Wild Hope Farm – Peanut Belk

0:00:24	History of Wild Hope Farm
0:03:49	How Peanut got interested in farming
0:05:11	Types of vegetables and fruits grown on the farm
0:06:11	Difficulties with asparagus
0:07:10	Why rhubarb isn’t grown
0:07:28	A typical day on the farm
0:09:25	H-2A workers
0:10:50	How farm operations have changed over the years
0:13:04	Employee management
0:13:36	Climate change
0:14:07	Organic certification process
0:15:56	Benefits growing organic
0:17:11	Soil protection “crop crop”
0:18:36	Drip irrigation
0:19:36	High tunnel system
0:20:46	Sustainability goals
0:22:51	Why organic measures are important
0:25:22	Educational and community aspects
0:26:52	Challenges of farming in Charlotte
0:28:06	Champions of farmers in Charlotte
0:29:45	Family on the farm
0:31:05	Collaboration with Watson Farms
0:31:52	Challenges of running a small business
0:33:17	What first year was like
0:34:39	Food Safety Modernization Act compliant
0:35:29	Community-Supported Agriculture program
0:36:21	Different market locations
0:37:14	How each market differs
0:38:02	Labor is largest expense
0:38:25	Difficulty of growing broccoli, tomatoes and lettuce
0:39:11	Seasonality of food
0:41:05	Advice for young farmers
0:42:16	Future of her farm
0:43:01	Future of farming in Charlotte
0:43:55	Hope to be a resource for the public

Sekiya Billman 00:01
This is Sekiya Billman interviewing Katherine “Peanut” Belk, who was born in 1991. It’s October 23, 2024 and we are at Wild Hope Farm in Chester, South Carolina. Today we will explore working on an organic farm with a CSA [Community Supported Agriculture] program. So what is the history of this farm?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
The farm got, well, my parents purchased the property twenty-seven years ago now. And before then, the land was, you know, many decades ago, once a dairy farm, and so there were – when my parents bought the property, still a few buildings, old milking barns and silos for grain that were left over from the dairy farm, but the dairy actually closed many years before they bought the land and had been used for rotational grazing of beef, or cows for a beef, a calf-cow operation. And it was owned by a family that’s been in Chester for a really long time, the Adams Family. And when my parents bought the land, they kind of bought it as a place to come on the weekends. There was nothing really here, not much infrastructure. So it was mostly for fishing and hunting and, you know, to come and camp out as well. And yeah. So over the course of the last twenty-seven years, they’ve done a lot of different projects on the farm, putting in trails, building a pond, tagging trees, tagging and identifying trees, planting trees, planting a garden, planting an orchard, things like that, and about eight years ago, July of 2017, the farm as a business started; Wild Hope Farm as we know it now.

Sekiya Billman 02:16
And how long have you been farming?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
And I have been farming since then. So I moved back home. I was living in Boston at the time working for a product design firm, very different world, and was, had been there for a number of years and was looking for my next move in my career, and was talking to my parents, and they kept talking about their vision of starting an organic vegetable farm, and I very naively thought, oh, that sounds like fun. Like you know, I think I could farm. I could learn farming. Which, looking back in retrospect, I think being naive was probably a part of my success is like not knowing how grueling farming really is. But I moved home then, and I worked with another person who had a background in agriculture, and so I came in and I added, you know, the marketing and sales side of the business, and he really focused on the growing. And over the course of the years since I’ve been doing this, I now feel much more knowledgeable on the agriculture side. I still enjoy doing, you know, the hiring, the sales, the marketing, that sort of thing, but I definitely do a more well-rounded mix of all the different roles on the farm.

Sekiya Billman 03:41
Was there anything specifically that got you interested in the idea of farming?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
Yeah, I think I must just have a loose screw. (laughs) I was a, I am a vegetarian, and I had been buying, supporting a farm through a CSA program. So I had been buying a farm share in Boston where I lived, and I lived a very kind of low impact life. I biked or ran everywhere I went. I didn’t own a car, I didn’t own a house. So in a way, like, you know, it’s very different than my incredible responsibility that I have now. But, you know, I was very active. I liked doing physical activities, and so, you know, and I’m, I like the type of work that allows you to dabble in a lot of different things, has a certain degree of chaos. So, you know, I think that maybe all of that kind of came together, and it makes sense that I’m farming, but at the time, I would never have guessed that I’d still be doing this. I thought, oh, I was going to move home for two years, spend some time reconnecting with family, because I had lived up in New England for a really long time. And. Um, yeah, now I’m kind of addicted, so I don’t know that I can see myself doing something different than farming.

