ASSESSING THE LANDSCAPE OF 

LOCAL FOOD IN APPALACHIA

5/1/2012

Written by Jean Haskell, Ph.D. for the Appalachian Regional Commission
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS p. 2

BACKGROUND p. 3

INTRODUCTION p. 5

INFRASTRUCTURE p. 8

ENTREPRENEURS p. 17

EDUCATION AND TRAINING p. 23

CULTURAL HERITAGE AND LOCAL FOOD p. 27

BUILDING REGIONAL CAPACITY p. 32

CONCLUSION p. 36

BIBLIOGRAPHY p. 37

RESOURCES ON THE WEB p. 42

STATE SYNOPSES OF LOCAL FOOD ACTIVITY p. 45

ALABAMA SYNOPSIS p. 46

GEORGIA SYNOPSIS p. 48

KENTUCKY SYNOPSIS p. 50

MARYLAND SYNOPSIS p. 52

MISSISSIPPI SYNOPSIS p. 53

NEW YORK SYNOPSIS p. 55

NORTH CAROLINA SYNOPSIS p. 58

OHIO SYNOPSIS p. 61

PENNSYLVANIA SYNOPSIS p. 63

SOUTH CAROLINA SYNOPSIS p. 65

TENNESSEE SYNOPSIS p. 68

VIRGINIA SYNOPSIS p. 71

WEST VIRGINIA SYNOPSIS p. 74

APPENDICES p. 77

GEORGIA ARC WORKSHOP AGENDA p. 78

WEST VIRGINIA ARC WORKSHOP AGENDA p. 79

NORTH CAROLINA ARC WORKSHOP AGENDA p. 80

TENNESSEE ARC WORKSHOP AGENDA p. 81

SOUTH CAROLINA WORKSHOP AGENDA p. 82

GEORGIA ARC WORKSHOP NOTES p. 83

WEST VIRGINIA ARC WORKSHOP NOTES p. 84

NORTH CAROLINA ARC WORKSHOP NOTES p. 88

TENNESSEE ARC WORKSHOP NOTES p. 90

SOUTH CAROLINA ARC WORKSHOP NOTES p. 92
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Food is all about networks; things that when connected together add up to more than the sum of their 

parts. Whether or not we care about food, the consequences of the way we eat are all around us. The 

global food system is a network in which we are all complicit. If we don’t like the way it works, or the 

world it is creating, it is up to us to change it. . . .Our legacy to those who inherit the earth will be 

determined by how we eat now—their future lies in our knives and forks and fingers. (Carolyn Steel, The 

Hungry City, 2008)

Many people across the Appalachian Region—farmers, food producers, chefs, researchers, nutritionists, 

teachers, economic developers, local food advocates, and many others-- are working tirelessly and 

passionately to make healthy, local food economies a positive part of Appalachia’s future. It is because 

of their work and with their help that this assessment of local food in the Region has been possible. 

They have shared their projects, their stories, their concerns, their successes and challenges, and, often, 

their wonderful local food, the focus of all this work.

The project would not have been possible without the support of the Appalachian Regional Commission, 

including participation in local food workshops and forums by the Federal Co-Chair, Earl Gohl, Executive 

Director, Tom Hunter, and Chief of Staff, Guy Land. Research objectives and progress were guided by 

the sure and steady hand of John Cartwright, Director of Regional Planning and Research, and enriched 

by the insights of Ray Daffner, Entrepreneurship Initiative Manager. The entire local food project from 

its inception through the highly successful final food forum, attended by over 350 regional participants, 

happened because Kostas Skordas, Regional Planner at ARC, works selflessly, with tremendous insight, 

sensitivity, and humor, plus unending and unerring attention to people and details. He also believes 

that growing the local food economy shows great promise for the Region’s economic and community 

development.

Throughout this research project, Dr. Katherine “Katie” Hoffman, the project’s research associate, has 

been dedicated to turning up new information, tracking down project leaders and stories, and 

constantly arguing for the culture of the Region’s food heritage as part of the economic pie. She does 

what Elizabeth Engelhardt describes in her book, A Mess of Greens; she understands “what else is being 

said when someone asks for a second helping of cornbread, carefully writes out a treasured recipe, 

opens a jar of garden tomatoes, or sneaks a sip of white lightning.” 

 
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BACKGROUND

An Appalachian Regional Commission report, Appalachia: Turning Assets Into Opportunities (2004)

defined and elaborated a paradigm for sustainable, asset-based economic and community development 

in the region. The Commission identified its role as a strategic partner and advocate for such 

development.

The report cited the growing national prominence of asset-based development which builds upon the 

positive attributes of regions, communities, and businesses and minimizes impact while maximizing 

return in national and global competition. As the report says, “taking what is and turning it into what 

can be is the foundation for this strategy.” 

Three categories of assets were identified in the report as having the greatest opportunity for moving 

Appalachia toward prosperity: natural, cultural, and structural resources. Scenic vistas, craft artisans, 

and old industrial sites are among the many assets with potential for sustainable development. The 

goals of asset development are economic prosperity and enhanced quality of life for the communities of 

Appalachia now and long into the future. 

Asset-based development depends on innovation and leadership, as well as infrastructure, financing, 

and local return on investment. According to Kretzmann and McKnight in a study for ARC on community 

capacity building (2004), “the key to. . .regeneration, then, is to locate all the available local assets, to 

begin connecting them with one another in ways that multiply their power and effectiveness, and to 

begin harnessing those local institutions that are not yet available for local development purposes.” 

Asset-based regional planning is not a new idea. In 1928, Benton MacKaye, who proposed the 

Appalachian Trail and thought deeply about sustainable development in Appalachia in his book, The 

New Exploration, believed effective regional planning depended on seeing “the simple potencies of life 

and life’s environment,” in effect, a region’s assets. He felt the job of regional planning was not to 

“make the country,” but to “know the country and the trenchant flows that are taking place upon it.” 

Planners must not scheme, but must reveal. Their job, MacKaye says, is “not to wage war—nor stress 

an argument: it is to ‘wage’ a determined visualization” (his emphasis). For MacKaye, the achievement 

of planning is “to make potentialities visible. . .and audible. It must be heard as well as seen.” Regional 

planners must fight “with the sharp weapon of visualization for the intrinsic human values” of their 

place.

In Spring 2009, the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) convened the section editors of the awardwinning Encyclopedia of Appalachia in a series of conversations to identify existing and emerging assets 

in the Region and to think creatively about how these assets might best be used for economic 

development and enhanced quality of life in Appalachia. Facilitated by Dr. Jean Haskell, the Whisman 

Scholar for ARC, and her research associate, Dr. Katherine Hoffman, the scholars visualized together the 

ways in which lessons from the ten years of exhaustive work on the Encyclopedia could be applied to 

continued sustainable economic and community development.

The group of scholars identified natural, cultural, and structural assets and added a category of 

intellectual and skill set assets that exist in the Region. In their written responses and their discussions 

in the consultations, they suggested extensive strategies for development of these assets in ways that 

are sustainable and life-enhancing for the region. The results of this series of conversations are 

documented in the report, Lessons Learned: Visualizing the Potency of Appalachian Assets (2009) on file 
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with the Appalachian Regional Commission.

One area that received enthusiastic attention was Appalachia’s tremendous assets in agricultural 

heritage and local food economy. Identified assets included an ongoing tradition of small farming and 

home gardening; the Region’s vast food diversity, knowledge of seed saving and growing heirloom 

varieties of local foods; an emerging infrastructure of farmers markets, food processing facilities, kitchen 

incubators, and canneries; a growing trend for chefs in the Region using locally grown foods in their 

menu offerings, plus ever-expanding culinary training; a rich heritage of traditional foodways and of 

craft, music, storytelling, literature, and custom related to food; and, some of the nation’s most 

respected leadership in the sustainable, local foods movement. 

From these conversations with the editors, ARC launched an exhaustive assessment of food system 

development in the 13 states and 420 counties of the Appalachian Region. The author identified 

numerous organizations and leaders involved in the local food movement throughout Appalachia, 

examined the depth and breadth of activity in various parts of the Region, synthesized best practices 

and available resources, and began to understand the gaps and needs for expanding this growing sector 

of the economy. The results revealed a vigorous and growing regional food economy that has the 

potential to increase employment opportunities, improve community vitality and quality of life, and 

become a sustainable and healthy part of Appalachia’s future economic and community development.

With this clear trajectory for community and economic development, ARC launched a series of 

workshops on the topic of Appalachia’s growing food economy throughout the region. The five 

workshops, held in Georgia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and South Carolina, brought 

together nearly 400 people in the region to discuss the region’s food assets, gaps in regional food 

systems, and strategies for growing local food economies. Some of the most important national leaders 

in the local food movement, who live and work in Appalachia, were speakers. Agendas and summaries 

of the discussions from the workshops form Appendix A of this report.

From these meetings, a picture emerged of local food efforts in the region that can inform ARC policy on 

support and advocacy for Appalachia’s local food economy. Topics of most concern to the workshop 

participants in every part of the region centered on the following categories: (1) Creating appropriate 

infrastructure; (2) Encouraging entrepreneurship; (3) Providing education and training programs; (4) 

Sustaining community heritage; and (5) Strengthening regional capacity in local food system 

development.

These categories provide the framework for this report, assessing what exists in the region now, 

identifying gaps and challenges in each category, and recommending strategies to improve the region’s 

burgeoning food economy.
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INTRODUCTION

GROWING THE APPALACHIAN FOOD ECONOMY

Appalachia boasts many assets for community and economic development–beautiful landscapes, 

sparkling waterways, abundant flora and fauna, internationally famous music and craft, a good work 

force, natural energy resources, a rich and complicated history, and so much more.

But perhaps the Region’s most vibrant assets, and maybe the most sustainable, are its food and 

agricultural assets. As Gary Nabhan says in Place-based Foods of Appalachia, the local foods of 

Appalachia “are treasures of global importance, just as much as the bluegrass music of the same 

region.”

Nabhan is not the only one who sees the food produced in Appalachia as a treasure. A 2011 study 

identified Appalachia as the most diverse foodshed in North America. 

Anthropologist and former farmer, James Veteto, claims we should “just go ahead and say it: People 

across. . .Appalachia are crazy about plants and animals. In my lifetime of interacting with Appalachian 

farmers, gardeners, and wildcrafting enthusiasts, I have never ceased to be amazed by their knowledge 

and love for all things green and growing.” 

Bill Kovarik in Appalachian Voices says, “farming in Appalachia is somewhat different from the rest of 

the nation. Despite the economic challenges, there seems to be a Faulknerian quality of endurance 

among Appalachian farmers.”

Bloggers have called food in Appalachia “particularly distinct,” perhaps the best example of “hyperlocal, 

community-driven cuisine,” concluding that “Appalachia boasts one–if not the–strongest, original, and 

consistent regional cuisines in America.” Another blogger writes that “a natural adoption of local, 

sustainable, and organic principles means that Appalachia really should be ground zero for city-slickers 

planning their next culinary odyssey.” 

What has produced such lavish praise for a food culture that has at times been misunderstood and the 

subject of food jokes? Appalachia is discovering that attention to sustainability of agrarian landscapes, 

protection of clean water, conservation of heirloom seeds and plants, production of good, local food 

and food products, connection of food to the rest of the region’s rich culture, and culinary traditions 

that bring good food to the table have enormous benefits for community and economic development.

Communities in Appalachia have felt the impact of the locavore or local food revolution sweeping the 

country. Farms are increasing in number, farmers markets have become ubiquitous, local food is the 

new buzzword in tourism and for regional restaurants, and demand for local food products has soared. 

Some communities, however, are struggling to meet the growth, needing improved infrastructure, more 

and better trained farmers and other entrepreneurs, more education for growers and consumers, 

enhanced community capacity to deal with planning and policy issues, and innovative ways to maintain 

local culture and heritage while growing community economies. 

Good news for the region has been growing support for sustainable agriculture and local food in 
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government agencies that set policy and from voices influencing the government on policy and funding. 

In 2012, the United State Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced a goal to create 100,000 new 

farmers and provide loans to beginning farmers that will total nearly $2 billion, with emphasis on 

specialty crops and organic food. 

The USDA’s Regional Innovation Initiative urges collaboration in five key areas, one of which is regional 

food systems and supply chains. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack argues, “We need generations of 

leaders in American agriculture to continue our position as the number one agricultural country in the 

world.”

Charles Fluharty, director of the Rural Policy Research Institute, gave forceful testimony in 2012 to the 

United States Senate Agriculture Committee that effective rural development requires a regional 

approach and more investment in rural programs from the federal government and major philanthropic 

organizations. He noted he was encouraged by the Obama Administration’s guidance to create a “PlaceBased” domestic policy. Part of his argument that rings especially true for Appalachian experience is his 

observation that “the people appear ahead of the policy development process,” since rural communities 

themselves have realized how critical collaborations are to their future competitive advantage.

Carolyn Steel, a British architect, conceives of communities built around food in her book, Hungry City: 

How Food Shapes Our Lives (2009). Using the Greek word sitos, meaning food, and topos, place, she 

believes we should aim for “sitopian” communities, since utopian communities have never proven 

workable for the long-term. She says, “sitopia is a practical alternative. The world is already shaped by 

food, so we may as well start using food to shape the world more positively. We live in a world shaped 

by food, and if we realize that, we can use food as a really powerful tool—a conceptual tool, design tool, 

to shape the world differently.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists released a 2011 report that cited evidence of the boom in local and 

regional food systems: more than 7,000 farmers markets (up from just 340 in 1970), more than 4,000 

community-supported agriculture ventures, and sales of agricultural products through direct marketing 

channels at $1.2 billion in 2007. After careful examination of the economic potential of local food 

systems and public policies that support them, they conclude that “further growth in this innovative, 

entrepreneurial sector has the potential to create tens of thousands of new jobs,” adding “it’s an 

investment we can’t afford not to make.”

The annual National Restaurant Association’s survey of professional chefs on the Top 20 Trends in food 

for 2012 lists locally grown meat and seafood, and locally grown produce in the top two positions. 

Other trends include sustainability, locally-produced wine and beer, farm/estate branded ingredients, 

micro-distilled/artisan spirits, and good nutrition for children.

Even big business is changing its perspective. In 2012, an event in New York on slow food and big 

business focused on businesses willing to commit to sustainability and to sharing stories of how small 

beginnings can achieve scale. One blogger commented, “the fact that these food leaders are getting 

together says a lot about the public dialogue today. They are listening.”

The Appalachian Regional Commission has been listening for some time. The ARC has supported 

research on local food, a series of workshops across the region on growing the Appalachian local food 

economy, and an important region-wide food forum that attracted over 350 participants with 

representation from all thirteen Appalachian states.
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Results of ARC research and regional engagement point to a vigorous, growing regional food economy 

that promises to be a viable, sustainable, and healthy part of Appalachia’s transitional economic growth. 

Growth that is life-enhancing and that brings positive public attention to Appalachia. 

As Anthony Flaccavento, noted advocate for local food, has said, “If a region known primarily for its coal 

mining, tobacco farming, and clear-cutting can come to exemplify sustainable development, it will be 

difficult to ignore.” Asheville-based Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, which keeps its finger 

on the pulse of the local food movement, says unabashedly that Appalachia “leads the country in 

developing local food systems that build local economies, sustain farms, and insure that everyone has 

access to the freshest and healthiest locally-grown foods.”
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INFRASTRUCTURE

In Appalachia’s agrarian history, farmers built a local infrastructure to get their food to consumers. 

Small farm stands or roadside produce stands sold directly to customers. Farmers trucked products to 

wholesalers or grocery stores, doing most of the processing on their own farms (e.g., killing hogs, 

smoking meats, etc.). Home canning and community canneries helped preserve food for home use and 

for sale. In today’s more sophisticated agricultural economy in the region, the same needs exist for 

growing food, food aggregation and distribution, food processing, and food preservation. Many 

communities are rapidly developing the kind of infrastructure needed to move food from farm to table, 

but there are also major gaps needing to be filled in other parts of the region.

At its most basic level, agricultural infrastructure begins with soil and seed. Good soil is critical and 

many farmers in the region do their own composting for soil enrichment. In some communities, this has 

become an entrepreneurial opportunity to create community compost centers for farmers and 

gardeners. For example, Appalachian Organics in north Georgia uses poultry litter to create organic 

compost that sells for $60 per ton and an identically named Appalachian Organics in Travelers Rest, 

South Carolina, uses worms and worm castings for its organic mulch. French Broad Organics and Frog 

Holler Organiks offer organic compost in the Western North Carolina area. Seeds are equally critical for 

the local food system, not genetically engineered seeds produced by Monsanto and other industrialized 

farm operations, but seeds saved from year to year and even heirloom seeds handed down through 

generations, all locally adapted to the place where they are grown. 

Drawing upon the oldest agricultural heritage in the Appalachian region, the Cherokee Traditional Seeds 

Project in Cherokee, North Carolina, led its initiator, Kevin Welch, to create the Center for Cherokee 

Plants, a Tribal seed bank and native plant nursery. Welch believes that the Cherokee tradition of 

gathering wild plants is a kind of farming and hopes to revive this ancient knowledge among the tribe. 

With similar goals, the Appalachian Center for Ethnobotanical Studies at Frostburg State University in 

Maryland is a collaborative that is devoted to multidisciplinary study and conservation of native plants 

of Appalachia. Their aim is to foster economic growth in the region through networking among growers, 

retailers, and consumers and helping develop enterprises that use regional plants. Hoping to conserve 

culture as well as plants, the center documents traditions in Appalachia of harvesting native plants and 

using botanicals and develops programs for Appalachian schools. 

One of the region’s most well-known heirloom seed collectors is Bill Best in Berea, Kentucky, who has 

over 500 Southern Appalachian heirloom bean varieties and over 50 Southern Appalachian heirloom 

tomato varieties, as well as some varieties of numerous other vegetables. He has become a regional 

expert on heirloom seeds (or, he says, perhaps an “eccentric”). In Cattaraugus County, New York, there 

is an annual Tickletown Seed Swap and programs on sustainable living. At a seed swap at Pine Mountain 

Settlement School in Kentucky in 2011, food blogger Joyce Pinson wrote the “experts and amateurs 

gathered for an ancient ritual that has taken on modern importance, seed saving. Due to our geographic 

mountain fortresses, seeds grown in Appalachia remain largely untainted by commercial agriculture and 

genetic engineering (GE or GMO). We hillbillies take such things for granted. We know that there is a 

stash of White Hastings bean seed hidden in Grandma’s freezer. We know that Johns Creek Bevin’s 
9 

Tomato is perhaps the lip smackenest summer pleasure in the garden. . . .In those tiny little seeds there 

is our history.”

Another element of Appalachia’s agricultural history has long been farmers selling products directly to 

consumers in roadside stands or farmer’s markets. When tourists first started coming to the mountains 

in great numbers in the 1950s, homemade, wooden roadside stands filled with produce and jams and 

jellies and ciders were ubiquitous on the landscape. Small farmer’s markets were a staple in many 

communities. Today, direct sales of farm products to consumers take many forms, such as larger 

farmer’s markets, pick-your-own farms, on-farm stores, community-supported agriculture (CSAs), and 

direct sales to grocers, restaurants, and institutions such as schools, hospitals and prisons. Often these 

sales are facilitated by websites for internet orders. The local food infrastructure and agricultural 

entrepreneurship have grown in complexity and sophistication.

A 2010 report on local food systems by the USDA showed that farmer’s markets nationwide had 

increased by 92% between 1998 and 2009. Current research shows that nearly every county in the 

Appalachian region either has a farmer’s market or has access to one in the area. Some farmer’s 

markets such as the Western North Carolina Farmer’s Market in Asheville are large, permanent facilities 

that offer space for farmers from all over the North Carolina mountain region, food service, and shops, a 

combination that also attracts a great many tourists. Similarly, the Capitol Market in downtown 

Charleston, West Virginia, the capital city, has both outside market stalls in season and permanent 

spaces inside a large market space that sells produce, local wine, chocolates and other West Virginia 

products and a restaurant. The Athens, Ohio Farmer’s Market, the largest open-air market in Ohio, has 

filled all of its 100 spaces for vendors and maintains a waiting list. Smaller markets, such as the one in 

Jonesborough, Tennessee, have become community gathering places, with a seating area for visitors 

and live music from the local area. Foods for sale include produce, beef, lamb, baked goods, goat 

cheese, shitake mushrooms, sorghum, plus plants, pottery, wood items, and textiles. An online ordering 

system allows for mid-week deliveries and they accept SNAP/food stamps to make fresh food available 

to local income individuals. The Jonesborough market is typical of many markets across Appalachia.

