Carol Coulter and Dave Walker – Interview conducted at Heritage Homestead Goat Dairy in

Crumpler, NC by Willard Watson.

Q1 – Who are you, When and where were you born?

My name is Carol Coulter and I was born in 1956 in Newark, New Jersey.

My name is Dave Walker and I was born in 1988 in Burlington, North Carolina.

Q2 – What did your parents do for a living? Did you contribute to the family income or help parents in their work in any way?

CC - So my mom was a stay at home mom until we all left the house and then she just worked part time at Sears. My dad worked for AT&T in NYC so we liked to go to work and help and get telephone wire, but no we couldn’t really help him. I started working when I was 14, pretty much then it was like if I wanted jeans, or if I wanted to eat out, or wanted to go to the movies, then I would just pay for things myself. My dad was super big into investing and saving so we had a lot of education about that. So bank accounts, and you know talking about how to invest money, and how to save, and how to get what we wanted.

DW – My dad was in the furniture industry in the Piedmont and he made furniture, he sold furniture, he sold hardware that goes on furniture, he sold lumber, imported lumber from Brazil and Africa and sold that, so I kinda grew up in the furniture industry. And then my mom was a children’s librarian in Alamance County and so that’s where I would spend my time after school and on the weekends hanging out at the children’s library volunteering as Clifford the Big Red

Dog doing that and the Fourth of July parade for a couple of years. Q3 – What do you do for a living?

CC – Yeah, so I just retired from Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture and I’ll be full time here at the farm now, working with Lon at the dairy We’ll probably add some new cheeses this year, since I’ll be in the kitchen more and Lon’s excited cause he’ll go out of the kitchen and start doing more in his blacksmith shop, and hide tanning, and broom tying, and all the pioneer arts he really enjoys.

DW – I’m the program director at Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture, so a lot of what I do is help bring people together and connect them with resources around sustainable agriculture, and I’m a first generation farmer - I have some pigs over in Valle Crucis.

Q4 – Carol, what type of farming operation do you have here in Ashe County?

CC – So we have a small licensed goat dairy. We milk about 22 goats twice a day, every day, whether you want to or not. We make cheese, fudge, and caramel sauce and we sell at farmer’s markets, we sell whole sale to natural food stores, chefs, wineries, we do a lot of festivals and then we also have ducks, chickens, we raise a couple of pigs on the whey from the cheese making - whey fed pork is really yummy - and we raise and breed Great Pyrenees dogs. And,

Lon just built us a wood-fired pizza oven, so this Spring we’ll start doing agro-tourism. People love to come and tour the farm so you can make a reservation for the evening milking and get a farm tour, do a little cheese tasting and then make your own pizza in the wood fired oven. So that’s the new piece we’re adding now that I’m home and we have a little more time and can try to organize that. Q5 – Carol, how long have you had your farm and how long did you work with Blue Ridge

Women in Agriculture?

CC – We bought the farm in 1994 and Lon and I were working at the NC Outward Bound School, so you can imagine we didn’t have a whole lot of money. So it took us about 15 years before we were actually able to build, like we built everything here, this part of the property had nothing on it. The house you passed when you came in is where we lived originally and we fixed that up and then we started working out here and the intention was never to be a dairy. We ended up getting goats cause this place hadn’t been farmed in like 25 years and it was full of multiflora rose, so we bought the goats to control the invasive species and it happened that I got dairy goats cause as a city girl, I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. And I just really enjoyed milking them and starting to make dairy products. So I drove Lon crazy until he built me a dairy, so he’s a really good guy. And it’s fortunate that he’s a builder cause he built everything on the property. So since 2009 we’ve been licensed dairy, but before that we had goats and we had different animals, llamas - Lon can butcher and do things. So we kinda thought we’d be this little homestead, but it kinda grew to something bigger and now we’re fulltime farmers.

So interestingly enough I was one of the founding mothers of Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture. So I was part of the startup and then when the farm started I didn’t have as much time and I kind of dropped out a little bit and kinda kept in touch and then in

July 2014, I came back, there was a position open and I came back to Blue Ridge Women in Ag. I was attracted to it both because it was a really great organization and it was a part-time position which fit in well with the dairy work that I wanted to do. When I started there wasn’t as much going on as there is now, so it was a lot easier back then.

Q6 – Dave, how long have you had your farm and how long did you work with Blue Ridge

Women in Agriculture?