Sekiya Billman 05:15
And what kind of crops do you grow?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
We grow pretty much everything that you can think of in terms of vegetables, aside from asparagus and rhubarb. I think those are the two things that you know, we pretty much don’t (yelling in background) grow but lettuce, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, squash, melons, watermelons, onions, garlic, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collards, chard, pretty much all, but all of those things we grow, and then we grow a limited number of fruit. So Asian persimmon, figs, blueberries and a little bit of blackberries. But some of our fruit is mostly for, like our farm crew’s enjoyment, not for, we don’t sell all of the fruit that we grow.

Sekiya Billman 06:05
And what are the reasons that you don’t grow asparagus and rhubarb?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
For asparagus, it’s that it’s not an annual vegetable. And so from a maintenance and weeding perspective, it’s just a lot more complicated. So you plant the crop, and then two years later you begin harvesting. And we are a tractor-based operation. So we’re growing on twelve acres. So we rely on the tractor to maintain our fields, to turn fields over, and then also we’re organic, so we follow the USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] Organic Standards. And for asparagus, it’s just very challenging to maintain and weed organically. And just like within our systems, you know, we’re used to, when the crop is finished, we’ll mow and turn it over using the tractor. But for asparagus, you’d have to, like, hand weed, yeah. And then there are probably some more niche crops that we don’t grow, that you just can’t grow in this climate.

Sekiya Billman
And rhubarb, does that have the same kinds of issues?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
Yeah, rhubarb is more challenging to grow in this climate, and that’s also just a very niche product. (phone buzz) So that’s kind of part of the reason why we don’t grow it.

Sekiya Billman
Can you describe a typical day on the farm for yourself?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
Yeah, so I wake up somewhere between four and six thirty. I have three kids, four and under. So we, our house can be pretty chaotic in the morning. In the peak summer, we’re starting work at 6:00 a.m. to try and beat the heat, and so I’ll get to the shed around 5:40, you know, the sun is usually not quite up yet. And we meet at, the managers meet at the whiteboard to talk about the priorities for the day; see if anything’s changed. You know, did we get a hurricane or tornado or something in the night that we need to deal with the repercussions of? And then we go into the day, the whole crew. We have about fifteen employees now. They’ll meet at the shed, at the, at the whiteboard, so we, the managers, or the farm manager, talks through what we’re going to do for the day, and then we kind of disperse and go out and do the different tasks. So Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays the day is mostly harvesting and then washing and packing for either a wholesale order, the farmers markets, or for our CSA program. And then Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday, we’re delivering the produce to our CSA. And then on Saturday, we do two different farmers markets. And then we usually do other field tasks, like hoeing, transplanting, fixing irrigation, you know, things like that on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the most part.

Sekiya Billman 09:17
And so, when does your day end generally?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
And so our crew of workers that are from the US, they work an eight hour day. So I usually end, you know, around like three fifteen in the summer, and then these days, more like four thirty and we also have five H-2A workers. So that’s a government program of, H-2A is the name of the visa, but it’s migrant laborers, and we’re working with a family that’s from a small town in Mexico, and so they usually will work longer hours. So that has been, you know, when we were first getting started, we didn’t have H-2A workers. It was all US-based workers, and we were a small crew, so I was kind of working all the time. I didn’t have kids as well, (laughs) but now I have kids and other priorities and demands on my time. And so it’s been really complimentary to kind of discover the H-2A program. And, you know, have people that want to work more hours, are able to work on the weekends. So we’ve kind of figured out a new routine that seems to work better.