A 2011 news story in the Chattanooga Times Free Press points to both the successes and challenges of 

farmer’s markets and direct farm sales to consumers. At local markets, the farms within 100 miles of 

Chattanooga sold only $10.3 million of local food products directly to consumers in 2007, up from $6.7 

million in 2002, but still a low percentage of total food sales by the farmers. Nevertheless, some of the 

farmers did more business in one day than in their farm’s history and see the markets as a reinvestment 

in the local economy, along with their growing Community Supported Agriculture businesses. Gaining 

Ground, a local food organization in Chattanooga, reported that, “if Chattanoogans spent just 5 percent 

more of their food budget—about one meal a week—to buy food from local farmers, more than $100 

million would be injected back into the local economy every year.”

Anthony Flaccavento, founder of Appalachian Sustainable Development in Virginia, maintains that the 

growth in such ventures is strong and continuing to grow, from 1,700 farmer’s markets in 1995 to over 

7,000 currently (USDA Agricultural Marketing Service). Flaccavento says in the article that “it’s a trend 

that’s both deep and broad. It’s sweeping. It’s covering much of the nation.” Responding to a critique 
10

of farmer’s markets that they are “elitist,” or cost more than working people, seniors on fixed incomes, 

or the poor can afford, Flaccavento undertook a study of 24 farmer’s markets in 19 Appalachian 

communities across six states. He found that farmer’s markets were the same or less expensive than 

supermarkets in 74% of all cases, by an average of 12% lower cost (SCALE, Inc.). Flaccavento notes that, 

even with the explosive growth of farmer’s markets, there isn’t enough supply to meet demand for local 

food: “The trend on the ground is for a lot of unmet demand. If you go beyond farmers markets and 

look at the college and university market, the public school market and the grocery market particularly, 

the demand is enormous.”

An increasing part of the market peg of infrastructure is, in fact, schools, hospitals, colleges and 

universities, and grocery stores that ask more and more for local food. The recent USDA study of local 

food systems (2011) noted that “farm to school programs represent an important component of the 

institutional market for locally grown produce,” with 41 States and close to 9,000 schools having some 

kind of farm to school program in 2009. The same USDA study found that increasing numbers of 

grocers, including such large retailers as Wal-Mart and Safeway, have local food initiatives; that 

American Culinary Federation members ranked locally grown food as the current “hot trend” and used 

locally sourced products in much of their restaurant cooking; and that hospital foodservice 

administrators favored serving local food in cafeterias and to patients, with nearly 300 hospitals, some 

of them private corporate hospitals, signing the Health Care Without Harm Healthy Food Pledge in 2009 

to increase their use of fresh, local food. All these impacts have been felt in the Appalachian region.

One of the leading organizations in farm to school programs is Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture 

Project in Western North Carolina. They have been so successful in connecting farmers to schools that 

they have become the Southeast Regional Lead Agency for the National Farm to School Network. Their 

model has been to build partnerships with existing distributors and make them familiar with ASAP’s 

Appalachian Grown certification program, to build the capacity of farmers to scale up to meet the new 

demand, and to work with State farm to school programs. Analysis indicates that net returns for the 

farmers in marketing to the school districts in 2006-2007 were substantially higher than those they 

received from selling to other venues. ASAP plans to explore ways to work with financial institutions to 

see if investors may want to support these efforts. Putting fresh, local food in the hands of school 

children when they are outside school is another aspect of farm and school programs. Students at 

Washington and Lee University in Rockbridge County, Virginia, operate the Campus Kitchen to send 

backpacks filled with nutritious snacks and meals home with low-income school children for the 

weekends.

Most universities and colleges across the Appalachian region have embraced bringing local food to their 

campuses. Not surprisingly, since several major land-grant institutions are in the Appalachian region, 

the movement toward sustainable agriculture and local food has influenced these campuses and their 

surrounding communities. Cornell University in Appalachian Ithaca, New York conducts research (such 

as the work of their Ecoagricultural Working Group that focuses on the Finger Lakes region) and their 

extension service helped Appalachian Broome County launch a Farm Friendly website to connect farms 

to markets. The surrounding Ithaca community has a thriving local food movement that includes a focus 

on Native American food production and a Field and Fork farmer-chef collaboration. At Virginia Tech in 
11

Blacksburg, Virginia, there is a student garden for organic and sustainable vegetable gardening and a 

Sustainable Food Corps, a student organization that works to bring fresh, local food to campus, invite 

speakers such as farmer Joel Salatin, featured in the Omnivore’s Dilemma, and deliver bags of locallygrown fruits and vegetables to area Head Start offices. One of the student leaders said: “Food is 

obviously an essential issue for all of us. There is a movement sweeping not just Montgomery County 

but across the nation to re-localize our food production and to provide a farm-to-fork link. My student 

colleagues in the Sustainable Food Corps are paving the way.” (Roanoke Times, 2009).

One example of the local food to hospital connection is the Martinsburg, West Virginia Veterans Affairs 

Medical Center. In the fall of 2011, to celebrate Food Day, the center chose to showcase farmers and 

flavors of the Eastern Panhandle of the state. They prepared a “Taste of Appalachia” menu for 

approximately 500 veteran inpatients, outpatients, and staff. With rainbow trout furnished by the 

Freshwater Institute in Shepherdstown and fresh produce from Kilmer Farms in Berkeley County, the 

veterans and their families enjoyed a fresh, local meal and music by the Blue Ridge Garage Pickers Band. 

The medical center helps support community businesses by relying on local food producers and 

distributors and helps aspiring culinary students at Blue Ridge Technical and Community College by 

offering internships with culinary staff of the center. 

Because small local growers spend time off the farm, selling to consumers, they often find it difficult to 

scale up their farm operations to meet increasing demands for local food from the larger consumer 

market such as grocery chains, institutions (schools, hospitals, prisons), and restaurants. Many recent 

activities are addressing this challenge in Appalachia’s local food system development.

Farmers who must spend most of their time attending to soil and planting seeds have little time, and 

often little assistance, with the tasks of aggregating, grading, and distributing what they grow to 

consumers, whether they are grocers, chefs, schools, or other markets for their goods. Several parts of 

the Appalachian region, with strong local food systems, have addressed these needs with some success.

Headquartered in Abingdon, Virginia, Appalachian Sustainable Development (ASD) was founded in 1995 

by Anthony Flaccavento, an organic farmer and economic development consultant, who has since 

become one of the nation’s leading spokespersons in the local food movement. ASD is a non-profit 

organization, using a hands-on, entrepreneurial approach to building a place-based, ecologically 

sustainable food system and economy in southwest Virginia and the surrounding area. The organization 

is now headed by Kathlyn Terry.

One of the initiatives of ASD is Appalachian Harvest, formed in 2000, which is an integrated field-totable network, with over 60 farmers (many of whom are former tobacco farmers) that grow and sell 

produce and free-range eggs to nearly 900 supermarkets within a 400-mile range. The network provides 

training for farmers and a 15,000 square foot facility where produce is washed, packed, and shipped to 

consumers. A challenge for the network has been that demand exceeds the supply. An added benefit 

from the network has been buying good-quality produce “seconds” from the farmers at a discount and 

then supplying local food to needy families in the area through ASD’s Healthy Families, Family Farms 

program.
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Flaccavento speaks enthusiastically about related efforts across the Appalachian region: “The 

Appalachian Staple Food Collaborative in Southeast Ohio supports regional production of healthy 

heirloom grains, which it then processes, markets, and ships to regional buyers. And the Monroe 

County Farmers Market in West Virginia aggregates and distributes produce, meat, eggs, and prepared 

foods from nearly 20 small farmers to customers using an online marketplace.”

A more recent success story is Pilot Mountain Pride, opened in Pilot Mountain, North Carolina in May of 

2010. The facility operates within a building that is a converted old hosiery mill and which also houses a 

branch of Surry County Community College. Pilot Mountain Pride is an aggregation center, a produce 

washing and grading facility, for small to medium size farms, giving them access to retail, service, and 

institutional markets. About 60 small to medium size farms in the area use the center and there is an 

emphasis on helping farmers diversify crops and on helping younger farmers succeed without large 

investments of capital. Farmers are required to attend Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) training on 

food safety issues, paid for by Pilot Mountain Pride. Lowes Food Stores have partnered with the center 

to purchase and distribute some of the produce. Market research predicts the center will be sustainable 

and will return 80% of profits to the farmers. 

When the center was dedicated, the mayor of Pilot Mountain, Earl Sheppard, said, “This is a new 

beginning. I’m excited because I am a farmer. This is going to be a new beginning for our young 

farmers.” Bryan Cave, the Extension Director for Surry County responsible for farmer education and 

outreach at the center, added, “This project is about more than fruits and vegetables. It is also 

promoting family time and education about how food is grown. It’s about the value of agriculture to the 

community and about preserving a way of life and rural character.”

One infrastructure project still in development in 2012 is the Northside Healthy Food Hub in 

Spartanburg, South Carolina. With initial funding from a federal Health and Human Services grant, 

additional funding is being provided from the City of Spartanburg, the Butterfly Foundation, the Mary 

Black Foundation, and the Hub City Farmers Market in a public-private partnership. The plan is to 

develop a compound that will house an urban garden, a community kitchen and café, and a permanent 

home for the Hub City Farmers Market. One writer called the project “almost a Cinderella story,” and a 

resident remarked that “no one organization, no one person, no one body has the solution or the power 

to save this neighborhood. But if you’re generating things in the community, then you’re going to move 

forward.” 

One often cited problem in local food distribution is how to get fresh, local food to the most rural 

communities or the low-income parts of urban communities that may have little access to markets or 

grocery stores—the so-called “food deserts.” One solution has been mobile farmer’s markets and the 

growth of community gardening. Before its plans to build the Northside Healthy Food Hub, 

Spartanburg’s Hub City Farmers Market sponsored a Mobile Market Truck to bring fresh produce weekly 

to underserved Spartanburg communities. Similarly, Rural Resources in East Tennessee, operates a 

Mobile Farmers Market to deliver orders of fresh, locally grown food to several rural pick-up locations. 
13

Headquartered in Berea College’s Appalachian Center in Kentucky, “Grow Appalachia” is a program 

designed to help Appalachian families grow more of their own food. Sponsored by philanthropist John 

Paul Dejoria of John Paul Mitchell Systems, the organization has eight program partners in Kentucky, 

West Virginia, and Tennessee that assist local families with personal gardens for their own food, works 

with schools, day care facilities, and youth leadership groups to involve youth in food production and 

elders through a senior center, and helps find markets for excess produce to add to family income. 

Community Food Initiatives in Appalachian, Ohio, has a community garden program and offers food and 

gardening education. 

Centers for produce aggregation and distribution are not the only infrastructure requirements for food 

processing in a local food system. Farmers who raise pastured animals to produce beef, lamb, pork, and 

poultry are largely restricted by government regulations from slaughtering and dressing animals on their 

own farms. Abbatoirs and other meat processing facilities have been few and far between in the 

mountains until only recently, adding fuel costs and time to the farmer’s financial outlays and higher 

cost to consumers of local food. Recently, this gap in the local food chain has begun to be filled by 

Appalachian communities and partnerships. 

In Highland County, Virginia, a regional partnership has been the driving force behind development of 

the Alleghany Highlands Agricultural Center. A steering committee of people from Highland and Bath 

counties in Virginia and Pendleton and Pocahontas counties in West Virginia raised more than $1.5 

million from private investors, grants, and a federal loan to build a meat processing and educational 

facility. The facility is creating jobs and solving the challenge local farmers have had of the great 

distances to get livestock to processing facilities. One local farmer said the new facility “gives producers 

and individuals some options, and gets things closer. I hate going across the mountain for everything.” 

A state official noted that the facility could serve as a model for similar efforts throughout the region.

South of Highland County, farmers and community members formed Grayson Landcare, Inc., a nonprofit organization to help improve the economic circumstances of farmers and preserve land, native 

biodiversity, and water quality and quantity. The group assisted development of a farmer-owned 

business raising pastured beef and lamb for sale to upscale restaurants, nearby universities, and other 

regional buyers. With grants from the Virginia Tobacco Commission and other agencies, plans are 

underway for an abattoir that will serve not only Grayson County but several neighboring counties in the 

region. The abattoir has been called “a key element of a local food system.”

Not just abbatoirs but aggregation centers for livestock sales are also an important piece of the food 

system puzzle. A nonprofit in western North Carolina created the Western North Carolina Livestock 

Market in 2010 to have a center for livestock auctions and to increase profit margins for local 

producers. In its opening years, it has proven to be highly successful.

In 2012, McDowell County, North Carolina, opened the doors of the first community-administered, nonprofit meat processing plant in the United States that is also USDA inspected and plans to become 

certified as “Animal Welfare Approved,” for low-stress, humane handling of animals there. Though not 

in an Appalachian county, the Foothills Pilot Plant will serve primarily poultry farmers in Southern 
14

Appalachia, processing chickens, turkeys, rabbits, and specialty fowl. Already working with about 40 

farms in western North Carolina, they have received interest from growers in South Carolina, Tennessee, 

and Virginia. The Foothills Pilot Plant is a collaboration of state and local governments, small-scale meat 

producers, and grant-making agencies.

Food processing also involves preserving food and converting it into value-added products. One of the 

oldest methods for preserving food throughout Appalachia has been home canning of produce and even 

meats and still is practiced by many of the region’s residents. But, making jarred foods for others to 

consume now is heavily regulated with stringent requirements for commercial kitchens. The result has 

been the revival of community canneries that meet new standards and the development of commercial 

kitchens and kitchen incubators in many parts of the mountains.

Washington County, Tennessee, revived its old community cannery and nearby Greene County, through 

the non-profit Rural Resources organization, offers a mobile kitchen to complement its mobile farmer’s 

market, taking foods and facilities to the most rural communities. One of the longest-running and most 

successful food manufacturing facilities is operated by the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks 

(ACEnet) in southern Ohio. For over twenty-five years, ACEnet’s shared-use Food Manufacturing and 

Commercial Kitchen Facility has been hosting businesses (now over 150 per year) and they offer training 

for those wanting to start or expand specialty food businesses. For their entrepreneurs, they offer 

assistance with every aspect of product development and product marketing, such as their “Food We 

Love,” marketing campaign for regional foods.

Similarly, Blue Ridge Food Ventures in Asheville, North Carolina, has an 11,000 sq. ft. shared-use food 

incubator and commercial kitchen that offers services for Western North Carolina and the surrounding 

area. They, too, offer product development, “guidance through the regulatory maze,” advice on 

packaging and labeling, and more. Products made from herbs and plant materials receive support from 

their Natural Products Manufacturing Facility. They have fostered over 170 businesses with reported 

sales exceeding $3.5 million. Blue Ridge Food Ventures also operates its own Winter Sun Farms, a 

community-supported agriculture program that offers frozen fruits and vegetables from local farms 

engaged in sustainable agriculture. Ricardo Fernandez, owner of Chef Ricardo’s Authentic Appalachian 

Tomato Sauces, testified that “using Blue Ridge Food Ventures, I was able to move quickly to get my 

award-winning product from testing to full production in just a year.” Mary Lou Surgi, executive director 

of Blue Ridge Food Ventures, believes the help they give with financing, packaging, marketing, product 

distribution, “whatever it takes to get an idea from the drawing board into consumers’ hands,” is 

essential: “If we just offered the kitchens and not that assistance, I think a lot of our clients would run 

away screaming.”

The Shoals Entrepreneurial Center in Florence, Alabama, realized there was a need in their area for a 

shared commercial kitchen. In 2001 they opened the Shoals Culinary Complex, the first community 

kitchen in Alabama. Their clients get to share the equipment and facilities of a professional kitchen, 

expertise of food processing and small business professionals, and access to a website and e-commerce 

shopping site. The Link Centre in Appalachian Mississippi has a commercial kitchen for culinary training 

and for catering events at their site.
15

A more recent effort underway in Appalachia is the Blue Ridge Agri-Cultural Center in Blue Ridge, 

Georgia. Focusing on what they call the “agri-cultural arts,” this center’s mission is described as “an 

incubator for local food and culinary traditions connecting the community, the farmer and artisans 

through gardens, workshops, cooking classes, and cooperative agreements.” Still in the development 

stages, they plan to have a community garden, professional kitchen, honey production, smokehouse, 

chicken coop, and an outdoor cooking facility. Another recent effort, a commercial kitchen for Unicoi 

County and surrounding areas in northeast Tennessee, got funding in 2011 from a variety of sources and 

is part of a larger community effort to expand their farming and tourism industries. 

One key part of the infrastructure puzzle is the regulatory climate within which farmers and local food 

product marketers have to work. There is a dizzying array of state, county, and local policies, plus 

federal mandates, and often a great deal of uncertainty about who is responsible for developing and 

enforcing regulations. However, the USDA 2011 study of local food concluded that federal, state, and 

local government programs increasingly support local food systems. They outline numerous federal 

policies that assist with the growth of local food markets: the Department of Defense “Fresh Program” 

(to help deliver fresh, local food to schools and hospitals); USDA’s Community Food Project Grant 

Program (to address food insecurity issues) and its Community Food Security Initiative (to fund farmer’s 

markets and CSAs for low-income communities); the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 

2004 which helps support local food for schools; USDA’s WIC Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program and 

Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program that make it possible for low income families and seniors to 

use food coupons at farmers’ markets, roadside stands, and CSA programs (used at 72% of all farmers’ 

markets now). USDA also supports food marketing through the Federal State Marketing Improvement 

Program, the National Farmers’ Market Promotion Program, and the Specialty Crop Block Grant, which 

has been particularly useful to farmers in Appalachia. 

The Rural Development division of USDA also supports local agricultural entrepreneurship through the 

Community Facilities Program (to help build and equip farmers’ markets, community kitchens, and food 

processing centers), the Business and Industry Guarantee Loan Program and the Value-Added 

Agricultural Market Development program, both of which provide funding for local food distribution and 

promotion. The Value-Added Producer Grant Program helps with business planning to aid farmers in 

boosting farm income; the Rural Business and Industry Guaranteed Loan Program gives priority to those 

involved in local food distribution; the National School Lunch Act encourages schools to use local 

produce; the Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development Center aims to get local food into 

underserved communities, and the Rural Microentrepreneur Assistance Program assists start-up or 

maintenance of small businesses, including food related businesses, in rural areas. In 2009, USDA 

launched a “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative to develop more effective ways to connect 

consumers with local producers.

Regulation at the state level usually takes the form of health and safety regulation and the collection of 

state taxes. However, many states have helped encourage local food system development by approving 

the use of food stamps at markets and CSAs, and sometimes offering incentives for such consumers to 

buy local food, approving land use policies to favor small farms and zoning for markets, creating state 

Food Policy Councils, and in 2009, the National Conference of State Legislatures compiled a 
16

comprehensive, searchable database that lists all state policies and proposals related to local foods 

between 2004-2009 (Healthy Community Design and Access to Healthy Food Database, 2010). At the 

local level, most regulation revolves around farmers’ markets, with issues of zoning, parking, permits, 

and security, but some local communities go beyond such steps to actively promote or fund their local 

farmers’ markets. 

While Appalachia’s local food infrastructure continues to grow in strength, the needs are still great. 