DW – Last year was my first time farming on my own. The year before I had done it with a friend of mine, to raise pigs. She grew vegetables in Valle Crucis and sold at the Watauga

(County) Farmer’s Market and so she had done pigs before and I wanted to see how it was done so we partnered and then last year it was just me kinda on my own doing it and I had 10 which was a pretty good number. So it took a lot, learned a lot last year so going into this year I feel a little bit more confident.

And then I’ve been with BRWA for almost three years, and before that I worked for High Country Local First in their entrepreneurship program for a year or two and came to Boone a year or two before that for the Appalachian Studies program and so one thing kinda leads to another. The farm definitely grew out of working with other farmers and working with entrepreneurs around food and wanting to better understand what they’re going through.

Q7 – How did you decide on your career?

CC – When Lon and I left Outward Bound our goal was to kind of live this simple life, work part- time, be homesteaders, he’s super big into gardening. His undergraduate degree is in agronomy so he’s a soil guy and he’s always messing around with soil and he loves the garden. He’s not so much an animal guy but I’m an animal person and not so much a garden person so it kinda blended nicely. I’ve never been able to get him to learn how to milk goats cause he knows if he does he’s gonna end up having to milk. So he’s the cheese maker, he loves being in the kitchen he’s a really meticulous and precise person which is important to making consistent cheese. I’m kinda whoop de doody floopdy doo and then my cheese is sometimes really good and sometimes it’s just edible - so it’s better that he’s in there. But I really like the animals so I do all the animal care, the milking, the kitting, he’ll help with the heavy stuff like you know unloading hay and things of that nature, but he’s pretty much the cheese guy. And I’m the market person, he hates being in large crowds of people so he doesn’t really go to markets or anything. So we have this division of labor.

It was really kind of an accident I mean I grew up in the city so my farm experience was eating things that came from a farm, and I was the kid you could get to go and grab the electric fence cause I didn’t know any better kind of thing. So there was a pretty steep learning curve, but people who are in the goat business are really generous and so I started attending a lot of workshops and learning and we just built it from there.

We started with two goats, well three goats cause there was a buck, and then it just grew every year. We’ve stayed really small, I would say, in the scheme of dairies that are in North Carolina we would be considered a micro-dairy and what I’ve observed over time is that you can make it small or you have to get really big. It’s the people in the middle that are struggling all the time, because all your costs go up but your income doesn’t make enough, you can break even, but it’s really hard to make a profit when you’re in the middle. And then if you get really big it gets complicated because you have to hire people and there’s a lot of goats to maintain. Like down East there’s a dairy that had 2,000 goats, and milking must take all morning and then you’ve got to start again in the afternoon and hoof trimming and parasite management. I just can’t imagine like why would anybody, but they have a contract with Costco they ship cheese by the palate. I like being really small, being in control, I like meeting people who are buying our cheese so that sort of fulfills my needs and Lon gets to stay on the farm and not interact with people and be in the cheese kitchen so it fulfils his kind of lifestyle.

Q8 – It seems like your outgoing role with the cheese business made the BRWIA work a little easier?

CC – Yeah I think being a farmer gave me a lot of credibility with farmers, and with consumers, cause you know, you can understand when people say things like, “Well why don’t you just do this?” and it’s like, “Well because these are the challenges and barriers,” and you know and just trying to get people to think about buying local and it takes energy, it takes effort, you know it’s way easier to go to the grocery store than to buy local.

Q9 – Dave, how did you decide on your career?

DW – After college, I was working for different non-profits and I worked for a magazine, Oxford

American and I really kinda had an “A-ha” moment that I’m really interested in place, and people’s connection with place, and my grandparents are from Watauga County, on my mom’s side. So looking at different grad. programs, the Center for Appalachian Studies really stuck out because of its focus on place and place-based community development. So that drew me to

Boone, and at first I was really interested in gathering places like Mast General Store. Then (I) started thinking about people’s connection with the landscape and how that changes over time.

Food and agriculture (are) really good spaces to explore that because everyone’s connected with food and through agriculture - it’s really deeply personal thing and it’s also something that’s always changing. Especially here in Watauga County, and how we want to be here because it’s so rural and pastoral, but at the same time that can price out a lot of our farmers and a lot of the people who have lived here for generations.

So that change is really interesting and then to think about what happens next, like in a post-tourist economy or a post-carbon economy and how agriculture can play a part in that. That’s what drew me, my research interests at the Center for Appalachian

Studies and then happened to get a job with High Country Local First just by doing some economic development projects with their director. And then my thesis was about how first generation farmers become successful here and so that led to working with BRWIA, and that led to me starting a farm, and pigs are really easy for me that was a really conscious choice because I like pork and I like pork chops but there’s a set schedule, you don’t have to keep the pigs over the Winter if you don’t want to. So I can buy baby pigs in March and then take them to the processor in September, I can buy some in July and take them to the processor in December and it’s a very concrete time period for them.