Sekiya Billman 10:45
What are your farming operations; and how have they kind of changed over the years, maybe with types of crops and changing, you know, technology?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
Yeah, I think that we have over the years, we’re trying to kind of simplify what we’re growing a little bit more. It’s not always easy, though, because with any new employee, sometimes they might have an interest in a niche product. So I think we’re going, looking into the future, trying to continue to simplify our planting plan. We have grown like ten different types of lettuce in the past, and that’s kind of unnecessary…(laughs) and from a harvesting standpoint, the different varieties leads to more complexity and potential for confusion when you’re onboarding new employees. Technology wise, I don’t feel like things have changed all that much. You know, we’ve definitely scaled our operation so we’re moving a lot larger volumes of product, ideally like pallets at a time going kind of out the door. And so just like thinking at a larger scale, having standards around harvesting, around our packing and wholesale, you know, qualities, and then, I guess, maybe most importantly, going into our employee management with a better idea of, you know, here’s the onboarding documents. Here are the expectations. Making sure that we’re being really clear about what we expect from all of our different employees.

Katherine “Peanut” Belk 12:40
So, yeah, I think we’ve been a lot more intentional and organized in regards to, like, managing our employees, and I think that’s one of the significant ways in which we’ve changed as we’ve matured as a business. It’s like now we have fifteen employees and their families that we’re responsible for. You know, we don’t want to lose people. We want to retain employees so that, you know, we’re investing in them, they’re investing in us. We offer more benefits and things like that, to try and attract great talent. And then also, climate change has definitely impacted how we farm, how we grow, so we’re having to kind of pivot. You know, the storms that we receive are much more severe, often leading to flooding, other things like that. So we’re trying to be smart about, are there certain crops that we shouldn’t even bother growing, you know, because it’s too difficult to grow in this climate, things like that.

Sekiya Billman
You have an organic farm. Can you tell me about the certification process, what that was like?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
Yeah, so we, the farm was cut for hay prior to us growing, or the, in the fields where we grow on was, was previously cut for hay. And so there was, you know, that hay was sprayed many, many years ago, but so we couldn’t get certified, you know, from the get go, but we stopped the spraying a year before we started farming. So I think it was only like two years into growing that we were able to get certified. We get our certification through Clemson University. They, it’s a percent of your gross sales up to a, they cap it at a certain amount. So I think our certification costs over $3,000 this year. You can get reimbursed like $750 of that. It does require a lot of record keeping, but that’s kind of like good farming practices anyways, when you’re at a certain scale; you need to know what you’ve done in the fields and everywhere. So, you know, it is more paperwork and stuff, but it’s really aligned with our morals and our vision for having a regenerative farm that’s feeding us for decades to come. You know, something that can be truly sustainable, both in the way that we’re treating the land and the way that we’re focusing, like treating our employees, and then financially is sustainable as well. So we kind of need all of those things to work out for it to make sense, and getting certified felt like the right move, given those values.

Sekiya Billman
Has the pushed or increased interest in organic produce influenced the way you farm or the crops that you raise? (car drives by)

Katherine “Peanut” Belk 15:30
No, I don’t think so. We were always going to farm in this way. It definitely has been beneficial. You mean, the public’s increase in interest?

Sekiya Billman
Yes, yes.

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
It’s definitely been beneficial as we’ve scaled that there’s a higher demand. You know, I really feel like it’s kind of a ‘all ships rise’ scenario where, if there were more farmers in our area, we would only benefit from that, because Charlotte really has a long ways to go in terms of, like, education around sustainability and, you know, clean food and supporting local farms. The farmers market scenes are still like, even though we’ve had farmers markets in Charlotte for many, many decades, they’re still not as popular, that like, as other cities that are much smaller than Charlotte. So I think that that’s changing, and will continue to change. But yeah, I really feel like there could be so much more potential demand in Charlotte if people were more educated.

Sekiya Billman
Can you tell me about the practices you use to protect the soil or prevent runoff?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
Yes. So, for protecting the soil, we cover crop intensively. So you know, when a crop is not in production, there’s some parts of our field that we might flip more frequently. We might plant three cash crops in that bed throughout the season. But for the majority of our fields that we’re growing under, we will terminate a crop. So let’s take like the tomatoes out in field three, for example, when we were done picking them, we mowed them, and we have a no till drill, and we’ll plant cover crops following that, so that we can ensure that that land is not bare for too long, because when it is bare and you get a heavy hurricane or heavy rainstorm, you can get a lot of runoff, but the cover crops will absorb that water and will help it to filtrate better into our soil. And then you can kind of see the property is obviously much bigger than just the twelve acres that we’re growing on, so the wooded areas help as like a buffer as well. We have a retention pond there, right by our production field, and then we have another pond in the back that can help catch the runoff. We have hedgerows. We have pollinator plots. We’re kind of doing a lot beyond just the growing.