More aggregation and distribution facilities are needed to move products to consumers in a more 

efficient and cost-effective manner, but in many parts of the region, a lack of investment capital makes 

starting these businesses difficult. Uncertainty and confusion in the regulatory environment also 

weaken the local food structure, when rules for local food production and processing are unclear and 

jurisdictions for enforcement overlap or conflict. On a positive note, the very weaknesses in the 

infrastructure for local food systems may become strengths in entrepreneurism as local businesses arise 

to fill the gaps. 
17

ENTREPRENEUERS

Like “locavore,” another word spawned by the local food explosion is “agripreneur,” a term for those 

involved in agriculturally-based pursuits that extend beyond traditional farming. Agripreneurs are 

entrepreneurs in the farming and food business. They may be engaged in Community-Supported 

Agriculture (CSA), value-added food production, agritourism, growing specialty crops, food marketing, 

creating capital for food ventures, or a host of other entrepreneurial activities.

Many of these entrepreneurs in Appalachia are the farmers, farm families, and farm communities 

themselves. They are finding new and interesting ways to add to their farm income. Dale Hawkins, 

farmer and chef in Rock Cave, West Virginia, is an excellent example of the phenomenon. In his career 

as a chef, Hawkins helped develop what has been called a “new Appalachian cuisine,” using local 

ingredients and traditional cooking methods in new ways. He continues the focus of making the past 

part of the present in his farming enterprises. Dubbing his venture as the New Appalachian Farm and 

Research Center, Hawkins has brought innovation to his farm community.

Organizing a group of family farms in the area under the brand “Fish Hawk Acres,” Hawkins and his 

partners operate a Community Supported Agriculture program that extends beyond providing boxes of 

produce on a regular basis to subscribers. They also offer an extensive list of prepared foods made from 

their local ingredients, responding to what Hawkins calls “market demand,” and calling the business a 

Community Supported Kitchen (CSK). They sell breakfast items, soups, entrees, and desserts with 

artisan cheeses and other products, a few of which are not locally sourced but sustainably produced. 

Some of their items such as chicken and beef pot pies are cooked and frozen in beautiful and substantial 

Fiestaware bowls; Fiestaware is a West Virginia product, so even the packaging is local. This group of 

farmers also does catering; they use a website and regular mailings to an extensive internet list to 

market their products and services. Hawkins helps conduct local food dinners across West Virginia and 

does research and training for farmers at his own farm. Hawkins says, “You can’t think the way farmers 

have traditionally thought—you have to diversify to get different streams of revenue.”

Community Supported Agriculture is a growing trend in Appalachia and elsewhere. In a CSA, a group of 

people buy shares for a portion of the expected harvest of a farm, giving them fresh, local food and 

allowing the farmer to know how much to grow. The USDA reports that there were only 2 CSA 

operations in the United States in 1986; today, there are likely more than 2500 such businesses. 

Many Appalachian farms that offer a CSA program are also involved in other types of entrepreneurial 

activities, such as niche farming, value-added products, and agritourism. In Appalachian North Carolina 

(Stokes County), there is a thriving truffle farm—Keep Your Fork Farm. The farm’s owners, Rick Smith 

and Jane Morgan Smith, represent, like Dale Hawkins, Appalachian agripreneurs who think creatively 

about diverse ways to grow their business. They not only literally grow Black Winter Périgord Truffles, 

called “black diamonds” for their value and rarity (they sell for $50 per ounce or $800 per pound), but 

they sell them to restaurants, make and sell truffle butter, offer tours and tastings on the farm for $50 

per person, and offer to speak about growing truffles for a fee. They were part of the 2011 National 

Truffle Festival in Asheville and were featured on Martha Stewart’s television program after she visited 

their farm. In the kind of cross-fertilization going on in local food in the region, the truffles are featured 

at the restaurant of an Appalachian winery, their truffle hunting dogs were trained at Glen Eagle Farms 

in Luray, Virginia, and the owners have a strong commitment to preserving the scenic beauty and the 

sustainability of small farms in their area. Other types of mushroom cultivation, especially shitake 

mushrooms, and the gathering of wild mushrooms such as morels is also a growing food industry in the 

Appalachian region.
18

With the growth of community kitchens and food business incubators in the region, value-added food 

products have become a substantial source of revenue. At the Shoals Commercial Culinary Center in 

Appalachian Florence, Alabama, businesses such as “A Bushel and a Peck,” that makes dipped and 

decorated apples, “Martha Grace Foods,” producing Mook’s Cheese Straws, Katie’s Mustard Slaw, and 

Two Mama’s Salsa have brought financial success to local families. In Appalachian Mississippi, the Link 

Centre has developed a community kitchen for training in the culinary arts and to support such 

programs as their “Backpack Project” that sends meals home on weekends for needy children. The Link 

Centre also offers catering service for events in their reception hall.

Some of the region’s large local food organizations help members market their products under a single 

brand, such as Appalachian Harvest (Appalachian Sustainable Development), Appalachian Grown 

(Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project), and Foods We Love (ACEnet). Using the Appalachian 

name is becoming more widespread in product development—High Appalachian Trout in Sophia, West 

Virginia, features not only fresh trout, but also rainbow trout paté and rainbow trout jerky (often raised 

in waters from abandoned coal mines); Appalachian Greetings in eastern Kentucky offers gourmet foods 

such as jellies, granola, green tomato relish, moonshine jelly, peach preserves, and other products; and 

West Virginia-based Appalachian Specialty Foods produces cooking sauces and salad dressings. 

Even some businesses outside the region capitalize on the name recognition; Appalachian Naturals, a 

large company that makes numerous value-added food items and natural botanical products, is in 

Massachusetts, near the Berkshire Mountains, but now also markets throughout the Appalachian 

region. Kraft Foods even sells Appalachian Blend, a snack mix of dehydrated fruits and processed nuts.

Growing heirloom crops and transforming them into value-added food items is another area of rapid 

development in the Appalachian food economy. Orchards, especially apple orchards which thrive in the 

Appalachian region, have capitalized on this new interest in old varieties. The Historic Orchard at 

Altapass on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, uses its 105-year-old orchard as the setting for 

heirloom apple sales, live music, storytelling, and dance, tours, many value-added food products such as 

jams, jellies, sauces, and sweets, hayrides, and beekeeping, birdwatching, and conservation of Monarch 

butterfly habitat. They describe their mission as “preserving the history, heritage, and culture of the 

southern region of the Blue Ridge, protecting the Orchard land with its apples, wetlands, butterflies, and 

other natural features, and participating with the public in our unique regional experience.” They offer 

memberships and online shopping. The Altapass orchard captures many tourists from the Blue Ridge 

Parkway and, while not always having the built-in tourist or the heirloom products advantages, other 

farms across Appalachia also lure tourists as a supplement to regular farm income. 

Agritourism in the region takes many forms. The Agritourism Networking Association in North Carolina 

lists all the following as agritourism activities: barnyard animals, farm riding trails, farm bed and 

breakfasts, country cabins and retreats, historic farms, reunions, museums, pick your own farms, farm 

roadside stands, nurseries, school field trips, summer camps, farm vacations, camping, bird watching,

fishing and hunting, hay rides, mazes, pumpkin patches, holiday farms, Christmas trees, crafts, picnics, 

parties, weddings and honeymoons, vineyards, wineries, and slow food dining. There are farms across 

the Appalachian region that offer the whole gamut of these tourist enterprises.

In Fulton, Mississippi, Holley Farm, described “as embraced by the beautiful hills of Appalachian 

Mississippi,” offers a corn maze, pumpkin patches, a cotton patch, a cane sorghum patch, wagon and 

hay rides, encounters with farm animals, and an old country store for its visitors, who pay an admission 
19

fee. Touting their “adventures in agriculture,” they benefit from collaborative marketing with the 

Mississippi Hills Heritage Area. In the Appalachian counties of New York, Harvest Dinners are hosted on 

farms to raise money for Healthy Food for All, a fund to make it possible for the economically challenged 

to participate in Community Supported Agriculture programs. One visitor described the event as “a 

winning recipe of gorgeous location, amazing local chefs, exquisite food products, and tables filled with 

people who grow the food and love food of the region.” Finger Lakes wineries provide the wine pairings 

for each course and farmers, winemakers, and chefs tell stories of their work. 

Some Appalachian farms offer tourists the experience of doing actual farmwork and enjoying the fruits 

of their labor at communal meals. Maverick Farms, in Valle Crucis, North Carolina, run by a trio of young 

famers, gives guests the chance to stay in the old farmhouse, help harvest herbs, fruits, and vegetables, 

and then enjoy one of their monthly farm dinners, which also often includes live, local music. Maverick 

Farms also provides space for artists-in-residence. According to a New York Times article, one guest 

from Los Angeles remarked that “it definitely made me appreciate what needs to be accomplished to 

put food on the table.” Numerous farms in Appalachian Pennsylvania offer farmstays with an emphasis 

on farm activities and food for families. Weatherbury Farm in Washington County is a grass-fed cattle 

and sheep farm that offers children the chance to be the “right-hand helpers of Farmer Dale.” Mountain 

Dale Farm in Snyder County lets children help feed cattle, horses, turkeys, and peacocks and watch for 

foxes, deer, and bears. “The Ole Farm House” in East Tennessee bills itself as a “working agritourism 

farm” and invites guests to be part of tending to goats, making goat milk soap, and harvesting fresh 

produce.

In many parts of the region, agritourism revolves around vineyards and wineries. The Southern Tier and 

Finger Lakes areas of upstate New York have over 100 wineries and numerous wine trails for tourists. 

Southeast Ohio has an Appalachian Wine Trail that features eight wineries, many of which also provide 

local food and some, such as Heritage Vineyards Winery & Guest House in Warsaw, have lodging 

available. Virginia’s wine country is divided into regions across the state and at least three of the 

regions are wholly or in part in Appalachia: Heart of Appalachia region, Blue Ridge region, and the 

Shenandoah Valley region. Villa Appalaccia Winery near Floyd, Virginia, looking much like a Tuscan villa, 

focuses on Italian inspired wines and local foods infused with Italian heritage. A 2011 study found that 

Virginia’s wine industry nearly doubled in economic impact between 2005 and 2010, providing nearly 

$750 million to the state’s economy yearly; spending just on winery tourism increased from $57 million 

in 2005 to $131 million in 2010. The North Georgia Wine Highway offers visitors vineyards, farms, 

orchards, mills, dairies, herbalists, and restaurants dedicated to preserving mountain foodways and to 

promoting fresh, local products. North Georgia has more than a dozen wineries and the rate of new 

vineyard plantings is among the highest in the eastern United States. With over 195,000 gallons of wine 

produced each year in Pennsylvania (making it the fourth largest wine growing state in the country), 

many of the wine trails wind their way through the mountains of Appalachian Pennsylvania. Western 

North Carolina has become such a wine-rich area that the Sustainable Appalachian Viticulture Institute 

was formed there in 2010 to promote the growing of cool-hardy and disease resistant grape cultivars in 

the 23 mountain counties of North Carolina and they hold an annual conference. Some have called wine 

production the fastest growing industry in North Carolina that provided over $1 billion in economic 

impact to the state in 2011. 

Distilling spirits, one of the oldest of Appalachian traditions, is making a comeback in the region because 

several states have revised laws to permit legal distilling. With the number of distilleries increasing 

quickly, this seems to be one of the growth areas in local food production, building on the region’s 

assets of grain and fruit production, clean and abundant water, and a heritage of distilling lore. In 

Appalachian North Carolina, Troy & Sons Distillery in Asheville makes legal moonshine from Crooked 
20

Creek Corn, one of the few corns that is originally American, and free-flowing mountain water. The 

owner says she makes moonshine “in the tradition of the spirit makers of western North Carolina.” The 

distillery owners have a strong commitment to sustainability, offering a Farmers Market Tour featuring 

organic and local dishes. Initially operating out of an historic farmhouse and barns, the distillery as of 

2011 located to the Southern Railway Warehouse in Asheville. Citing their Appalachian roots for their 

commitment to environmental and energy sustainability, the Mauney brothers, graduates of 

Appalachian State University, recently opened their Southern Artisan Spirits distillery in their greatgreat-grandfather’s hosiery mill on the edge of Appalachia in King’s Mountain, North Carolina. They 

make Cardinal Gin from organic ingredients and plan to develop a small-batch bourbon.

South Carolina’s revised micro-distillery laws led to the establishment of the Dark Corner Distillery in 

2011 in Greenville. Using the name ascribed to the upstate part of South Carolina since the 1800s, the 

distillery makes 100-proof moonshine in a copper still. Housed in an historic building, they also have a 

tasting bar and a museum dedicated to the history of the Dark Corner. When Tennessee also revised its 

laws, the Ole Smoky Tennessee Moonshine Distillery opened in Gatlinburg, the first federally licensed 

distillery in the history of East Tennessee. The distillery is a family business, with the corn grown and 

milled locally, and transformed into such products as Ole Smoky Original Moonshine, Ole Smoky White 

Lightnin’, and Ole Smoky Moonshine Cherries. They also offer distillery tours. In West Virginia, Smooth 

Ambler Spirits in Maxwelton is an artisan, small-batch distillery making vodka, gin, whiskey, and bourbon 

using local and regional ingredients. They offer tours, a tasting room, and gift shop. In Morgantown, 

Mountain Moonshine Distillery appeals to the college crowd of the university town. 

The Northern stretches of Appalachia have their own distilleries. In Pittsburgh, an artisan whiskey 

distillery, Wigle Whiskey, opened in 2011. Named after Philip Wigle, one of two men convicted of 

treason and sentenced to hang for his role in the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, one of the owners says the 

venture is “an opportunity to restore this Pennsylvania industry that has been dormant for a long time.” 

Built to latch onto the thriving tourist trade of the Finger Lakes area in New York, the Finger Lakes 

Distillery was born in 2009, with owners from New York’s Southern Tier and one from Alabama. They 

produce whiskey and rye, vodka, gin, brandy and some other liqueurs, using grapes, rye, barley, and 

wheat from the Southern Tier. One of their popular brands, Glen Thunder, refers to the auto racing 

industry in nearby Watkins Glen. 

In addition to the distilling of spirits, micro-breweries for beer have also seen exponential growth in the 

Appalachian region, actually much earlier than whiskey distilling because laws on brewing beer began to 

change in the 1970s. By 2009, according to the “Southern Appalachian Beer Guide” in Blue Ridge

Outdoors Magazine, in recent years the mountain region has become one of the fastest growing craft 

beer markets in the country, producing award-winning beers and ales. In Appalachian New York, the 

Southern Tier Brewing Company in Lakewood produces 28 different beers that they export to 29 states 

and 12 foreign countries. They also offer local food and brewery tours. Asheville, North Carolina, by all 

accounts, is the epicenter of craft brew in the Appalachian region, named in 2011 as Beer City USA for 

the third year in a row in a national poll. Asheville has at least eight breweries, with another four or five 

just on the outskirts, plus many pubs and taverns devoted to microbrews. The Highland Brewery is the 

largest and offers a seasonal Cold Mountain Ale. The Asheville Brewing Company offers brews, food, 

and movies at its site. Just outside Asheville, there is a German microbrewery in Sylva and the 

Appalachian Craft Brewery in Hendersonville. Capitalizing on this booming asset, Asheville hosts six 

beer-related festivals each year: Oktoberfest, Winter Warmer Beer Festival, Asheville Beer Week, Beer 

City Festival, Craft Beer Festival, and the Brewgrass Festival, featuring beer and bluegrass.
21

In the mountains of Virginia at Mountain Lake Hotel (site of the film “Dirty Dancing”), there is another 

annual Brewfest that also features Virginia microbreweries and local bluegrass. Mountain State Brewing 

Company in Thomas, West Virginia, produces their signature beer, Almost Heaven Amber Ale, and a 

seasonal blueberry beer, taking advantage of Canaan Valley tourism for marketing. 

Such explosive growth in microbrewing has led to a complementary new entrepreneurial opportunity in 

growing hops from which to make the beer. Virginia was once known as the “hops capital of the world,” 

and they hope to regain that distinction in places such as the Blue Mountain Brewery and Hop Farm 

near the Shenandoah National Park. In North Carolina, enough farms have taken up hops growing to 

form the Southern Appalachian Hops Guild, Appalachian State University in 2012 offered a hops 

workshop, and North Carolina State University started the North Carolina Hops Project to conduct 

research that will make hops a valuable cash crop. In Haywood County, hops farmer Scott Grahl and 

partner Stephanie Willis have used Tobacco Trust Fund grants to turn an old farm into a hops farm, 

working with the North Carolina State Soil Science and Horticulture Departments to learn ways to 

improve the soil, increase yields and quality, and improve marketing opportunities. Currently, most 

Appalachian microbreweries have had to import hops from the Pacific Northwest, so Grahl and others in 

the Guild saw a market opportunity. Noting that nearby Asheville is Beer City USA, Grahl says, “Every 

brewery from Asheville has said, if you guys grow it, we’ll buy it.” Grahl also likes the fact that he is 

preserving historic farmland by using it. Other members of the Guild include Blue Ridge Hops in 

Madison County, a USDA certified organic farm, and the Hop’n Blueberry Farm in Buncombe County 

doing sustainable farming of hops, native blueberries, medicinal herbs, and milkweed, plus a butterfly 

flight house. In Appalachian Pennsylvania, the Flying Squirrel Organic Hops Farm began in 2009 using 

sustainable farming methods and Demeter’s Garden in Centre County, launched in the same year, 

already had a local market in a café and an aleworks.

The biggest problems for hops growers are the labor intensive production and the high costs of 

processing hops. In the Pacific Northwest and in Germany, hops growers form collectives to manage 

these challenges, but Appalachian growers have not yet been able to make that much investment up 

front. Hops still is emerging as one of the growth areas in Appalachian farming, with farms in New York, 

Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and under serious investigation in almost 

every state in the region. 

Like distilling and microbrewing, development of the fishing industry depends upon the pristine water in 

much of the mountain region. Mountain trout has long been considered one of the region’s delicacies. 

Restaurants in the mountains of North Georgia advertise trout any way you like it—fried, broiled, pecancrusted, smoked, and so on. Many camps and inns in the region offer services for cleaning and cooking 

freshly caught fish to the legions of trout fisherman who come to the region’s rivers and streams; some 

farms offer trout farms that make the fishing less wild and more certain of a catch, and they usually also 

provide cleaning and cooking service. 

West Virginia is home to the U.S. Trout Farmers Association and has become a center in the region for 

aquaculture. In Raleigh County, High Appalachian Trout sells trout fillets, trout paté, and smoked trout 

jerky to individuals and to places such as the Greenbrier, Tamarack, and Kroger stores. Trout for this 

company and for many others in West Virginia is raised in water from reclaimed coal mines. In 2000, 

the Mingo County Fish Hatchery opened using water from a Mingo mine; the manager says the water 

“flows from the mine by gravity to the incubator and the tanks. We hardly even use any electricity.”

West Virginia has benefited from the expertise of its Freshwater Institute, headquartered in 

Shepherdstown, West Virginia. The Institute has helped open many fisheries, including a yellow-perch 
22

hatchery in Pocahontas County, a tilapia farm in upstate New York for Fingerlakes Aquaculture (with 

Cornell University), and an aquaponics farm in West Virginia that uses water from raising the fish to 

grow herbs and vegetables. In 2011, the Worldwatch Institute reported that the number of fish farmers 

in Appalachia was growing, especially in the coal fields, and raising not only trout, but catfish and even 

salmon. The manager of Mountaineer Trout Farm in Princewick, West Virginia, sees huge growth ahead 

for the industry, saying “we see 10 years down the road between 1 and 2 million pounds of production,” 

and all the farms are hoping to capitalize on the buy local movement. 

Another report in 2011, this time from National Geographic, noted that the United Nations put a 

temporary halt to sturgeon caviar exports from the Caspian Sea because the fish species was becoming 

endangered. This has provided an entrepreneurial opportunity for Appalachian fish farmers. 

Shuckman’s Fish and Sunburst Trout, for example, located in Louisville, Kentucky buys most of its fish 

from Appalachian fish farms and is now expanding into trout caviar with a facility in an abandoned coal 

mine in Lynch, Kentucky. The rainbow trout aquaculture center is a joint venture of Sunburst Trout and 

Southeast Kentucky Community College and Kentucky State University. They hope to have a year-round 

supply of fish and caviar and, according to the director of the program, “we’re hoping to diversify the 

economy around here, which has been primarily coal for steel production.” Appalachian caviar—no 

longer considered an oxymoron. 