So if I want to get into something else, I can maybe not do it next year, but it’s a way to better understand my connections with the land and then figure out how to run a small business.

Q10: 19:35 - How would you say the work has changed since you started?

CC – So when I started there was myself and an Americorps staff member and we were basically doing the farm tour and some workshops and more so when Dave got there. Dave is really good at organizing groups and doing focus sessions and listening and hearing what people wanted. And what we kept hearing from farmers is they had more capacity to sell, but they didn’t have markets. And it is a difficult thing in a rural area, you know, in an urban area the population density just makes it so much easier to increase your sales where here in a rural area it’s just really hard cause if you have to drive really far then you have to have a market big enough to make a certain amount of money to make it worth that effort. And so how do we increase the markets? And also training, you know they wanted some farmer training.

So we kind of looked at ways we could enhance the markets through a number of different strategies until finally we actually are running a weekday market, a Winter market, we created the food hub for an online market, and also working with chefs and figuring out wholesale and trying to help folks create their own markets, on-farm sales,

(we) really worked hard with them around the farm tour to have them create items they could sell to generate income as well as new customers so it’s been a lot around marketing and then Dave can talk about the training side of it. And then there is also another piece around food equity and trying to make sure the resource people have access to food. So creating a Double Bucks program and the Cost Share program and the

Community of Gardens program. Cause what we were seeing were food pantries were really stocked with highly processed, high sugar, high salt food that were really just making people chronically ill. So how do you get good, fresh, local vegetables in there and then how to get folks to eat it, when you’re addicted to not good food it’s not easy to then switch to good food. A lot of work there. So kind of three focuses marketing, training, and equity pieces.

DW – Yeah I’d agree, you know, as our capacity grew then we were able to better serve new programs and ideas. We get calls a lot like, “You ought to do this,” and “Why don’t we have this?” and I’m sure they got those calls before Carol but just having a part-time executive director and an AmeriCorps, it’s hard to try out those new things. So once you add another staff person then you can start to deepen your capacity and then you can add another staff person and our credibility definitely grew because we were able to do these innovative projects and collaborative projects with other organizations. You know, like around food equity, we were not gonna open a food pantry, but we definitely work with community gardeners and we know the food pantry folks so we can connect the community gardeners with the food pantries. So finding a niche and a role in kind of being the pollinator or like the glue between different food projects.

Q11 – Describe a typical work day

CC – When it’s milking season I get up at five in the morning I go downstairs and milk the goats, feed and water everybody, come in shower, sometimes I might be organizing cheese that has to be delivered to spots in Boone. Grab my stuff head to the office. The drive to the office was always helpful cause I could kinda get centered, so is milking, I could kinda think and I could talk out loud to the goats and they’re always agreeable and thought my plan was good, so that was helpful. I could kinda get centered through those two things, driving to work, thinking about my day. I’m a list person so always making lists cause my brain just can’t keep all those things in there and I’ll forget stuff. And then get to the office and try as much as I could to deal with things on my list like things that had deadlines I would definitely get to, but then there’s always people coming in and talking and asking questions, or fires to put out, or meeting to go to, or farmers that wanna meet and talk about something. So you know every day was just a different series of sort of problems to solve more than anything.

Writing grants, I think the hardest thing is when you start to grow then there’s this incredible pressure to keep the funding coming, keep people employed, and programs running. And I felt that a lot, if I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat it was about, “Oh my god what are we gonna apply for now to keep the funding going.” And we’ve been really grant reliant and really successful in trying to really move toward more donor based funding, but you know when you’re a new non-profit in

Boone, there’s some well-established, very much needed non-profits so how do you get your little piece of the pie and you don’t wanna take anything away from those other really great programs. So kinda trying to use the, I guess Obama Strategy, small donations over a really large portion of people. So we’ve been increasing, not nearly where we need to be.