Sekiya Billman 18:08
Do you use irrigation, dry farming?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
We are using drip irrigation. We also use a little bit of overhead irrigation on specific crops that are direct seeded. (cough) The drip irrigation is plastic, black plastic irrigation tubing that goes under the ground, so it’s going directly to the source. So it is like a much more efficient way to get water to your plants than to just broadcast it. In our climate, we have extreme weather swings, and you really can’t grow vegetables that are the diverse vegetables that we are growing and rely on, like dry farming, for example, it just wouldn’t, you wouldn’t have, (phone buzz) you would have a lot of crop loss.

Sekiya Billman 19:00
Can you tell me about the high tunnel system that you use?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
Yes, we use these Haygrove polytunnels, and we have two, kind of traditional high tunnels. But that’s kind of a reaction to a lot of the, you know, climate changes that we’re experiencing is that without covered space, we really can’t grow in the winter. So this covered space is pretty critical, (train horn) and letting us grow crops through the rainy season, and keeping disease and pest pressure off of the crops, because the level of rain that we get in (train horn) any given storm, it can be pretty intense, so it’s protected from the rain pretty much. So yeah, you can. We’ve gotten two high tunnels through NRCS [National Resources Conservation Service] funding, and then we’ve also paid out of pocket for other tunnels, but they pay for themselves because, you know, you’re able to do the farmers markets and grow year round, pretty much, but without the tunnels we couldn’t grow through the winter.

Sekiya Billman
Tell me about the sustainability measures you have in place in your hope to go Net Zero.

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
Yeah, I think that prior to farming, I thought it would be a simpler thing to measure, quantify, and now I’ve kind of totally given up hope. I mean, we do have, we’ve invested in solar systems for residences as well as the business and those solar systems offset probably 60% of our energy needs. So there’s a solar system over this whole building here, and then over here, but it’s just incredible. Like every, we started off just with that solar and then we realized that wasn’t nearly enough, and we put it all up here, but it’s still not quite enough. (tractor sound) And then the way that Duke does it, you have to give, you’re always putting energy back into the grid, and then they reimburse you if you over-produce. But you know, it does never feel like we could have enough solar. But we also have invested in reusable bins, so instead of using wax boxes or disposable boxes, we are using for our 350 to 400 member CSA program, these reusable bins each week, (phone buzz) and that helps us to, to cut down on our waste on the farm. We also are not growing under plastic, a lot of vegetable (car drives by) , especially organic farmers, are growing in plastic. So they’re, the beds you probably have seen if you go visit a strawberry farm or something, it’s all covered in plastic. We’re growing directly into the soil. So we’re doing things like that as well.

Sekiya Billman 21:55
So what is important to you about making all of these changes in the way that you’re farming – these conservation efforts? (trucks drive by)

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
I’m going to be one of the people spraying organic pesticide or herbicide, I want to feel comfortable spraying the thing, the product, on my food that I’m eating. I want to feel, comfortable with the safety of what I’m using on my body, and so I think that is really important to me. I really don’t use a lot of products in my life, so I really value clean, simple living and eating and consumption, I guess. And so I think just the organic certification makes sense. I also, you know, if you can work with nature rather than against it, it can be more financially viable in the long run. You know, if you’re wanting to do this for many decades, you don’t want to churn and burn your soil. You don’t want to, you know, kind of take away all the nutrients without feeding it back. You want to think about the ecosystem that you’re living in and how everything is interconnected. And, you know, the retention pond helps to catch the runoff. But we also planted pollinator, native wetland species of plants around there that attract beneficial insects that can, you know, eat our pests. And so instead of, it’s kind of like taking, you know, trying to build up your immune system in a more holistic way, rather than taking antibiotics. So when you take antibiotics, you’re killing the good and the bad bacteria at the same time, leaving your body in a more vulnerable place. The same goes with like relying on pesticides or synthetic fertilizers or something. You know, you’re, you’re actually, you’re not thinking about the ecosystem. You’re being reactive rather than proactive. So if you can work with nature, you can, you know, have a much more robust farming system, if that makes sense, you know, and that just, it makes me feel better, mentally, physically, and then also makes more financial sense. So like investing in the soil, so that, you know, we can continue to do this.

