One has been raising your food for a lifetime. The other started a few years ago. We brought these two different farmers together to harvest a bumper crop of cross-generational insight.
By Steve Russell • Photos by Sarah Cramer Shields

Spend much time at a farmers’ market and you’ll spot both archetypes—the old farmers with scarred hands, feedcompany hats, and lunch-sack scratch pads, and the young farmers with shiny hair, fleece tops, and Blackberrys (the variety that surfs the Internet). You may wonder if they’ve made each other’s acquaintance across the aisle, and if they have much in common beyond dirty fingernails.

Whitney Critzer’s family has been farming in the Rockfish Valley for five generations. Today, Critzer Family Farm is best known for its pick-your-own strawberries and peaches along the road to Wintergreen, and fresh produce sold at the Staunton and Charlottesville farmers’ markets. The farm has been under Critzer’s direction since 1978, but in truth, he’s been a farmer for all of his 61 years.

Megan Weary, 35, has been growing produce and flowers for only four years, since she and husband Rob, with more devotion to the eat-local ideal than experience in agriculture, made a major life change and started Roundabout Farm in Keswick. Their farming style is still evolving— this year Roundabout is expanding its successful wholesale operation, but will no longer set up at farmers’ markets or operate a CSA.

We asked Critzer and Weary to take a break from their chores for a freewheeling farmer-to-farmer dialogue. They were curious enough about their opposite archetypes to say yes, and nice enough to let us learn more about local farming—past and future—from their conversation.

BREAKING GROUND

CRITZER: I was born on the farm. I grew up with peaches, cattle, hogs, corn, and hand-milked cows. My grandfather and his two brothers also were blacksmiths and had a buggy shop; Critzer Shop Road [Route 151 in Albemarle and Nelson counties] is named for that. It was the life I loved, and I couldn’t wait to farm. I farmed with my father and took over from him in 1978. The only thing I didn’t like then was peaches. So first thing, I got rid of them [chuckles]. Then the next year I replanted the peach trees.

WEARY: The dream of this farm was really my husband Rob’s. His parents had a small farm in Pennsylvania and basically fed themselves from a vegetable garden. He studied government and political science at UVA, then went to Guatemala in the Peace Corps and worked with farmers there on saving corn seeds and building silos. While there, he met another Peace Corps volunteer who moved back to Vermont and started a farm. He was our inspiration. Rob would talk about this dream, and I said, “Sure.” He still has a job at the Nature Conservancy, so I joke that his dream is to farm and I’m the one living his dream. But when I was a UVA student, I volunteered with the city parks department to plant bulbs in the road medians and grew containers of vegetables on my porch. I got a master’s degree in education and was a teacher for seven years, so I had no formal education in agriculture, but a lot of interest.

CRITZER: How was it starting out?

WEARY: The first year we broke ground, it was really difficult, but we’re starting to see the benefit of building soil health with cover cropping, manure, and compost. We see the benefit of having land under cultivation. Instead of being so compacted, the soil is now looser. The first year we farmed one acre and sold about $9,000 worth of produce. Now we farm 15 acres and do about $12,000 per acre, barring what the deer destroy out of the equation. I’ve also figured out a lot about postharvest handling. The first couple of times I harvested anything, it was a mess by the time I delivered it. I learned that if you harvest flowers with the stems too long, they droop. Beginner mistakes are costly. And embarrassing. Our learning curve has been huge.

CRITZER: Oh, I’m still at the bottom of that learning curve. The thing I love most about farming is that it’s always different. Just last spring, about a fourth of our plums, cherries, and peaches bloomed, then there were three weeks of cold weather and they just sat there and did nothing. I’d never seen that big of a gap in bloom period in my whole life. A lot of farming is just planting something, watching it die, figuring out why, and planting it again.

EATING (AND FARMING) LOCAL

WEARY: Right now is a great time for people to get into farming for their community. We were fortunate in our timing in joining this movement. The demand is so great, and people want to know the farmer who is raising their food. We recently had the chance to start sending our produce to some of the more famous chefs in D.C. But then we realized we’d have to give up some of our more local accounts, and we don’t want to do that.

CRITZER: It’s exciting to see people think about food. Heck, it’s exciting to see people think about anything. We have ruined the food market to a large extent because so many people have become interested in only one thing—price. How can we get it cheap, and how can we get it quick? Nobody knows where food comes from, and the only way to get a picture of that back is to realize that if we’re gonna eat, we might have to—

WEARY: Work for it?

CRITZER. Yeah. The key to what happens to us in the future is young folks coming into farming. We need to encourage that. We used to have kids working on the farm, and a lot of those who started when they were 10 came back and worked for me in the summers, even after they went off to college. But because of regulations, it became impossible for kids that young to work, and 16-year-olds now aren’t much interested in that kind of job. When people ask me what I like about growing strawberries, it’s the kids who come with their parents to our pick-your-own patches. We get about 2,000 kids every year. They eat a bunch of strawberries in the patch they never pay for, but their parents buy jams and jellies before they leave, so it works out. I love kids. My wife and I don’t have children, so at some point that will be the end of that family tradition. I was born into this life, but I’m the last one.

