Appalachia Star Farm Caters To Local Market

By Erin McGrath

Spring is here and on a warm but windy day earlier this month, Kathryn Bertoni was outside pulling double duty as both a mom and a farmer on her family’s farm, Appalachia Star Farm, in Roseland.

While her youngest son, Luca, 3, munched happily at a small picnic table in the yard on bananas and crackers, Bertoni, 31, planted hundreds of seeds in rectangular black flats for this year’s growing season.

That day’s seeds were parsley, which will go into one of the hoop houses on Appalachia Star Farm and eventually be moved into the ground to grow.

Sitting on nearly five acres tucked against the mountains in a small valley in Roseland, Appalachia Star Farm grows a variety of fruits and vegetables and is one of the many farms in Nelson County taking advantage of the warm spring weather to prepare for this year’s growing season.

“Usually we start the last week in February,” Bertoni said. “But this year was a little late because there was still snow all over the ground. We start seeding and we’ll pretty much grow until December.”

Planting the Seed

Kathryn and her husband, Michael Bertoni, moved to Nelson County and began Appalachia Star Farm in 2003. Although neither was from a family of farmers, they knew this was the profession for them.

“My husband had done a lot of farming work growing up,” Kathryn Bertoni said. “He would pick apples or blueberries while he was playing in a band. He would go make money and then go somewhere to play.

“The farming lifestyle was something that we wanted to do.”

For a year, the Bertonis worked at an internship on Water Penny Farm in Rappahannock County to learn the ins and outs of farming and at the end of the internship, the Bertonis began looking for land and found it on a small farm in Roseland.

“We wanted to be near Charlottesville because one of the things we wanted to do was community supported agriculture, or a CSA,” she said. “We felt like Charlottesville would be a good market for that.”

For Appalachia Star Farm’s CSA system, individuals or families buy a share in the farm’s produce and each week, they receive a portion of the farm’s crop output. In this system, the farmers and the consumers share the risks and benefits of the food production.

At The Market

In Appalachia Star Farm’s first year of production, they attended three farmers markets and sold 15 shares in their CSA. This year, they’re still attending those three same markets, and their CSA shares have expanded to 70.

The farm sells more than 40 types of produce between April and November, which is a staple at the Lexington Famers Market in Lexington on Wednesdays, the Nelson Farmers Market in Nellysford and the Charlottesville Farmers Market in downtown Charlottesville on Saturdays.

Other businesses have taken a hit in the economic downturn, but business is booming for the Bertonis.

“The ‘buy local’ movement has grown tremendously and it’s really getting a lot of attention and I think that’s been good for us,” Bertoni said. “Even last year we worried about the economy and if the markets were going to be down but they were still up for us. Food is one of those things that people have to buy.”

Nelson County is home to three local farmers markets and is a member of the Charlottesville Area Buy Fresh Buy Local marketing and outreach campaign, whose mission is to advance the economic sustainability of family farms, protect farmland and strengthen the local food systems, said Melissa Wiley, director of special projects for the Piedmont Environmental Council.

“The campaign utilizes Buy Fresh Buy Local food guides, a Web site, community events and an array of marketing tools to connect consumers with locally grown foods and farms and to strengthen the connections between rural and urban areas,” Wiley said.

Dollars and Sense

Like many farming families, the Bertonis’ only income comes from the produce they sell on their farm.

And like many farming families, in the next month, they’ll begin the arduous task of rising before dawn to travel to local farmer’s markets to sell their wares.

“Most of April and May markets we sell plant starts,” Bertoni said. “That’s a lot of our early market sales, is the plant sales. We’ve managed to just get all of our income from the farm. The CSA really helps us do that.”

The growth of the farmer’s markets in Nelson County has been a part of the bigger picture of growth in local farmer’s markets throughout Virginia, Wiley said.

“Virginia had just 88 farmers markets across the Commonwealth in 2005, according to the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services,” Wiley said. “Currently, Virginia has just over 170 markets, a cumulative increase of approximately 94 percent in less than five years.”

Spending money closer to home can also help neighbors in the farming business.

Wiley said that each dollar spent in local businesses such as farms circulate longer in the local economy than those dollars spent outside local businesses. If each household in Nelson County spent $10 per week of their total food dollars on fresh local produce and farm-based Virginia products, then more than $4.8 million in annual community food dollars for local businesses would be generated.

Having three of those farmers markets in Nelson County alone indicates that there is a local demand for fresh and local produce from residents and visitors, Maureen Kelley, the tourism and economic development director for Nelson County, said.

“The customer mix at each market is seasonal, but is typically 75 percent local and 25 percent visitor based. Visitors are looking for an experience, creating a memory,” Kelley said. “Meeting the producer at a farmers market and bringing home a specialty item is often the highlight of a vacation.”