 
23

EDUCATION AND TRAINING

For many years, training in agriculture and food production was the purview of land-grant universities in 

the United States. County extension agents worked with farmers, food producers, and youngsters in 4-H 

and Future Farmers of America to provide the latest in farming techniques, food safety regulation, and 

preparing young folks for a farming future. As small farming declined in America, the extension services 

began to shrink, land-grant universities began to concentrate on large-scale, industrialized farming with 

chemicals and antibiotics, and fewer and fewer young people looked to farming as a viable future.

Fortunately, the emphasis in recent years on local or community food systems has encouraged changes 

in agricultural education and workforce training. As small-scale farming began to increase but with a 

focus on new technologies, extension services have begun to see a greater demand for what they can 

provide, college and university agriculture programs have adapted their approaches to focus on 

sustainable farming methods and training farmers for the next generation, and there is more public 

outcry to return extension service to former levels and reinvigorate school programs such as 4-H and 

FFA. This has been true in the Appalachian region as well. In addition, other groups such as non-landgrant academic institutions, non-profit organizations, and private entrepreneurs are developing new 

technical curricula, researching issues related to food and farming, and fostering a stronger sense of 

regional agricultural identity. 

The Appalachian region is fortunate to be home to many of the country’s leading land-grant universities, 

including Clemson University in South Carolina, Virginia Tech, University of Tennessee, Pennsylvania 

State University, West Virginia University, North Georgia College and State University, Mississippi State 

University, and Cornell University in New York. Although on the margins of the region, Kentucky State 

University, University of Kentucky, and North Carolina State University also contribute to agricultural 

and food work in Appalachia. Much cutting edge research and teaching is being done at all these 

schools.

A major research project, funded by a $2 million grant from the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s 

National Institute of Food and Agriculture, began in 2011 with faculty researchers from West Virginia 

University, Virginia Tech, and North Carolina State University. The goal of the project is to improve 

individual health and the health of the regional economy by strengthening local communities. Methods 

include surveying where food is grown in Southern Appalachia, assessing farmland and gauging the 

distance between food and residents, and identifying areas of need with a view to establishing 

sustainable community food systems. Susan Clark, one of the faculty researchers on the project from 

Virginia Tech, noted in the Rural Blog that “the Southern Appalachian region has historically struggled 

with high levels of food insecurity and economic instability. We aim to enhance knowledge of barriers 

and opportunities for improving food security and economic viability through local and regional food 

system development in this region.” 

The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg has been reaching out beyond 

the campus into area high schools and communities to boost the development of local food systems. 

Several high schools in the region are learning how to grow and market alternative crops through an 

innovative grant program offered by Virginia Tech. A professor of agriculture and extension education 

at Tech said, “We anticipate that students who participate in the local entrepreneurial projects will 

become more aware of the constantly changing food production opportunities that can exist or be 

developed in local communities.” She added that it can show students the diversity of career 
24

opportunities in the agriculture industry and showcase business opportunities. Projects have included

building high-tunnel greenhouses, producing potatoes in raised beds, and installing a fillet station next 

to an existing tilapia operation in a county school.

The University of Kentucky, through its Agricultural Economics department, has offered a training 

program called “A Common Field: A Whole Farm Management Education Program for Beginning 

Farmers,” designed to offer education in production, marketing, and networking skills for new farmers. 

Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, offers a Small Farms Program that includes an undergraduate 

course called Exploring the Small Farm Dream with topics such as diversified farming, grass-based 

farming, community-supported agriculture, farm business planning, and more. Their Beginning Farmer 

Project strives to enhance the likelihood of success of new agricultural enterprises by offering resources 

and training through a website, a guide to farming, an online class, and regional farmer trainings. 

Penn State University offers a Start Farming program to help produce a new generation of farmers, and 

they received a grant for a project specifically for beginning women farmers that offers “pot-luck 

learning circles” to develop on-farm and business skills. West Virginia University has an active Small 

Farm Center that focuses on fruit and vegetable production, value adding, beginning farmers, farmers 

market management, agri-tourism, and animal production and marketing. The Small Farm Center also 

hosts an annual conference that combines communities in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and 

southeastern Ohio.

Land-grant schools have a mandate to work with farming and provide community service, but other 

non-land-grant colleges and universities in the Appalachian region have also become part of community 

food efforts. East Tennessee State University in Johnson City and Milligan College in Milligan, Tennessee 

partnered to host the first East Tennessee Local Food Summit in 2011. In addition to bringing together 

consumers, producers, educators, elected officials, and local “foodies,” they engaged students with a 

targeted reading and video list and involved them in the planning and discussions. Tuskegee University 

in Alabama has partnered with the Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network to provide programs for 

beginning farmers and ranchers and to offer organic agriculture training for extension workers.

The Ford Foundation in 2009 funded the Alliance for Sustainability, a network of community colleges to 

work collaboratively on new and better ways to educate, train, promote, and support sustainable rural 

development, particularly where associated with industry clusters. One of their areas of emphasis has 

been Central Appalachia and they have held meetings in Charleston, West Virginia, Knoxville, Tennessee, 

and Rome, Georgia. Their most recent meeting in 2011 was titled, “Growth from the Ground Up: 

Community Colleges and Sustainable Food Systems,” in North Carolina. Educating students for 

sustainable agriculture is one of their key areas of development. 

Community colleges, technical institutes, and even some colleges and universities in the region train not 

only farmers and food producers, but those who cook the food. Culinary training prepares students in 

areas of cooking, food safety and sanitation, food vocabulary, and often business management. In 

Asheville, North Carolina, the Asheville Independent Restaurant Association, Goodwill Industries, the 

Asheville City Schools Foundation, and Green Opportunities partnered to offer “GO Kitchen-Ready” 

training at a local school. Using local food products is a key ingredient in the program. Training is 

offered in culinary skills, plus job preparation skills, and assistance with job placement is provided by the 

partner organizations. 

Training in aquaponics, one of the growth food industries in the region occurs on many mountain 

campuses. Hocking College in Ohio has a fish hatchery facility for research and training for regional 
25

entrepreneurs. There are aquaponics teaching facilities at the State University of New York at Cobleskill, 

Garrett Community College in Appalachian Maryland (that also grows produce using the nutrient rich 

wastewater from the fish), and at Gadsden State Community College in Alabama. Floyd County, 

Kentucky, has an aquaponics program in a local high school to teach students how to raise, add value, 

and market fish and fish products. 

Community organizations often provide short courses and workshops to help educate local folks about 

gardening, cooking, food preservation, and other topics. The Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network 

(ASAN) offers Farmer to Farmer educational programs in which farmers mentor one another. An 

innovative feature of the program is called the “Pass On,” in which participants in the training received a 

pass-on gift such as supplies, honeybees, chicks, seeds or seedlings with the understanding that they 

must pass on their training and more gifts to another producer. Working with Alabama A & M 

University, Tuskegee University, Auburn University, the National Young Farmers Education Association, 

and the Alabama Green Industry Training Center, ASAN helped create the Consortium for Agricultural 

Newcomers Access to Learning (CANAL). The Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture 

(PASA) offers sustainability schools for community members to teach them sustainable living practices. 

Community Food Initiatives in Appalachian Ohio held a series of Appalachian Food Workshops in 2011 

that explored organic gardening, wild foraging for nettles and using garden weeds medicinally, home 

brewing, canning and making jams and jellies, making compost, running a sustainable food business, and 

permaculture. Gaining Ground, the Sustainability Institute of Mississippi, located in Appalachian 

Mississippi, offers a year-long class to help people learn to grow food on one square meter of land, such 

as their front yards, to take the intimidation factor out of home gardening. They also offer student 

internships with their organization. One fascinating student project influenced by Gaining Ground is the 

“Farm on Wheels,” created by students at the Mississippi School for Math and Science in Columbus, also 

in an Appalachian county. The senior students converted a school bus to run on biodiesel fuel, installed

solar panels on the hood, painted the bus with farm graphics such as chickens, corn, and watermelon, 

and hit the road to carry a message of sustainable living. They plan to add a greenhouse roof, learning 

garden, irrigation system, worm tea bin, compost tumbler, portable chicken coop, and more. 

In Berea, Kentucky, the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center, established by one of the region’s 

most well-known heirloom seed savers, Bill Best, takes agricultural education and training of people of 

all ages very seriously. Not only does the center collect family and heirloom seeds and help heirloom 

growers, but they train young people during the growing season to value, grow, and market heirloom 

fruits and vegetables. They also train folks of all ages in traditional techniques of food preservation, 

train owners of woodlots in less intrusive logging practices, experiment with Appalachian medicinal 

herbs and mushroom production, and assist Appalachian counties in becoming more self-sufficient in 

food production.

The federal government, through the USDA Agricultural Research Service, operates the Appalachian 

Farming Systems Research Center near Beckley, West Virginia. This laboratory serves the agricultural 

community of the Appalachian Region by developing knowledge and technology to make small farms in 

the region more profitable while protecting the environment. They work to identify and target products 

to meet niche market demands and help farmers with problems of climate, steep terrain, and eroded 

soil. The laboratory’s current priorities are ways to deal with climate change, food safety research, and 

global food security research. In addition to helping farmers have access to cutting-edge technology, 

the research center also maintains an archive, available on its website, of Appalachian agricultural 

heritage, with photographs, video documentaries, and narratives that are available to the public.
26
27

CULTURAL HERITAGE AND LOCAL FOOD

Barbara Kingsolver, in her award-winning bestseller, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about living off the land 

and local food for a year in Appalachia, says: “A food culture in not something that gets sold to people. 

It arises out of a place, a soil, a climate, a history, a temperament; a collective sense of belonging. 

People hold on to their food customs because of the positives: comfort, nourishment, heavenly aromas. 

Food cultures concentrate a population’s collective wisdom about the plants and animals that grow in a 

place and the complex ways of rendering them tasty. These are mores of survival, good health, and 

control of excess. Living without such a culture would seem dangerous.” What Kingsolver describes is 

akin to the French notion of “terroir,” that wine or food is an embodiment of the place from which it 

comes—the land, the climate, the methods of growing and producing, the traditions, the culture. 

The leading voices in the local food movement worldwide emphasize the importance, both economically 

and socially, of the centrality of culture in agriculture. Food with a place, a face, and a taste, or “storied” 

food is helping fuel the local food movement. Michael Pollan in his seminal work, The Omnivore’s

Dilemma, puzzles, “when you think about it, it is odd that something as important to our health and 

general well-being as food is so often sold strictly on the basis of price. The value of relationship 

marketing is that it allows all kinds of information besides price to travel up and down the food chain: 

stories as well as numbers, qualities as well as quantities, values rather than ‘value.’” 

Gary Nabhan in Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, creates a lengthy 

“Terroir-ist’s Manifesto,” from which one section is particularly significant:

Know where your food comes from

by the richness of stories told round the table

recalling all that was harvested nearby

during the years that came before you,

when your predecessors & ancestors,

roamed the same woods & neighborhoods

where you & yours now roam.

Know them by the songs sung to praise them,

by the handmade tools kept to harvest them,

by the rites & feasts held to celebrate them,

by the laughter let loose to show them our affection.

Many local food groups in Appalachia embrace the necessity of providing the cultural context for the 

food grown and eaten in the mountains. Indeed, for many people in Appalachia, food has always been 

inseparably and reciprocally tied to music, craft, storytelling, literature, architecture, customs and 

celebrations. Appalachia is one of those rare places where you can eat food and drink 

water/wine/beer/cider/whiskey produced on the land in front of you, seasoned with herbs from the 

nearby kitchen garden and mushrooms from the local woods, in a log or stone building built by hand, on 

tables and chairs made of beautiful highland woods and adorned with gorgeous, local wildflowers, on 

pottery dishes made from local clay and glassware made in the region, with locally woven napkins and 

tablecloths, listening to stories and music about food in the mountains. 

Farmers’ markets have become one locale for bringing together food and culture. In addition to food, 

many markets in the mountains offer local flowers and herbs, pottery and woodcraft, handmade 
28

textiles, and traditional and bluegrass music. One example is the Farmers and Artisans Market in Floyd 

County, Virginia, sponsored by the SustainFloyd organization. The market is held in a 3,000 square foot 

timber frame pavilion (built locally with logs harvested by a local horse logging company) and features 

locally grown produce and handcrafts, plus a stage for local music and community events, often the site 

of community festivals such as FloydFest, their nationally acclaimed music festival. The SustainFloyd 

group believes the market helps them advance two of their main objectives: “to help develop a local 

food system and to encourage the creative economy and local entrepreneurship.” They have as their 

vision “to develop new ideas that inform the next generation of initiatives for this rural community while 

preserving local traditions.”

Most of the major regional organizations that deal with local food systems incorporate elements of 

cultural heritage into their work. The Collaborative for the Twenty-First Century Appalachia, 

headquartered in Charleston, West Virginia, has published a toolkit to help communities turn their 

culinary heritage into economic strategies, including ways to hold community cook-offs based on local 

food and traditions and how to create cookbooks of local fare. The Collaborative itself sponsors the Cast 

Iron Cook-Off, an annual event growing in attention and acclaim, in which regional chefs use local 

ingredients and the heritage of cast iron cookware to transform traditional dishes into what they call “a 

new Appalachian cuisine.” The group also sponsors essay contests for young people who collect stories 

of the history of agriculture and food in their families and communities. The organization received a 

2011 state humanities grant to conduct a West Virginia Foodways Heritage Inventory.

Similarly, Slow Food Asheville teamed with Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, in the 

Appalachian Foods Storybank project. After training interested participants in oral history techniques, 

the Storybank project collects and archives stories from individuals, families, and communities about 

Southern Appalachian foods, “how they are grown or harvested, to ways of preparing and preserving 

them, to anecdotes of family or community rituals surrounding food.” 

In upstate New York, many food, tourism, business, and arts groups have joined in partnership to 

promote their Regional Flavor project. The executive director of the Concord Grape Belt Heritage 

Association, one of the partners, explained that “the Regional Flavor concept of community and 

economic development combines the uniqueness of a region’s places, geography, heritage, farm and 

foods, recreation, arts and crafts, lodging, culture and events into authentic experiences for local 

residents and visitors.” Consultants from the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks (ACEnet) in 

Ohio, who have a similar program, have helped the New York effort. 

According to the ACEnetwork website, Regional Flavor Strategies is an innovative, homegrown approach 

to rural community and economic development that “builds on the best of a region’s places, passions, 

and potential. It invites people often excluded from the economic development process (mom and pop 

businesses, artisans, farmers, historical societies, arts councils, tourism bureaus, parks and recreations 

assets, educational institutions, and other non-profits) to “actively engage in seeking innovative ways to 

combine regional assets [its heritage and traditions, culture, arts, food, landscape, and people] to 

generate a unique regional flavor.” Their goal is to create “rooted wealth” in their communities and 

regions.

Another important regional group dedicated to regional flavor is the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA), 

based at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. Although they study the heritage of foodways 

throughout the South, they have often focused on the food heritage of Appalachia. In 2003, they held a 

conference on Appalachia: The Land and the Larder. One attendee from Texas wrote on her food blog 
29

that “there’s something so irresistibly Southern about a collegial meeting that begins each day with 

poetry invocations and ends each evening with Tennessee whiskey-soaked revels, that pairs scholarly 

papers about moonshine whiskey or beaten biscuits with a . . .comedy routine and a Pimento Cheese 

Invitational, and that serves fresh dairy buttermilk with chunks of savory cornbread for a morning snack 

and heirloom Appalachian apple varieties in the afternoon.” (Wood, Austin Chronicle, 2003). From this 

conference came the 2005 book, Cornbread Nation 3: Foods of the Mountain South, edited by Ronni 

Lundy, an esteemed food journalist from Appalachian Kentucky, author of cookbooks, and winner of the 

Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.

Numerous other organizations have also started the process of documenting Appalachia’s food 

traditions. At North Georgia College and State University, the Appalachian Studies program calls its 

signature project “Saving Appalachian Gardens and Stories,” which involves an annual demonstration 

program for heirloom seeds and an oral history collection. Since 2006, in partnership with the 

Department of Biology at the university, the program has collected heirloom seeds from the mountain 

region and oral history interviews with the seed donors about gardening traditions and foodways of 

Southern Appalachia, believing the memories “are as important as the genetic diversity of the seeds.” 

In 2010, Virginia Highlands Community College in Abingdon began development of an Appalachian 

Heritage Garden Trail. Noting that much work had been done to preserve and promote the music, arts, 

and crafts of the region, there were no comprehensive efforts to preserve trees, shrubs, flowers, and 

plants. The trail will ultimately have a series of eight “period gardens” on the campus and in Abingdon. 

In Kentucky, the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development focuses mainly on 

building economic resources for communities, but they have recognized the economic and community 

value in preserving the region’s stories of sustainability and self-sufficiency. The “more stories to tell” 

section of their website records narratives of family farms and another section that features “Voices of 

Appalachia,” and their Standing on the Mountain literary journal provides more outlets for local folks to 

tell their stories of success.

Appalachia has been lucky to have numerous dedicated food documenters who write about the region’s 

culinary heritage. The Foxfire series of books began documenting the region’s food traditions and 

brought them to national attention as early as the 1970s, culminating in a book solely about the region’s 

food in 1984 (Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery: The Regional Memorabilia and Recipes). In 1998, 

Georgia writer Joseph Dabney published Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine: The 

Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking. Fellow food writer, John Egerton, said of the book 

that it was about “a mountain sensibility, suffused with language and lore, stories and songs, an abiding 

sense of place and, not least, dinner tables where families drawn by ageless tradition and an irresistible 

panorama of culinary gems linger to recite their history in stories—and in so doing, to nourish their 

social and cultural roots.” 

Dabney is also known as a chronicler of Mountain Spirits and More Mountain Spirits, his two books on 

making moonshine and other alcoholic concoctions. A more recent offering on mountain moonshine is 

Charles D. Thompson, Jr.’s Spirits of Just Men: Mountaineers, Liquor Bosses, and Lawmen in the 

Moonshine Capital of the World. Thompson, a professor at Duke University, writes about his home of 

Franklin County, Virginia, acknowledged as the historic epicenter of the moonshine trade, and argues 

that making moonshine was a rational and savvy choice for struggling farmers and community members 

during the Great Depression. He asks “where did the corn come from? It was, we might argue, a locally 
30

produced, value-added product made by mountain producers that any ‘locavore’ (local-food advocate) 

might applaud as part of the solution to our food problems today.” 

Mark Sohn, who retired from Pikeville College in Kentucky, has become widely known as an authority on 

Appalachian food and cooking. He has written books such as Appalachian Home Cooking: History, 

Culture, and Recipes (2005) and Mountain Country Cooking: A Gathering of the Best Recipes from the 

Smokies to the Blue Ridge (1996), and he was section editor for the Food and Cooking section of the 

Encyclopedia of Appalachia. He has verified recipes, examined food origins, and documented food 

traditions across Appalachia and he concludes, “Appalachian food may be a stereotype, but the food of 

Appalachia is not.” 

Sohn deems apple stack cakes “a mountain icon.” The cakes have six to eight thin layers of cake filled 

between each layer with a sweetened, spicy apple filling. Perfecting the art of making one of the cakes 

was the mark of a good mountain cook. As Sohn writes, “The cake was popular because five of the 

essential ingredients—dried apples, lard, sorghum, buttermilk, and eggs—were grown on the farm, and 

the others—spices, flour, and baking soda—could be purchased in local markets. Today, mountaineers 

romanticize this cake because it stands out as one of the region’s special creations.”