SELLING POINTS

CRITZER: When I was growing up, my understanding of marketing was that we packed green peaches into bushel baskets and loaded them into non-refrigerated boxcars in Crozet that took them to Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston. During those two last weeks of harvest, Crozet was unbelievable—pickups lined up for a mile. Then six months later you’d go to the mailbox and there’d be a check from the Blue Goose Company for your peaches. Until then you had no idea if you’d gotten 10 cents a bushel or $10 a bushel.

Years later, when I took over, an older farmer in Orange County told me to drop my subscription to Farm Journal and read Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens instead, to learn what the consumer wants. What colors are popular, what recipes are running. That took a long time to sink in, but that’s the answer—think like the consumer. Today, 90 percent of what we do is straight to the consumer. But we sell something different than just the product we grow. I’m not selling peaches; I’m selling a beautiful view. I’m selling family entertainment.

WEARY: I’ve said the same thing. I’m selling people a peace of mind, and they’re paying to be part of something that’s good for the community and the environment. They’re buying produce from their neighbor, supporting a farm that doesn’t use any chemicals in its growing process. That’s what the local food movement is all about—looking at how farms in your own community are necessary for a strong local economy and preservation of open spaces.

PERCEPTION VS. REALITY

CRITZER: The biggest misconception is that farmers are rich [chuckles]. We may look pretty good on paper, but that doesn’t help when the bill collectors call. The economics make it challenging for anyone who’s already farming, much less someone who is trying to start out.

WEARY: People don’t necessarily think we’re rich, but yes, they don’t understand the real economics of farming. Even me, I might see what another farmer is charging for sausage at his stand and figure he must be doing well. People should understand the costs of running a farm. The money we have to put out there is tremendous, with no guarantee of getting it back. It’s risky. The cost of producing food is expensive—it’s not just seeds in the ground.

CRITZER: It costs about $15,000 to put in an acre of strawberries. We have raised beds for easier picking, row covers, gravel to hold down the covers, a lot of irrigation, and frost protection. It takes a lot of pick-your-own customers to get that first $15,000 back. Believe me, starting about the middle of February when strawberries begin growing, I get up every morning about 2:30 to watch the thermometer.

FARM FUTURES

CRITZER: For the future, the role of government somewhat scares me. I don’t mind government being involved, but often the people who make the decisions about farm regulations, whatever party, have little understanding of what actually happens on a small farm. Their efforts don’t always help. The government is more unpredictable than the weather.

WEARY: For us, the biggest challenge for the future is figuring out the balance between work on the farm and work off the farm. My husband would like to work full-time on the farm, but right now we think we still need some outside income. It would be nice to get back to a quality of life where we can actually take a vacation sometime.

By moving to wholesale, and giving up the CSA and farmers’ markets, we’re also going to give up some of the identity that we’ve created for the farm. It probably won’t be as fun because people won’t stop me in the store and ask, “Are you that farmer?” That’s okay, we’ve built a business and now we can move forward. We’ve felt that we’re jack of all trades, master of none. Without the variety required for CSA customers, we can be more streamlined. There are some things I won’t be sad not to grow anymore. I really hate picking beans every other day for six weeks.
But I will miss having the CSA members working here. Once people get comfortable with each other, you just have these great philosophical discussions while pulling weeds for hours.

CRITZER: My hat’s off to Megan for being able to work with volunteers and apprentices. My experience with that, way back when, was that in the spring on a 70-degree day, there was all kinds of help. But in August when there was a 95-degree sun boiling down, well…

WEARY: Because of our proximity to UVA, and our connections there, we’ve drawn a lot of students to Roundabout. Professors come out with their classes. There is a lot of interest among people in their 20s in getting involved in agriculture. We’re going to lose a lot of farms as your generation stops farming, Whitney, but there are a lot of young farmers coming up. It gives me great hope for the future of farming.

For more information about these farmers, visit www.critzerfamilyfarm.com and www.roundaboutfarm.net.

FARM SHARES

Farmers probably aren’t the best networkers, given that they might spend more time with seed catalogs than they do with other human beings. One local group aims to put a dent in that isolation while using the collective experience of established farmers for the benefit of greenhorns.

Started in 2007, Piedmont Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training (or, whew, CRAFT) is primarily a mentoring program for area farm apprentices and interns, arranging visits to other farms to broaden their agricultural experience. Participating farms in the area include Appalachia Star Farm, New Branch Farm, Roundabout Farm, and Twin Oaks Community.

“It’s a good learning environment for the apprentices,” says founding participant Todd Niemeier, urban farm manager for QCC Farms. “And just as good is that it got our farmers talking to each other. Some of these farmers have been doing it forever, some are new themselves. A couple of us talked regularly, but sometimes we just don’t know what’s going on at other farms. Participation in CRAFT has opened up communication. Now we get together and share information and growing techniques.”

And maybe seed catalogs.

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