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Logan and Emilie Tweardy of ShireFolk Farm with son Emmett (Photo by Sarah Der)
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Photo by Sarah Der
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Photo by Sarah Der
Tending the Flock
A husband-and-wife poultry-processing team draws inspiration from Middle Earth
Emilie and Logan Tweardy process 200 chickens twice a month. Before they begin, the husband-and-wife team takes a moment of silence, preparing themselves mentally. Typically, Emilie says a few words. She reflects on the chicken’s lives and their time at ShireFolk Farm since arriving as 3-day-old chicks from a hatchery in Pennsylvania. She thanks them.
Even after three years, processing is not taken lightly. “We strive to make sure they have a great life here, and they have one bad day, just one bad day,” says the 30-year-old Emilie, with fiery pink hair.
In 2016, the Tweardys were granted a farm processing exemption — awarded to small-scale poultry farmers — that allows them to kill, clean and package poultry on their 64-acre farm in Palmyra. Although slaughtering poultry is a major component of their farm, their livelihood, ensuring that their chickens live a happy life is at the forefront.
Both farmers graduated from Colorado State University with degrees in natural resources. Although they felt passionately about agriculture, something made them pause: Was farming an idea they’d romanticized, or could it be a way of life?
The Tweardys landed in Costa Rica for a six-month stay, working on a permaculture ranch — a farming method focused on making little to no impact on the environment — and tending to a chicken flock as they lived and breathed the poultry lifestyle.
It was time spent at Wishbone Heritage Farm, a poultry and honey farm in Charleston, South Carolina, that solidified their future. “When you have a big dream, it helps to observe someone else in their own early stages,” Emilie recalls. “You can take it [your dream] down off a pedestal, and it doesn’t have to be this unreachable anymore.”
It was clear to the Tweardys — they were going to be poultry farmers.
Three years later, ShireFolk Farm, a reference to J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” has transformed into a pasture-model poultry farm. On their property, 1,200 chickens and 360 laying hens — who produce 140 dozen eggs a week — roam freely, along with 350 turkeys. They can access acres of grass, migrate along the property, and if they’re lucky, get a visit from the newest member of the farm family, Emmett, the Tweardys’ 1-year-old son.
The recent addition of a high tunnel greenhouse allows ShireFolk to grow tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers; they’ve also begun selling mushrooms. Earlier this year, the Tweardys won a Food Animal Concerns Trust grant, which they will use to improve food and water systems for their poultry.
“The Shire is a place I grew up dreaming and fantasizing about ... a peaceful society of food and community focus and people inwardly focused on their corner of the world,” Emilie says. “We’re definitely sort of simple folks and enjoy food, friends, family, and being on the land and working that way.”
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Herbert Brown Sr. and Herbert Brown Jr. of Browntown Farms (Photo by Jay Paul)
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Photo by Jay Paul
Turning Over a New Leaf
A 110-year-old tobacco farm experiences a rebirth with vegetable and fruit crops
"I never thought I would be a farmer, never wanted to be a farmer,” says 30-year-old Herbert Brown Jr. of Browntown Farms, a 104-acre, multigenerational farm nestled in Brunswick County that’s been around since 1908.
Times have changed. In 2009, Brown graduated from Virginia State University with a degree in agriculture. Three years prior, his father, Herbert Brown Sr., had retired from a career in law enforcement and found himself returning to the fields.
“When you sit there and say your grace and say, ‘Thank you, Lord, for the food I’m about to eat,’ also thank the farmer who raised it,” says Herbert senior, 61, who’s seen the farm go through its series of ups and downs.
In Browntown’s heyday, it was a bustling tobacco farm run by Linwood Brown Jr., Herbert senior’s late brother, one of the founders of the National Black Farmers Association in 1995. Linwood had witnessed the denial of farm ownership loans for African-American farmers, including himself, while white counterparts were granted assistance. This led him to speak up and call out the USDA. (A class-action discrimination lawsuit against the USDA later resulted in a $1.25 billion settlement.)
