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I first visited Whitted Bowers Farm in Cedar Grove in 2008, just a year after the farm had started. The long driveway crossed a huge open space, flanked with dirt-covered fields just waiting for their time to come. Rob and Cheri Bowers had bought the land only two years earlier. The couple had met at…
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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…
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One of the new farms on the Farm Tour this year [2013], Waterdog Farms in Hurdle Mills offers a restful, scenic experience and a chance to dip your feet in the Flat River. Rickie White and Christopher Fipps jumped into farming when the perfect farm came along. They lived in Carrboro but knew they wanted…
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Dani and Austin Genke’s journey to Boxcarr Farms in Cedar Grove began in New York City, where they met working at a restaurant while Austin was in culinary school. When Austin graduated, Dani followed him to his first job in Las Vegas, but they knew they wanted a different kind of restaurant: one that used …
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You’ve probably driven or biked past Hogan’s Magnolia View Farm hundreds of times. Just north of Carrboro, it’s located at that spot where Hillsborough Road comes to a “T” intersection, and you’re faced not with houses or new apartments or the entrance to yet another shopping center, but with a wide green field bordered by…
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Long furrows stretch out across the flat expanse of tilled ground at Transplanting Traditions Community Farm. Poking up from the earth are familiar plants like lettuce and onion, as well as naked stalks of lemongrass. The Farm is a project of the Orange County Partnership for Young Children (OCPYC ) that works to adapt refugee…
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It’s always a treat to be in a restaurant and see a “we buy local!” sign. I tend to assume that restaurants buy food from large companies, since I so often see distributors’ trucks parked on Main Street, hazard lights blinking as a man in uniform with a dolly wheels boxes of ingredients down the…
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The Farm Tour has many “favorites”—farms that get 500-600 visitors each day, where kids can ogle giant hogs, pecking chickens, and herding-dog puppies. But not all Farm Tourists enjoy wading through a crowd for Mapleview Ice Cream or trekking past multiple pastures to gather eggs at the Fickle Creek Egg Mobile. Want to get away…
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Cecilia Redding started Down 2 Earth Farms on 143 acres in Rougemont, NC. She’d been working in the food industry as an agricultural engineer but pursued her dream to farm when she found the land for sale. In 2012, Matt Ball, who lived on the property, joined her team. With the help of two part-time…
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Carolyn Twesten and Steve Rankin bought a run-down tobacco farm in 2010. It had no plumbing or electricity and an antique, inoperable well.  They moved onto the land in a camper and began restoring the house, and somehow managed to start farming, too. After just two years they started selling their produce and eggs at…
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