DW – Yeah waking up early, checking my email, setting up emails for the day, figuring out what

I’m gonna do for the day. That normally happens early in the morning and then go out to the farm on my way to work. I keep my pigs at an incubator farm, so that’s maybe 10 miles from my house. So driving out there, checking on them, feeding them, making sure they have water, seeing how they’re doing, getting them up and moving about. Then going into town and normally a meeting or two in the morning talking with folks in the office and then making some phone calls and then, maybe working on the website or working on a database, and then some afternoon meetings, and then back out to the farm usually around six or so to do some weed eating or some kind of project. Maybe moving the pigs or mowing the grass, and then home. So it’s a pretty full day, in the summer it’s definitely like a six in the morning to ten o’clock at night, full day, but it’s fun. And then being out on the farm is definitely a way to like reset because I’m just thinking about being out there in that space and with the pigs and what’s going on - they don’t have cell service so it’s hard to get in touch with me. And Valle Crucis is a really beautiful place to be in the afternoon there, with the sunset and everything. It’s a really rejuvenating space.

I used to live in Matney, a higher elevation than Valle Crucis, between Valle Crucis and

Banner Elk. But I recently moved more towards the Foscoe part of Valle Crucis so on 105 near Broadstone, it’s the same difference, It’s just head to the farm in a different way.

It’s neat, I like that space because I have some family land in Valle Crucis, and I can see that from where I keep the pigs and vice versa. I have a garden on the family land so I can look down and see. So there’s a lot of connections there.

CC – I forgot, when I get home there’s still milking and animal feeding. Sometimes there’s cheese making and cheese packing or somethings going on, so there’s a whole ‘nother. Usually in the summer time about 8:30 or 9 p.m. we sit down and then we try to protect Sundays, other than milking we try not to do any events. We have a sauna, we usually take a sauna after milking on Sunday morning, we have a brunch, just chill out in the afternoon and, we might have to do some little thing but we try not to do any projects unless we really have to. Try not to invite anybody over, it’s just, you know our day of rejuvenation and it’s starts all over again on Monday.

One of the reasons we chose goats is, we dry them up in October, we breed them and we pretty much take the Winter off. I have some frozen curd we’ll use for our orders in the Winter. Chevre just freezes really well so we just take it out, mix it up into flavors, pack it, and it just goes to wherever it needs to go. Catch up on projects, Lon’s finishing up a deck we’ve been working on for three months now, cause you have to fit it in between other things.

We usually pick one big project a year that we’re gonna work on, so this year it was the deck. And then we ended up having some maintenance issues with fences, the billy goats were really rough on fence and snapped some posts off this year trying to get to the girls early. So there’s unexpected things, and then there’s the ones you plan on. If we were crazy rich we would just hire people to do everything and spend money crazily, but we’re not so we just had to pace ourselves. Each year there’s some, Lon’s ever hopeful we won’t have a big project but I always find something for him to do.

Q12 – What type of people do you work with?

CC – For the most part they’re pretty like-minded people. They’re people who like and support local agriculture or farming, or they just have a real interest or passion about food. Great varieties, you know, they come from all walks of life but yeah it’s more liberal, food oriented, local economy oriented, fun people. I mean I enjoy almost everybody I interact with. Every once in a while there’s a difficult challenging person, but for the most part, they’re fun people to be with.

DW – I think because our program has started to spread out throughout the food system that we work with different types of people in different spaces. And so we have some programs that are geared more towards sustainable agriculture organic type farmers who may be like college educated, may not be from Watauga county. But now that we have the food hub, and we have cold storage space, freezer space, you know we’re working more with like cattle men, whose great grandparents have grown up in the mountains. And because we’re working with community gardens we’re working with people who may be low resource, low income. We’re working at the farmer’s market with people who may be seasonal tourists, maybe they live in

Charlotte most of the year but the come to Blowing Rock to live in the Summer and they shop at the Watauga County Farmer’s Market. It’s really different by the programs we’re working with and I think that’s probably something that’s changed over the last 17 years that Blue Ridge

Women’s been around. And I think that’s gonna keep changing and keep being more dynamic cause everybody eats and everybody’s living in this space up here in the mountains.

CC – Yeah, food’s definitely the thread that ties them all together.

Q13 – What do you do with downtime at work?

CC – Well, we really like sittin’ on the porch! (laughs) I like hangin’ out with the goats, sometimes I’ll just go and sit with them, or sit with the dogs, or sit with the pigs, the pigs are really fun when they’re little, when they get big they’re a little more scary cause they don’t mean to do anything they’re just big. I like to wander, we’ve left a part of the property wooded, so I like to wander around in different seasons. We have lady slippers and gray’s lilies, and you have to be there in the right season to see them.

We keep trying to plant different things, and this year with a little more time I’m really trying to work on pollinator gardens for butterflies and bees. We just really like this space, it’s a great place to hang out. We’ll go down to the pizza oven and bake bread or make pizza or just hang out down there. Carol thinks up new projects for Lon to do.