Tanya Danckla Cobb at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville has written Reclaiming our Food: How

the Grassroots Food Movement Is Changing What We Eat and, with her colleague, Christine Gyovai, has 

organized the Central Appalachia Food Heritage Project (CAHF). The CAFH is a collaborative, 

community-based effort to build knowledge about the foodways of Central Appalachia and use this

knowledge to help build community vibrancy and thriving local economies. In the project, they hope to 

identify heritage foods that are endangered, map heritage food and agricultural sites (such as mills, 

granaries, butcheries, and cideries), identify heritage food production areas, collect personal stories 

about significant food and agricultural practices, and foster opportunities to celebrate the region’s food 

heritage. Another Virginian, Jim Minick at Radford University, has won widespread acclaim for his book, 

The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family, that recounts his family’s experiences in creating 

and operating an organic, pick-your-own blueberry farm in southwest Virginia. 

Elizabeth Engelhardt, a professor at University of Texas, grew up in the mountains of North Carolina and 

draws on that history for her A Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food, a feminist look at 

how food choices conceal stories of race, class, gender, and social power. She writes that, if you asked 

her family members where they are from, they likely would say “the mountains of North Carolina,” 

noting that “putting ‘mountains’ first emphasizes how important they are in terms of loyalty and love of 

place. At the same time, making mountains the most important part of the phrase recognizes the 

marginalization of Appalachia and its foodways from the rest of the state and the region.”

Wendell Berry, who lives and farms on the margins of Appalachia, writes perhaps more eloquently than 

anyone about local food and sustainable agriculture in Appalachia and elsewhere. From his 

groundbreaking book, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture in 1977, to his most recent 

Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food in 2009, Berry argues that for farming to be sustainable 

and successful, it must “consult the genius of the place,” asking what nature would do if no one was 

farming in a particular place, what will nature permit them to do there and will help them do there, and 

what can they do there that will cause the least harm to the place and their natural and human 

neighbors.”
31

In some parts of the Appalachian region, certain food traditions are so distinctive that they become 

famous far beyond the point of origin and are longed for by natives who live outside of the area. The 

spiedie (pronounced SPEE-dee), a sandwich that originated in New York’s Appalachian Southern Tier, 

has thousands of devotees who crave its smell and distinctive taste. The name comes from the Italian 

spiedo meaning cooking spit. Originally made from lamb, they now are often chunks of either lamb, 

pork, chicken, beef, or venison that is marinated in a tart, piquant sauce and then grilled on a skewer. 

To serve it, sliced Italian bread with extra sauce is wrapped around the meat, still on the skewer, which 

is then pulled out, making the bread a kind of mitt for the meat. The sauce usually has wine vinegar, 

water, lemon juice, garlic, and fresh mint and many “secrets” to the sauce are passed down through 

families. Each year, the town of Binghamton, New York, holds the Spiedie Fest and Balloon Rally, which 

has vendors selling all manner of spiedies and a cooking contest to find the best spiedie. A company in 

Binghamton produces the sauce commercially and sells over 2 million bottles annually, especially to 

former residents now spread across the country. In 1999, the Library of Congress memorialized the 

Spiedie Fest in its Local Legacies project with text, photographs, videotape, posters, programs, and even 

three bottles of marinade. One former resident of the Southern Tier says “spiedies are God’s gift to 

barbecue, truly one of the culinary delights of the world.” 

Similarly, in West Virginia, the pepperoni roll is a special regional food. Using his Italian food heritage, 

Guiseppe “Joseph” Argiro is credited with “inventing” the pepperoni roll in 1927 at his Country Club 

Bakery in Fairmont to serve Italian-American coal miners. Many versions of the traditional roll now exist 

with home cooks, and they can still be purchased commercially at the original Country Club Bakery and a 

more modern version at Colasessano’s, also in Fairmont. Another fascinating West Virginia food 

tradition is the bear meat picnic held annually for many decades at the historic Forks of Cheat Baptist 

Church, established in 1775, to honor the importance of bears in the lives of early pioneers. The late 

pastor, Joseph C. Gluck served as Bear Master and inducted hundreds of individuals into the World Bear 

Eaters Club. The church has also had a tradition of an annual opening of the “whiskey tombstone,” a 

hollow grave marker once used to buy and sell spirits, unbeknownst to church members. After Gluck’s 

death in 2004, the bear meat picnic dwindled away, but there is now interest in reviving the tradition. 

Mountain food traditions incorporate strands from many groups—Native Americans, African-Americans, 

Italians, Hungarians, Swiss, Jews, Poles, Scots-Irish, German, English, and more who have lived and 

worked on farms, in coal fields, and in mill towns. They adapted their heritage recipes to local 

ingredients and to the needs of their families and occupations to produce a blended yet distinct 

Appalachian food heritage that is being documented more fully all the time. And such local food culture 

has economic value. As the 2010 USDA study of local food systems concludes, the concept of local food 

is intimately tied to the “story behind the food” or its “provenance,” that points to the reputation of the 

place from which the food comes in signals of quality, culture, and history.

 
32

BUILDING REGIONAL CAPACITY

“Community growth begins with individual growth; local people must address local problems; successful 

development begins with small tangible goals—pick the low-hanging fruit first; team-building (and its 

accompanying personal commitment) are essential; and the real task for leaders is to be social architects 

who build human infrastructure.” Dr. Vaughn Grisham, Director of the McLean Institute for Community 

Development, University of Mississippi.

The Center for Rural Entrepreneurship defines community capacity as the knowledge, skills, and 

attitudes necessary to improve and sustain your community. They identify several principles important 

to sustainable community development: (1) People in the community must be responsible for 

addressing local problems; (2) Leadership is important, but you also have to develop organizations and 

institutions that will implement the development strategy; (3) The development process must be both 

local and regional to achieve its fullest impact; (4) Any development process must have broad-based 

participation by all members of the community, starting with the poorest members; and (5) 

Communities must build on their assets, the most important of which are people.

Explosive growth in the development of community food systems in Appalachia has occurred because 

the region has been engaged in just this kind of capacity building. Individuals who are passionate about 

the idea of local food have also had the foresight and persistence to team with others in a common 

vision. 

In addition to these leaders in the Region who can articulate the vision of successful community food 

systems and what it means for Appalachia, numerous organizations have been created to link 

community members and, increasingly, to link communities to one another across the mountains. 

People in the Appalachian Region—extension agents, university researchers, planners, policymakers, 

farmers and food producers, economic developers, community activists, school children to sophisticated 

“foodies,” corporations and philanthropists, are all playing a critical role in local food system 

development. 

Many of the region’s successful non-profit local food organizations have brought together stakeholders 

from many parts of their communities and gotten them to work in concert with one another on 

sustainable, healthy, local food. With members in Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and West 

Virginia, the Central Appalachian Network (CAN) has done much to strengthen local food value chains in 

the center of the region and to offer models for other parts of the region. CAN, organized in 1993, 

works on many fronts to advance the region’s economic transition to a more sustainable future.

In 2009, CAN hosted a regional convening, “Growing Healthy Food Systems from the Ground Up,” and 

awarded $100,000 to eight local food projects. In 2011, CAN hosted a ground-breaking meeting in West 

Virginia with the Appalachia Funders Network to address the most critical issues facing local food 

systems in Central Appalachia. They held in-depth conversations on four critical topics: growing season 

extension; aggregation, distribution and rural/urban connections; institutional buying; and statewide 

organizing and policy work. In their final report, “Local Food Value Chains: A Collaborative 

Conversation,” they concluded that education and outreach are critical to the success of food value 

chains, that intermediary organizations are key to enabling local food work to move forward at a 

regional scale and to crossing political boundaries to give local foods a voice and impact nationwide, and 

that it is crucial to foster serious and productive collaboration among all parts of the local food value 

chain. 
33

The Central Appalachian Network is one of the key collaboratives working with the Wealth Creation in 

Rural Communities initiative of the Ford Foundation. The mission of the initiative is to improve rural 

livelihoods with a systems approach that creates multiple forms of wealth that are owned and 

controlled locally. The approach focuses on place, provides incentives for collaboration, creates 

multiple forms of community wealth (financial, natural, social, individual, build, intellectual, and political 

capital), and emphasizes local ownership. CAN is using this approach successfully to work on building a 

healthy local food system value chain. According to the Ford Foundation, groups in Appalachia work 

more effectively in collaborations than they have observed in other parts of the country, giving them 

better chances for creating thriving local economies.

Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP) in Asheville, North Carolina, a model in capacity 

building, has prepared a toolkit, “Farm Promotion and Support,” for authorities in economic 

development and tourism to help them work more effectively with the farm and food aspects of their 

local economies. The organization also has a Local Food Research Center that examines the social, 

economic, and environmental impacts of localizing food systems. ASAP Farm to School and Farm to 

Institution programs bring together educators, extension agents, health care professionals, and others 

to learn about the values of local food and how to support the local food system. ASAP rightly boasts 

that “as a result of our work, Western North Carolina and the Southern Appalachian region lead the 

country in developing local food systems that build local economies, sustain farms, and insure that 

everyone has access to the freshest and healthiest locally-grown foods.”

The Appalachian Foodshed Project, a grant-funded collaboration among North Carolina State University, 

Virginia Tech, and West Virginia University, is using a foodshed concept to address issues of community 

food security in West Virginia and the Appalachian portions of North Carolina and Virginia. Their 

objectives are to create a place-based foodshed model with emphasis on food accessibility and 

affordability; design and implement participatory community food security assessments; expand food 

system/security programs and curriculum; and implement a comprehensive, community-based 

evaluation of foodshed security. In 2011, the group held a Capacity Building Forum in Blacksburg, 

Virginia, and in 2012 hosted a conference on “Cultivating Appalachian Food Security.”

The Eastern Kentucky Food Systems Collaborative brings together several organizations, institutions, 

and individuals who include farmers, health professionals, academics, extension agents, and local food 

advocates to support, strengthen and connect the local food system in Eastern Kentucky. Their projects 

have included a local food system inventory of Eastern Kentucky and a sustainable farmer training 

program. The Brushy Fork Institute, also in Kentucky, works with the Appalachian Rural Development 

Philanthropy Initiative to offer mini-grants to build capacity of the region “through prudent stewardship 

of resources, thus supporting the growth of local wealth through permanent community endowments.” 

An even more multi-faceted capacity building program comes from the Mountain Association for 

Community Development (MACED). MACED works to create economic options in eastern Kentucky and 

Central Appalachia that offer meaningful work, stronger communities, respected natural resources, and 

a higher quality of life. As they say, “Welcome to our vision of Appalachia.” The group’s work helps 

provide financial investment and technical assistance to communities, conducts research and supports 

good public policy, and crafts development tools that make a difference. 

MACED’s Agricultural Diversification Lending Program helps family farmers diversify their agricultural 

income. One family assisted by MACED, for example, began cultivating shitake and oyster mushrooms 

on their 200 acre Sheltowee Farm in Salt Lick, Kentucky, and harvesting wild mushrooms growing in 

their forest. When demand rose beyond supply, the family needed to construct a building to have year-
34

round production and MACED helped with funding and technical assistance. In partnership with 

Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, MACED also is involved in the Appalachian Transition Initiative, 

which promotes active, participatory, and action-oriented conversation about economic transition in 

Central Appalachia to move toward a more just, sustainable, and prosperous future for the region.

MACED is one member of another capacity-building group in the region, the Appalachian Development 

Alliance (ADA). The Alliance is a collaboration of Kentucky-based community development financial 

institutions working to provide business development capital and technical assistance to small 

businesses and distressed communities in eastern Kentucky. While MACED and the Alliance do not 

focus solely on sustainable agriculture and local food development, they are organizations which 

provide many kinds of support for such endeavors. 

In Virginia, the Blue Ridge Plateau Project is a collaboration among Grayson LandCare, Sustain Floyd, 

Virginia Tech, the Virginia Farm Bureau, Virginia Departments of Agriculture and Consumer Services and 

Recreation and Forestry; USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service, several county governments, 

civic organizations, and concerned individuals. Jerry Moles, one of the leaders of the collaboration, says, 

“We need not be in an age of heavy equipment and massive investments. Instead, we can choose to be 

in an information/collaboration arena. If people decide to work together to achieve shared goals, their 

degree of involvement and the capital accumulated to create new relationships among themselves and 

the Earth are bound only by a lack of imagination.” He adds, “as a consequence, the people’s capacities 

to change the economy and practices of agriculture are enhanced.”

In Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Sustainable Agriculture Association (PASA) believes “success is 

defined as achieving our mission now while also building capacity to impact the future for many 

generations to come.” They offer sustainable agriculture education, regional marketing and business 

support, consumer outreach, advocacy for local food systems, and community building. As David Eason, 

PASA’s director of Western Pennsylvania programs says, “local seems to be the old idea that’s new 

again.” 

Gaining Ground, an initiative of the Benwood Foundation in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is focused on 

building regional capacity through local food as an economic driver. With a commitment of $1.65 

million from the Benwood Foundation for three years, Gaining Ground hopes to raise the level of local 

food spending (and thereby increase the local economy by more than $100 million annually), tackle the 

problem of food deserts in the area, and help people in their community become more aware of the 

politics of local food using their message, “with every bite you make a choice.” Neil Peirce, chair of the 

area’s Citistates group, quotes the argument of the director of Chattanooga’s Office of Sustainability: 

“The strategic value of this initiative means it should be treated as a major economic issue. It links all 

parts of our community. It responds to the threat of our national security posed by long supply lines. It 

protects farmland from subdivisions. And it poses a real intergovernmental challenge, spanning a threestate area.” Peirce finds the point intriguing and asks: “If a human and economic need as basic as food 

can’t reconnect city and county, making allies of longtime competitors, then what can? And if not 

Chattanooga, with its track record as a successful risk taker, then what other American city?”

The West Virginia Farm and Food Coalition, an initiative of the West Virginia Community Development 

HUB, encourages a state-wide and region-wide dialogue about local food systems with the goal of 

providing healthy, locally-produced food to all citizens, especially low income families and other 

vulnerable groups. Their concerns are for health and food justice, food security, cultural heritage, and 

ways to build community capacity.
35

Some of the funding for the West Virginia Farm and Food Coalition comes from the Claude Worthington 

Benedum Foundation, which, like several other philanthropic organizations, are also helping enhance 

regional capacity in community food systems both individually and through their Appalachia Funders 

Network. The 2009 Annual Report of the Benedum Foundation focused on local food system efforts in 

their service areas of West Virginia and Southwestern Pennsylvania. Titled “From Farm to Table: 

Growing the Local Food Economy,” the report noted that “the local foods movement is not just about 

economic development, but also, and increasingly, about community development.” 

The Benedum Foundation is one of several philanthropic groups in the Appalachia Funders Network, an 

organization of public and private grant-makers “who envision an entrepreneurial-based Appalachian 

economy that provides opportunity for all while sustaining the environmental and cultural assets of our 

region.” One of the focus groups for the organization centers on local food systems in Appalachia, 

examining local food systems and how to strengthen them. 

At the 2011 gathering of the group, which had representatives of 52 organizations working in 

Appalachia, ARC Federal Co-chair, Earl Gohl, concluded that “the more we collaborate, the stronger we 

make our networks, the greater we will see a return on the capital investments that we make in the 

region.”
36

CONCLUSION

“A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world 

from which food comes.” (Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” 1989)

The time is ripe for local food system development in Appalachia. But, as local food advocate Anthony 

Flaccavento, warns, “it is a very exciting and promising time, but also critical, because if we don’t enable 

farmers to plug into good markets and follow the sustainability approach very soon and very quickly, 

then this will pass. The desire for local food will become a fad.”

What needs to happen to strengthen local food systems was outlined clearly in findings from a study by 

Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project: (1) Develop trusted local food labels; (2) Target larger-scale 

markets; (3) Support farmer efforts to satisfy local demands; (3) Create more favorable state and local 

policies; (4) Improve public education about local food; (5) Expand direct marketing channels; (6) 

Expand local food activities across the region; (7) Foster collaboration; (8) Adapt infrastructure for 

distribution and processing; (9) Develop and support farmland preservation; (10) Align tourism and 

agriculture. 

In Appalachia, growing the local food economy is a major opportunity to create positive, lasting 

community and economic change based on already existing assets. Appalachia’s agricultural and food 

related assets provide a foundation on which local communities can build sustainable economic 

development. Reflecting regional and national trends, sustainable food system development matches 

many of Appalachia’s strengths with the growing demand for local, healthful, safe food that also 

supports the economies of those who produce it.

Many communities in the Appalachian Region are already utilizing local food and sustainable agriculture 

as a strategic resource to increase job opportunities, revitalize local economies, spark entrepreneurial 

ventures, and strengthen local capacity. Local leaders can continue these efforts by supporting and 

maximizing local food and farm assets, helping provide self-sustaining economic opportunities for 

Appalachia. 

In Appalachia, growing the local food economy feels like a homecoming, like we’ve come full circle, back 

to our roots. Back to land well-tended, good work that makes a good living, sufficient food and selfsufficient communities, mouth-watering tastes of the homegrown, sharing food with neighbors in 

comforting rituals and offering local food to strangers with mountain hospitality. 

There’s lots yet to do. Seeds need to be saved and soil enriched; kitchens and slaughter-houses need to 

be built; more food needs to find more ways to get to more markets; laws need to adapt and more 

dollars found; more kids need to eat better food and more songs about food need to be sung; more 

hands need to be clasped and more voices raised across the mountains in collaboration. But, as we are 

realizing, Appalachia is the value-added. 
37

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42

RESOURCES ON THE WEB

Agritourism Networking Association (www.ncagr.gov/markets/agritourism)

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Appalachian Center for Ethnobotanical Studies (www.frostburg.edu/aces/)

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Appalachian Farmers Market Association (www.appfma.org)

Appalachian Foods Storybank (www.slowfoodasheville.org/heritage-foods-committee/)

Appalachian Grown (www.AppalachianGrown.org)

Appalachian Regional Commission (www.arc.gov)

Appalachian State University Sustainable Development Program (www.susdev.appstate.edu)

Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (www.asapconnections.org)

Appalachian Sustainable Development (www.asdevelop.org)

Biscuit Power Food Blog (www.biscuitpower.com)

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43

Finger Lakes Distilling (www.fingerlakesdistilling.com)

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44

Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center (www.heirlooms.org)

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45

STATE SYNOPSES OF LOCAL FOOD ACTIVITY IN THE APPALACHIAN REGION

The following summary of local food activity in each of the thirteen Appalachian states is intended to 

provide a snapshot of these efforts instead of a comprehensive overview. The local food landscape in 

each State is complex and dynamic, changing almost daily. Each synopsis gives a sense of the priorities 

and the major organizations in a given State related to the local food economy.
46

ALABAMA SYNOPSIS

Appalachian Counties: Bibb, Blount, Calhoun, Chambers, Cherokee, Chilton, Clay, Cleburne, Colbert, 

Coosa, Cullman, De Kalb, Elmore, Etowah, Fayette, Franklin, Hales, Jackson, Jefferson, Lamar, 

Lauderdale, Lawrence, Limestone, Macon, Madison, Marion, Marshall, Morgan, Pickens, Randolph, St. 

Clair, Shelby, Talladega, Tallapoosa, Tuscaloosa, Walker, and Winston.

While Appalachian Alabama has always been a place of small farms and long a place for fine dining in 

cities such as Birmingham, it has only recently fully embraced the local food movement. The Alabama 

Sustainable Agriculture Network (ASAN) only came into being in 2001 at the Southern Sustainable 

Agriculture Working Group Conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In the Fall 2011 ASAN newsletter, 

the group’s president noted that Alabama ranked last in the country in organic farms, ranked near the 

top of the country in obesity, and had six Alabama counties in the top ten nationally in food insecurity. 

For all those reasons, plus the millions of food dollars flowing out of Alabama communities, ASAN has 

adopted an aggressive agenda to meet their motto of “Healthy Farms, Healthy Food, Healthy 

Communities.” 

As a network of over 800 farmers, consumers, and agriculture-related organizations, the group has goals 

of increased awareness of sustainably produced food and fiber, expanding sustainable agriculture 

practices by education and training for farmers, promoting methods to raise farm prices and increase 

access to markets, be an advocate for sustainable agriculture with policy makers, helping train the next 

generation of farmers, increasing food security, and building a culturally diverse network of sustainable 

farmers and consumers. The group hosts sustainable agriculture field days, holds an annual food forum 

and other events, provides resources such as the Alabama Farms Resource Guide, and operates a 

mentoring program for beginning and expanding farmers and ranchers. In 2011, the group organized 

the first ever Alabama workshop on organic farming and, in 2012, will partner with Georgia Organics for 

a conference in Columbus, Georgia. They also promote and support local food policy councils and may 

help form a statewide food policy council. 

