Growing Local Food and Protecting Farmland
This article appeared in the Spring 2009 Piedmont View.
Customers enjoy a May day in the pick-your-own strawberry field at Muskrat Haven Farm. Photo by Rose Jenkins.
Two Rappahannock farms that are prominent producers of local food were protected by conservation easements in 2008. Manfred Call went through the county's Purchase of Development Rights program to protect Muskrat Haven Farm while Nick and Gardiner Lapham donated a conservation easement on Sunnyside Farm to the Virginia Outdoors Foundation.
"I think everybody has a responsibility to steward their land," says Mr. Call. At the 130-acre Muskrat Haven Farm in Amissville, he and other workers grow a variety of fruits and vegetables. They sell produce at roadside stands and invite customers to pick-their-own strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries. Land conservation is part of the overall stewardship picture for Mr. Call. He says, "We're very conservative in the way we apply our nutrients and the chemicals that we use." He has also protected streams with riparian buffers at Muskrat Haven and at another farm he owns in Culpeper.
He decided to protect Muskrat Haven, where he has farmed since 1975, because, "I just grew up on a farm and I realized how important it is to keep the urbanization from creeping in on farms... Once it's gone, it's gone and our kids will never see it again."
At Sunnyside, a 420-acre organic farm that borders Shenandoah National Park, Mr. Lapham says, "We grow crops and we grow biodiversity." His family has owned the farm since 2006 and, while they're still learning, they hope to show that these two goals are mutually supportive. Mr. Lapham sums up their working hypothesis: "What we would like to be able to demonstrate is that by increasing native biodiversity, by increasing our pollinators, by improving our water, by improving our soil, that we create a beneficial environment to grow food."
At Sunnyside, they raise over 40 types of vegetables in fields and greenhouses and they cultivate apple, pear and cherry orchards, selling the food at farmers markets and through their CSA. To encourage a diversity of native plants and wildlife they set aside riparian buffers, cull invasive species and burn fields that will grow back in native warm-season grasses and wildflowers. Their farm also includes some 225 acres of forests, which connect to Shenandoah National Park. The conservation of Sunnyside filled in a gap between protected lands, bringing together a nearly 2,500 acre block of private conservation land adjacent to the Park.