DW – In the office when I’m not working on anything in particular, you know, just talking with folks and hanging out. That’s a really important time just to get to know people better. And that’s probably something we can do more of that like out in the public. We talk a lot about porch sittin’ in Appalachian studies, and it’s hard to do. You have to be really intentional about it and then create time to do that, but it’s definitely valuable and, could do more of that.

Q14 – Does your occupation have any special sayings or expressions? What are they? How did they come about?

CC – You know there’s one I like to use a little bit, we didn’t create it but I kinda like it. It’s

“teach a man to farm and his family will eat, teach a woman to farm and the community will eat.” And I think it’s just, not a knock on men, but just women have a different kind of view of food and why they’re getting into farming. Men it’s to provide for your family and take care, and make money to send your kids to school and blah blah blah. And women I think it’s just more this broader connection to community and taking care of people. And I think it’s just cause we’re nurturers by nature. So again it’s not a knock on men but I think it’s a lot of why we’re seeing more and more women get into farming, they’re the fastest growing segment of new farmers, and I think it will eventually have an impact on our food system.

DW – I don’t know, there are acronyms that we use. We have a new executive director so sometimes I’ll say acronyms or say like a first name for somebody and I need to remind myself to say the whole thing.

CC – I guess the other thing is, “buy local” and trying to get people to really think about where they’re spending their money and the impact that has on the community. And whether it’s just gonna go out to some executive that’s making a bazillion dollars or we’re gonna keep farmers able to stay on their farms and continue to feed our community. Not to be a pessimist but if you look out there, severe weather, fires, floods, unstable governments. I mean I really do believe there’s gonna be an interruption in our food system and it’s gonna be where there’s good strong locally developed food systems where we won’t feel the effects of it perhaps as much as urban centers or areas where they haven’t done anything around local food. And not that we’ll starve but there may not be some items at the grocery store, or maybe it’ll break down totally, who knows, but we know when the depression happened, people here didn’t feel it the same way people in urban center, because they’re life, it was already depressed. And they were able to take care of themselves and, I just people really should pay attention to that. So, this is a saying, “It makes sense to grow food locally, like it makes sense to make cars in factories.”

DW – And to get back to your question, who do we work with? We recently did a survey among our food hub produces and we were asking them question about their values and like what’s important, like why do you sell through the food hub? Is it to support local economies? Is it to support family farms? To support sustainable agriculture? And a lot of those things might mean the same thing and I think being conscious that different people value different things and sustainable agriculture, to me, might mean one thing, and to someone else might mean something else. I think that’s changing and like how we can better communicate with people.

Some people may not identify with a post-carbon teacher, but they really care about local economies. And making sure that young people can stay here and work in the mountains. And those could be the same things, you know like if climate change, you know we have a bunch of forest fires and we don’t have a ski season then that disrupts the tourist economy and then young people can’t stay here. Yeah sometimes we use different words to work with different groups.

Q15 – What special knowledge, skills, and abilities are needed? What techniques and methods?

CC – You need passion. You need to be really passionate. I think you need to be a good listener, if you only wanna do what you wanna do, chances are you aren’t gonna be doing the right things. You have to be good at getting money and resources and able to work with a really diverse group of politicians, other organization leaders, the public, and farmers. You need to be able to work with all of them without alienating them, or then they become your enemy and it’s harder to get things done. I think that’s one of the great things about BRWIA is we’re really collaborative and we try to invite everybody to the table and we try to listen and not always take all the credit for everything. DW – And we follow through with what we’re gonna do so people can trust us and they know what we’re gonna do. And I think listening really matters. Forming collaborations, that takes a lot of time, sitting around and figuring out what your partners are wanting to do but I think we’ve figured that out in some spaces, and we’re working on it some spaces too. So it’ll be interesting to see how it works out.

Q16 – What are things about your work outsiders would not expect?

DW – How much time on the computer there is. When we list a job, it’s like a community gardens job or something, a lot of folks think we’re out in the gardens all the time, you know, planting, but a lot of it’s like on the computer in meetings trying to get people to do the planting and to get people excited about gardening. Just a lot of meetings and a lot of computer work.

CC – I guess it would be all the background things that happen to make some program successful. And why some things, they’re not immediate because you have to go through this process to get to the place where it actually kinda starts to take off. I think right now with Blue

Ridge Women in Ag, we went from like two people in 2014, to all these programs in 2018, and they’re still evolving, we don’t have it perfect. We’re still learning and every day some new piece is like why didn’t we consider that last year? Well we didn’t know to consider it last year.