ASAN’s training programs include a Farmer to Farmer program based on mentoring between 

experienced and beginning farmers and demonstration farms on which farmers can learn sustainable 

agriculture techniques. An innovative feature of this program is called “The Pass On,” in which 

participants in the training receive a pass-on gift such as supplies, honeybees, chicks, seeds or seedlings 

with the proviso that the participant must pass on their training and more gifts to another producer 

within two years. Working with Alabama A & M University, Tuskegee University, Auburn University, the 

National Young Farmers Education Association, and the Alabama Green Industry Training Center, ASAN 

has helped create the Consortium for Agricultural Newcomers Access to Learning (CANAL).

A 2012 study, “Race, Space, Habitus: Segregation and Local Food in Birmingham, Alabama,” critiqued 

the local food movement as being “almost wholly a white affair with, until recently, very little 

participation by people of color,” even though many of the proponents of local food in Birmingham 

were white progressives who believe in diversity and equality. The study concludes that there must be a 

stated and conscious anti-racist ethic for the local food movement to move forward in the region. Some 

organizations in the area already address the issue head-on. ASAN has a partnership grant with 

Tuskegee University to provide organic agriculture training for extension professionals and a second 

partnership with the university to provide outreach and assistance to beginning farmers and ranchers. 

With Alabama A & M University, they also have a program for socially disadvantaged farmers and 

ranchers.
47

The Clean Food Network is a partnership of 15 small farms in Northern Alabama who are committed to 

sustainable agricultural practices with goals of supporting family farms and offering local, fresh food that 

is pesticide and hormone free. Their products are sold through an online market and then delivered to 

drop sites in Huntsville and Madison. To help build a healthy local economy, the members pledge to 

spend their dollars with local merchants and support local charities. Farms in at least a dozen of the 

Appalachian counties of Alabama offer many types of agritourism activities, ranging from pumpkin 

patches to corn mazes, hayrides, school tours, petting zoos, storytimes, and even helicopter rides.

Appalachian Birmingham and Jefferson County have a reputation for fine dining that features local food 

that began with Frank Stitt, a native of Cullman, Alabama, who has birthed four restaurants in 

Birmingham, won many awards including the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef in the Southeast and 

a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southern Foodways Alliance, and written a book about 

southern recipes and traditions. While studying cooking in France as a young man, Stitt had what he 

terms “an Alabama epiphany,” realizing that food in the hills of Alabama could be as good as local food 

in France. At his famous restaurant, Highlands Bar and Grill, he serves up white bean and collard green 

gratin, pork with corn pudding, and squab with redeye gravy, with what has been described as “a deep 

and profound commitment to the place” he calls home, a place to “butter cornbread and pass around 

the bounty of our region’s farmers, artisans, and chefs.”

The emphasis on good local food in the Birmingham area has also led to formation of the Birmingham 

Originals, a group of chefs who have locally owned and operated restaurants. They are committed to 

increasing awareness of unique regional flavors and locally produced food, strengthening the city’s 

reputation as a regional culinary hub known for food and hospitality, creating “buying power” for chefs 

to purchase local food and other services, and to increase their philanthropic endeavors through their 

“Break’n Bread” charity event. In 2011, another organization, the Birmingham-Jefferson Food Policy 

Council came into being to look at the area’s food system, educate community members about access to 

healthy food and ways to combat “food deserts” in the area, and to make recommendations to 

policymakers. Their food summit in 2010 focused on food security, with sessions on community 

gardens, local food advocacy, school lunches, the grocery gap, public markets, faith-based security 

initiatives, and creating more walkable communities around food. The Jefferson County Food Charter, 

which guides the group, states that “farming, food production, distribution and sales represent a $1.4 

billion economic impact in Jefferson County. Our community’s economic and land-use policies should 

align with a food policy system that encourages job creation, entrepreneurship, and robust local food 

resources.” One entrepreneurial venture in Birmingham is the Shindigs Catering trucks, whose “local 

food fast,” means taking healthy food for lunch out into various areas of the community.

Culinary training in Appalachian Alabama is available at the University of North Alabama, which offers a 

four-year degree in culinary arts, at Tuskegee University, Jefferson State Community College, Samford 

University, and several other sites. The Shoals Culinary Complex in the Shoals Entrepreneurial Center 

serving the Florence-Sheffield area houses a shared commercial kitchen and is a business incubator for 

food products. Clients have use of the facility and access to training in business planning and operation. 

One possible place for growth in Appalachian Alabama is with the Muscle Shoals National Heritage Area. 

The heritage area covers ten types of heritage, including music heritage, Civil War heritage, 

transportation heritage, and so on, but seem to have little focus on food heritage, which has been 

successfully included in other heritage sites in Appalachia such as the Blue Ridge Heritage Area. 
48

GEORGIA SYNOPSIS

Appalachian Counties: Banks, Barrow, Bartow, Carroll, Catoosa, Chattooga, Cherokee, Dade, Dawson, 

Douglas, Elbert, Fannin, Floyd, Forsyth, Franklin, Gilmer, Gordon, Gwinnett, Habersham, Hall, Haralson, 

Hart, Heard, Jackson, Lumpkin, Madison, Murray, Paulding, Pickens, Polk, Rabun, Stephens, Towns, 

Union, Walker, White, and Whitfield.

The mountains of North Georgia have become a destination for good food and wine, drawing on the 

bounty of local farmers. As one local restaurateur noted, “The notion of using local fresh and local 

ingredients is not new to the Georgia mountain people who planted gardens and orchards, raised farm 

animals and foraged or hunted in the wild to supplement what they might purchase at the market. 

However, the unique development is the birth and growth of North Georgia's Wine Highway.”

North Georgia has more than a dozen wineries and, according to one food blog, the rate of new vineyard 

planting is among the highest in the eastern United States. In 2001, the Georgia legislature saw the 

importance of the industry and authorized designation of roadways and signage to create the Georgia 

Wine Highway. More recently, owners of many of the vineyards, farms, orchards, mills, herbalists, 

dairies, and restaurants formed the collaborative group, the Georgia Mountain Foodways Alliance, 

dedicated to the preservation of mountain foodways and heritage and to promoting fresh and local 

products. Each year the group holds the “Grow, Cook, Eat: A Mountain Harvest Celebration” in Clayton, 

Georgia.

Among the vineyards, inns, and restaurants are Wolf Mountain Vineyards near Dahlonega, Frogtown 

Cellars nearby, Monteluce, also near Dahlonega, a Napa Valley-Tuscan-themed destination that features 

a fine restaurant and residential living, and there are smaller vineyards such as Tiger Mountain Vineyards 

in Rabun County, Crane Creek Vineyards in Young Harris, Blackstock Vineyards near Dahlonega, and 

Persimmon Creek Vineyards in Rabun County. All of the vineyards do much more than make and serve 

food and wines. At Tiger Mountain, the owners host a “Fiddle and Author Festival” and, in May, an 

“Awakening of the Vines,” with music provided by the Atlanta Chamber Orchestra. Crane Creek has 

annual art and tomato festivals, and Persimmon Creek offers wine tastings and high-end food products in 

a tasting room in the nearby town of Clayton. One of the owners of Persimmon Creek, Mary Ann 

Hardman, sums up her culinary philosophy by saying, “what grows together goes together” and “farmers 

are our local heroes.”

North Georgia Technical College in Blairsville offers a culinary program and prepared an outstanding 

locally-sourced meal for an ARC local food workshop held there. The college also partnered with 

Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project in Asheville, North Carolina, to produce the Northeast 

Georgia edition of the Local Food Guide. The project director at the college said, “healthy local markets 

for our regional farms mean that farms are preserved as part of our landscape. Rural economies and 

cultures can thrive when local economic activity remains in the communities. As they say, local food is 

thousands of miles fresher, and that's why it makes more sense to buy local.”

At North Georgia College and State University in Dahlonega, the Appalachian Studies Center launched a 

food heritage project called, “Saving Appalachian Gardens and Stories.” The project includes an annual 

demonstration garden for heirloom seeds and an oral history collection. They not only save and share 

seeds, but they preserve cultural history by interviewing seed donors about gardening traditions and 

foodways of Southern Appalachia. The project’s director says, “Such memories are as important as the 
49

genetic diversity of the seeds.”

North Georgia was the site of some of the earliest efforts to preserve agricultural and culinary heritage. 

The Foxfire series of books grew from student oral history work in Rabun Gap and became world famous. 

In the books, and later in other forms of media, all types of farming, food preparation and preservation, 

hunting and wildcrafting, farm architecture and tools, and a host of other topics have been documented, 

photographed, and filmed. Rabun Gap remains an important center for work in local food, with active 

members of the Georgia Mountains Foodways Alliance and Sustainable Mountain Living Communities. 

Georgia Organics, headquartered in Atlanta, works with farmers across the state to provide information 

and training in organic farming, where to find organic food restaurants, farmers’ markets, grocers and 

other retailers who carry local and organic food, CSAs, and places for community gardens. They offer 

tips for schools interested in organic foods, information for consumers, and help for home gardeners. 

Northeast Georgia recently developed an internet based market called “Locally Grown.” Serving Rabun, 

Habersham, and adjacent counties, the growers who are represented in the market are committed to 

chemically free farming and all produce and products are sustainably grown. The creators of the market 

say they were motivated by beliefs that locally grown food builds the local economy, conserves natural 

resources, and helps the community learn sustainability.

In Blue Ridge, Georgia, the Blue Ridge Agri-Cultural Center is an incubator for local food and culinary 

traditions that connects the community, farmer, and artisans through gardens, workshops, cooking 

classes, and cooperative agreements. Still in the development stages, the learning center will feature a 

community garden, honey production, a smokehouse, professional kitchen, chicken coop, outdoor 

cooking facility, and a classroom. They also provide locally grown food for Harvest on Main, a chefowned restaurant in Blue Ridge that features regional flavors.

In Northwest Georgia, students at Berry College run Berry Farms, where they produce angus beef, Jersey 

beef, Jersey milk, herbs, and fresh produce for sale as part of the Student Enterprises program. They 

take animals for processing to nearby Sheriffs Meat Processing Plant in Calhoun, Georgia. The farms are 

part of the WinShape Retreat Center, created from the Normandy Dairy Farm that has always been part 

of the campus. The Normandy French architecture of the barns and other buildings received a National 

Historic Preservation Honor Award in 2007. 
50

KENTUCKY SYNOPSIS

Appalachian Counties: Adair, Bath, Bell, Boyd, Breathitt, Carter, Casey, Clark, Clay, Clinton, 

Cumberland, Edmonson, Elliott, Estill, Fleming, Floyd, Garrard, Green, Greenup, Harlan, Hart, Jackson, 

Johnson, Knott, Knox, Laurel, Lawrence, Lee, Leslie, Letcher, Metcalfe, Monroe, Montgomery, Morgan, 

Nicholas, Owsley, Perry, Pike, Powell, Pulaski, Robertson, Rockcastle, Rowan, Russell, Wayne, Whitley, 

and Wolfe.

Appalachian Kentucky has several important local food initiatives. One of the leading organizations is 

the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED). They work to create 

economic alternatives for communities in eastern Kentucky and Central Appalachia (they are members 

of the Central Appalachian Network or CAN and the Appalachian Development Alliance). MACED 

provides financial investments and technical assistance to communities, conducts research to support 

good public policy, and crafts effective development tools to help communities retain natural resources 

and wealth that they now lose. The organization has an Agricultural Diversification Lending Program to 

help farmers expand their businesses. For example, they assisted one family mushroom farm in Salt 

Lick, Kentucky in constructing a building that allowed them to grow year-round. MACED says it is 

committed to “investing in small farms to help them survive and prosper.”

The Community Farm Alliance, headquartered in Frankfort, works in Appalachia and across Kentucky to 

encourage cooperation among farmers, rural, and urban citizens through leadership and grassroots 

democratic processes to ensure an essential and prosperous place for family-scale agriculture in local 

economies and communities. They call their approach L.I.F.E., or local innovative food economies. They 

believe that local food systems benefit citizens with better food and allow farmers to make a living from 

their land, opening the door for new generations of farmers. Much of the funding for diversification in 

farming comes from the Kentucky Tobacco Settlement. Among their farm to community programs are a 

Farm-to-School program that teams Bath County farmers with the Bath County School System to help 

provide meals for over 2,000 students. The regional Agricultural Education and Marketing Center that is 

located in Bath County made the program possible, serving as a collection site and using the certified 

community kitchen to make value-added foods for the schools. One local farmer says the food “is 

produced local and consumed local. Keeps the cycle closer to home.” Other community programs are 

helping connect farmers with the Kentucky State Parks, which now have a state mandate to use locally 

sourced food and helping colleges such as Centre College make organic and farm-fresh food available 

on-campus.

A recently formed group in Kentucky is the Eastern Kentucky Food Systems Collaborative, a group that 

involves farmers, health professionals, academics, policy advocates, Extension agents, and community 

members. They have developed an on-going eastern Kentucky Local Food System Inventory and work to 

support, strengthen, and connect the local food system throughout Eastern Kentucky. They have also 

offered a sustainable farmer training workshop in Annville. 

Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County, operating since 1913, launched a sustainability 

initiative in 2008 to increase and diversify their school’s food production, promote backyard gardening 

and food production in the community, conserve energy, and create educational programs related to 

food and energy. They began the Pine Mountain Community Garden (one of the sites for Berea’s Grow 

Appalachia program) and harvested over 28,000 pounds of food in 2011 used in the school and the 
51

community. They also host potluck meals, a sustainable agriculture series, seed swaps, and work to

create markets for local growers. The 2012 seed swap was well-attended and elicited these comments 

from Kentucky food blogger Joyce Pinson: “Experts and amateurs alike gathered for an ancient ritual 

that has taken on modern importance, seed saving. Due to our geographic mountain fortresses, seeds 

grown in Appalachia remain largely untainted by commercial agriculture and genetic engineering (GE 

or GMO). We hillbillies take such things for granted. We know that there is a stash of White Hastings 

bean seed hidden in Grandma’s freezer. We know that Johns Creek Bevin’s Tomato is perhaps the lip 

smackenest summer pleasure in the garden. . . .In those tiny little seeds there is our history.” 

One Kentucky program garnering national attention is the Grow Appalachia initiative based at Berea 

College in Berea. Funded by philanthropist John Paul Dejoria, CEO of John Paul Mitchell Systems and 

headed by David Cooke, the program is devoted to teaching and supporting the people of Appalachia in 

addressing the problem of hunger in the region by learning to grow their own food. With program 

partners throughout eastern Kentucky, Appalachian Tennessee, southwest Virginia, and West Virginia, 

Grow Appalachia works to provide mountain families with resources and support to produce more of 

their own food, develop systems to share surplus with the elderly and disabled, create systems to 

market other surplus, develop family to family training programs, preserve heirloom varieties of 

produce, and enhance the resiliency of communities through rediscovery of Appalachian heritage and 

knowledge. Among their partner sites is the Laurel County African American Heritage Center where 30 

families and 10 youths work a common garden space and market their produce at a local farmers’ 

market.

Kentucky’s land-grant institution, the University of Kentucky, also has programs to address local food 

issues. The Cooperative Extension program offers a course called “A Common Field: A Whole Farm 

Management Education Program for Beginning Farmers” to focus on farmers completely new to 

farming to learn whole farm planning, business management, production skills, marketing skills, and 

hands-on training. The Appalachian Center at University of Kentucky has an interdisciplinary local food 

system team that works to help the university and non-university groups collaborate and share research 

around issues of local food.

Appalachian Kentucky has also produced its share of food “stars.” Dean Fearing, nationally known 

executive chef at the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Texas, grew up in Ashland. Ronni Lundy, reared in 

Corbin, won the 2009 Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of writing about 

Appalachian food traditions, including Cornbread Nation 3: Foods of the Mountain South and Shuck 

Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken. Bill Best, who directs the Sustainable Mountain 

Agriculture Center near Berea, has become nationally known for his work in protecting heirloom seeds 

and vegetable varieties.
52

MARYLAND SYNOPSIS

Appalachian Counties: Allegany, Garrett, Washington

With only three counties in the Appalachian region, the mountain portion of the state provides a great 

deal of agricultural and local food activity. The state values its western section so much that it regularly 

sets aside farmland in the region for preservation. In 2006, the Governor of the state announced the 

purchase of easements to protect 543 acres of prime farmland in the Appalachian counties of Garrett, 

Alleghany, Washington, and adjacent Frederick County. This brought the total farmland protected in 

perpetuity in the four counties to more than 33,000 acres. The Governor at the time said, “Today’s 

agricultural land preservation approvals are part of an historic commitment to maintaining productive 

farmland and a local food supply in the face of some of the greatest development pressure and highest 

land prices in the nation.” The Secretary of Agriculture added that “farmland preservation is a strong 

investment in our economy, our environment, and our quality of life. [These] approvals help further 

producers’ efforts in Western Maryland to continue farming, keep the farm in the family, or expand the 

business.”

Appalachian Maryland is particularly strong in the production of cheeses. Particularly notable is Firefly 

Farms in Garrett County that has won both national and international awards for its artisan cheese. 

Many restaurants that feature sustainable, local foods in Maryland and in neighboring Appalachian 

states such as West Virginia and Virginia use the products from Firefly Farms. Another Garrett County 

farm, Backbone Food Farm, is a diversified family farm that raises chickens, draft horses, cows, ducks, 

and vegetables and herbs, using only sustainable and organic methods. Plus, they offer on-the-farm 

educational programs for children.

The Amish and Mennonite communities of Garrett County preserve traditional foods for this part of 

Appalachia. They cook whoopie pies, moon pies, and pepperoni rolls in their own communities and 

often share them with outsiders. At the Swan Meadow School of Oakland, students helped document 

the region’s culinary traditions in 2009. German food traditions are particularly strong in Western 

Maryland.

The Washington County Rural Heritage Museum also focuses on the agrarian heritage of Appalachian 

Maryland and was host of the Smithsonian traveling exhibition on American food in 2007. In 2009, the

Garrett County Economic Development Corporation received an $80,000 grant to develop capacity to 

serve Maryland grocery chain markets with Maryland-produced berries year round and allow Maryland 

growers to enter the grocery chain market at premium prices as “locally grown” produce.

At Frostburg State University in Appalachian Maryland, two programs focus on the region’s bounty. 

Frostburg Grows is a greenhouse project to provide local food year-round. The Appalachian Center for 

Ethnobotanical Studies, which also partners with West Virginia University, is a collaborative, 

multidisciplinary effort to study and conserve native plants of Appalachia. Their objectives are to 

identify Appalachian plants with medicinal or other economic potential, encourage conservation of wild 

plants, preserve Appalachian culture related to traditional harvesting and use of botanicals, and use the 

research in K-12 and higher education, medical education and treatment, the pharmaceutical industry, 

and other educational and economic ventures. 
53

MISSISSIPPI SYNOPSIS

Appalachian Counties: Alcorn, Benton, Calhoun, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Clay, Itawamba, Kemper, Lee, 

Lowndes, Marshall, Monroe, Montgomery, Noxubee, Oktibbeha, Panola, Pontotoc, Prentiss, Tippah, 

Tishomingo, Union, Webster, Winston, and Yalobusha.

Appalachian Mississippi, like the rest of the state, has come late into the sustainable agriculture and 

local food movement, but in recent times, people in the state agree that the movement is “spreading 

like wildfire” across Mississippi. Much of the leadership is coming from the Appalachian foothills part of 

Mississippi, in large part because the land-grant university, Mississippi State University, with many 

agricultural resources is located there in Starkville. Mississippi State, like other land-grant universities in 

the Appalachian region, is making the transition from an agribusiness model to more sustainable 

methods of farming and influencing the local area. One interesting university activity is the Sweet 

Potato Drop, now several years old. Over 20,000 pounds of sweet potatoes are brought to Starkville 

from Vardaman in Appalachian Mississippi, which bills itself as the “sweet potato capital of the world.” 

