By Christina Ferrari - There’s a lot happening on the 28 acres of RambleRill Farm. Throughout the lush hills of forest and green, almost seventy tawny chickens peck at leaves and twigs amongst a swath of tall maple trees. There’s a dazzling array of annual vegetables grown at RambleRill, plus a wide variety of lesser recognized delights - medlars, pawpaws, goumi berries, Chinese chestnuts and persimmons. Ten Nigerian Dwarf goats peek their heads out of a red barn nearby, their beards swaying with curiosity as they approach the fence to look for snacks. The shrieks of preschoolers (pain or delight?) can be heard in the woods behind another large barn, part of the Longleaf Forest School that began using the farm as a teaching space one year ago.
The ruckus seems to put owners Jane Saiers and Darin Knapp at ease. On a crisp October morning, the couple, both with long graying hair, are stacking pine logs inoculated with five different varieties of mushrooms. Despite admitting with a laugh that the scene looks a little like chaos (perhaps a giant mushroom-filled Jenga), Darin and Jane stand firmly by their simple message- “Slow down.”
“Once people slow down a modicum, they have a moment to listen to the wind. Cook a recipe with chestnuts. All of these things take time,” Darin said.
This phrase is upheld at RambleRill’s weekend markets (called “Saturday Slowdowns”), during monthly forest bathing walks led by Jane, a certified horticultural therapist, and throughout their farming practices. RambleRill is one of a small handful of certified organic farms in the county. “Darin and I view soil as a foundation and building the soil, maintaining the soil, treasuring the soil is a foundation of our farming,” Jane said.
There’s a debate amongst farmers whether or not to be certified due to a high price tag and strict record keeping. However, Jane considers the certification as the only true standard that they have for farming, since one farmer’s definition of “organic” might vary from his neighbor’s down the road.
The couple purchased 10 acres of the plot in 2009, dubbing it RambleRill Farm after the rolling rill that runs through the land and flows into New Hope Creek. Fittingly, it took them time to get their start in farming as well. Now in her sixties, Jane began her career at the biopharma company GlaxoSmithKlein in biomedical communications. She and Darin finally moved to North Carolina in 1992 when Darin got a job at the University of North Carolina as a researcher in neuroscience. They started a small garden in their backyard growing blueberries. Jane wanted more.
“I was spending 12 hours a day in front of a computer, and the call to be outside with my hands in the soil just really started to pull on me,” she said.
After working at Glaxo, Jane enrolled in a two-year associates program in Sustainable Agriculture at Central Carolina Community College, received her master gardener certification, and acquainted herself with horticultural therapy. GSK helped support the price tag of starting a farm.
“If that were 25 years ago, if I were coming right out of college, I never would’ve been able to make that leap,” Jane said. “It’s not financially feasible to be a small farmer in Orange County.”
The diversity of RambleRill’s production and programming is impressive, but it’s also crucial for profit. There’s increasing pressure to succeed as Jane and Darin’s 28 acres is encroached upon by low-density residential developments.
Orange County is home to some of the most fertile soils in North Carolina, but farmland is disappearing at a rapid rate. North Carolina has the second highest rate of threatened farmland in the nation. In the absence of policy change, most prime agricultural land in Durham and Orange Counties will be converted to low-density residential use by 2040. With a population increase of nearly 10% from 2010-2020, farm acreage loss could equate to the loss of nearly 9,100 farms, or $1.25 in farm output according to the American Farmland Trust.
Jane is part of the Farmland Preservation board and the head of the Farmland Protection Subcommittee. She admits disappointment in the policies of Orange County.
“Despite Orange County loving small farms,” she said, “the county has not prioritized them. As somebody who wants to have a resilient local food system, those interests aren’t being strongly represented in the county.”
Although farmland is decreasing, the number of farms in Orange County has grown. There are more small farms, and the average farm size has fallen. But older farmers are often selling their land to non-farmers, and young farmers are having an increasingly difficult time finding land. More conversation between generations is necessary to continue the legacy of farming in North Carolina.
Jane and Darin hope to preserve their land in a conservation easement. They’re currently working with the Lands Legacy Program, Cedar Grove Law, and the Triangle Land Conservancy to ensure that their farm will be purchased at agricultural value and passed along to future farmers.
“I want to do this for as long as I possibly can,” Jane said. “It does bring us joy because we are trying to do better things for ourselves and the world.”