The Good Road

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[music playing] Can looking back push us forward?

Ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Billie Holiday.

[music playing] Will our voice be heard through time?

Can our past inspire our future?

Active act of concern.

[music playing] [applause] Asheville, North Carolina has long been a hidden gem among foodies.

The density of top notch award winning restaurants and breweries far surpasses the size of this diverse and outdoor loving mountain town.

And these days, that gem isn't as hidden as it used to be.

Like so many mid-sized southern cities, Asheville's population has exploded.

And as the city grows, so does the disconnect between the food people eat and the land it comes from.

A world class restaurant scene doesn't spring from a vacuum.

And in Asheville, it's cultivated and supported by more than 150 years of family farms and family knowledge, which is a lot to cover.

But there is at least a map of sorts.

Today we're taking a ride on Asheville's Farm Heritage Trail.

[music playing] The Farm Heritage Trail is a scenic driving route through the rural parts of Asheville's Buncombe County.

The route collects a patchwork of family farms, conserved farms, and organizations all trying to preserve the land and knowledge that helps make Asheville, Asheville.

Through farm stops, it encourages locals and tourists alike to get out of the city and connect to the land that supports it.

Today we're also traveling with our friend, David DiBenedetto, editor and chief of a publication that certainly knows the land, Garden & Gun magazine.

Our first farm stop is only about 20 minutes from downtown and functions as a demonstration and education property for the Southern Appalachian Highland Conservancy.

From land conservation and access to water restoration and even a farmer incubator, they do a lot of different things.

We met with their community farm coordinator, Chris Link.

[music playing] How much of this do you guys occupy?

The community farm where we are is 140 contiguous acres.

It's just one farm and one piece of a much larger web of conserved farmland.

And that's both with easements.

So farmers owning their land and we hold an easement.

So it won't be developed as the short of that.

And then we also hold multiple other pieces of farmland in Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee.

Y'all are not managing everything, you're collaborating with the people that actually do it.

So talk a little bit about that model.

This is a very specific project here in terms of the farmer incubator program.

And so this site has turned into more of a demonstration property as well as a property that is well suited for farmers to access land.

So this is an example of a farm family who wanted to see this property stay as farmland, wanted to see it as a resource for the community, and also wanted to show how to manage the land well and show that to others.

I mean, everything's bespoke.

It really is.

There's the individual farmer, there's the individual plants, there's the individual these lands that you guys are managing.

It's a quilt of different efforts that produce something that then spills out into this food scene of Asheville.

It's naturally the antithesis of monoculture.

Dave, how do you know about all this stuff I'm struggling listening to you talking?

[laughter] No.

I'm a garden geek.

I love it.

Even in my backyard, I've got a pollinator pocket with milkweed, Salvia for the hummingbirds.

To me, a lot of what we write about springs from the land trying to teach my kids that we can contribute.

Even a little patch of land can help.

And in terms like climate change or big on people's minds.

And so when we're talking about what you just said, which is basically diversity, diversity leading to resiliency and resiliency having redundant type systems built into it, that will be what help us through these times that aren't as consistent maybe.

So this was historically a pasture where we harvested hay.

And what we've been able to do out here with a little bit of equipment, we have cut and dug swales along the contour lines.

The purpose of that is to slow water, to catch water, to let it infiltrate and get into the ground.

We've also planted a lot of trees out here.

We're not going to have 4,000 tulip poplars.

We're going to have fruiting trees.

We're going to have nitrogen fixing trees.

We're going to have nut production.

We really have a long vision.

It's like this isn't going to come to fruition or be fully realized maybe for another 30 years.

40 years, you really see it.

But through these management practices, we hope to create diversity and tons of production off this small piece of land that's fairly sustainable.

Asheville folks get it.

Yeah.

They know that so much of what this town is about springs from the land.

One of the goals here, as we call it, is connecting people with the land.

Right.

And that's local, that's tourists, that's farmers, that's everyone.

And so if we can work towards that end to connect them in interesting ways that also educate, it's a win-win.

Chris introduced us to Suzanne of Blazing Star Flowers, a flower farmer supported by their incubator program.

This is got to be your busies season.

There is this wedding graduation?

It is.

Father's day, mother's day.

Execution, and then also preparing for the season ahead and trying to get everything planted.

And how big is your property?

How much are you working on?

This is just about a half an acre that I'm growing on quite intensively.

So my project is just a little world within a much larger world of the farm here.

It's a pretty gorgeous world.

Yeah.

Good place to be.

As we walk out to her fields, she explains why the incubator program is so important for new and experienced farmers alike.

It's a tremendous asset with all the challenges of starting a new small business to be able to begin with having a hoop house like this structure or having a walk in cooler and just out of the gate to have those things allowed me to focus on my business.