Like the food hub has gotten all kinds of interesting challenges now as more and more people want to sell there, there’s people who don’t think we should keep allowing things that are competing with their products to sell there. So who can be there and what’s the criteria and how do you determine value added. So like if you’re buying stuff from other people does that count, or you can only raise it and do it? How do you bake, cause who grows wheat? Can you compare that to buying an animal and then value adding it? So there’s just all these dynamics because now it’s about money and it’s not that they’re only about money but they need to make a certain amount of money to make it work. And then if you create more competition, you know it’s just sort of a similar thing at the farmer’s market. The Watauga County Farmer’s Market now is so popular, like last year, 28 farmers or vendors applied and they only had space for 10, so

18 people didn’t get in who were counting on that as a way to generate income for their business. And then where do those 18 people go?

And they’re mad because now this little clique of board members who make the decision, you know, for sure produce growers felt like they were being eliminated because they didn’t want more competition. But then if you dilute it so much and nobody makes money, it’s not just black and white – like there’s all these shades of grey you’re trying to weed through and figure out what’s best, and is it best for most, is it best for one? And so it’s constantly, and unfortunately individuals can’t see what you’re dealing with often. So they only see their thing, like “I want this to happen,” and “I always wanna sell the most,” and “I want my product at the top of the list.” And so how do you deal with all of that? And then still pay for people to do it? Like, we have to take some money to make the program run and then there’s different opinions about whether that’s fair or not.

DW – I would say a lot of our programs, they’re working within a specific part of the global food system. But we’re trying to rebuild, through a holistic approach to rebuilding the food system. So some programs may just focus on farmers, and like the farmers are just seeing that program, but we’re thinking about the customers too. So like with the food hub maybe we have a product that’s produced outside of the High Country, but it’s something our customers really want. And if they’re gonna show up to buy Kombucha from Winston-Salem and then buy $50 worth of pork chops and $20 worth of potatoes grown in Watauga county, then that’s a win.

But that may be hard for some of our producers to see because they’re seeing it through the lens of their product. And so we’re trying to balance these competing interests. And, yeah it’s definitely, we’re rebuilding it from, you know during the Green Revolution we just forgot how to have a local food system, so there are different people around the country and the world doing similar projects as us, but no one really has it figured out. So it’s all the time experimenting and seeing what works, readjusting. So that’s what keeps it interesting, but also what makes it challenging every day.

Q17 – What were originally the most difficult aspect or your job?

CC – I think, we get lots of opinions and feedback and then figuring out what’s the most reasonable strategy, I don’t know that it’s the best, but what, based on the resources and assets that we have, what’s the best strategy to put forth, to at least start. I’m real comfortable with a little bit of chaos and discovery and evolution. Some people are like, “Well you don’t have this policy.” And it’s like well, okay chill, we can develop it. We need to figure it out, but

I’m not a genius, you know, I can’t see into the future so these are all things that are developing, give us time and keep the feedback coming but give us time and maybe that policy doesn’t make any sense either. So it’s just trying to help people understand the bigger picture and just doing your best. I mean if you just trust that people are trying to do their best then it’s just a lot easier. There are just some people out there, no matter what you do, it’s all criticism.

They just constantly pick you apart, it’s just like, well, you do it. And sometimes I’ve said that to people, and it’s like we don’t have the capacity to do that, if you’re really passionate, you do it.

“We’ll help you any way we can but you go run with this,” and they’re like “no.” So sometimes expectations are really out of whack with what you have capacity or resources to do. I mean I wish I had a magic wand, but I haven’t figured that one out yet. I am gonna go down and do the

Universal Harry Potter thing, so maybe I can get one.

DW – I think, as someone without as much experience the hard thing starting out is figuring out what you have the capacity to do. Like you can’t work 60 hours a week, and that’s not fair to you or the people around you. So figuring out, what should you be working on and what should you just be sitting and listening to do.

CC – Or figuring out who else could do it.

DW – And that takes time. We’ve seen that with, you know, a lot of our staff are younger and so they’re figuring that out too. So letting them figure that out on their own or maybe offering guidance in different ways.

CC – It’s pretty amazing. We pay pretty crappy salaries; we don’t have any benefits. I mean just cause we don’t have those resources, I would love to have those but you know for the kind of work we’re doing and the kind of output it’s pretty amazing that people are willing to do that for as little, and figure out how that, take a second job, share apartments, you know drive crappy cars, not have a car at all. Non-profit work just doesn’t pay that well unless you work for the Red Cross or something where you can make six figures. So as we start to build, hopefully that income will follow where we can offer benefits and things but it’s just really hard. But we have really great, young, passionate folks. And in some places we’ve had lots of turnover and that always really hurts a program because that continuity and all that loss of knowledge then the new person’s kind of starting at ground zero. And they’re gonna bring a whole new set of skills and passions so things keep moving forward but they’re kind of wiggling their way there.

