John Ager

Partial Transcript: My name is John Ager. We’re here at Hickory Nut Gap Farm, which is the farm of our family -- our extended family. One of the interesting things about the farm is that we’re right on the Blue Ridge. That’s all the water that starts up there and goes all the way to the Mississippi River. We’re the first ones to take care of it, and we’re trying to do the best we can. Our family has lived here for over a hundred years. My grandfather-in-law started something called the Farmer’s Federation, which was an effort to bring the mountain farmers into the modern world. We have been farming this land for all that time, and you get kind of attached to it.

Partial Transcript: I think in the early years, it was mixed farming like mostly went on here. We did have a dairy farm here when I came in 1969 right on this site, actually, was the dairy farm. The barn here in the back was the lounging barn for cows at night. I’d come down the mountain and roust them up to milk them right over there. Most of the mountain dairies were built right on a creek like this one. And the cows would go in and out of the creek. They’d get water. And they’d pretty much tear up the creek. In the afternoons, the cows went across over there under the road. There was a culvert. We had to round them up and herd them back under the road and through the culvert. We really realized that we weren’t doing the creeks or the water in this area any favors. There was a big effort, I guess in the 1980’s, to start dealing with the runoff. The people realized that the easiest way to have clean water is to keep stuff from getting in it to start with. So we built a retention pond over there and would gather the manure from the milking parlor and elsewhere to go through that and keep it out of the creek.

Partial Transcript: It’s an interesting family story, and maybe my wife Annie can talk about it better than I can. Annie’s grandparents, Jim McClure and Elizabeth McClure, came down here from suburban Chicago. They were looking for a place to raise their family, to be outdoors, to be physically active. They came in 1916 and began buying this land and creating Hickory Nut Gap Farm. Mrs. McClure was an artist – had actually lived next door to Monet for awhile in France – watched him paint. She came here with a sort of artist’s eye to the farm. Mr. McClure really wanted to get an active, prosperous, money-making farm going and then the plan was for him to go off and be a big-time Presbyterian minister somewhere. He really fell in love with the land here, the farming here, and the people here and realized that he could devote his energies to helping these mountain people take care of their property and for them to make enough to raise a family on as well.

Partial Transcript: So when this area was first settled, the obstacle was the forest. They began cutting trees and people lived all back up in these mountains – in places. And they were farming in places that shouldn’t be farmed. The trees have come back, but 100-150 years ago, people spent most of their time cutting trees and making use of the trees. When the floods came in 1916, they were devastating because the trees were gone. And the creeks were silted up. It was an ecological disaster as much as it was a flooding disaster. People were killed around here. I think that was the real problem. Well, I think in the early year, survival was on everyone’s mind. Get enough food to eat. Get through the winter. It was pretty tough here. I think plowing techniques were not very good. You tended to lose a lot of top soil into the creeks. You probably plowed right up to the edge. What we learned growing up about how you plow so that the rains don’t wash the topsoil into the creeks, I think that was all problematical in the old days. But on the other hand they had less power to do things on their farm. They were mostly doing things by hand and with oxen or mules. This was an area where a pretty important road went through. And the road went right up the side of the mountain. You can still see how eroded that road got from all the animals that went up and down that road.

Partial Transcript: We’re primarily today a grass-fed beef farm, which means you raise beef cattle with their naturally – they’re ruminants where they are naturally designed to eat, which is grass, not grains. In order to do that, in order to raise high-quality meat, you need to rotate the animals through different pastures. So that’s primarily what we do. We sell to local restaurants and we sell right here at the store. Actually now we have partners, and we sell all over the south east -- our Hickory Nut Gap meat. We also have hogs. Hogs are not ruminants, but they do like to be outside. They like to root around. That’s their more natural habitat. We not only use them to raise, but we also use them to help take care of the land – to clear invasive species and so we can kind of move them around the farm and clean up areas and then reseed them.

Partial Transcript: It’s partly because we have them outdoors. And we only have maybe 300 pigs. Those CAFO units where they raise thousands and thousands – 50,000 pigs – They’re all on slats and, as anyone who’s been on a farm knows, a pig really generates a lot of manure. That manure and urine goes down through the slats and gets washed into these big lagoons. Down east where most of these farms are, it’s flat and they’re near rivers and the rivers flood. It’s happened now so many times that I think we’ve got to really admit that it’s a problem. But we have something like 1.9 million hogs in eastern North Carolina -- the second biggest hog-growing state. And I think we just need to find out better ways to deal with that manure than put them in those lagoons. But we’re, you know, in comparison, pretty small-time. We think we have a better product because the pigs have been outdoors and they’ve been able to live their lives closer to what, you know, how they like to live.

Partial Transcript: If you have them far from the stream, the pigs themselves, you know, root around and dig it back into the soil. It’s really not a problem. And we have grass buffers. We have grass buffers around all our creeks and we don’t let the beef cows in the creeks at all. We’ve gotten some cost share money to build water systems up there so the cows don’t go in the creek at all. So that’s very, very important if you’re going to keep the creek clean.

Partial Transcript: Well, we think that there’s a large segment of the consumer market out there – customers that will drive all the way here to our store to get our meat – who want meat that they can trust. Grass-fed beef has a different chemical make-up – more omega 3s – because that’s the more natural state of a cow. Maybe the hardest thing for me is I’m the guy that likes to take care of the land, and in our current world we tend to get inundated with invasive species. Here it's multi-floral rose and oriental bittersweet, and so down here on the farm, I can’t spray those bad boys like I used to. And that’s fine. We’re dealing with it. It’s just a little more work.

Partial Transcript: We have always felt as a family that conservation was a high priority. We want the water that comes onto this land to be as clean when it leaves as when it comes on the land. We want to be river-friendly because we just love this land. The river is a big part of what we love about it. It’s in our heritage to take care of the ecosystem here on this property.

Partial Transcript: We think our future is bright. As I said, the future is – we think our future is bright because there’s customers out there looking for the kinds of products we are producing. We also believe that people in Western Northern Carolina, in Asheville, tourists, people – we just met a guy from Bermuda that just was here looking around. People are really interested to see farms – especially a mountain farm in such a beautiful setting. So we also have a kind of ecotourism component. We love for people to come out and bring their children to see the baby chicks and pet the goats and go out and see the cows and the pigs. And we think we’re also doing a big part to educate people about where their food comes from So we’re very excited. One of the real challenges for farms is getting the next generation to take on the task and we’ve been very successful.

Partial Transcript: One of the legacies I’m most proud of is that we’ve put this land in conservation easement. What that means is, not only will we not be developing – putting houses here – which at one point seemed the logical thing to do -- but we also have land stewards that come every year to make sure that we’re taking care of this land. So they’re outside people from the Southern Appalachian Highland Conservancy that verify that we are taking care of the land like we said we would when we put it in easement. So I feel like my legacy is going to be that we’ve protected this land for the next generation and, hopefully, for many more to come.

Partial Transcript: Wilma Dykeman was a friend of our family’s – a personal friend – and we visited her often in Tennessee and she came here often. She was a real visionary. She wrote The French Broad in the late 1950’s and recognized that that river, for all its beauty, was being abused by urban areas, by industry and by agriculture. And she put out a call. This river is too beautiful to ruin. And that was the beginning of the effort. Now the old industrial part of Asheville is coming back to life as an arts district and people are moving down there. That’s a great legacy. We like to think that our farm is part of that legacy here and that’s something that we can all be proud of as a family.