Ian Newell, owner of Celeste Farms and creator of the proposed Farm Restaurant Act
If you drive outside of the city, a few miles west of Rocketts Landing in Varina, off Osborne Turnpike, just where the streets shift from congested cars to cornfields and bucolic land punctuated by stalks, you’ll end up at Celeste Farms. The 4.3-acre regenerative property is dotted with wildflower meadows, symmetrical rows of leafy produce and barrel saunas. A circa-1900 farmhouse sits on the front lot, while a large barn and a greenhouse occupy a rear parcel.
After living in Varina for a decade, business owner and Virginia Commonwealth University graduate Ian Newell wanted to preserve its beauty. He purchased the property in 2018 and began welcoming the public to the space in 2023. Since then, Celeste Farms has evolved into a multifunctional outdoor wellness hub, where people can unwind in the saunas and cold plunge, stretch out under the pavilion and do yoga, or attend a farm dinner.
For three years, Newell served produce plucked straight from his fields to guests and hosted ticketed farm tours and dinners on his property. Then, in January 2026, the Virginia Department of Health sued the Varina farm for noncompliance and serving food grown on the farm without proper health inspection permits; the case was settled and dismissed in June. Now, Newell is advocating for the Farm Restaurant Act, proposed legislation he says would create a clear, accessible and affordable pathway for small farms to serve the food they grow to the public.
“Eating food where it is grown is about as natural as breathing air,” Newell says. “This farm, and every farm like it, deserves legislation that supports that — so that the farm can support the community.”
Celeste Farms is located in Varina, just outside Richmond
A Regulatory Maze
At the center of the dispute is a deceptively simple dilemma: When does a farm become a restaurant? In Virginia, that distinction determines which rules, permits and infrastructure a farm must have before it can pivot from harvesting crops to serving meals prepared with its produce. At Celeste Farms, the answer has become a fight over food safety, agricultural zoning and the future of small farms.
Under Virginia’s current laws, says Stephanie Hudson, eastern region public information officer with the Virginia Department of Health, selling cooked, prepared food to the public qualifies the farm as a food establishment. The moment produce, livestock and eggs move from their raw state — greens get a splash of vinaigrette, a fresh egg cracks against the frying pan or a piece of chicken lands on the grill — they enter different regulatory territory.
Newell contends that getting a commercial kitchen permitted on his property, which is zoned for agricultural use, would be unnecessarily difficult and states that dinners held at an open-air barn on a working farm are inherently different from those served at a restaurant with four walls.
Celeste Farms is not Newell’s first venture into food service. Goatocado, his fast-casual, health-forward eatery and catering business, began as a food truck before evolving into a brick-and-mortar restaurant on Main Street. Newell says he has more than 15 years’ experience with temporary food establishment events not tied to a restaurant and thinks the framework should be applicable for the farm.
When Newell began his food-service operations in 2023, the farm was approved for Agricultural District zoning and he obtained a permit to operate a restaurant accessory to the farm. At the time, according to VDH, the farm’s limited food service and occasional dinners were covered by a temporary food establishment permit, designed for a single event lasting no more than 14 consecutive days.
As operations at the farm expanded to include breakfast and dinner service, VDH says, Newell was advised several times to apply for a separate food establishment permit — a detailed, multistep process involving an inspection, blueprint review and a certificate of occupancy from local building officials. VDH will not sign off on an operational health permit until local building officials grant a certificate of occupancy, tying agricultural dining to local zoning and construction codes. Those requirements represent significant financial and logistical hurdles, Newell argues, particularly for an operation built on an agricultural foundation rather than restaurant infrastructure.
The disagreement escalated into a legal battle in August 2025. Newell had offered either to use the Goatocado food truck at the farm or to buy a dedicated truck for the property, thinking the truck’s permits would solve the noncompliance issue and was told it wasn’t necessary, he says. Then VDH sent Newell a notice of alleged violation that escalated into an injunction and a civil lawsuit filed against Celeste Farms in Henrico Circuit Court in January 2026. Newell acknowledges that the farm’s permitting did not keep pace with its expanded food service, “in part because there was no clear, proportionate path in current law for a farm scaling this way to follow.”
The dispute points to a larger regulatory tension. Farms exist on agricultural land; restaurants exist on commercial property. Virginia law allows agritourism operations, such as wineries, to serve drinks and food on agricultural land without traditional restaurant infrastructure. Current health codes also allow certain small-scale food service at bed-and-breakfast establishments under adjusted rules. But farms like Celeste seem to operate in a gray area, Newell says.
“Under current laws, I can raise, process, vacuum-seal and freeze up to 1,000 chickens on my farm without inspection,” he says, “but I can’t legally cook and serve that same chicken to guests without meeting additional restaurant requirements.”
Celeste Farms
Farm Restaurant Act
In July, Celeste Farms launched a statewide campaign for the Farm Restaurant Act, a grassroots legislative proposal intended to give small farms a streamlined legal framework to serve and prepare the food they grow on their property.
The argument isn’t that farmers should be freed from health codes and regulations, Newell says, but rather that the system should be clearer and allow small local farms to turn the food from their fields into another potential source of income without forcing them to become something they’re not.
Newell’s proposed Virginia Farm Restaurant Act can be thought of as introducing two distinct avenues for farm dining, depending on how often the farm wants to serve food: a casual tier called the Farm TFE (temporary food establishment) Permit and the more robust Farm Restaurant Permit.
The annual Farm TFE Permit would cover occasional events, such as a limited number of weddings or seasonal farm dinners each year. It would remove the hassle of filing paperwork for every date and the burden of commercial zoning, so farms wouldn’t need a certificate of occupancy, paved parking lot or commercial kitchen. Ian Newell says the Farm TFE permit idea embraces the reality of working land. “Portable toilets, an unpaved parking area, string lighting, a gravel driveway — all explicitly acceptable, because that’s what a working farm actually looks like,” he says.