DW – I think people are drawn to the work because it’s creative and they get to work with other people who’re interested in making a difference and that’s exciting. And you can see the changes happening and so that’s motivating too.

Q18 – What is or was the most satisfying part of your job?

CC – Just seeing the community come together around food in lots of different ways and all the ways we’re connected. I mean I think there’s really great things happening in the High Country.

So it’s really satisfying to see where we were when we started BRWIA, you know a group of women wanted to farm and we were trying to figure out how to do it and you know now, most of those women are somehow still related in the agriculture field and being active. But just watching how much things have grown, how much more than where we were in the late 90s or early 2000s. So that’s been really satisfying.

And I think if we can get people to understand that, you know, Earthfare has great food and buying organic or Publix or Harris Teeter is good but that’s not local. And so again there’s just this big disconnect, people think they’re doing the right thing but that’s still not supporting the local farmers. So getting them aware of all the different outlets that we’ve created to buy local, that you can even go to a farm and buy local.

You know there’s CSA’s, there’s markets, the Be Natural Market which, if you’re gonna buy something then that’s the one that’s got the most local or attending your farmer’s market so that to me is the really big piece now. I mean less than 2 percent of our population in Watauga county buys local, and for a foodie place the great thing is there’s only potential. There’s nothing but growth. So how do we reach people and get them to make that little bit of extra effort it takes to order from the food hub or to go to the market on Saturday or Tuesday or the Winter market or whatever. You know, buy a

CSA share or whatever it takes. How do we reach people and get them? And now we’re competing with Blue Apron and just all these different ways people can get food and it has to be about convenience. That’s what we’re battling, that’s why people go to grocery stores cause it’s really convenient. But how do we, what do we do?

DW – I think it happens in a couple of different spaces in small moments. So like I help organize workshops on farms where farmers talk about like how to lay out irrigation, or how to prune their apple trees and after the workshops we have a potluck and sometimes that happens and the farmer will invite 15 to 20 strangers into their kitchen to sit down for a meal together and I think that’s really powerful in that they’re inviting these strangers, you know people that they don’t know, to sit around their private space to talk about their shared craft. And so that’s really powerful. Another way that it comes is meeting with interns and having them come up and say like, “I really want to work on this food equity thing,” and like “I’ve been thinking about it and this is what I want to do.” And so helping to empower them and connect them with resources so that they can incorporate it into their academic course work but also maybe like that’s where they’re gonna go professionally. And so it happens in different small ways. Seeing people connect with the programs that we’re doing and connect with other people is really important.

Q19 – What advice would you give someone beginning this line of work?

CC – You know I guess if you’re a beginning farmer, really look at what the markets are and really figure out your niche - don’t do what everybody else is doing. And figure out where you’re gonna be able to sell and then start slow. I’ve seen people like they wanna do produce and animals and eggs and it’s like all at once and then they, you know, they can’t do it well and then they don’t get into the markets they anticipated and then they’re kinda screwed. So take it slow and if you want to get into non-profit work - volunteer, intern, get your feet wet, figure out which kind of work you want to do and then just be passionate and focused. I wouldn’t do both at the same time though, unless you’re some kind of crazy person.

DW – Yeah I think, as far as non-profits, I knew I wanted to work for a non-profit economic development kinda like community-based program and so was pretty conscious, knew about

Carol and liked what she was doing at BRWIA and I was working for another non-profit and knew that there were definitely certain things I could learn from working for BRWIA that I wasn’t getting at the other job and so it was a pretty like conscious decision to realign and think about what I’m doing. CC – You came in and volunteered, we didn’t pay you in the very beginning but Dave was pretty passionate about what he wanted to do so we just figured out a way to find money for him and then he was able to find money for himself so, that helped a lot.

DW – For the first six months I wasn’t paid, but I had another job going, and then there was a pretty significant change in Heifer International leaving Boone, but they left with a really good gift to a lot of programs and so then that helped empower my work.

CC – The really great thing is, Dave really knew what he wanted to do, he wanted to start the

C.R.A.F.T. program and that was great cause it didn’t require a lot on my part other than kinda puttin our heads together every now and then; he knew a model he wanted to do and he organized. I mean Dave was one of the easier employees to have.

