In just a few days, I will leave my home in Black Mountain North Carolina to drive to Raleigh to spend 48 hours serving as a volunteer for the first Farm Aid concert to be held in North Carolina. I am excited about my first trip to Farm Aid and my mind keeps wondering back to 1985…the year it all started.
I remember where I was when I first heard of Farm Aid. I was a junior in high school and I had an after school job on a dairy farm in Meadows of Dan Virginia. Hurricane Ridge Dairy Farm was owned and operated by the Gene Barnard Family and they were one of the first families in the community to have dish television. Not the satellite company, mind you. They had the big saucer dish placed in the back yard to bring the world into their living room.
Extended family members took turns watching satellite television at the main farm house in between shifts on the farm. On occasion, I got to join in around the television after the calves had been hand-fed with bottles and the stalls had been cleaned.
This television brought news both bad and good. In that little farm house, I learned of the Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy on a snowy January day when school was cancelled and I was working extra hours to earn a little more money. And I learned about Farm Aid and the efforts that Willie Nelson and many other artists were making to save family farms.
While the facts were reported in the living room, the reality still seemed a world away. Images of large corn and wheat fields with huge combine machines fill my memory of the early years of the concert. Faces of distraught people as they relinquished their farms to creditors. Places and sites I had never seen with my own eyes. And now, celebrities were trying to save the people by saving their farms.
I grew up on a 100 acre farm that served to support my family of six with vegetables, beef cows, fruit and chickens. Organic, free range, grass fed…we did it all, but we called it farming. No fancy titles or certifications were needed. And money was tight. I had no concept of how poor we were until I started working to pay for my education. Who knew that our simple way of life would become a luxury – today it is a lifestyle that people dream of and wonder if it will ever be within reach.
For many years, I worked as an accountant. First in public accounting for one of the largest firms in the world and then for manufacturing firms. I counted and reported and shivered in a perpetually cold air conditioned office until I had enough. One day I decided to do something different.
At first, I didn’t know exactly what I would do with myself, but I was certain that I needed to be outside most of the time…just like the days on the farm. Little by little, I turned my passion for cycling into a bicycle touring business called Velo Girl Rides. But that’s not all. Putting in the miles to build my business, I spent hours riding past farms. These farms were the same ones that provided local, fresh food at the Saturday Tailgate Market in my town. I wanted to find a way to introduce cyclists to these farms.
From the idea, a new form of agritourism grew. I created Cycle To Farm which is a 62 mile bicycle ride through farmland that encourages cyclists to stop at farms along the route, sample the farmer’s product, and make purchases on the spot. Volunteers transport the purchases back to the finish line where a party, complete with a farm-to-table meal, awaits. Farmers meet new customers and cyclists meet the people who grow their food.
The next such event will be held on October 11 in the Sandy Mush community of Buncombe County North Carolina. All of the farms on the tour were once tobacco farms and now they grow very different crops including: grapes for wine, Christmas trees, vegetables, pastured raised pork and beef, flowers and chickens. All of the farmers are like me in that they had very different careers before returning to a family farm or purchasing a farm in the community.
Events like Cycle To Farm help these folks live the dream of farming and lead a simpler life. Cycle To Farm provides a tiny fraction of the support that Farm Aid provides to farmers, so maybe you can imagine how honored I felt when Kari Williams, Development Director of Farm Aid, contacted me to inquire about offering a Cycle To Farm experience at Farm Aid Eve.
Now I am packing for my trip to Raleigh where I will spend two days working in various venues as I try to soak in as much knowledge of the event as possible. My intention is to create a special Cycle To Farm event for Farm Aid Eve 2015, but first, the hard work of volunteering for Farm Aid begins…just like back on the farm. Live is truly very good when lived simply and outdoors…see you at Walnut Creek Amphitheater!
