The story below is from our November/December 2018 issue. For the full issue Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
Roanoke’s young growers use social media and unique products to connect with consumers.
Betty Clicker Photography, courtesy Thornfield Farm
Veggies at Thornfield Farm
Susanna Thornton unpacks a series of grey plastic totes filled with the bounty from her fields — golden onions, shining peppers, box after box of tiny, orangey-red tomatoes.
She sets them out in pretty baskets atop burlap-covered folding tables beneath a pop-up tent at Sweet Donkey Coffee House.
For the next three hours a stream of customers stops by. Many have signed up with Thornfield Farm, Thornton’s Botetourt property, to pre-order their week’s veggies, meats, flowers and eggs online.
Betty Clicker Photography, courtesy of Thornfield Farm
Susanna Thornton checks on her harvest.
These shoppers likely receive Thornton’s email newsletter and follow her inviting Instagram feed. Their children might have attended her weeklong farm camp last summer or they may have sipped cider and hopped on a hayride in the fall.
For Thornton, the planting, harvesting, selling, it’s about more than making a living; it’s even bigger than growing good food. Thornton labors in oppressive heat and bitter cold, rarely taking a day off, all in the name of creating connection.
“We want shoppers to engage with their food in a positive way,” Thornton says as she snaps a bite of a purple-flecked Dragon Tongue bean. “My model is less about the community supporting me as a farmer and more about me educating them about why it’s better to eat food that’s fresh and local.”
Thornton is not the person that comes to mind when most of us think “farmer.” She’s a 32-year-old college graduate, who grew up on the land she’s now farming, but spent a decade far from home and agriculture and only found her way back after a yearlong apprenticeship in Maine.
But if she’s not your everyman farmer, she is one of a growing crop of food producers that’s shaking up agriculture’s status quo. Recent U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics show that for only the second time in a century, the number of farmers under the age of 35 is on the rise.
Further data from the 2012 Census of Agriculture reveal more details of these young farmers: 69 percent have college degrees; the majority do not come from farming families; they work land holdings of less than 50 acres. They chose farming because of deeply held beliefs about the environment, the security of the food system, the importance of clean farming practices. Farming for them is less a job than a chosen lifestyle.
In Roanoke, Thornton is not alone in her use of social media, her consumer-focused marketing, her desire to build community among grower and eater. Or her age.
A walk through the Grandin Village Farmers Market — where Thornfield Farm sells every Saturday from April to November — reveals a third of the vendors are farmers under 40.
The result is a market with a creative vibe and intensely local, often unusual products, such as flats of microgreens, bright yellow pawpaws, shiitake mushrooms, meat rabbits, cartons of colorful eggs, locally milled grains and wholesome baked goods.
“The reason the Grandin market started was to be open to small-scale, sustainable farmers,” says Maureen Best, executive director of Local Environmental Agriculture Project or LEAP, a Roanoke-based nonprofit that manages the Grandin Village market and several other local food initiatives. The market was set up with strict definitions of local (grown within 100 miles) and an emphasis on transparency, which created an atmosphere welcoming to young, innovative growers. “Farmers seek out other farmers with similar value practices,” she says.
With land prices still relatively affordable in the Roanoke region and the city’s profile rising among millennials, coming years could see even more young farmers looking to put down Roanoke roots.
Urban Farmer Moves to Town
In October 2017, now-30-year-old Cameron Terry moved from Denver to Roanoke with his girlfriend and a dream.
His big idea was to farm small urban plots that belonged to other people, then sell the vegetables he raised at market. He’d be using land in a more productive way, spending his days doing something he loved, increasing the supply of local food, educating people along the way and not going into debt in the process.
Courtesy of Cameron Terry
Cameron Terry, hard at work on his farm.
His girlfriend’s parents offered their yard as a starting point, so Terry got busy prepping beds there.
The pieces really began to fall in place when Terry connected with Roanoke Community Garden Association and they told him about a partnership with Carilion Clinic in Southeast Roanoke’s Morningside neighborhood. RCGA would have community gardening plots for rent and Carilion would fund an urban farm to be used as teaching tool and way to raise food to be donated to the community. Carilion was looking for someone to plan, plant and harvest that space.
“I felt very fast that I was in the right place trying to do the right thing at the right time,” Terry says.
As the growing season wound to a close, Terry’s business, Garden Variety Harvests, had secured five yards and plots across the city.
“It’s all gone better than I expected, truthfully,” he says. “I had skepticism that the farming community would embrace my idea.”
But, Terry says his produce has sold well at the Grandin market. As he expands production, he plans to sell more to area restaurants, who he says are hungry for fresh, local vegetables and herbs.
“I know I’m not going to get rich,” says Terry, who graduated from film school in 2009, intending to create documentaries. But he thinks Roanoke is the right place to allow him to build a good, growing life.
“Small farming is the way of the past and the way of the future,” he says.
Choosing Farms Despite Challenges
The hurdles that stand in the way of success for all farmers — young and old, new and experienced — are high.
USDA statistics show that 12,000 farms closed nationwide from 2016 to 2017. One million acres of farmland were lost in that same year. Fifty percent of farms across the country documented less than $10,000 in sales that year.
Land is expensive to acquire; the need to buy seed, equipment and other supplies upfront drags growers into debt; small farmers struggle to gain access to customers when shoppers can buy food more cheaply and conveniently at supermarkets.
All of which makes it remarkable that anyone, at any age, chooses farming.
But that’s exactly what Daniel and Kelly Key did.
Liz Long
Kelly and Daniel Key of Truffula Farms
The couple bought six and a half acres and a 1920s house at the Southeastern edge of Roanoke City two years ago. Their land is steep, rocky and shaded — which has forced them to be innovative with what they grow and how they grow it.
In addition to working full-time jobs, Daniel and Kelly raise rabbits, chickens, ducks, hogs, vegetables, mushrooms and bees. They bring a range of products to the Grandin market every other week: eggs and produce, as well as Kelly’s baked goods and cocktail bitters.
Their to-do list is never ending — weed, build, research, plant, harvest, can, deliver. “We have a lot of hopes and dreams right now,” says Kelly, 31. “We’re trying to figure out how much we can handle.”
They raise rabbits for meat — about 50 a year — which they sell to area restaurants. They’d like to expand that part of the business, but it’s more complicated than simply scaling up.
“Because we’re so small right now, everything is incredibly inefficient,” Daniel, 32, explains. “If we invested in infrastructure, it would be easy to double that number.”
The Keys moved to the area in 2014 after working on farms in Massachusetts and California. Daniel’s parents own Key Living Options, a business that staffs small group homes for people with intellectual disabilities. He works there four days a week.
The couple began by gardening in their rental home yard, then farmed for a year at the Catawba Sustainability Center. But growing on ground that wasn’t theirs taught them they needed to find a farm of their own.
Now, they’re free to clear land and improve soil as they see fit. But they still struggle with the everyday realities of farm life: how to beat the bean beetles and keep predators from killing the chickens. How to give the rabbits pasture time without letting them escape. Where best to invest the limited time and money they have.
“Usually we just deal with what comes at us,” Kelly says.
As hard as it is, though, this is where they want to be: doing right by their animals, choosing farming practices that give back to the environment. Most of all, participating in a community that works together to sustain itself.
“To me, it’s all about the people,” says Daniel. Eating food raised by neighbors, helping one another, learning from other growers. “It’s just such a much more meaningful experience.”
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