Some other programs where I was maybe more generating something based on what I was hearing than hiring someone and trying to convey that to them and, particularly when they’re new programs if you don’t sort of have that ability to deal with a little bit of chaos as it evolves it can be really crushing cause if you’re not a strong person it sort of makes you feel like you’re not good at what you’re doing because there’s all this chaos. But it’s sort of just that nature of something beginning. And so that’s a much harder place for a new, young person to start. I think more structure for a young person is helpful in the beginning, unless you’re just one of those creative, crazy people.

DW – Finding mentors is like really easy to say, but it’s harder to like have happen, and so like with the program I work with at BRWIA, the C.R.A.F.T. program, we just try to create spaces where people can get to know each other and leave that match making up to them. And so maybe they pass a phone number on to somebody else, and we see those connections happening, but it’s kinda hard to force. And then in the non-profit structure, you could set up weekly meetings where you have to talk to a more experienced staff person or something but it’s just gonna have to come naturally and I would say some advice for a younger person would be to be proactive about like seeking out those people. And so it may not be somebody you first expect but, like I have an intern right now and I’m encouraging them to just go and interview people who do local food work. And just figure out like what their jobs are, and so maybe out of those five interviews, like one person really connects. But, if you just sit around and wait, it’s not gonna happen.

Q20 – What does CRAFT stand for?

DW - Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training, and it was a program that was started in Western Massachusetts in the late 1980s, early 1990s, from a group of sustainable agriculture farms. They wanted to share the burden of training their apprentices and their interns and so each month they would have a different work shop or farm tour for farmers on a different farm. So like one might be about lettuce production and one might be about post- harvest handling or rotation livestock grazing. And so because sustainable agriculture includes so many different kinds of farms, it was a way for that apprentices to see those different types of agriculture, and to meet different people and to form a community. A lot of times when you’re on a farm, you’re in a rural space so you might just be isolated to that farm community so having a larger social network. And so we’ve been doing that here for the last three years, and farms in High Country, they’re really diverse in that, the scale is small but, you know like ten acres is a really large vegetable farm. And so it’s good to be able to see the different types of agriculture that are going on here.

Q21 – Describe a memorable moment from work.

CC – Wow, there’s lots of them. The more memorable ones for me are one on one work with young folks or new folks who wanna be in farming. Of course people come to me with like millions of goat questions, not so much that they want to start a dairy, although there are those, but people who just wanna have a goat for family milk or whatever. So I guess Susan

Owen, and helping her get started with goats and answering questions and helping her understand, you know it looks easy when somebody does it because they know what they’re doing but goats are actually pretty demanding and have lots of little weird things that can go wrong and so I’m sort of her mentor.

And Melinda Brown with her pigs and getting her connected into the system, she’s been really fun to actually watch develop. She’s pretty much now the breeder, and everybody buys their pigs from her, she’s sort of filled that niche and she’s really good at it and she’s probably the least likely looking farmer you’ve ever seen. I don’t know if you know Melinda, she’s kinda tatted and earring and kinda looks like a biker chick. But she is a really excellent farmer and just amazing with livestock and curious and we got her connected to cooperative extensions and now she sells Dave her pigs, and me my pigs, and Against the Grain Farm their pigs and Amy. I mean everybody around this area that’s where they get their feeder pigs. So that’s been a fun one to watch happen. And she’s just a super great person, she’s helping Anne Rose now in the butcher shop, we got her a scholarship to the Women’s Meat Conference and she’s like all about it, I mean yeah, she’s probably one of the funner mentees.

DW – Yeah, I guess I was just thinking we did this profile farm book of farmers in the High

Country and it’s a paperback book that has really nice pictures and stories and the farmers talk about something that they have a lot of experience in like agro-tourism or canning or butchering, and then there’s an online component that gives more technical advice like where to go for labor or when do you need a lawyer. But when we had the book release party at the

Blowing Rock Art and History Museum, the people who were there like the consumers, they are supporters, people who don’t have farms, they were like going up to the farmers, getting their autographs. That was a really special moment in that we’re celebrating something like pretty radical, you know growing food for their community but that doesn’t happen everywhere.

CC – Yeah I get requests for references all the time and Susanne is going on to get her doctorate now, I would imagine Penn State, but it could be Cornell or Duke. Sadi got into a really prestigious program in Minnesota, other people have gotten really cool jobs across the country and it’s really great that we were kinda the training ground to kinda get ‘em passionate about that food and then are able to give good recommendations that help them get into really cool programs and then, you know, hopefully they’ll circle back around at some point be with us again. You know, I don’t know where they’ll land but the Boonerang effect, you know who knows.