With student volunteers, the potatoes are dumped and bagged for soup kitchens, churches, and 

charities that get about 2,000 pounds each. One of the faculty members involved noted that 

“Mississippi is No. 3 in the nation as far as food insecurity. So it’s really exciting for us. . .to make sure 

people have fresh produce.”

The Starkville area has seen Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms sprouting up all around 

them, three started just in 2010. One excellent example is Bountiful Harvest Farms, owned and 

operated by Mississippi State University graduate, Sam McLemore. After hiking the entire Appalachian 

Trail, he decided to focus on growing food in the Starkville area. His farm is a CSA and an organic farm. 

McLemore says the CSA concept “creates a community among members, and between members and 

farmers,” because of the shared risk: “If a hailstorm takes out all the peppers, everyone is disappointed 

together, and together cheer on the winter squash and broccoli.” McLemore also sponsors student 

apprenticeships in sustainable farming.

Organic farming has been slow in coming to Mississippi but is spreading quickly. The Mississippi 

Department of Agriculture’s organic coordinator called Mississippi “the last frontier in organics.” He 

noted that more than 11 million acres, or 37 percent of the state land is used for farming, but in 2009 

there were only 23 certified organic growers, which he compared with New York, a state in which only 7 

million acres are used for farming but which boasts over 500 organic farms. He also pointed out, 

however, that organic farming is the fastest-growing sector of Mississippi’s agricultural industry and 

Mississippi organic farmers recently cornered the national market in blueberry production.

Some of the most effective work in sustainable farming is being done by Gaining Ground, the 

Sustainability Institute of Mississippi. Started in 2010 as a non-profit organization devoted to helping 

people make sustainable choices to improve their lives, the group is a collaboration among Mississippi 

State University, private businesses, and local volunteers. Their work focuses on showcasing advances 

in ecological design, environmentally sound farming and forestry practices, and advances in sustainable 

living through research, scientific inquiry, community service, regional outreach, and tourism. The 

founders of the organization, Alison and Mike Buehler, came to Mississippi from Knoxville, Tennessee, 

which has its own Gaining Ground organization, transplanting best practices across the Appalachian 

region. The Mississippi group has numerous projects that include a farm to school pilot project, a 

program called “O Gardens!” in which they teach participants how to grow one square meter of food in 

a year to make home gardening less intimidating, an annual conference since 2009 which draws more 

and more participants each year, and an internship program for students.
54

One of the most fascinating student initiated projects in Appalachian Mississippi is the “Farm on 

Wheels,” a senior project for students enrolled in the Mississippi School for Math and Science in 

Columbus (Lowndes County). After reading about a bus converted to biodiesel fuel by students at 

Mississippi State University, the high school students decided to obtain a bus, convert it to biodiesel and 

then they added solar panels on the hood and painted the bus with a mural of lush farmland, with corn, 

cotton, watermelons, and chickens. They decided to use the bus to promote sustainable living, 

especially in agriculture and local food, taking the bus to various sites in the state during the summer of 

2011. They plan to raise additional funds to put a greenhouse on the roof of the bus, install a rain 

catchment system, a learning garden, a portable chicken coop, worm tea bin, compost tumbler and 

other innovative systems. They have used social media such as a blog, Facebook, and Twitter to 

promote their efforts and raise funds, and they work with the Gaining Ground organization to advance 

their efforts.

Several farms in the hilly part of the state are involved with agritourism and promote their farms as 

Appalachian. Holley Farm in Fulton, identifies itself as “in the heart of scenic Appalachian Mississippi,” 

or sometimes, “embraced by the beautiful hills of Appalachian Mississippi,” and has a corn maze, 

pumpkin patch, cotton patch, cane sorghum patch, tours and much more. Other farms in the area with 

similar activities are the Wise Family Farm, Burton’s Sugar Farm, Adkins Farm, and Pumpkin Patch 

Farms. The Mississippi Hills National Heritage Area also promotes tourism in the area and does point 

visitors to regional food locations.

Although not located in an Appalachian Mississippi county, the Southern Foodways Alliance in Oxford at 

the University of Mississippi had done much to help preserve and promote Appalachian foodways. They 

frequently meet at Appalachian sites to celebrate Appalachian food traditions and one of their 

publications, Cornbread Nation 3, focused entirely on “Foods of the Mountain South,” edited by 

Kentuckian Ronni Lundy. 

 
55

NEW YORK SYNOPSIS

Appalachian Counties: Allegany, Broome, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Chemung, Chenango, Cortland, 

Delaware, Otsego, Schoharie, Schuyler, Steuben, Tioga, and Tompkins.

Sustainable agriculture and local food efforts in Appalachian New York benefit from having a land-grant 

university (Cornell University at Ithaca) in the area, an important culinary tourism area in the Finger 

Lakes, and access to major urban markets for local food. All these factors contribute to a thriving local 

food center in this part of Appalachia. A study of the area done in 2005, “Southern Tier Agriculture: A 

Regional Resource and a Landscape in Transition,” asserted that “farm and food production is a 

mainstay in the Southern Tier economy and a dominant feature of the rural landscape.” The study 

found that dairy farm products and forage crops led the economy, with cattle and other livestock, feed 

grains, vegetables, nursery products, fishery services, and forest products added to the overall farm and 

food picture. The study concluded that investments in farm businesses had many positive benefits for 

the farms, the environment, the working landscape, local consumers and the community and suggested 

strategies to position farms for survival. Statewide, the New York Sustainable Agriculture Working 

Group assists in efforts to ensure equitable, affordable access to fresh, nutritious foods.

Ithaca, in New York’s Appalachian Southern Tier, has long been a leader in the local food movement. In 

1973, its famous Moosewood Restaurant was established to bring healthful, natural vegetarian cuisine 

to the area. Moosewood became nationally and internationally famous through publication of its 

twelve cookbooks, the latest in 2009. Bon Appétit magazine named Moosewood one of the “thirteen 

most influential restaurants of the 20th century.” Still in operation as a collectively owned business, they 

now also do much community outreach. One of the chefs is involved with a group of women dedicated 

to improving food in the Ithaca school district, a group called Cool School Food. They work on recipes, 

have tasting days at schools where children can vote, and then some recipes are incorporated into the 

school menu. One of their recipes was chosen for a USDA cookbook developed from a competition 

sponsored by Michelle Obama. Moosewood has also been involved with activists in the food 

security/food justice area to combat racism in providing access to healthy food.

In 2006, the local paper in Ithaca pointed out that Ithaca had more restaurants per capita than New York 

City, adding that “Ithaca is one of few communities that can credit its fine cuisine not only to the 

gourmet chefs who prepare it, but also to the farmers who provide them with the freshest locally grown 

ingredients.” The article pointed to farms, such as Ludgate Farms, a family farm in the area for more 

than 30 years and to GreenStar Cooperative Market, also in Ithaca for more than 30 years. One of the 

managers of the market says, “not only are local foods the freshest food items available, but supplying 

local products enables people to keep their money within the city of Ithaca, and supporting our 

neighbors and community is an important part of our co-op.”

Cornell University in Ithaca has long been involved in agriculture and food production because it serves 

as New York’s land-grant university. Cornell and the Cornell Cooperative Extension Service have joined 

in supporting the transition for many of the state’s farmers from conventional agricultural methods to 

organic production. Noting that organic farming is one of the fastest growing agricultural sectors in the 

country, in 2011 they could point to a growth in the number of organic farms in New York from 225 to 

820 in just a decade. In addition to academic and research programs in agriculture and nutrition, Cornell 

offers such innovative programs as their Garden-Based Learning initiative. One part of the program is 

geared to school gardening, helping teachers develop curricula around gardening that teaches a whole 
56

host of other knowledge and skills. Another piece of the program focuses on helping military family 

members develop a gardening program.

The Cornell Extension program provides a local food guide so that all the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes 

Region farms have a place to list their location and products. The Extension Service also offers the New 

York Beginning Farmers Project that includes a website for resources, an online beginning farmer class, 

regional field training classes, and services available through the Extension Service. In 2007, the 

Extension Service in partnership with numerous other organizations helped launch a Farm Friendly 

website in Appalachian Broome County, whose economy is largely agricultural, to help promote local 

agriculture and products, agritourism, and valuable information for farmers. 

Ithaca is home to the EcoVillage, one of the nation’s first ecological co-housing communities and a 

pioneer in sustainability education. West Haven Farm, a CSA farm in the EcoVillage, is home to the 

Groundswell Center for Local Food and Farming, an initiative that helps diverse learners develop the 

skills, knowledge, and access to resources they need to build sustainable land-based livelihoods and 

more equitable and sustainable local food systems. Their goal is to nurture the next generation of 

farmers and cultivate knowledgeable “food citizens.” Groundswell offers a summer practicum in 

sustainable farming and food justice through Tompkins Cortland Community College; a sustainable 

farming certificate program; the Finger Lakes Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training 

(CRAFT) which uses mentor farms to train others; a Farm Business Planning course; and they hope to 

launch a farm business incubator in 2013. One of their most innovative programs is the Crop Mob, an 

event held once a month on a different farm each time, in which members of the “mob” show up to 

help with farm tasks (harvesting crops, weeding, rock picking, setting up fences or hoop houses). At the 

end of the work, a meal is provided and farmers and mobbers work together. 

In Appalachian Allegany County, a private university and a state technological school contribute to the 

local food efforts. Alfred University in Alfred, New York, has a GreenAlfred program to make the entire 

campus more sustainable, including reducing carbon footprints of buildings, building new LEED 

buildings, recycling, and many efforts in sustainable dining. They have removed trays in the dining halls 

to reduce food waste, provide students with reusable drinking cups, have weekly “no fryer” days in the 

dining halls, have a student garden, and have a commitment from their food service provider to 

substantially increase the amount of locally grown food for use on campus. Working with Cornell

Cooperative Extension, they are finding potential local farm suppliers and learning how to work within a 

local, sustainable food system. Alfred State College in the same town offers degrees in agricultural 

technology and agricultural business with an emphasis on organic and sustainable agriculture, programs 

in culinary arts, and they promote degrees that lead to green careers.

Many other organizations add to the vibrant local food picture in the Southern Tier. The local Slow Food 

chapter concentrates on supporting school gardens. Their “ultimate dream” would a garden in each 

school in the region, supplying food for families that tend the garden and for local food banks, and 

having teachers incorporate gardening into the school curriculum. East Local Southern Tier is a group 

that hosts a weekly food and cooking program online that features a seasonal ingredient, often organic, 

heritage, or heirloom, and asks participants to buy the ingredient locally and use it in a recipe. The goal 

is to connect the community, food professionals, local farms and markets. The New York Venison 

Donation Coalition collects nearly 10,000 pounds of venison for the Food Bank of the Southern Tier each 

year and in 2011 received a $10,000 gift from the Cargill Salt Company in Watkins Glen. 
57

Western New York also has an active Field and Fork Network that connects farmers and chefs. 

Tickletown, in what is called “the enchanted mountains” of Cattaraugus County, hosts an annual seed 

swap. Appalachian New York has many active farm to school programs and provides local food for 

senior citizen centers. 

On a government level, the Southern Tier West Regional Planning and Development Board received a

grant in 2011 to jumpstart their local foods project. They plan to promote local food with restaurants 

and schools, enhance and educate people about the benefits of eating locally grown food, and 

strengthen the local food system. The Executive Director said, “I think we will just grow our region from 

within itself.” The Elmira community in Appalachian Chemung County received an $875,000 grant from 

the New York State Department of Health in 2011 for a five-year initiative to make Elmira a healthier 

place to live. One part of the grant is to establish community gardens and work with local restaurants to 

provide healthy, local food in an effort to reduce the area’s high rates of obesity and diabetes. 

Agritourism is an important part of the economy in Appalachian New York. Edible Finger Lakes

magazine promotes local foods and festivities, “celebrating and promoting the regional food scene with 

a focus on the many farms, vineyards, culinary artisans, chefs and home cooks, farmers’ markets, food 

shops, country inns, restaurants, and cafes.” They sponsor harvest dinners in the fall and give Local 

Hero awards to honor individuals and businesses that make contributions to the Finger Lakes local food 

movement. One attendee at a harvest dinner, which raises funds for the Healthy Food for All Program, 

said “these events are a winning recipe of gorgeous location, amazing chefs, exquisite local food 

products, and tables filled with people who grow the food and love the food of our region.” One of the 

foods well-loved in the region is the spiedie (pronounced SPEE-dee), brought to the region in early days 

by Italian immigrants, especially in the Binghamton area. A spiedee is chunks of barbecued meat (either 

lamb, pork, beef, chicken, or venison) that has been marinated in a special tart sauce, cooked on skewer. 

Slices of Italian bread are then used as a mitt into which the meat on the skewer is placed and then the 

skewer removed. Its popularity has led to an annual Spiedie Fest and Balloon Rally that includes a 

spiedie cook-off and to successful commercial businesses that sell the sandwiches, the bread, or the 

sauce.

Vineyards and wine tours are highly popular in upstate New York, an area that is home to over 100 

wineries. Additionally, the Southern Tier Brewing Company has developed a reputation for fine beers, 

brewing over 28 different beers and exporting them to 29 states and 12 countries around the world. 

They also offer tours and local food along with beer samples. Recent changes in distilling laws helped 

lead to the establishment of the Finger Lakes Distillery in Watkins Glen that makes a wide range of 

small-batch spirits.

Many farms in the Appalachian New York area offer farm tours, fall festivals, farmstays, pumpkin 

patches, corn mazes, and other activities. Two examples are of particular interest. The Tan Child’s Farm 

and Winery in Cattaraugus County is a small, boutique winery specializing in blueberry wine made from 

blueberries grown on the adjacent Child’s Blueberry Farm. Another farm, Canticle Farm in the same 

county, is a non-profit CSA run by the Franciscan Sisters of Allegany. They grow grapes and have 

produced heritage pigs. They offer visitors “a special space for contemplation.” Throughout 

Appalachian New York, there are events that feature Native American food and culture. 
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NORTH CAROLINA SYNOPSIS

Appalachian Counties: Alexander, Alleghany, Ashe, Avery, Buncombe, Burke Caldwell, Cherokee, Clay, 

Davie, Forsyth, Graham, Haywood, Henderson, Jackson, McDowell, Macon, Madison, Mitchell, Polk, 

Rutherford, Stokes, Surry, Swain, Transylvania, Watauga, Wilkes, Yadkin, and Yancey.

The Appalachian portion of North Carolina has emerged as one of the places in Appalachia and in the 

whole country that is in the very forefront of the local food movement. The transition from tobacco 

farming to other types of farming helped spur on development of specialty crops, the growth of farmer’s 

markets, creation of infrastructure to support farmers, a strong farm to table, farm to school, and farm 

to other institutions component, and nationally acclaimed leadership in food system development. 

Strong tourism in western North Carolina, partnered with sustainable agriculture and local food, makes 

for strong local economies. Changes in state laws boosted the growth of microbrewing and craft 

distilling. All these components have created strong local food economies in the western North Carolina 

mountains.

One of the premiere non-profits working in western North Carolina is Appalachian Sustainable 

Agriculture Project (ASAP), based in Asheville but working in Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, and South 

Carolina as well. They offer extensive programs and support services for farmers and others in the local 

food arena. They produce an annual Local Food Guide that gives information on tailgate markets, farms, 

restaurants, grocers who carry local food, apple farms, caterers and bakers using local food, artisan food 

products, farm stores and stands, u-pick farms, bed and breakfasts and farm lodging, farm subscription 

programs (CSAs), agritourism travel destinations, and distributors for local food. Their certification 

program, Appalachian Grown, Local Food Fresher, assures consumers that the products they get are 

grown on local, family farms. A national leader in farm to school programs, ASAP’s Growing Minds 

initiative works to cultivate beneficial relationships between farms and schools, including serving local 

food in schools, assisting with farm field trips, experiential nutrition education, and school gardens. 

ASAP also has a Farm to Hospital program in which they connect farmers and hospital food services and 

teach courses on local food, health, and wellness. The organization produces many excellent resources 

for those interested in local food, including a thorough Farm Promotion and Support booklet with ideas 

and tools for economic development and tourism development authorities. They have a partnership 

with Slow Food Asheville in the Appalachian Storybank Project to collect stories about traditional 

farming and foodways in the region. 

Another program in Asheville is the Go! Kitchen Ready training program that prepares graduates for 

employment in food service. They use local food in the training and they work with other area 

organizations to provide job placement support. 

Asheville has become the epicenter for craft brewing in the country, being voted the top beer city in the 

United States for three years in a row. The growth of the microbrewing industry has also created a 

market for hops, and enough farms in western North Carolina grow hops that they formed the Southern 

Appalachian Hops Guild. Likewise, the explosion in vineyards and wine production in Appalachian North 

Carolina led to formation of the Sustainable Appalachian Viticulture Institute to promote cold-hardy and 

disease resistant cultivars in the Appalachian mountains. Craft distilling, such as the Troy and Sons 

Distillery located just outside Asheville, is also a rapidly expanding part of the local food economy. 

Asheville hosts the annual truffle festival, as well as at least eleven other food festivals (including the 

Ramps and Rainbow Trout festival, the Livermush Festival, and the Sourwood Honey Festival), and 
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abounds with restaurants featuring local food. It’s no wonder Asheville now bills itself as a Foodtopian 

Society, “taking the farm to table movement . . .to an all-out way of life.” They promote “Appalachian 

Mountain Made Food and Cuisine.”

Just outside Asheville, Warren Wilson College maintains a college farm on which students work to learn 

sustainable farming practices, supply the campus food service, and offer a public market for their crops. 

Because of their commitment to local food and the proximity to Asheville, Warren Wilson alum, Susi 

Gott Séguret, a Cordon-Bleu trained chef and traditional musician, began offering her Seasonal School of 

Culinary Arts program there several years ago, which now also includes weeks in Ithaca, New York, 

Sonoma, and Paris. Organic compost facilities are located in Waynesville, North Carolina (Frog Holler 

Organiks) and between Asheville and Hendersonville (French Broad Organics Recycling and reflect the 

kinds of entrepreneurial opportunities that arise in a healthy local food system.

Not far to the east of Asheville, the area around Pilot Mountain, North Carolina, has also experienced 

new strength in its local food economy. Pilot Mountain Pride, an aggregation and distribution facility for 

the produce of local farmers, opened in 2010 in a converted hosiery mill to serve about 60 small to 

medium sized farms in the area by helping them get access to markets, diversify crops, and get training 

in Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) and food safety issues. The director of the center says, “This project 

is about more than fruits and vegetables. It is also promoting family time and education about how food 

is grown. It’s about the value of agriculture to the community and about preserving a way of life and 

rural character.”

At Keep Your Fork Farm near Pilot Mountain, Black Winter Périgord Truffles are grown sustainably and 

hunted out by a truffle-sniffing Border Collie. Native to France, the truffles are being cultivated in North 

Carolina (and in Tennessee) in hopes of making this part of North Carolina “the Périgord Region” of the 

United States. The dogs are trained in Appalachian Virginia at Luray. Martha Stewart brought her 

television program to the farm in 2007. 

In Marion, North Carolina, the Foothills Pilot Plant, the first community-administered, non-profit meat 

processing facility in the country, opened in 2012. The Foothills Pilot Plant is the only USDA-inspected 

facility serving independent poultry growers in the Southern Appalachian region. They hope to become 

certified as “Animal Welfare Approved” for the humane handling of food animals.

One organization that has worked for more than 30 years to help small farmers in North and South 

Carolina is the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association. The Association works to advocate, educate, and 

build connections to create sustainable food systems centered on local and organic agriculture. They 

work for fair farm and food policies, build market development programs such as the Carolina Ground 

Organic Bread Flour Project, and they train farmers in their various conferences and workshops around 

the region. The Association created Mountain Partners in Agriculture which then led to formation of 

Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project. Another organization, Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture, 

based in Boone, works to empower women and their families with resources, education, and skills 

related to production and consumption of sustainably-grown food from the community.

