By Emily Buehler, Weaver Street Market Website Coordinator
With two perfectly sunny days last weekend, the 2009 Piedmont Farm Tour was certainly a success—we’ll let you know the numbers when they’ve been tallied.
I visited the new Maple View Farm Agricultural Center, located across the fields from the well-known Country Store on Dairyland Road between Carrboro and Hillsborough. The large red building is just a fence away from the Maple View cows grazing in their pasture. Inside the foyer, poster displays showed the milking herd, the bottling facilities, and samples of what the cows eat in addition to grass: barley silage (with crimson clover), corn silage, grain (including ground corn and occasionally other grains) and whole cotton seed. (Maple View Farm grows its grain and grinds it on the farm.) They also had their own grass-fed beef for sale.
Down the hallway past classrooms filled with plants, dirt, and hutches of baby chickens, I exited the building to reach the animal pens: goats, pigs, a lone calf, and even a llama stood in the shade, watching the Farm Tour visitors. A shady path led to a pond where geese cruised around or preened on the bank. Newly planted gardens covered the hillside.
The new facility is an agritourism center that “encourages children and adults to experience agricultural life though hands-on experiences” and “strives to educate its visitors about the benefits of sustainable agriculture.” During the week it will host school groups, and starting in May it will be open to the public on weekends for $8/person. It also offers birthday party packages. To read more about the Agricultural Center and Maple View Farm’s operations, visit their website here. http://www.mapleviewfarm.com/
Maple View Farm milk, butter, and ice cream are available at the Farm’s Country Store and at stores across the Triangle including all three Weaver Street Market locations. The milk comes in reusable glass bottles, which require a deposit of $1.50. (This is the same price charged to Weaver Street Market, so you can return the bottles to the Country Store without losing money.) If you’ve never had milk in glass bottles from our local dairy farm, you must give it a try.