Virginia Free Farm Cultivating Food Justice
If you come to Virginia Free Farm at Spotted Pig Holler, you’ll find many of the typical features of an average American farm. You’ll see chickens pecking away, diligently fertilizing the grounds in preparation for subsequent growing seasons. Ducks and geese will be busily pulling every last weed they can get their bills on, while hard at work gifting the farm with a bounty of beautiful eggs. You’ll notice tangles of polyculture gardens mimicking the diversity of our natural ecosystems, and pigs oinking noisily at anyone who’ll listen, in hopes that a kindly visitor will share a morsel of food. It’s the Rockwellian pastoral landscape many envision when picturing a bucolic farm. What’s different about this farm, however, is that the food produced here is given away — all of it.
Founding a Free Farm
What if I told you there’s a better way to farm? A way as old as the hills of the Piedmont; one that’s been all around us, waiting patiently like a seed for the right conditions to sprout.
Several years ago, I began to feel burned out from the farmers market scene and from delivering to restaurants and boutique grocery stores. Don’t get me wrong, I