Sekiya Billman 24:25
So it seems like you have this educational aspect to the work that you’re doing on the farm. Does that, do you have workshops? Do you…

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
Yeah, we do. We have a number of different events on the farm. Not a ton. I think I used to do more. But again, with kids, I realize I want to have some balance in life. But this Saturday, we’re doing a mushroom cultivation workshop. We do a plant sale, we do farm tours, we do a music, you know, fun summer celebration day. So we do a little bit of everything, flower arranging workshops, and they’re great. It’s really fun to get people out. Because I think, you know, it makes sense that, farming is not a big part of the culture in Charlotte, so it’s a matter of getting people out here, letting them see, oh, that’s what ginger looks like, you know, as a plant, it’s in the ground. I don’t, the root is underground, you know, and it has this kind of tropical stalk, and teaching the adults, their kids, you know, everyone about what goes in, what it takes to farm, so that if we have a crop loss, and our peppers don’t look as good as they might normally, you know, they understand why that’s happening. Or, you know, what eating in season really means. You know, because you can’t, you can buy broccoli at the grocery store any day of the year. But that’s not the reality of growing. You can’t grow broccoli any day of the year in South Carolina.

Sekiya Billman 26:08
What are some challenges or strengths of farming in the Charlotte area?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
I think some challenges are that, you know, development is encroaching everywhere, and when farmland is lost, it’s lost forever. You know it’s never going to go back into farming. And I think that Charlotte is a very corporate city, and there’s less people are thinking about, you know, they might spend a lot of money on exercise classes or clothing or the car that they’re driving, but they’re not taking that same mentality and focusing it on what the food, what food they’re eating? So they’re cutting costs in the grocery store, but spending money elsewhere, you know. And I think it just doesn’t really connect that, you know, all of these different things need to come together. And it’s all interconnected. And the cheap prices that you’re getting at Trader Joe’s, you know, somebody’s paying for that, and we probably ultimately are all going to pay for that, you know, through climate change and other practices. But I think that, it’s like there are a lot of really smart and talented people in the food world. In Charlotte, you know, you have people like Verdant [Bread Company], you know, they’re, they’re trying to teach people about the benefits of eating, you know, pure ingredients, flour and water in their sourdough bread, teaching about the fermentation process. You have, you know, the Uptown market just started in downtown Charlotte. So that’s a new farmers market right in the heart of Charlotte that’s producer focused. (car drives by) You have really smart and passionate people that are starting, trying to start market, start market, garden style farms. So I think it’s changing. You know, there’s a group that my dad has been involved with called the Working Farms Fund that’s trying to conserve land and keep it in the hands of farmers, land that’s under the threat of development, I should say. So I think that there’s definitely a lot going on. There’s some pretty great chefs in Charlotte that are bringing more awareness to farm to table style eating, like Greg Collier of Leah and Louise, and I can’t remember some of his other restaurants. So I feel like there’s a lot going on. It’s not that there’s not enough going on, but I think that we really need to get the community kind of involved, and it takes every different angle. (car drives by)

Sekiya Billman 28:52
What… Do you involve family in your work and how?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
Yeah, so my parents own the land. My mom owns the land, and my, she technically is the owner of the business. They have a house here. They were really heavily involved the first few years, and then have since been much less involved. Now that we are more established, we’re financially, you know, we’re cash flow positive. We’re able to pay for ourselves. It was mostly like the first three years when we were getting started, they helped to cover the upfront investment costs of the startup. But they’ll still come to the farmers markets. My little sister, two of my little sisters have worked for me. My brother is always kind of helping out, but they, a lot of my family lives in Charlotte, and then I have a husband and three young kids that are all here on the farm, and, you know, they’re driving by. We go for walks and stuff, and so, yeah, it’s definitely like, feels like all the people that I work with know my kids. So it is like a big family, both in a very great and uplifting way, and also sometimes in a challenging, slightly dysfunctional way. (laughs)

Sekiya Billman 30:12
Do you collaborate with other farms?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
We currently, we used to have our own laying hens, and now we buy in from Watson Farms. They have grass fed chicken and pork and beef. So we buy, you know, 130 dozen eggs a week from them. And we also, you know, it’s a pretty small community of sustainable farms. So we’re always kind of, I’ve got farmer friends that I text with. What are you guys doing? What variety are you using? Things like that. But we haven’t really found a farm that we could work closely with and buying in produce, you know, but I would love to do that in the future.

