My farmer neighbors

Living on the land, with the land

It’s Friday afternoon and I’m bumping down a country road in my truck, headed for Sam and Kendra’s farm to pick up my family’s weekly share of vegetables and eggs.

Every time I drive this five-minute trip, I am supremely happy. Supporting small-scale, local, sustainable agriculture feels like such a worthwhile thing.

First of all, I get healthy, fresh food that was grown only a mile from my house. That’s about as teeny a carbon footprint as you can get.

Also, I’m contributing – in a small but significant way – to this young couple’s efforts to live close to the land. I’m one of the customers who helps them make a living from the Earth. My dollars directly support their commitment to grow food and flowers in ways that are healthier not only for humans, but also the planet.

Sam Whigham and Kendra Schirmer are my neighbors in this green valley that lies in the shadow of the Southern Blue Ridge Escarpment, where rolling hills meet the mountains. Between their land and ours, a ribbon of a trout river gurgles through the pastures where Sam grazes his Red Devon cattle.

As I crest the top of a hill, I see Sam up ahead on his ATV, herding the cows from one field into another. Every day he moves them to fresh pasture. It’s a practice called rotational grazing, and it means that Sam’s cattle are totally grass-fed. No grain. No antibiotics. No chemicals.

Yessiree, those are some healthy bovines.

“They get fat on grass,” Sam says. “And their meat is full of omega-3 fatty acids.”

Sam says his Red Devon cows are “very social and docile.”

Sam is all about regenerative agriculture: no tilling or plowing, which destroys topsoil. No synthetic fertilizers, no pesticides. Some of these 90 acres his family owns used to be chemical-soaked commercial tomato fields. Sam’s going to turn them around, no matter how long it takes.

The cows are his colleagues in this worthy venture.

“They’re trampling and pruning weeds, by walking on them and eating them. And they inoculate the soil with microbes from their waste,” he says. “You’re reseeding, you’re fertilizing, you’re building soil.”

Sam also raises laying hens and broilers. His flock of Rhode Island Reds are prolific egg layers — and I can testify that they’re chatty gals. I always stop to say hello when I visit the farm.

Sam’s half-acre of vegetables, surprisingly, reaps the highest return of anything he produces. Sam focuses on tried-and-true varieties he can count on selling – not expensive gourmet oddities.

“I want to grow things people will recognize and buy,” he says.

I’m here to tell you: Sam grows some fine-tasting carrots.

Right now, in the height of summer, my weekly produce basket from Sam’s farm includes:

• Lettuce (we had a cool, rainy June so the salad greens kept going)

• Kale

• Collards

• Daikon radish

• Carrots

• Cucumbers

• Yellow squash

• Cabbage

• Beets

  

Earlier in the season, there were red radishes, garlic scapes, and arugula — honestly the most delicious I’ve ever tasted. Later on, as summer’s heat intensifies, there’ll be fresh figs and tomatoes. (My husband, Jim, eagerly awaits those tomatoes.)

As with all community-supported agriculture programs, you never know exactly what you’ll get each week. Whatever is ready to be harvested is what goes into the basket. And that’s the fun of it, for me. I love the surprises nature has in store for us.

My recipe file has grown exponentially, as I find new ways to use the weekly bonanza of vegetables. (Jim and I have recently gotten into roasting instead of steaming. Wow, what a tasty difference!)

Sam and Kendra with their cat, Mullein

Sam and Kendra have lived here, in their century-old farmhouse, for nine years.

They met in Nashville, where Sam was interning at a farm and playing music with friends.  Kendra was working in restaurants, after finishing a degree in photography.

Sam told Kendra about his parents’ land in a pastoral mountain valley near the border of South and North Carolina, twenty-five minutes from the nearest town. He said he wanted to head down there and become a farmer. Make a living off the land.

Kendra -- who grew up in the mountains of New Jersey -- thought it over, but not for long. She too liked the idea of living closer to nature. They packed up and moved.

Almost a decade later, their life together is a healthy mix of food and flowers, land and love.  There’s also a lot of hard physical labor. Days off are rare.

Sam’s father, Roger, helps him with bookkeeping and some of the bigger tasks such as mending fences, maintaining water lines, and fixing tractors. Eastatoee Community Farm is a family affair.

Early every Saturday morning, Sam loads his truck with meat, eggs, and produce and drives up the mountain to the Transylvania Farmer's Market, just across the state line into North Carolina. Sam has been a regular at the market for eight years. He has loyal, long-time customers who visit his booth every week. The market is unusual in that it operates year-round, even during the Appalachian winter.

“People show up when it’s sleeting,” he says, with a grin.

Meanwhile, Kendra has grown her own thriving business called Laurel Creek Florals, named for the small stream that bisects their farm. (Check out Kendra’s website. It’s a thing of beauty.) She started with flower farming, selling homegrown bouquets to local retailers and grocers.

“That was labor intensive, and the profit margin was low,” she says. Plus, it involved driving long distances every week, burning a lot of fossil fuel, to make deliveries.

Gradually her focus shifted to creating custom-designed floral installations for weddings and other events. Kendra refers to her signature as “garden style.”

If a bride wants her wedding flowers to look natural and individual, as opposed to mass-produced, Kendra gets the call -- because her flowers are either cultivated right here on the farm or sourced from other local growers.

In the case of flowers that struggle to grow in the heat and humidity here (roses, for example), she has them shipped from a sustainable grower in Oregon who uses minimal packaging and does not dip the flowers in fungicide, as other floral shippers do.

Dahlias, zinnias, and cosmos are some of the species Kendra loves to grow herself. When she needs greenery to augment her arrangements, she might cut branches from nearby invasive-but-pretty shrubs … or use twigs of mountain laurel, since it grows so abundantly on their land.

Kendra and a row of phlox

Kendra is passionate about keeping her carbon footprint low in an industry known for excessive waste. Everything she uses, from vases to chicken-wire frames, gets recycled. Faded, spent flowers and foliage go in the compost heap. Kendra makes it a point not to use floral foam (those green blocks which serve as the base of most floral arrangements), because it degrades into microplastics.

Her arrangements feature hand-torn silk ribbons that she dyes with plant-based pigments made from leftover flowers. She dreams of teaching natural dye workshops and launching online sales.

Later this year, though, Kendra will be scaling back her work schedule, for a happy reason: There’s a baby on the way! She has found a midwife who will help her have a home birth, right here on the farm.

The couple knows first-time parenthood will change their lifestyle in many ways, but they have no plans to stop farming or to uproot themselves from this valley they call home.

“People ask me, ‘How can you live way out here?’ “ Kendra says. “But how could I ever live anywhere else?”

As they stand arm in arm, looking out across their land after a summer rainstorm, Sam is just as sure as Kendra that they’re here to stay.

“I’m not goin’ anywhere,” he says.