Community Owned Natural Foods Grocery
Debbie Donnald and Audrey Lin never take a break. The founders of Two Chicks Farm in Hillsborough spend their summers growing produce in the fields and in shade houses, and their winters growing in hoophouses and ramping up production of their preserves: fermented krauts and kimchis, pickled vegetables, and their infamous pepper jelly. They attend…
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Daniel and Allison Cooper have returned to the farm. Cooper-Lasley Farm has been in Daniel’s family for seven generations, transforming from the original 1797 homestead into a dairy farm and then, when the dairy prices dropped in the 1980s, into row crops. But the farm had fallen into disuse. Daniel met Allison on the school…
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Want a bigger garden in your life? Think you’re limited by the size of your yard, or your full-time job? Then check out the MacAllers’ Four Leaf Farm in Rougemont, ten miles northeast of Hillsborough. “It’s a mixed ‘farmlet,’” jokes Helga MacAller of their farm, a relatively small property with so much going on, you…
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In the ten-plus years that they’ve been farming on Dimmocks Mill Road in Hillsborough, Richard Holcomb and Jamie DeMent have built quite an establishment. Their fifty-five acres contain impressive rows of every vegetable imaginable, woodlands filled with hogs, mobile chicken coops, a barn, and a sawmill that turns trees from the farm into lumber for…
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Farm Boy Farms started as a homebrewing venture, but it’s grown into much more. Dan Gridley still brews beer, but he also grows hops and works with neighboring farmers to grow barley, which he malts and sells. The side business is more than a hobby. Dan wants to further the craft beer industry in our…
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Portia McKnight and Flo Hawley began the Chapel Hill Creamery in 2001. They planned to buy North Carolina milk to make their cheeses, but production had declined so much that the state often needed to import milk. Undaunted, they purchased land south of Dairyland Road and cleared and converted it to pasture with a mix…
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Meredith Leight has big plans for the land at Granite Springs Farm. What began as a small family farm is poised to become an intentional community of farmers, food artisans, and craftsmen. Meredith and her husband Ed started the farm west of Pittsboro in 2009. “It was an expression of hope,” she says, “because he…
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