60. Big News!
550 days ago I announced on this blog that Garden Variety Harvests, in solidarity with the Southwest Virginia Agrarian Commons, was searching for a piece of property to move our farm onto. It is with great excitement that I officially announce the news that has been bubbling around our local food community for months: we’ve found our new farm!
The new GVH headquarters is a place you may already know as the Lick Run Farm and Community Market, and more seasoned Roanokers may remember the Crowell Nursery that operated on this land dating back at least five decades ago. We’ll be at the corner of 10th Street and Andrews Road in the Washington Park neighborhood. The property measures about 3.5 acres in total and offers not just plenty of vegetable growing space (3-4x the current GVH footprint), but also a chance to steward a small pond system and perennial food-bearing gardens. Our vision is to have a farm with an open-gate policy: when the gate is open, the public is welcome to come take a walk around the gardens or picnic under the trees. And one of our first priorities is to make sure that our vegetables are available for purchase through a help-yourself farm-stand!
We owe so many thanks to so many individuals and groups for helping this opportunity come to fruition. Truthfully the remainder of this blog could develop into a list of all the folks I’m grateful for as this land search comes to an end. First in line are the previous stewards of this land led by retiring farmer Rick Williams. When Rick took possession of this space some twelve years ago, it was an overgrown abandoned mess of weed trees and falling-down outbuildings. The work of clearing and shaping land is painstaking; no vegetable farmers like doing it but we all appreciate it very much. It’s that labor that enables me to even envision a vegetable farm when I look at this place.
I also must thank the Agrarian Trust, LEAP, the Peckman family, American Farmland Trust, The Harvest Collective, and every other organization that has contributed their time and dollars to sharing the cost of supporting this urban agriculture dream. Land deals are complicated and confusing and layered and there’s no way I could have been able to land this plane by myself. But these copilots helped to continue progress, answering all the questions right along with me. And when the time came for the community to voice their opinion on our plan, a couple dozen people wrote letters to the Board of Zoning Appeals to declare their support for our plan to run an agricultural operation on parcels zoned “residential” and “commercial”. To read those affirming words from you all did so much to bolster my confidence that we’re on the right track.
The move to Lick Run will be gradual: it’ll take a few years before all the potential vegetable fields are brought into production. But since we’re staying urban, GVH doesn’t have to get out of the business of farming yards immediately. The backyard micro-farms and the relationships with landowners are already established and relatively minimal from a maintenance perspective. We’ll look to have most of our vegetable washing and packing happening at the new site as soon as we can, but much of our market fare will be coming from the yard plots in 2022. The beauty of moving such a short distance is that we can do a little bit at a time as the infrastructure improvements allow. I’ll still be doing a lot of driving in the farm truck this year, but I can see the light at the end of that tunnel.
Taking urban land into the commons with the goal of restorative food production is revolutionary work. This means that this small farm will never be bought or sold again; it’ll never be absorbed into a commodity operation or developed into an office park. For as long as humans inhabit the city of Roanoke, we can expect that farmers will be working this land to feed this community. I often daydream about what it would be like to meet the 5th or 10th person to be farming this land. I imagine what they may be producing and how their passions lead them to cultivate the land in different ways. It’s exciting to be contemplating a legacy in such a real way as we start to work these soils.
Very shortly the Southwest Virginia Agrarian Commons will be launching a public fundraiser to pay for the acquisition of this land. Land deals are not cheap and regenerative farming doesn’t capitalize in the same way a unicorn tech start-up does, so we will need the support of the community to seal this deal. The Agrarian Commons has achieved so much in similar fundraisers in other parts of the country and I’m beyond grateful to have them leading the campaign to pay for this legacy-building land transfer. Please be prepared to share, give, and share again until we reach our goal.
It’s stupefying to consider the route I’ve taken to get to this point: having left Colorado as a gardener who wanted to farm five years ago and building the skills and relationships to forge a completely new and incredibly fulfilling career. Now my immediate family has completely relocated to call this place home and I couldn’t be more humbled by how willing people have been to embrace and play part in this yard-farming dream. The land search is officially over, but the farm is just getting started!