Sekiya Billman
What are, what have been some of your unexpected challenges?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
I think I just really underestimated how hard it is just to run a small business in general. How to satisfy, you know, our, my employee’s needs, I think that we, we have to kind of house people here because we’re further out. There’s not a lot of housing, so you get to this, you know, weird situation sometimes, where you’re providing them housing. You know, you’re a friend, but you’re also their boss. And, you know, it can be challenging. A lot of farming, farms are not necessarily the most professional workplaces, and we’re trying to make this more of a professional workplace. So I think that has been, yeah, I think, just employee management has been kind of the hardest thing for us on the farm. (truck drives up)

Sekiya Billman 32:04
What was your first year like?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
It was crazy. I think there were a lot of tears. Because we were doing things like building a fence, a deer fence, digging trenches for the irrigation, trying to look into solar, trying to get our street address changed, trying to get the farm to be recognized on Google. You know, dealing with zoning or not zoning, but, well, yeah, zoning to build other buildings on the property, and it just felt chaotic. And, you know, you’re just nothing that you’re doing makes sense or is straightforward. And I think also, some people at the farmers market are like, “Oh, who are these, you know, people that think they’re going to get into farming and scale up” and, you know, I think it was just challenging in a lot of different ways, but exciting too, you know, I think I’m glad to have it behind me though. (laughs)

Sekiya Billman 33:15
Have any recent laws for environmental changes impacted your recent endeavors?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
No. We try to do things by the books, and I don’t foresee us having any issues. You know, we now are FSMA compliant: Food Safety Modernization Act. So that’s a little bit, you know, we were audited last year, but we were already doing, keeping up with the practices that they wanted us to adhere to, so it wasn’t scary or problematic in any way.

Sekiya Billman
How do you involve the community on your farm?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
Well, we have the events that I talked about, and that’s kind of the main thing. You know, we also were at two farmers markets. We have a 350 member CSA program. So community is kind of what we’re all about.

Sekiya Billman
How did you decide to start the CSA program?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
We started with a focus on CSA farming, just because that was the area, that was the style of farming that the previous farm manager already knew how to do. He was doing it at Clemson. And you know, you can’t just sell through one channel, really. You need to have, when your cucumbers are flush, you know, you need to, you don’t want to give them to your CSA members year after year. You need to be able to have wholesale outlets or sell them at the farmers market. So the diversified outlets are very important to, you know, having just a robust market stream.

Sekiya Billman
So you go to farmers markets, you have your CSA program, and you sell wholesale. Do you sell to local or regional, like chain grocers at all?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
We sell, probably to the Swamp Rabbit Café in Greenville, but a lot of the grocery stores are (crier??) we don’t have, we have mostly chain grocery stores in Charlotte. Maybe Reid’s is the only non-chain grocery store, and they don’t really buy locally, as far as I know, but we sell the food hubs that then redistribute our produce to kind of restaurants in Charlotte. There’s a grocer in Charleston and other restaurants in Charleston. So we sell to three different food hubs, one in Charlotte, one in Charleston, one in the Raleigh/Durham area. And they kind of put our produce in different places.

Sekiya Billman 35:53
Is there? How does providing for the different markets differ?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
They’re just different standards. You know, the farmers market, people are wanting the produce to look really pretty and be packaged in a certain way. For wholesale, you need to pack them in wax or unwaxed boxes. Have the label, the unit, the product type, the variety, the date. And then with our CSA, you know, it doesn’t matter as much what it looks like, but I spend more time writing emails to our customers, and if the customer doesn’t pick up, you know, trying to get them to come up to the farm to pick up, things like that. And then I should also say we donate, probably like a pallet of produce every week to a food hub or a food bank in Chester. (car drives by)

Sekiya Billman
What are your largest expenses, would you say?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
Labor. That’s it. (laugh)

Sekiya Billman
Are there crops that can no longer grow predictably in the region?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
Yeah, I would say, certain varieties of broccoli are really hard. Tomatoes out in the field are really hard. So we only grow tomatoes under our tunnels, and then broccoli. We’re going to kind of grow less out of it. Yeah, it’s more, it’s not necessarily that you can’t grow something at all, but you kind of have to limit the amount that you grow, or grow it only in a specific window. You know, lettuce can’t grow through the summer because it’s not heat tolerant. Certain varieties aren’t heat tolerant.

