If you could start your dream project, and you knew in your heart that you would not fail (not the reality of failing just the fear around it), how bigwouldyou dream?
What is your personal dream project? What does it look like? What are the parts that make it really appealing to you? That make you really want to do it?
(Clips from aSoil For Water Case Studyon Glade Road Growing in 2023. Thanks so much to Eric Bendfeldt of Virginia Cooperative Extension and NCAT for creating the Soil For Water series. Full video availablehere.)
It’s 2008 and I’m 25. I’m in grad school in a basement cubicle on campus and it’s midday on a gorgeous August day. I’m getting antsy sitting at my desk and I decide to go for a bike ride during lunch.
My boyfriend was working on a farm called Greenstar off Glade Road. Further down Glade Road, I had seen a sign on the fence of another piece of farm property that was going to be auctioned off. And today just happened to be that auction day.
So I ride my bike out Glade Road because it’s pretty out there anyway and the auction is just getting underway. There aren’t many people there, maybe less than 20. There’s a map of the property laid out that says there’s a stream at the bottom, old-growth oaks and hickory on the hill, and even more pasture land in the back. It’s a really pretty piece of open land.
And I watch the auction begin. I see the two bidders it comes down to. There’s a final bid, the gavel goes down, the auction is done and an older man I’d never seen before is the winner. Another older guy standing next to me chuckles, elbows me, and jokes why I didn’t bid. I wish. The auction ends. I go back to school.
Fast forward a couple of years to spring 2010. My then-boyfriend-now husband is wrapping up his 2-year internship at Greenstar Farm and he was about to start a part-time job at VT’s college farm at Kentland. I’d finished grad school and despite having applied for over 50 jobs (and I kept count) I wasn’t getting any callbacks, interviews, nothing.
One Saturday my husband comes home from a volunteer day at the YMCA community garden and says, “You know who I met today? That guy who bought the farmland on Glade. He said he’d show it to us sometime.” So that is how we met Pat.
Nothing was really coming my way that I wanted to pursue job-wise and JP’s interest in farming was at least, well, interesting. So why not entertain the thought of pursuing a farm?
We did do a little looking around elsewhere at farm property that we could buy ourselves. But what we could afford was always really far out, typically in rocky or thin soil or wooded. It wasn’t looking likely that we would be able to buy our own piece anywhere within 30 miles of a town.
So we toured Pat’s land with him. And we liked the place. We put together a proposal and he was good with our proposal. We moved forward with starting our farm here. Basically, he would rent the land to us and pay for some capital improvements.
I love looking back at our proposal then from 2010. It lists everything. It’s as if you asked an 8-year-old to write a farm plan. Remember that big dream I told you to think about? Our imagination was unbridled. We proposed an orchard, u-pick berries, vegetables, value-added farm produce, cider mill, camps, tours, livestock, aquaculture, more.
We did dream big, which was awesome.
Here’s my journal entry from April 14, 2010.
“JP and I are in the start of starting a small farm operation in Blacksburg. A nice 48-acre pasture across the Brown Farm was sold at auction in 2008 to a man named Pat. Well now it is almost 2 years, a masters degree and 50 job applications later and JP and I are thinking that maybe staying in Blacksburg and starting a farm at our age is not such a shabby idea…We have so many things to learn…a lot! But we are taking notes and keeping a journal and making a lot of contacts. It is exhausting and intimidating at times, especially since it is someone else’s land…But I am confident we will come ou