And I want to know about all these flowers.

Yeah.

There's a lot.

Is just that row alone?

Over 200 different varieties of flowers.

Really?

There's a lot, an incredible amount of diversity for such a small space.

Is that dill right there?

It is.

So there are a lot of plants that are dual use.

They could be used culinarily, and then also that's a dill that I use for the flowering seed heads and the pods.

And also it's an incredible attractor of beneficial insects.

And are some of these flowers edible?

They are.

And while a lot of my business isn't focused on edible flowers, it's a side project I really enjoy.

I'm actually providing some today for baby showers.

She's going to put them in ice cubes or I do chocolates in the holiday season.

They're all organically grown, not sprayed with anything.

And is Suzanne's doing this all on her own?

Like it's just you?

Essentially, family and friends, and anybody I can rope in when I've got a big project?

How many days a week are you out here?

Eight.

Eight?

[laughter] White flowers.

Well, it's interesting.

Where I lived previously, there wasn't anybody else growing organic vegetables, so I felt very mission driven.

But in Asheville, we're fortunate to have so many incredible vegetable farmers and fruit farmers and honey and egg people that it really freed me up to just sort of the heart wants what the heart wants.

It wants flowers.

I can't explain it.

That's awesome.

I love that.

Why is this place a great place to do what it is that you're doing?

Just compared to some other places that I've lived, I feel like Asheville just has a tremendous amount of support for small farms.

There are a lot of people doing it, but there's also a lot of demand.

So your average visitor comes into town and eats this amazing meal, they really know all the collaboration that happens behind the scenes.

I wouldn't think so.

Unless they're really, really curious and they really dig, it takes everyone doing what they do to make it all work.

Yeah.

[music playing] This hoop house is the center of the action for a lot of the season.

I start everything from seed and transplant it out.

We've actually got some eucalyptus growing in the center.

Is this here?

Yeah.

It can be very vigorous.

[laughs] Last year it was about 16 feet tall.

We don't have that many koala bears.

I was going to say that.

[laughter] The hoop house is very helpful for mitigating some of the swings of climate change in terms of the extreme weather spikes.

I always compare it to a museum quality.

Everything's just like a little bit more perfect, pristine.

It doesn't show the wear of the harsh world.

And it seems complicated.

You have to think about the business of it, you have to think about the science of it.

How hard is that to be able to juggle?

And I think what keeps it interesting year after year is the complexity.

And there's the wonderful cycle of gardening and farming where there's always next year.

That's one of the things that makes it a really engaging career like a year after year or over a lifetime.

Are you good with math?

I'm good with spreadsheets.

There we go.

[laughter] Chris took us on quite a hike as we headed down the hill to see the water restoration project on this property.

Just tell us a little bit about where are on the property right now?

We're within the stream restoration project, 26 acres of restored stream bank that we finished up in 2013.

What exactly are you guys trying to do?

That's a great question.

So when we acquired the property, it had been open grazed.

So the waterways were used by the cattle for drinking and cooling off.

What we had was bare ground all around it.

A lot of erosion in some areas.

The stream actually went underground, you couldn't see it at all.

And we had tons of invasive species.

So Multiflora rose, kudzu, honeysuckle along with trash.

And historically things that were dumped ended up down here eventually.

Over the years we've planted over I'd say 28,000 native trees and shrubs through this area.

Large regrading.

And now here we are almost 10 years later where this was just bare ground, then this would have been empty.

And now we have all this around us.

At the end of the day all of our sins end up in the French Broad.

And that's the case across the country.

So we are a headwater for the French Broad.

We have two springs on this property.

This is just one property of over 80,000 acres that we've conserved in almost 50 years to improve water quality that, yes, ends up in that French Broad River, which is only under a mile away.

What you guys are doing is really thoughtful, and it benefits these people literally downstream.

What shows up on your plate or what wins a James Beard Award or something like that, it starts in places like this where people are actually putting a lot of effort and thought into that.

Chris, when you describe Asheville to anyone else, how do you do it in a few words?

I think of water when I think of Asheville.

And we're at the headwaters of a water that goes on for many, many, many miles from here and contributes to other communities and feeds a lot of other land.

Me what I think about a lot is passion.

The passion that Nashvillians have for not only this place, but for creativity, and the bigger picture.

You're doing what you love, but you're doing a service of a bigger and better goal out there.

I think people care here.

And you coined a word right there, Pashville.

.

Pashville.

[laughter] I love it.

[music playing] As a fifth generation farmer, Anthony Cole, is not only passionate, he understands the concept of downstream.

