Loose Leaf Notes

~ The following appeared in The Floyd Press on April 14, 2011

Floyd County is known for its vibrant music and art scene.  It’s also been fertile ground to a flourishing of sustainable agriculture, which has recently been gaining recognition.  Since the early 1990’s small market growers and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms have been putting down roots in the county, adding a renewed green twist to Floyd’s longtime farming tradition.

Tenley Weaver and Dennis Dove have been at the forefront of Floyd’s local food movement, both as certified organic market growers at their Full Circle Farm and as owners of Good Food Good People (GFGP), a retail and wholesale distributor of farm fresh products that links regional farmers and consumers within a 100 mile radius.

With as many as 30 local growers providing a wide variety of fresh organic and biologically grown vegetables, herbs, and no/low spray fruits to area restaurants and caterers, farmers markets, health food stores and colleges –  and with one of the largest CSAs in Virginia – GFGP is a labor of love that has really taken off.

“It’s the cooperation of the growers and the support of the suppliers and consumers that has made it a success,” Weaver said from a desk tucked in a back corner of GFGP’s Greens Garage.  The Garage, which Weaver refers to as a “farm stand and more,” is a community outlet for local produce, eggs and dairy, locally baked bread, honey, hormone-free grass fed beef and pork and more.   It also houses spring seedlings and organic farm supplies and serves as a CSA packing station and pick-up site.

CSAs have been increasing in popularity over the last two decades. They foster relationships between farmers and retail consumers, who pre-purchase farm shares at the start of the growing season and are paid back in produce harvest.   GFGP provided approximately 300 CSA fruit shares and 130 vegetable shares in 2010, up from 50 vegetable shares in 2009.

Along with Fresh Fruit Shares and Fresh Vegetable Shares, GFGP also offers a Fresh Egg Share and a Handcrafted Food Share, which features locally produced food and craft food prepared with local ingredients, such as grass pastured meats, cheeses, baked goods, homemade pastas, jams, salsas, chutneys and more.  Weaver explained that jam made from local berries and bread made from local wheat are considered “value-added foods,” an important part of the local food chain system that keeps food dollars in the local economy.

Rounding out their local food offering is GFGP’s Ala Carte virtual order program, which allows customers to pre-order by email value-added items that are carried at the Greens Garage.  Unlike CSA produce, which is delivered weekly from April through December at drop-off sites in Floyd, Roanoke, or Blacksburg, Ala Carte orders are delivered every two weeks year round.    GFGP also wholesales fresh vegetables grown in hoop greenhouses throughout the winter.

In 2009 GFGP purchased their first official delivery truck.  Today they have “a fleet,” comprised of 2 vans and 2 trucks. They currently employ approximately 10 part-time workers during peak season, including packers, delivery drivers, a Greens Garage manager, a share coordinator, and staff for farmers market booths.

Recently GFGP formed a partnership with Homestead Creamery, a retail market and dairy operation based in Franklin County. With a goal of sustaining local family farms, the creamery has been bringing old fashioned back into fashion, making milk truck deliveries of fresh dairy products, eggs and more to homes and stores since 2006.  Beginning with the 2011 growing season, GFGP will provide Homestead Creamery with a custom share of produce, which has the potential to double the size of GFGP’s CSA program.   To accommodate that growth, Weaver and Dove are looking for an expanded headquarters site, preferably raw land Weaver noted, so that more energy efficiency can be built into the operation.

As homesteaders who live off the grid, Weaver and Dove were initially reluctant business owners, but they are passionate about market growing and understand the contribution GFGP is making towards a sustainable local economy. Through GFGP they have been able to support local growers to make decent wages, lessen food miles and provide “something tangible for our friends and neighbors to eat,” said Dove, a former Virginia Tech environmental researcher of crops and soil sciences. “We wake up and look out the window and see our work for the day. It’s the most rewarding work I can think of,” he added.

Weaver, who has a degree in literature, discovered her passion for wholesome food while working at a health food store in Delaware, where she went to school. She gives credit to the “historical moment” – referring to the recent positive media attention given to green businesses and lifestyles – for helping to propel GFGP to success. “We were in the right place at the right time. We couldn’t have done this 20 years ago.”

As the country has seen with recent bailouts of financial markets, conglomerates can be susceptible to collapse. Whether banks or farms, small local businesses offer a diversity that promotes security. “Food safety and security is increased by thriving small farms. If there’s a problem at one farm you have more to rely on,” Weaver explained. “When you focus your food source on a few multi-nationals, you get things like the recent widespread peanut contamination or the outbreak of E. coli in spinach, a problem that affects many people in a severe way.”

Markets for organically produced local foods are growing steadily and market growing is increasingly becoming a profitable way to make a living. But the work is hard and the hours are many for Weaver and Dove.  “We work on a shoestring. We don’t do debt,” Weaver said.

Explaining how their grassroots business has been built on friendships, Weaver cited an 85 year old orchardist whose farm provides the bulk of their Fresh Fruit Share as one of her greatest inspirations. “He’s one of the few people I know that is truly satisfied. He’s got his homestead scene together. He’s happy with what he’s created, loves his job and isn’t striving for more and more.”

Along with the produce that Weaver and Dove grow for GFGP on three acres of their 25 acre Floyd homestead, small farms in other parts of Floyd County, as well as those in Montgomery, Carroll, Patrick, Campbell, and Giles County, custom grow for GFGP.

Walker Mountain Community Farms is a collective of Amish families near Pearisburg that has been providing produce for GFGP for more than a decade.  “We started out working with the fathers of the younger generation that we work with now. The sons we work with now were eight years old when we started,” said Weaver, who frequently profiles local growers in the newsletter she pens for the business.

Relationships, whether with food or with people, are a foundational theme at GFGP. The business grew out of friendships and conversations with other growers who had a mutual desire for more local market opportunities, Dove explained.  He described how this area was a hotbed of local agriculture (most notably cabbage and apples) that funneled into the Roanoke Market up until the early 1960’s.   Today, the majority of beef cattle, dairy products, and Christmas trees produced in Floyd County are transported to markets out of the region.

One of GFGP’s goals is to attract more small farmers to Floyd to help incubate the local food system.  Both Dove and Weaver would like to see the construction of a produce wash/pack house that small farmers could use as a shared resource.  It’s costly for each small farm to privately invest in equipment that meets food safety standards, Weaver stated.

“Local food has brought us a long way.   We have to preserve our regional agriculture,” Dove said.

“We’re just doing what people have done since time immemorial. It’s only been in our generation that this has seemed new,” Weaver added.     ~ Colleen Redman

Notes: Tenley Weaver can be contacted at 540 745-4347 or at goodfoodgoodpeople@swva.net.  The above was adapted from an earlier article I wrote about GFGP.