as part of the crop rotation, that keeps the fertility in the ground.
In other more formal gardens, the purple vetch and clover would be rooted out as weeds. But here they are nourishing the soil using regenerative methods without pesticides.
The little bit of pesticide used for the hay had wasted away after three years, the period required for organic designation.
Wooding is grateful for the renovation of the land that has revived without chemicals or other additives. “I am so thankful. I was at the point of despair. Merlin came and drove around the fields.” He had a super tractor, compared to the old vehicle Wooding had used before. There is the addition of lime and chicken poo, plus the cover crops. This year the crop will be soybeans to be marketed to organic producers.
What if you get an outbreak of insects, or overwhelming tall grasses, or other invaders? How can you avoid using pesticides?
Note I asked my students to go out and find stories on farming in the Baltimore area. Ayotomi AkinlosotuWilliams, who took most of these photos unless otherwise designated, discovered this farm in the heart of a Baltimore City food desert in the fall. I visited this week. It is changing the way children eat, cook and farm.
As you enter the alley from around the corner, you hear the soft clucking of chickens which first indicate the presence of the farm. Occasionally in the mornings, a rooster crows. The brown and gray hues of the city slowly yield to the bright greens of foliage, and you are suddenly on a working farm in the middle of Baltimore city, Plantation Park Heights, established almost 10 years ago, has remained an iconic staple in the neighborhood.
Townhomes overlook the garden, here in October
Entrance to the farm from the street leading to garden boxes, pictured here this month.
The farm brings together people of all backgrounds and ages, from its school-age volunteers to Wes Moore, who visited the farm as he was running for governor this election season.
“I’ll be sitting around a table with someone who’s a professor, someone who’s an immigrant from the Caribbean or something, and a 9 year old who’s lived in Baltimore his whole life,” said Scott, a volunteer at the farm since last September. He and the other volunteers sat in a circle inside the greenhouse, enjoying conversation as they waited for their boss to arrive.
Scott described the farm as a “melting pot”, and compared it to his understanding of Martin Luther King’s dream. “We can all sit together, no one’s considering skin color or where someone’s from,” he said.
The harvesting season begins early spring. Seedlings are placed in black trays in the greenhouse. Lettuce, kale, and other plants that thrive in cold weather are planted in black trays in the greenhouse as tiny seedlings. They remain there all throughout spring and summer, until they are ready to be transported outside and into the ground. There is no cold storage on the farm, so once grown, the crops are harvested and cleaned for farmer’s markets to pick up and sell before each plant’s individual market begins. This process is different from that of a larger, more industrialized farm that would harvest everything atone point.
This farm in particular takes pride in variety, from indigo flowers and bananas to crops like okra and kale.
Banana tree and other exotic plants thrive next to staples like kale and potatoes.
One volunteer joked, “If it could be grown in Baltimore, Chippy’s probably tried it,” referring to the founder and director of the farm. “If it can’t be grown in Baltimore, he’s probably still tried it.”
Farmer Chippy is the leader of the farm (Photo by Lavinia Edmunds)
Richard Francis, better known as Farmer Chippy provides the inspiration for the grassroots efforts. “As a biomedical field service engineer my travels took me to amazing places with fun people and great food but the daily experience in hospitals, clinics and urgent care facilities continued to be disturbing,. . . . I had a burning desire to explore options that promoted a healthier quality of life for our youngest citizens,” said Farmer Chippy.
“I hope to be the engineer/farmer that popularizes the benefits of conventional medicine while exploring potential new research that brings cleaner, greener food close to less fortunate communities in Baltimore.”
On a visit in January, Farmer Chippy was checking in at the farm which even in the stark winter had la ot going on. Winter is the farmers spring, after all. The farm is adding 55 more boxes for growing more flowers and vegetables. A cluster of men were working on fixing a motor, while volunteers were handing out fresh food boxes; about 50 neighborhood residents in need of food lined up for a fresh vegetable drive-through that occurs each Thursday. Each box contains beets, potatos, apple ,cabbage and greens, all fresh and organic.
Farmer Chippy has carved out his own niche in the farming community. He just returned from a farmers’ organizational meeting in Puerto Rico where he brought seven student farmers to represent the only urban garden at the nationwide meeting of farmers. He says his farm can be a model for other urban communities in need of access to fresh food and nutrition. They make money selling produce in the spring, summer and fall, at three city farmers markets.
The farm’s next venture may be cannabis once legalization takes place. “It’s a gray area right now, but we’re trying to get things in place so that when recreational stuff is all legal we can hit the ground running,” Scott said
Besides growing crops, the farm seeks to educate city folk on expanding their palates for healthy food.
