Financing Our Foodshed (14 page)

When I asked him how things were going, Alfred replied:

Impressive. But there’s even more. He served on the interim board of directors that established the new South Durham Farmers Market, and the Eno River Farmers Market, where Alfred first started selling bread, tapped him to serve on their board. Recently, Alfred received a grant from the US Department of Agriculture to build a high tunnel as large as 2,600 square feet.

Last fall, at the Carolina Farm Stewardship Annual Conference, I saw Alfred sitting with a throng of young farmers. He was patiently answering their questions. Because Alfred knows a tremendous amount about plants, he has become a great resource for our local food and farming community. Industrious is an understatement. If you get a chance, go meet Alfred and talk plants. It’s fascinating. Galveston’s loss has certainly been North Carolina’s gain.

It is always a pleasure to see Mackenzie and Tucker at the Thursday and Saturday farmers market in Pittsboro. I can count on them for great food and laughter. I know I’ll find them amidst large coolers of their locally grown, naturally raised Lilly Den Farm meat. Somewhere nearby will be two very cute, lively, locally grown redheads: Dennet and his sister, Lilly.

For over four years, Lilly Den Farm has been producing quality meats and selling them at farmers markets and to restaurants
and other businesses. From “pint to pasture to plate” is how Lilly Den hamburgers are described on the Carolina Brewery’s restaurant menu. That’s because part of the farm’s feedstock comes from the brewery’s own spent grain. Local cows on a local food diet!

As it says on Lilly Den’s website, animals are raised in a way that should give their customers “peace of mind knowing the meat was raised as naturally, and humanely as possible.”

That’s the way Tucker was taught to farm. He’s a third-generation farmer and has been farming since he was a teenager. Mackenzie is a “city girl from Staten Island, NY, who fell in love with a country boy and the farming way of life,” she told me with a smile. She also teaches fourth grade.

Mackenzie first approached me about a Slow Money loan for new labels. Their meat production had grown to the point where they needed a particular type of label required by the health department.

Printing these labels would cost $500. It made for a perfect small Slow Money loan.

The friend who made the loan is a regular shopper at the Chatham Marketplace, which carries Lilly Den Farm’s chicken, pork, and beef, so we came up with a fun option for her payback: She got a $500 Marketplace gift card, to use whenever she wanted. Over the next six months, a portion of the $500 was deducted from the money that the store would have paid Lilly Den Farm for their meat. It was a win for everybody — and another “first” for Slow Money NC. We love finding innovative ways to finance our local foodshed.

New labels for Lilly Den Farm.

Several months later, Tucker talked to us about needing to purchase a skid steer. (No, it’s not a large cow that enjoys sliding around the farm. As I learned, it’s a useful piece of equipment that does the heavy lifting and maneuvering of feed, manure, and such around the farm.) Tucker had been renting one on and off for several years, but he was finding himself needing one more and more. It would be much more convenient and make more economic sense to own one. But even a used one would run about $10,000, and the bank wasn’t interested in making that loan.

At 36, Tucker has a vast knowledge of farm animals, animal health, and animal nutrition — in addition to his good marketing and sales sense. As I learned more about his background, it became clear why this was so. But the bank didn’t care about that. So the question was, who could help him finance a skid steer?

Giles Blunden had heard about Slow Money and contacted us. He wanted to connect with a farmer who might need a loan, so I told him about Tucker. One sunny Saturday morning in June, he and his wife, Ginger Blakely, drove down from Chapel Hill to check out our Chatham Mills Farmers Market and to meet with Tucker and Mackenzie. Tucker had found a used skid steer in excellent condition that was half the cost he had expected to pay. An older farmer had passed away, and his son wasn’t going to continue farming and wanted to sell the equipment as soon as he could. So Tucker knew he needed to move quickly. Giles and Ginger were interested in helping with the financing. They stopped by the Lilly Den stand, and then we all moved up to the deck outside the Chatham Marketplace. Then the fun began, as Tucker and Giles swapped stories.

I was curious to know more about how Tucker had started farming, so he filled in the details:

“Most kids start with a paper route,” I said, and everyone laughed.

Chuckled Tucker:

Relaxing at Lilly Den Farm.
Credit: Bett Wilson Foley
.