While the proposed Farm Restaurant Permit is meant for farms that want to serve food on a regular basis, it would bring more government oversight than the Farm TFE tier, including an inspection from VDH on a rotating schedule determined by the complexity and safety risk of the food being handled — but the farm would not be treated exactly like a conventional restaurant. The idea is a spectrum of oversight. “This is the specific gap this bill closes, without touching a single actual food safety requirement,” Newell says.
Both permits would carry localized sourcing standards (with at least 51% of the food served originating either from the host farm or a neighboring farm and sourced directly), a provision intended to keep the designation tied to agricultural production and allow growers to supplement their menus with outside ingredients but deter them from relying on commercial distributors. Newell compares the concept to the framework already used for farm wineries and breweries, where agricultural production and hospitality exist under the same umbrella.
Oversight of the Farm TFE Permit would be handled through a peer-farmer inspection program modeled after the national Certified Naturally Grown initiative, where participating farms can be evaluated by other farmers using established standards. “We’ve tried to make that pretty simple,” Newell says. “Other farms … are actually doing the regulation themselves. You don’t have to have government oversight with all this bureaucratic paperwork.”
Lay of the Land
The agricultural conundrum goes beyond Celeste Farms. Farms increasingly rely on dinners, workshops or tours to survive, but while consumers are hungry for experiential dining, farmers trying to diversify often find themselves trapped in a complex maze of agricultural zoning and health department regulations.
This is where agritourism steps in. By welcoming visitors onto the land, farmers can forge a connection between hospitality and agricultural production.
According to the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, agriculture is Virginia’s largest private industry and the state’s agricultural production is among the most diverse in the nation. However, the economic reality for individual growers is stark. Data from the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia and the USDA Census of Agriculture show that more than 80% of Virginia’s farms generate less than $50,000 in annual sales.
“Farming alone rarely pays for itself anymore,” Newell says. “It’s a labor of love. Virginia’s food safety rules were built for restaurants on commercial property, not farms on agricultural land. A farm dinner in a barn is not the same thing as a restaurant on Main Street.”
John Montgomery is the founder of the Dorey Park Farmers Market and the co-owner of Fleur-de-Lis Farms, a 16-acre diversified farm in eastern Henrico. Montgomery and his wife grow vegetables and flowers; raise pork; maintain a laying flock of about 150 hens; and produce fresh cheeses, butter and pickled vegetables. He says he supports the general idea of the Farm Restaurant Act while emphasizing food safety and saying regulations should reflect the actual risks and realities farms face.
“Generally, we believe the more we focus on preparing and serving food grown on the farm and nearby, the more likely it is to get support,” Montgomery says. “Our vision is more of ‘farm-to-table’ dinners rather than a full-blown restaurant set up. Both of these approaches can be supported, but the more the farm begins to look like a traditional restaurant, the more it is likely to become regulated as a commercial enterprise rather than an extension of the farm experience.
“Having a statewide standard approach would go a long way toward promoting on-farm food preparation,” he says.
A similar issue has come up at Chisholm Vineyards in Earlysville, just outside Charlottesville in Albemarle County. The vineyard has hosted farm-to-table dinners but had to rely on licensed caterers due to legal restrictions surrounding food production and sales.
“We believe that a wine tasting room needs to provide food purchase options for our customers,” owner Andrea Matheson says. “We have items that we purchase and resell. We would like to use our own crops to make food products that customers could purchase ... and would benefit us financially and benefit the community.”
For agricultural businesses like these, the proposed Farm Restaurant Act could provide a way to generate more revenue. As it undergoes legislative and legal feedback from lawmakers, the proposal remains a living document ahead of its formal introduction to the Virginia General Assembly.
Meanwhile, Celeste Farms is now operating within the existing regulatory framework after securing a VDH health permit and a temporary certificate of occupancy to serve meals out of its farmhouse. Newell is also building a Conex kitchen — a purpose-built commercial kitchen inside a refrigerated shipping container — which he describes as a scalable middle ground that he hopes to replicate as a framework for other small farms.
Since drafting the proposed Farm Restaurant Act, Newell says, he has met with representatives from the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, the health department, and other agricultural stakeholders. He has submitted the draft to Gov. Abigail Spanberger and four state senators to create a formal “Farm Restaurant” classification under Virginia law, with the goal of introducing it during the 2027 General Assembly session.
The proposal comes amid a focus on agriculture at the state level. In June, Spanberger signed legislation creating Virginia’s first Farm & Forest Prosperity Plan, directing the Secretary of Agriculture and Forestry to develop a comprehensive strategy focused in part on the economic prosperity, diversification and growth of the commonwealth’s agriculture and forestry industries. Newell is positioning the Farm Restaurant Act within that broader effort to expand economic opportunities for Virginia’s farms.
Many farmers interviewed for this piece support the proposed Farm Restaurant Act, but others who wanted to remain off the record question the details — what qualifies as a neighboring farm, what peer inspection would entail, how localized sourcing standards would be determined and whether the legislation would prevent localities from imposing additional requirements.
For Newell, the Conex kitchen is a practical solution for the time being, and the Farm Restaurant Act is his attempt to change the rules for small farms going forward. “It asks the General Assembly to apply a principle it has already accepted — for farm wineries, breweries and distilleries — to food,” he says. “A farm can already grow grapes and serve wine under a proportionate framework. A farm should be able to grow vegetables, raise animals and serve a meal the same way. This applies that same idea to food: a clear, affordable, standalone path a small farm can lean into to keep its doors open.”