His former family tobacco farm, Jasper Wood, has been diversifying since the '80s in order to add Fraser firs and no-till organic pumpkins, squash, and more.

Anthony not only knows what he's talking about, he takes his history and his responsibility to the community very seriously.

[music playing] If you did look north from this way, you're looking out across the French Broad Basin.

And the Haywood County Line would be that way.

And as you come out of it, there's valleys that come up into ridge lines closed box valleys.

And so when I grew up here, it was true Appalachian Mountain people.

My father grew up in this house.

It's my grandparents house.

They didn't get electricity until 1935.

And going to Asheville was a full day like out of the old westerns with the wagons.

Farms at that time, even when I was growing up, well, primarily life would be categorized today as pretty much subsistence farms where my mother would count 300 quarts of beans a year.

You put up corn, you did hogs.

It's not that you didn't buy grocery store stuff, but you didn't buy a lot of grocery store stuff, salt, sugar, coffee, those kind of things.

Was it truly a single horse farm?

Yeah.

We had a perch and work mare named Sue.

Everybody had a third of an acre of tobacco.

That was what you paid the taxes with.

And that stuff, everybody, every year.

That was the money crop.

How old's his barn?

OK.

This is a great story.

My father was born here in the one room hayloft of log cabin like Abraham Lincoln tops in '25.

So they came down here in '27.

And when he was 10-years-old, the logs in that log barn, he drug out with pearl, the horse at the time.

As a 10-year-old.

Yeah.

[laughter] So most of the time he's barefooted because not because he didn't have shoes, but because he could stand on the logs.

Wow.

And they bring two out at a time and he could stand on the logs while pearl would bring them out.

Buncombe County has a stellar farmland preservation program.

So there's an awareness in Buncombe County that doesn't exist in other places.

This is a highly productive soil here.

It goes into the bottoms that got like most of these farms will have an area of what USDA refers to as prime soils.

And USDA understands food security and where we're at as a country and we can't lose our prime soils.

They can't be replaced.

It takes thousands of years to evolve to get prime soils.

In north Carolina, 96% of the farms are still family farms.

From a public standpoint going forward, we can't lose our production capacity.

But this little small creek is newfound creek and it's designated as an impaired waterway.

Well, that occurs further down.

Right here where I'm at, it's still high quality water.

And I've got a half a mile of this creek.

Now what I do on the farm production and otherwise, I'm accountable to everybody from right here to the gulf of Mexico because this area is in the TVA district and it flows to the Tennessee and into Ohio and then to Mississippi and then into the gulf of Mexico.

But so does the people in the suburbs that their storm-water coming off of their roof, where does their gutter go?

How much parking area do they have?

Do they have pavestone?

Do they have impervious surface area?

Everybody has a dog in the fight, as the old saying used to be.

Food is the same way.

So the people in the urban setting, they need to understand that if to continue to get that, they have to support the farm communities left, because the only way we're going to have farm communities are left as farms have to be profitable.

Everybody has to make a little bit of money or nobody makes anything.

What I'm doing here and what other people that you'll see on the Heritage Trail is really forward looking for the next generations.

I've got three watersheds and this little farm right here puts 200,000 gallons of water a day into the French Brook.

At some point that's got to have value.

And this farm by oversimplified rough math is sequestering about 7 pounds million of carbon a year.

And we're talking about science, we're talking about the climate, we're talking about the food supply, we're talking about security, we're talking about finance, we're talking about business, we're talking about all this stuff, all that knowledge that happens here so that someone can have a salad in Nashville downtown Asheville.

It feels like there's so much that people could learn.

Where do they need to come along this area and get to know some of the farms?

Well, I think that's exactly the whole point of the Heritage Trail.

The knowledge goes with the experience.

We've got to raise a generation that understands.

We have 412 parts per million carbon dioxide.

We were 208 for all of the time that humanity's, you've got to go back 2 and 1/2 million years to get back to where we're at now.

We're in trouble.

There is a transition that's occurring.

And I'll say it here, there's a great family down the road that came in from Colorado, and they've got a Devon cow.

And they've plowed up the finely manicured lawn that was around the pool.

And there's other people that I go to and they've ripped out the holly bushes by the steps going in, and now they have blueberry bushes.

And instead of flowers, they have strawberries.

Everybody can make a difference.

It doesn't have to be a huge difference, but we're going to be a whole lot better if everybody tries to make a little bit of difference.

It becomes cumulative.

I don't like the term middle of nowhere.

Now, because there's the role you play and the role of this small farm plays collectively is important to everybody.

That's the other thing, and I think people who live in cities they don't necessarily understand why this is important.

Every little farm has a pretty good story.

Every farm has a story.

Every everybody does.

We don't know things until we know.

Yeah.

