As dozens of children in rain boots tromped through a field trip at Hickory Nut Gap Farm, a minor crisis arose in the farm store.
“Jamie, this is the last of our cider,” said a solemn-faced worker, proffering a half-empty jug of amber liquid.
Jamie Ager, a Warren Wilson College grad and fourth-generation farmer on this rolling 500-acre swath of Fairview property, handled it in stride, directing his crew to grab some apples and press some more on the fly, like a chef in a busy restaurant kitchen.
With the opening of his new on-site deli, Ager is now many things at once: restaurant owner, farmer, store manager and more.
Hickory Nut Gap is a working farm first, but also an idyllic destination for agritourism with baby animals to ogle, pumpkins to pick and cider to guzzle. But even though it breeds a brand-new set of problems, economic diversification is the name of the game in modern farming.
“Agriculture in general needs to get a little more entrepreneurial,” Ager said. “A lot of farmers feel entitled to live the lifestyle they live, and that’s never true in the American way of life, for better or for worse. You have to figure out how to be creative and make the numbers work.”
But making the numbers work represents a significant barrier to young farmers getting into the business, especially in a region where land prices are exploding.
“Farming has never been a business to get into if you’re trying to make a bunch of money,” Ager said. “But it definitely helps to have the land – you’ve got to have land to farm.”
Finding strategic advantages
Ager’s great-grandfather Jim McClure, a Yale-educated minister, fell in love with this Fairview property a century ago while on honeymoon with his new bride Elizabeth, who studied painting with Claude Monet.
They stumbled across the landowner at the Old Sherrill’s Inn, now a popular wedding destination and a money-maker in its own right. The property belonged to a wealthy 22-year-old woman stuck in marriage with an 80-year-old, and the McClures purchased it from her on the spot, saving her from her less-than-ideal existence.
In the ensuing years, McClure started the Farmers Federation, a cooperative organization with a goal to bring better agriculture to Western North Carolina.
“That was kind of his mission, to take this post-Civil War, rural Appalachian area, with people just sort of scraping by, to more of an agricultural economy,” Ager said.
By all accounts, the group was successful until its dissolution in the ’60s, using its purchasing power to buy feed and seed at deep discounts. It also founded the Hatchery, the River Arts District building where the White Duck Taco Shop is now, and another Roberts Street building, now home to the Wedge Brewery.
Much of that and other farming infrastructure in WNC was built using money McClure raised through his involvement with Yale’s Skull and Bones Society, creating a family legacy to last a century and beyond.
“Everyone’s got their own strategic advantages, you just have to figure out what yours are,” Ager said.
Land a big barrier
But even with a good strategy, issues still remain for young farmers. And tourism, it seems, can be a double-edged sword.
According to a recent report by Carolina Organic Growers School, many say their biggest barrier to farming is finding affordable land to lease, rent or buy.
Of more than 150 local farmers surveyed, 72 percent had been farming for fewer than 10 years; 48 percent were 39 years old or younger.
Cameron Farlow, the farmer programs coordinator for the nonprofit school, said that the area’s increasing popularity is one “major factor” in the complex issue of lack of land availability.
But Charlie Jackson, executive director of the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, says steep land prices in Buncombe County aren’t a farmer-specific problem.
“If you ask a baker ‘What’s your biggest barrier to having a store in Asheville?’ it would probably be the same,” he said.
Jackson said WNC “blows away” other regions in terms of local food sales. And that’s in large part due to visitors to the region.
“Tourism is very connected to the profitability of farming,” he said.
More problematic, he said, might just be heightened expectations from young farmers trying to get into the business.
“There’s a romantic ideal about (farming), and I actually don’t have a big problem with land being a significant barrier,” he said. “Because if you can’t overcome that barrier, you’re probably not going to succeed as a farm business.”
Jackson said the key to surviving may just be adaptability.
“Food production is what everyone wants to get into, but it’s also one of the hardest things to do,” he said. “That’s why only 15 percent of the farms in Buncombe County actually grow food.”
Building business, from the ground up
Christina Carter and her husband Kevin Toomey, owners of Ten Mile Farm, which supplies produce to Asheville restaurants like Table, are more than familiar with the challenges of food production.
After nine years of significant issues finding land, the couple in December secured a 24-acre piece of McDowell County. Parcels that Carter considered in Buncombe County reached $28,000 an acre — without a house.
“In the beginning, we weren’t making enough to afford it, and then there was the property bubble,” she explained. “You could afford to buy the land, or you could buy a house, but you couldn’t get both.”
Carter said flat, tillable acreage is in high demand in an area of the country with the topography of a rumpled blanket.
But even with nearly a decade of land headaches, she wouldn’t have gone about it any other way.
The struggles — a flood, a lease not renewed — gave the couple time to discover who they really were as farmers.
“It’s hard work; you have to fail a lot,” she said. “And you have to develop your market. I can plant 30 acres of vegetables but, if I don’t have anywhere to sell it, it doesn’t matter.”
Asher Wright, farm manager at Warren Wilson College, recently named one of the 40 Best College Farms in America by CollegeRanker.com and among “The 20 Best College Farms” by Best College Reviews, said farmers’ difficulty in finding land is nothing new.
“You go back in literature to even the Colonial days and find farmers lamenting the expense of land,” he said.
Business sense — or the lack thereof — is an even greater issue, he said.
Even as Warren Wilson excels at farming and science, it does not have a business-development program.
Though he covers cash flow and business sense when working with students, Wright said programs like Mountain BizWorks and those available at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College can further help fill that void.
But without proper business training, farming can come with a steep learning curve.
“At the end of the day, the easy part is raising the animals and growing the vegetables,” he said. “The hard part is marketing yourself, selling your product and creating a brand, whether that’s a bodacious farm stand or a meat label like Hickory Nut Gap has created.”
Creating a legacy
At Hickory Nut Gap, tourists are milling about the new butchery and deli, buying burgers made from cattle from the farm’s meat brand and drinking more freshly pressed cider.
It’s important that the farm leverage the focus on local and the nose-to-tail meat ethos to its advantage, Ager said. It’s keeping the food on the farm and saving money on processing costs, but it’s also keeping the family on the farm, what Jackson of ASAP said is one key to sustaining WNC’s thriving agriculture.
“We have three sons, and we want to build a business that’s going to have the ability to continue to create the good family legacy that we have here,” Ager said.
Even though the Fairview land is protected by a conservation easement, and will be for the foreseeable future, Hickory Nut Gap, until recently, had never been properly branded, he said.
But there are plenty of opportunities for a young farmer with a good business head, he said, pausing to wave as his cousin drove down the road, past the sightseers eating cider doughnuts
“The continuity and the rootedness of it is pretty powerful,” he said. “And it’s pretty uncommon in the modern day. But for a fired-up young person, there’s good opportunity on land — if you can do it.”
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