Sekiya Billman 37:48
What is an aspect of farming that people wouldn’t consider or is misunderstood by the general public?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
I think a lot of people don’t understand seasonality. You know? What is grown when you don’t have cucumbers year-round, you know? And even when you put cucumbers under the high tunnel, if you’re not paying the heat, the high tunnel like it doesn’t, you can’t have cucumbers in the winter. You can only extend the season so much, and it only makes sense to extend the season so much. It doesn’t make sense to be spending a lot of labor hours, you know propane fuel to heat buildings, to grow produce. We need to kind of adapt the way that we cook, instead of following strict recipes in any given season, or like they don’t necessarily match up with the season we should be eating and cooking in season. And then I think, you know also, just like it is confusing to a lot of people what the organic certification means and what that requires, and that totally makes sense, you know, you go in the store and you see natural and you’re like, is that organic, you know? But obviously now I know that natural or sustainable does not mean organic. You know, it just takes a lot to farm, but it is also like any small business that you’re running, you know, that has the same challenges of, that a brewery might have, you know, a restaurant might have, or any other service industry job.

Sekiya Billman 39:29
I helped start a bakery in New York, and just like the learning curve and the…

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
It’s crazy, (laughs) that’s why I say you’ve got to be a little crazy to want to do this sort of work.

Sekiya Billman
What advice would you give for people who have only been doing this for a few years or just starting… to farm?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
I think, be super creative. You know, you’re going to get a bunch of setbacks. You’ve got to be kind of relentlessly optimistic and just be willing to pivot, you know, we’ve lost probably 50% of our fall crops with the hurricane. But if I were to let go of, you know, but our payroll has obviously stayed the same. And if I were to let go of some of my employees, that would create a lot of backlash. It just wouldn’t be a great situation. So we’re harvesting willows that we’re growing in the flower garden for willow bundles to try and sell those. We divided our peonies, and they’re selling the peony tubers. You know, we’re just trying to get scrappy and think of anything that we’re growing, that we could sell, that there could be a market for, and that can be fun, but it is definitely – farming is the most humbling thing. You’re just constantly as soon as it dries up, you have severe flood warnings. You know, it’s just been crazy.

Sekiya Billman
What do you see for the future of your farm?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
I see a simplified version of what we’re doing, you know, hopefully a place where young growers can continue to learn and grow with us. Which was one of our big goals was to educate the next generation of farmers. And you know, something that is robust and can handle these setbacks and weather or personnel setbacks as well. You know we’re not kind of too brought down by any given thing. We can keep, keep carrying on.

Sekiya Billman 41:46
What do you see for the future of farming in Charlotte?

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
I think it’s only going to continue to grow. Hopefully. It seems like people are a lot more interested. Like the Matthews Farmers Market, the amount of foot traffic has kind of doubled, probably over the past five years. I would imagine that Uptown Farmers Market this year might be able to say the same thing. And that’s been really incredible to watch. And I think people really care, and they’re starting to, as soon as they begin to learn, you know. And I think often times it happens when people are having kids, and they realize, they want to feed their kids clean food or they want to teach their kids how to garden or do a project with their kids. It encourages them, “Oh, I have no idea how this works” or “I have no idea what it means to grow clean food” you know, and then they start going down this rabbit hole. And, you know, I just hope to be a resource for young farmers, for community members, you know, just to, hopefully help to rise up the level of conversation about sustainability, or sustainable farming. And, you know, regenerative agriculture more generally.

Sekiya Billman
All right. Well, I think that that is it.

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
Okay, great.

Sekiya Billman
Thank you so much.

Katherine “Peanut” Belk
Of course. Thank you.