Tiara Matthews , a volunteer who has been working at the farm for eight years, sets up the food demos. Students learn how to make dinner through the demo, then they get the ingredients fresh from the farm and the recipe to take home and make the meal with their parents or grandparents. Today’s dish featured collards, eggs, potatoes and lavender.
To make the farm work, you have to have dedicated people and have to have funding and support, said Matthews. “We have a lot of youth support. Everyone lives around here. And they like to hang out here,” she added.
Tiara Matthews has been volunteering at the farm for 8 years (by Lavinia Edmunds
Farmer Chippy is not into corporate sponsorship but has received grants from sources as diverse as Rite-Aid and the Baltimore Community Fund. “We have our own capacity. We move around on our own dime,” he commented. Most of the money comes from sales to farmers markets.
Recently the farm received a grant to support agriculture curriculum in five city schools. Students will learn how to grow, harvest and market nutrient-dense food. Farmer Chippy points out the farm is one of ten selected by the American Farmers Bureau Federation as the one of the top ten innovative farms in the country.
When my friend Cynnie Keller Davis offered me a ticket to the Kentucky Arts and Writers Festival, I jumped at the opportunity, At 88, Wendell Berry was going to read, and he had just completed two new books: The Need to Be Whole and How It Went. http://www.berrycenterbookstore.orgWe hit the road to New Castle, Kentucky, for the weekend.
As an antidote to the terrible divisions in America, I keep reading more about his life, his environmental activism and his railing against unjust causes from the Vietnam War to strip mining, all the while living a good life, rooted in the land and family. His searing analysis of the perils of agribusiness in The Unsettling of America in 1977 rings true today. Berry is a champion of sustainable farming and poet of the farming life. “The soul of the local food movement,” food writer Mark Bittman calls him.
Cynnie is a Berry fan as well, drawing inspiration from Berry’s beautiful Sabbath poems, published in a thick volume, called This Day, among other works. As owner of Bellair Farm in Charlottesville (profiled last month), she is exploring ways to keep the farm in the black. So before seeing Wendell on Saturday at the festival, she arranged an interview Friday with Mary Berry, Wendell’s daughter and executive director of the Berry Center, to find out about a promising program they have developed to help local farmers develop sustainable crops that can yield stable incomes.
We drove out on a drizzly Friday afternoon from Louisville, a clean, prosperous city made wealthy from bourbon, horses and other industries. We followed the highway for 38 miles along the Kentucky River out to the farmlands that are home to Berry’s family and literary legacy. The well-clipped fields are hilly and green, dotted with cattle and simple, often faded, red and blue tobacco barns that reminded me of my home-county Halifax, Virginia.
The Berry Center occupies a prime location in New Castle. Further down the street is Our Homeplace Meat, and on the other side is the bookstore, full of all of Berry’s works and keepsake editions.
Arriving on Main Street in the town of New Castle, (population c.900), we could see the influence of the Berrys, in the bookstore housed in a renovated double log cabin, in the My Homeplace Meat shop and at the Berry Center, located in the gracious historic house, where we met Mary Berry,
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“We don’t have an agricultural problem. We have a culture problem,” begins Mary who often invokes her father in her soft but commanding southern accent. “We have to have a culture that supports small to midsize farmers and good land use.” We sat around a long oval wood table in the conference room, surrounded by wonderful photographs of Wendell on the farm when he was working with draft horses and writing his iconic nature poems,
Photos by the late James Hall, given to the Berry Center by his wife poet Mary Ann Taylor-Hall
Steeped in the heritage of her father and grandfather, Mary grew up on the farm (at times without running water or electricity) with parents Wendell and Tanya. Her grandfather, a lawyer who worked in Washington, D.C, developed the tobacco price support program, which she has researched at the center’s own archives. As an adult, she farmed burley tobacco. She and her husband at one point ran a successful CSA–all in the family tradition that goes back at least five generations in Henry County.
Their love and care for the land informs so much of what they do.
Tobacco Price-Support is a model
Surprising to me, the basis for their innovative idea is the federal Tobacco Price-Support program, developed in the 1930s, along with other commodity support programs. Using a tobacco coop to buy up excess tobacco, the program did not cost the government anything (see How the Tobacco Support System works for details, below.)
The central idea of the Tobacco Price-Support program was to stabilize prices for farmers through quotas limiting what each farmer could sell and guaranteeing minimum prices. “We are using the idea that you can control production and have a parity price. We can’t replicate the program my grandfather developed but what we can do is use its principles to give farmers decent pay and take them out of a boom and bust economy.”
This explanation of the Tobacco Price Support program is displayed at the Berry Center which promotes key elements of the program as a model to provide small farmers with a decent wage and stability.