And so how do you know until you know.

Yeah.

And as redundantly stupid as that sounds, it really is the way it works.

There's nobody-- I have never met anybody that I couldn't learn something from.

There is no shortage of knowledge in the highlands but it can be a challenge to access Having been in the area for just under 60 years, Kate and Fuhrmann are the new kids on the block.

They started their mail order herb and plant service in the '70s because they couldn't find a way to source French tarragon and Corsican mint.

Now they support amateur farmers and backyard gardens all over the country by providing an absolutely staggering number of starter plants by mail.

[music playing] So why do we have the color name?

Did you find the Corsican mint?

Yeah.

That it smells really nice.

It smells nice.

Is that time in there?

That's all times.

It's all the way down through there.

All kinds, lemon, lime, regular.

Elephant ear.

No.

That's lamb's ear.

Lamb's ear.

OK.

I knew it was an ear.

That's a very traditional European plant.

Its common name is bible leaf because people putted the dried leaves in their bibles to make them smell good.

It got kind of a minty flavor.

Instead of the fire and brimstone smell that usually happens.

I got you.

[music playing] Well, you all seem to have a few plants in here.

What is this?

Everything I'm interested in.

It's our Longwood garden.

That's the one I thought looked like a cat tail.

OK. You call it a monkey tail.

It's same thing as that one.

I don't know its name.

I think it's amazing.

Yeah.

It is.

It has a bright red flower.

Fuhrmann, who is this that came in with us down here?

That looks like Izzy.

Oh, Isabella [laughter] Kate, how many of these greenhouses do you have on the property?

So we have 1, 2, 3, 4.

They have walked up the hill.

They all have names.

This one is the glass house and conservatory.

And this is the picking house because that's where we started, so we could pick the orders there easily.

And then it wasn't big enough, so we built the cloud house.

The first morning after it was covered, we went in and it was all misty inside.

So we said, well, that could be the cloud house.

And then the final one is called the sky because the sky is the limit.

[laughter] And that was it.

No more greenhouses.

[laughter] So tell us a little bit about what makes this part of Western North Carolina special.

That's a good question, but I can't give a good answer.

It's it was just perfect.

You got a feeling.

It was-- I mean, it's a self-contained cove.

Our water is all in this cove.

The wildflowers, the animals, the birds.

How often do you guys go down the mountain?

Well, we can go every day or we can go once a month.

It depends on what has to be done.

We're producing some joy, where people can plant their plant gardens, and they know that they are planting even a square foot garden and they're making a contribution to mother nature.

What I've found in every conversation we've had along this whole trail, is that there's a ton of knowledge.

You don't get it when you drive by.

We've had people from all over the world, and we enjoy immensely getting to know them.

Somebody called this afternoon from San Francisco to put in his order.

He happens to be completely blind, but he gets the most interesting plants from smell and texture.

That's got to feel so rewarding to be able to give that gift to someone.

Well, we appreciate it.

Let's talk a little bit about the fact that how much have things changed since you all moved down here?

Because, again, we're talking 57-ish years, you say?

The roads are paved.

[laughter] Yes, some things I'd be more impressed with what stayed the same, and that's the feeling of community.

There have been newcomers like us, but the people who have been here for 150 years are still there.

Their progeny are still here and that community is still here.

So that hasn't changed.

And to have the conservation have the movement for conserving land, that is really important.

The farm heritage trail farms are all conserved farms and it's been a truly wonderful thing.

I want to thank you guys for the work that you've done for such a long time.

Definitely.

Congratulations on its growth.

Yeah.

Well, thank you.

Pun intended.

[laughter] Knowledge in community turn out to be the key to the Asheville food scene.

So when you sit down to enjoy that award winning meal, freshly brewed beer, or food truck taco, take a moment to think about how it got there and where it came from.

Everyone benefits from a downstream mentality because ultimately everyone is downstream.

And no matter how upstream you think you are, it's helpful to remember what Anthony Cole told us, you don't know until you know, and there's nobody out there that we can't learn something from.

[music playing] Funding for The Good Road has been provided by.

Can looking back push us forward?

Ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Billie Holiday.

[music playing] Will our voice be heard through time?

Can our past inspire our future?

Active act of concern.

[music playing] [applause] What makes a good road?

Blazing a trail making a difference.

Being unafraid to take the path of most resistance.

Toyota has a beyond zero vision for a carbon neutral future that lets you find your own good road with Toyota's electrified lineup, including battery electric, hybrid plug-in hybrid, and fuel cell electric vehicles designed to get you where you want to go from work to school or wherever your adventures take you.

Toyota is all about paving good roads.

Proud sponsor of The Good Road.

Toyota, let's go places.

[music playing]