“I remember as a kid going on charter buses and going to different states and marching and protesting,” says Herbert junior, who along with his father helps make up the 3 percent of farmers in Virginia who are African-American.
In 2006, when Herbert senior took over the farm after his brother’s death, the farm changed course. It’s currently home to 50 chickens, four hoop houses with more than 200 tomato plants, cucumbers and peppers, and rows of collards, cabbage, sweet potatoes and muscadine grapes.
The farm’s specialty is strawberries, but excess rain and curious, hungry deer destroyed almost their entire crop this year. “That’s farming, sometimes you have three bad years and one good year, or vice versa, it works like that,” Herbert senior says.
Last year, the duo began to dabble in jam production, and they recently launched a pilot CSA program that they’re trying to introduce to rural areas, but they mostly sell direct-to-consumer.
“We do it all,” Herbert junior says. “You have to market, be a businessman, an accountant, a grower, a scientist, a mechanic.”
The father-and-son team plans to delve into agricultural tourism by hosting events on the farm. Herbert junior also offers farm tours and mentors young people through a farm leadership program. “I tell them, ‘You may never have thought you’d be a farmer, but farming is not what you think,’ ” he says. “I never thought some of the stuff my dad told me I would tell someone else, and that’s an amazing thing.”
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Barbara Hollingsworth and David Hunsaker of Village Garden (Photo by Jay Paul)
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Photo by Jay Paul
Fruit of the Earth
A Hanover couple grows hundreds of heirlooms in their backyard
"I want to show you why Hanover County is known all over the world for tomatoes,” says David Hunsaker of Village Garden, a half-acre farm located in his backyard in Atlee.
“It has little to do with what we do and more with what nature did — you have the perfect soil,” explains the 56-year-old Wise native, scooping up some soil to show me the magical trifecta — clay, dirt, sand — that provides the tried-and-true grounds to produce some prime ’maters.
The first year, Village Garden produced 53 tomato varieties — now there are over 200, grown using organic, biodynamic farming methods so everything is pesticide- and herbicide-free. They obtain seeds from exchanges, worldly travels and fellow farm friends.
Twice a day, Hunsaker and his partner, Barbara Hollingsworth, walk around the farm and pick crops, usually accompanied by a glass of rosé (their favorite) and sporting straw hats while their dogs, Rusty and Shanti, follow behind them.
Village Garden is also home to 28 egg-producing ducks, one of which decides to dive in the pool during my visit.
“They know better,” says Hollingsworth, approaching the pool while gracefully balancing her glass of rosé. The duck guiltily exits.
Village Garden also packs some heat.
“Chilis and tomatoes are part of the same family, and they like each other, so we plant them together,” Hunsaker says.
Their basement — aka the tomato and chili processing center — is where “the magic happens.” Pool tables are disguised under a rainbow of fruit; they bring their crops here to weigh and process.
Three fridges are stuffed with bags filled with hundreds of exotic, brightly colored peppers, from Inca Drops to Carolina Reapers. The peppers are used in herb, spice and hot chili seasoning blends, as well as Village Garden’s zesty kimchi. We head back outside.
“Try this, it tastes like candy,” says Hunsaker, handing me a marble-sized tomato with an outer husk — an Aunt Molly’s Round cherry tomato.
I peel the husk, pop it in my mouth, and flavors of pineapple and melon trickle across my taste buds. It’s delicious — a sweet, tropical flavor unlike anything I’ve ever had.
“There’s no decent chef that’s not a tomato whore,” says Hunsaker, who works closely with chefs at Lemaire, Heritage, Pasture, Saison, East Coast Provisions, The Daily and Shagbark, to name a few. He and Hollingsworth deliver an array of heirlooms, most of which can’t be found at other farms locally, to restaurants twice a week.
A little eccentric, a little atypical, a trip to Village Garden is reminiscent of a visit with your cool aunt and uncle. Hunsaker and Hollingsworth’s passion is evident, and their relationship, their home and their life are rooted in their garden.
Who says you can’t garden and wine?