It was easy to tell by the way Tucker talked about his dad that he was a special person. He not only ran a small Guernsey dairy near Albany, NY, he was also the vice president of the Golub Corporation. Founded in the early 1900s, Golub built up a supermarket chain called Price Chopper. With 128 stores throughout the Northeast, they are still one of the nation’s largest privately held corporations that is predominantly employee-owned.

An advocate for small farmers, Tucker’s dad had helped start Golub’s “Grower Producer” program that encouraged local farmers by offering to buy the best of their crops. The program still exists today. His dad also started a program to encourage teens like his son to go into farming. He promised them he would buy and sell in his stores
whatever they could grow.
“I remember him getting into his truck in a suit jacket and tie,” Tucker said, again with a laugh, “and going around picking up their boxes of food, and then heading off to the office.”

Sadly, Tucker’s dad died only a little over a year after that trip to the bank, so Tucker took on running the rest of their small dairy as well. That meant being responsible for about 45 cows, a mixture of show cows and milkers. To make extra money, he helped other breeders show their cows. By the time he was 20, he was working full-time as a professional cattle fitter — cleaning, clipping, and blow-drying the topline (the judges are very particular about those hairs along the top of the spine) and leading show cows in competitions throughout North America.

He was eventually forced to sell the family’s dairy herd, but he picked up a commercial auctioneer’s license, and later, a real estate license, to pay the bills.

By the time he settled in Cortland, NY, with Mackenzie, his new bride, he had worked for several years negotiating farm real estate transactions. He still kept a few show cows, and they raised a few dairy cows, beef cattle, and pigs for themselves. With the increasingly poor quality of meat available, he decided to get his meat handler’s licenses, expand on his variety, and sell his products locally.

Although Mackenzie hoped they would someday move closer to her family in North Carolina, Tucker was sure he was an upstate New York farmer through and through. But then, one morning just before Christmas, Tucker left the house to feed and milk the cows before heading to work. It had been well below zero during the night. The pipes had broken, water had flooded the barn floor, and all the doors were frozen shut. He broke a window to get in, got a heater going, and eventually got the milking done.

“It took me two hours just to get the cows out the door,” he recounted. “About noon I went back into the house and told Mackenzie to get on the computer and find a farm somewhere that averages less than ten days a year below freezing!”

So she did. After a few months of shopping farms in Virginia and North Carolina, they happened on the property they now own in rural Chatham County. “This is it,” Tucker said as soon as they drove in. “We’ll take it!” He saw the big, open building and thought, “I can make this work.” The price was right, it was close to Mackenzie’s family, and it rarely gets below freezing.

These days, Tucker and Mackenzie seem to be going from strength to strength; as their farm is maturing, their market is growing, and they are becoming an integral part of our local food supply.

Giles recently retired from a remarkable career in architecture, sustainable housing development, and alternative energy — solar, to be exact.

Back in the 1970s, when he first moved here from California, solar was a new technology and largely considered too alternative, or too expensive, or both. He was undeterred and over the next several decades designed and built two co-housing projects using green building methods, brought solar technology to numerous homes and businesses, and designed several award-winning green buildings.

Giles spent more than 35 years refining the design of solar homes and promoting green building practices in the Chapel Hill area.
He has been a mentor, and his work served as a model for how to develop and design green buildings for scores of fellow architects, builders, and homeowners. Giles was building LEED-certifiable (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) residences before the program was even created.

He is now working on community projects as a volunteer, finding ways to increase local business, avoiding corporate products, created for profit at the expense of the planet, and seeking to slow down the economy to a natural pace — all things he believes are the path to a new, healthy, planetary order. “Becoming a participant in the Slow Money community was just another way for me to achieve these goals,” he told us.

Ginger is the farm connection. She grew up on a farm in central Illinois. Her father milked cows and raised hogs and beef cattle as well as growing corn and soybeans. Her fondest memories are of getting up early in the morning and going to markets with an animal in the back of the truck and her dad behind the wheel. She learned early on the vagaries of farming and the uncontrollable risks of weather and markets. She also learned how important a supportive community was for a strong society. When she graduated from college, she walked into a local car showroom and drove out in a new car — on just a handshake and a promise to pay when she could.