For many good reasons, tobacco is not popular these days, even though I recall when it was king in Halifax County and many people including my uncles and grandfather, thrived in the business. Now the area is depressed, in need of a new staple of new infusion of income, or a different crop. Burley tobacco, used in cigarettes, reigned here in Kentucky as the top crop before the federal government eliminated the crucial support in 2004. In the transition from tobacco, Kentucky, which had once raised the most burley tobacco in the U.S., lost 10,000 farms. “We are going to have to do it without the government,” added Mary, who critiques policy from Washington which supports industrial agriculture to the detriment of small farms.
Mary said the local food movement has failed to reverse the decline.
Beginning in 2017, Mary gathered 12 small farmers from the area; some were picked by Wendell from his long-time associations as a fellow farmer, to work on ways to build up sustainable small farms with good practices.
All but one of the participants had farmed tobacco in the past and were searching for a way to find more sustainable ways to farm after tobacco.
Our Homeplace Meat: A local shop for local meat
To address the need for agricultural support, the Berry Center has developed four programs: the Agrarian Culture Center and Bookstore; The Archives where the historic documents about tobacco are stored; the Wendell Berry Farming program; and Our Homeplace Meat, all supported by a nonprofit 501-C funded by grants and donations. For Our Homeplace Meat, the Berry Center provides farmers with contracts that guarantee a higher price per pound than the standard market. “We started by figuring out the parity price per pound for cattle farmers,” explained Mary.
Each farmer raises more cattle than required in the contract. The emphasis is on pasture-raised quality—no GMOs, antibiotics, or steroids. What doesn’t make the grade at Homeplace Meat goes into the regular meat program and ends up in supermarkets. They send the grass-fed, finished cows for processing at Trackside Butcher Shoppe, a flourishing business located a few miles down the road.
Farmers don’t have to do processing or marketing. Creation Gardens, a food distribution company, has worked out a deal with Our Homeplace Meat to sell the beef to regional markets, including high-end restaurants eager for “local” produce, in Louisville, Cincinnati and elsewhere. Online sales feature cleverly designed packs.
We stopped by Our Homeplace Meat Shop, in a cozy wood frame house which has been converted to a store where you can buy fresh and frozen cuts from one quarter of a cow to one pound of burger meat. One customer was buying the popular Rose Veal, milk fed and grass fed, according to humanitarian standards. “Very tender and better than any other veal, he said. Prices are reasonable because the cost of transportation and advertising and even packaging are eliminated. “And the very cool thing is the farmers are all local,” says Sandy Canon, ringing up sales at the shop.
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The model for Our Home Place Meat could be used for anything farmers produce, Mary maintains. It’s working now for the Henry County farmers making $400-450 more per head of cattle, she says. Production is up 200 percent.
She admits for now the model depends on support from nonprofits. Eventually, though, with more parts falling into place, it could become a self-sufficient coop.
Amidst the dismal reports on the demise of the American farm, it is refreshing to see the positive programs coming from the Berry Center. They are adding to the farmer population, too, through the Wendell Berry Farming Program, which provides 12 students tuition-free education offering a BA degree in sustainable farming practices, in collaboration with Sterling College in Vermont.
While we didn’t see Berry that day, his presence is felt everywhere, whether in quotes on Berry Beef packages or on literature promoting the Berry Center programs. “What is important to me about the Berry Center and what I am learning from it, is its willingness to go to work at home on a small scale, to improve the economy of local farmers and, therefore, the health of the local land. This is radical now when public attention is all on global solutions to global problems. But what works here is likely to work elsewhere, whereas a global solution that won’t work locally is a waste of time,” says Berry. We would hear him and other Kentucky writers in person tomorrow (Saturday).
After the meeting with Mary, we drove out to the Berry Center farm, where the students work, located on 50 wooded acres in the Port Royal area where Berry has spent his most of his life. It’s quiet, sheep are gathered in a field just beyond a simple brick house. The sunset broke the sky up in bright pink, and everything seemed peaceful, in its right place, in this age-old rural landscape. This is local.
Dinner in a stall
We drove back to Louisville in blackness and turned off for dinner at Bar8 restaurant at Heritage farm in Goshen, 20 miles northeast of Louisville. It’s a beautiful horse farm, home to past Kentucky Derby winners and many other “local” attractions, as glitzy as Berry Center is noncommercial. It has converted the stable into a fancy farm to table restaurant that features food from its gardens and two pages of bourbon selections at its bar.
Dining in the horse stalls at Barn8, in Goshen, Kentuckywith Cynnie in back
The place was hopping. Diners were paying high prices for the farm ambience and local food. We ate delicious trout and crispy Brussel sprouts between the stalls.
No question, there is a market for local, for what is good, authentic, and delicious. Whatever form it takes, we just have to make sure the farmers get their share.