Two North Carolina mountain women who have acted on such empowerment own and operate 

Maverick Farms in Valle Crucis, just outside Boone. Armed with academic degrees and a family farm, 

sisters Alice Brooke Wilson and Hilary Wilson, with partner Tom Philpott, food editor for Grist.org, 

operate their farm as an open laboratory, experimenting with human-scale farming techniques and 

traditional food preparation. They welcome guests to the farmhouse, who can help with farm chores, 

serve monthly farm dinners, and provide for artists-in-residence. They operate a CSA, have a summer 
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camp for at-risk youth, and recently launched a new initiative dubbed FIG, Farm Incubator and Grower 

Program, to mentor young farmers and increase local food capacity. 

The level of local food activity in Appalachian North Carolina is growing so fast and is so multi-layered 

that it is not possible to document all of it in a regional report. Suffice it to say that Appalachian North 

Carolina is one of the leaders in the region, even the country, in development of local food systems. 

 
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OHIO SYNOPSIS

Appalachian Counties: Adams, Ashtabula, Athens, Belmont, Brown, Carroll, Clermont, Columbiana, 

Coshocton, Gallia, Guernsey, Harrison, Highland, Hocking, Holmes, Jackson, Jefferson, Lawrence, 

Mahoning, Meigs, Monroe, Morgan, Muskingum, Noble, Perry, Pike, Ross, Scioto, Trumbull, Tuscarawas, 

Vinton, and Washington.

Farms in Appalachian Ohio are diverse with numerous organic farms, certified naturally grown farms, 

grass-fed livestock farms, including Scottish highland cattle and bison, many farms growing heirloom 

varieties of produce, Amish farms, and agri-tourism farms such as Bramble Creek Farms in Washington 

County that asks visitors to work and cook as part of their experience. The Athens County Farmers 

Market is the largest open-air market in the state of Ohio with over 100 vendors, and the Athens County 

Convention and Visitors Bureau has created a 30 Mile Meal Map, so locals and visitors can find nearby 

local food and farm markets, CSAs, farm tours, and food festivals and events. 

Appalachian Ohio has some of the oldest and most successful organizations involved with local food 

system development in Appalachia. Rural Action, formed in 1991, has as its mission to foster social, 

economic, and environmental justice in Appalachian Ohio. Their goal is to build sustainable 

development models based on the region’s assets, including local food systems. The sustainable 

agriculture program has several successful initiatives. The Chesterfield Produce Auction was created in 

2005 to provide a space for farmers to sell their produce, often in large quantities, to a range of buyers, 

large and small. An online project, Ohio Foodshed, provides a one-stop source for information about 

local food in Appalachian Ohio, with directories of growers, lists of farmers’ markets, produce auctions, 

and community gardens, stores and restaurants that use local food, networking for local food advocates, 

and many other resources. In partnership with two other organizations working in the region, Rural 

Action has helped create the Trimble Township Farmers Market, bringing a seasonal market to one of 

the poorest areas in Athens County and one that accepts EBT benefits. They also offer workshops on 

diabetes prevention, landowner site assessment, local food for family and customers, and offer a 

summer feeding program for children.

Another Ohio group, Community Food Initiatives (CFI), is a grass-roots organization founded in 1992 

with a mission of building and supporting a local food system that will give all people in their region 

access to fresh and nutritional food. They have programs that support community gardens and food 

and gardening education, a Donation Station in which local farmers, food producers, and community 

gardeners contribute local food to feed the hungry, and a Farm to Cafeteria/Edible Schoolyards program 

designed to introduce children to gardening and farming and to provide more nutritious meals in 

schools.

The Community Food Initiatives group is housed in the complex created by the Appalachian Center for 

Economic Networks (ACEnet), another highly effective organization in Ohio for community food efforts. 

ACEnet’s mission is to build networks, support innovation, and facilitate collaboration with Appalachian 

Ohio businesses to create a strong, sustainable regional economy. One of their business incubators, the 

nationally recognized Food Manufacturing Center helps food entrepreneurs develop, manufacture, and 

market food products. Through their volunteer Appalachia Harvest group, ACEnet has had enormous 

impact on food security in Appalachian Ohio by preserving and distributing over 350 gallons and 445 

pounds of fresh produce in a two year period, a program they plan to continue. They have been in 
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partnership with many other Appalachian food organizations and serve as a model throughout the 

region for more than 25 years of effective work.

One of ACEnet’s partners in Ohio is the Appalachian Staple Foods Collaborative (ASFC). They were 

created in 2008 to build a model field-to-table food system for Appalachia based on the production, 

processing, and marketing of staple beans, grains, and oilseeds. Their processing facility is the Shagbark 

Seed and Mill Company, also located in the ACEnet complex. The philosophy of ASFC is “staple crops are 

easy to grow. Sow seed and buy a scythe. For larger-scale production, look into sharing equipment with 

your neighbors.” Products from the mill are being sold in a local Kroger store and other grocers, in 

restaurants, and at farmers’ markets.

In partnership with Rural Action, county extension agents, and farmers in Appalachian Ohio, the 

Appalachian Nutrition Network (ANN) began in 2004 as a non-profit agency that organizes, sponsors, 

and administers USDA food and nutrition programs such as the Summer Food Service Program, the After 

School At-Risk Program, and others for Appalachian Ohio and in West Virginia. Borrowing a slogan from 

Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project in North Carolina—“Fresher by Thousands of Miles”—ANN 

has made a commitment to purchase their fresh fruits and vegetables from local farmers. They serve 

food to Appalachian children at 26 different sites.

The Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, while having only one Appalachian County (Ross) in its 

membership, conducted a Local Food Assessment and Plan in 2010 with relevance for its neighboring 

Appalachian counties. They recommended, for example, developing a state-level framework to assess 

urban and rural food deserts and modernizing Ohio’s land-use statutes. 
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PENNSYLVANIA SYNOPSIS

Appalachian Counties: Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Bedford, Blair, Bradford, Butler, Cambria, 

Cameron, Carbon, Centre, Clarion, Clearfield, Clinton, Columbia, Crawford, Elk, Erie, Fayette, Forest, 

Fulton, Greene, Huntingdon, Indiana, Jefferson, Juniata, Lackawanna, Lawrence, Luzerne, Lycoming, 

McKean, Mercer, Mifflin, Monroe, Montour, Northumberland, Perry, Pike, Potter, Schuylkill, Snyder, 

Somerset, Sullivan, Susquehanna, Tioga, Union, Venango, Warren, Washington, Wayne, Westmoreland, 

and Wyoming.

One of the largest organizations working in local food issues in Pennsylvania is the Pennsylvania 

Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA). Founded in 1992, PASA has worked to transform 

agriculture and food systems in Pennsylvania and beyond in ways that improve land, restores health of 

citizens, and makes farming more viable. They work in sustainable agriculture education, regional 

marketing and business support, consumer outreach, advocacy for a safe, sustainable, fair food system, 

and community building. Their annual Farming for the Future Conference attracts over 2,000 attendees 

each year and is followed by field days and intensive learning programs. They coordinate Buy Fresh, Buy 

Local chapters in Pennsylvania and launched a Good Food Neighborhood social network to link local 

people to local food, farms, and one another. Coordinated through this network are their sustainability 

schools in which they offer short workshops on sustainable living for community members. PASA also 

monitors legislative policy that affects agriculture and local food efforts.

David Eason, director of Western Pennsylvania programs for PASA that includes 19 counties that are in 

Appalachian Pennsylvania, has become a national spokesperson for local food issues. He says, “Local 

seems to be the old idea that’s new again.” He believes the whole local food effort is a way “to take 

back regional production.” Eason works to enhance local farm products with regional branding, adding 

that he wants to establish “a baseline of where we are in western Pennsylvania by branding regional 

food products.”

In Central Pennsylvania, SEDA-COG, the local development district and council of governments, is very 

active in local food issues. Through their Community Resource Center and grant funding, they have 

assisted buy fresh, buy local programs and they work to establish connections between towns and cities 

in their area and local growers and others connected with the local food economy.

Pennsylvania’s land-grant institution, Penn State, offers a vast array of agricultural programs in both 

curriculum and through the extension service. Notably, in 2012, the College of Agriculture there 

declared a “Year of Global Food Security,” to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the passage of the 

Morrill Act creating land-grant schools. For the initial event, they brought together 70 Fulbright Scholars 

from around the world to discuss the need for food security across the planet. The director of 

international programs for the college said, “We have to make sure the infrastructure is in place and 

that people have the incomes to access safe and nutritious food. Moreover, this work must take place 

in the context of sustainability, with sensitivity to sovereignty consideration.” Students at Juniata 

College in Huntingdon started an organic garden on campus called “Roots and Shoots.” Their Student 

Food Initiative has gotten commitments from the on-campus food service provider to incorporate the 

garden’s produce into campus menus. At Lock Haven University, students in the MountainServe Center 

(whose motto is Learning by Serving Where the Ground is Uneven) assist with a Community Lunch 

program in partnership with the Salvation Army.
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Pittsburgh, one of Pennsylvania and Appalachia’s most significant cities, has many local food efforts 

underway. Grow Pittsburgh is a non-profit organization devoted to supporting urban farming. They say 

their vision is “the day when growing and eating healthy, local food is commonplace” and note that they 

are committed to growing food, growing farmers, growing community, and growing capacity. Grow 

Pittsburgh operates urban gardens in many neighborhoods of the city and they are widening their scope 

by working with Allegheny County and the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy to encourage gardening 

partnerships outside the city. Each year they expand their Edible Schoolyard program to new schools, in 

which they integrate garden activities into the regular classroom curriculum to help improve eating 

habits and improve learning. Braddock Farms, an urban farm in the city’s business corridor, teaches 

young people in their youth internship program about intensive gardening and they supply the area with 

fresh food. The Frick Art and Historical Center offered the city of Pittsburgh their Victorian greenhouse 

and their Shiloh Farm to provide fresh produce for the city. They promote the greenhouse and garden 

by saying that “the Frick market garden employs different gardening techniques and serves as an 

excellent model for backyard gardening.” New initiatives of Grow Pittsburgh are City Growers, for 

starting community food gardens, Allegheny Grows for food gardens throughout the county, and the 

Community Garden Exchange for resource sharing and networking among all community food gardeners 

in the Pittsburgh region.

Working with Grow Pittsburgh is Slow Food Pittsburgh, whose members rely on fresh produce from 

local, urban farms. In a blog about the organization, one writer noted that the city of Pittsburgh had 

helped the urban farming movement by relaxing some city ordinances to allow farming, keeping 

chickens, and maintaining beehives. 

Just outside Pittsburgh, in Natrona Heights in Allegheny County, four youthful partners bought 

Blackberry Meadow Farms from a couple retiring after 18 years. Their goal is to run the farm not only as 

a sustainable farm, but a model for a new generation of young growers. One of the partners told a 

Pittsburgh City Paper reporter, “We have big dreams for this place. We don’t want it to be just a farm.” 

To diversify their income streams, the farm partners operate a CSA and also sell wholesale as well as 

direct sales at farmers markets. One of the partners says, “the local economy is gonna be the only thing 

that survives,” adding that diverse sources of revenue is as necessary as diverse crops: “It is a business. 

It has to be in the black. If we’re in the red, it means local agriculture is dead.”

Farms that offer CSA programs in Pennsylvania are plentiful. An example is the Edible Earth Farm in 

Tionesta, bordering the Allegheny National Forest and the Allegheny River. It is a certified organic farm, 

with both CSA and direct sales (with a plan in 2012 to open their own Country Shoppe on the farm) and 

the farmers are active members of PASA.

Crafting local beers and spirits has grown in Pennsylvania, as it has in other Appalachian states. The 

local beer business has given rise to two hops farms in the Centre County area. They both are organic 

growers and sell to a local café and aleworks. In Pittsburgh, an artisan whiskey distillery opened in 2011, 

named Wigle Whiskey for one of two men convicted of treason and sentenced to hang for his role in the 

Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. A similar venture in the area is Pennsylvania Pure Distilleries which makes 

Boyd & Blair vodka in Glenshaw. Pennsylvania also boasts significant wine production, producing over 

195,000 gallons annually, making Pennsylvania the fourth largest wine growing state in the country.
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SOUTH CAROLINA SYNOPSIS

Appalachian Counties: Anderson, Cherokee, Greenville, Oconee, Pickens, Spartanburg

In 2011, the Greenville County Planning Department spearheaded a local Food System initiative to learn 

more about the state of its food system and how it can be improved. With a mission to increase access 

to healthy, affordable foods, LiveWell Greenville has partnered with the County to support the efforts. 

The Food System initiative began in August 2011 with two forums for local food producers and a survey 

that was distributed to these local farmers to gather more information. Access to Healthy Foods is the 

name of the planning group. LiveWell Greenville is a partnership of dozens of public and private 

organizations that aims to make Greenville a healthier place to live, work, and play. Two efforts are 

healthier foods in schools and workplaces and nutritious snacks in child care centers. 

The food systems professionals in the upcountry area are now connected by a lively internet forum that 

distributes information and opportunities to the participants. Many of the partners in the group are 

working to convert the Duke’s sandwich facility in Simpsonville into a food processing/storage/hub for 

local food producers.

In May 2011, the Governor of South Carolina announced that Amy’s Kitchen, the nation’s leading maker 

of natural and organic convenience foods, was going to establish a new production facility in Greenville 

County, bringing with it 700 new jobs and a $63 million investment. Amy’s Kitchen uses certified organic 

ingredients, grown without pesticides, non-GMO, and do not contain hydrogenated fats or oils. The 

market for organic foods, according to the company, is among the fastest-growing grocery categories, 

with sales expanding more than 10% annually. Another growing entrepreneurial effort in Upstate is 

Appalachian Organics in Travelers Rest, which uses worms and worm castings to create organic mulch 

and compost.

An exciting development in 2012 was announcement of the plan for Spartanburg’s new Healthy Food 

Hub, a public-private partnership that will open in 2013. The permanent, year-round farmers market 

will have a retail store, urban farm, educational and commercial kitchen facilities, and 21 new jobs. 

With initial funding from a federal Health and Human Services grant, additional funding comes from the 

City of Spartanburg, the Butterfly Foundation, the Mary Black Foundation, and the Hub City Farmers 

Market. 

Edible UpCountry, a magazine devoted to celebrating the foods of Upstate South Carolina, created an 

issue in the winter of 2011 exploring the foods of the growing Latino community in the area, including 

Caribbean, Brazilian, Columbian, and Mexican foods. In 2012, Edible Upcountry sponsored the Upstate 

Food Hub, a business connection event to connect food producers and food buyers. 

The David E. Shi Center for Sustainability at Furman University has as its core mission to support 

sustainability on campus and in the greater community. Multidisciplinary and cross-divisional, the 

center helps integrate sustainability themes and topics into the academic curriculum and research. In 

2011, the Shi Center’s theme was local food systems, with significant student and local community 

interest in the topic in the upstate region. Partners in the efforts include Edible Upcountry, Greenville 

Forward, Gardening for Good, and Greenville Organic Foods. Furman University has its own organic 

practice garden on site. The Furman Farm is a one-fourth acre garden that gives students and 

community members hands-on experience in sustainable agriculture and small scale food production. 

Produce is sold at the Randy Blackwell Farm Stand.
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The Travelers Rest Community Farmers Market, held on Saturday mornings, is part of a downtown 

Greenville complex that has walking/biking trails, wide sidewalks, and a large public park. Oconee 

County has farmers markets at Seneca, Walhalla, and Westminster and has nearly a dozen berry, farm, 

and produce stands that include a dairy and a Christmas tree farm. Perdue’s Mountain Fruit Farm is a 

Certified Roadside Market also in the Travelers Rest community north of Greenville. They produce many 

varieties of fruits and berries on a small scale and sell value-added food products. Owner Dick Perdue 

says, “There is a strong movement to buy local. When you buy local, you get two things. The local guy 

will grow a better variety and they taste better.” He markets with inexpensive email newsletters that 

cost less than $1000 a year and reaches 2000 families in South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, 

Florida, and Georgia.

“The local markets are places to see familiar faces of vendors and customers, and they make you feel 

you belong to a community.” So say agriculture officials who note that South Carolina has some 80 

community-based farmers markets and 120 roadside markets. “Put the state on your plate” was the 

campaign slogan for one candidate for the state’s Department of Agriculture commissioner, who also 

developed a “Certified S.C. Grown” campaign. Research shows nearly 80% of South Carolinians will pick 

a South Carolina product if that information is shown on the grocery aisle; 77% of 190 stores surveyed 

participated in the South Carolina grown campaign, even big chains like Wal-Mart, Piggly-Wiggly, IGA, 

and Bi-lo. Said one official, “The local foods movement is palpable. It is significant.” A “Fresh on the 

Menu” program lets chefs who source 25% of their menu items from local farmers advertise their 

participation in the campaign. 

Several farms (Brick House Farms, Old Paths Farm, Marik Farms) in the Gaffney area of South Carolina, 

raise pastured poultry, beef, and pork. Country Blessings Farm in Tamassee and Lost Marbles Farm in 

Pickens keep goats for dairy and cheese. Oconee Bells Family Farm in Westminster and Blue Skies 

Organic Farm and Nursery in Easley grow organic produce. The Happy Berry Farm in Six Mile is a pick 

your own farm with blackberries, figs, muscadines, blueberries, and seedless grapes. Bee Well Honey 

Farm and Carolina Honeybees, both in Pickens, are beekeeping operations that sell honey and honeyrelated products. Urban Farms in Spartanburg is a small urban farm that grows heirloom vegetables and 

saves seeds. There is a buffalo farm (Buffalo Farms) in Simpsonville and Barrioz Natural Gardens in 

Central that has vegetables and herbs. Each June, the Carolina Farm Stewardship program conducts the 

Upstate Farm Tour, featuring 20 different farms. 

Clemson University in Clemson has a student-run organic farm to develop and demonstrate farming 

systems that are ecologically, economically, and socially sustainable to strengthen local food systems. It 

is certified organic and grows many heirloom breeds native to the area. Clemson University “works to 

create regionally and nationally recognized models for Sustainable Agriculture through research, 

teaching and public outreach programs.” The organic farm was on the chopping block in 2008 because 

of the economic downturn, but now thrives with a Clemson Farmer’s Market and an heirloom garden 

open for tours. 

Anderson County Schools launched a program in 2008 called “Grow With Me” to supply Anderson 

schools with locally-grown produce, including melons, broccoli, cucumbers, tomatoes, strawberries and 

sweet potatoes. Students learn about the food in class and take tours to farms. This was the first farmto-school program in South Carolina. There is interest in adding local meat to the program but because 

the meat is processed far away, it is not feasible at this time. Anderson County won an award from the 

Congressional Hunger Center for its efforts.
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Anderson County Farmer’s Market showcases produce grown only in Anderson County (waivers only if a 

product is not grown in the county) and, on Tuesday nights, local restaurants serve dinner at the market 

representing a “Taste of Anderson.” The market manager says county residents spend about $500 

million a year on food but only 5 to 12 percent of that money stays in the county but they are working to 

change those numbers. Also in 2008, Anderson County hosted the Carolina Farm Stewardship 

Association conference on sustainable agriculture and a locavore group in Anderson held an Eat Carolina 

Food! Challenge. A farmers market opened in the Anderson Area Medical Center and other hospitals 

may follow. 

Master Gardeners in South Carolina have a project called Plant A Row for the Hungry. In Greenville 

County, the Project Host Soup Kitchen Garden supplies produce for 250 people per day. A Spartanburg 

County project donated nearly 33,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables to local shelters.

 

Changes in micro-distillery laws in South Carolina spurred the development of the Dark Corner Distillery, 

the first time traditional moonshine whiskey has been produced legally in the state. Located in 

Greenville, the distillery features a tasting bar and museum about the history of the mountain area of 

South Carolina. 

South Carolina has its Appalachian food “stars.” Among them are celebrity chef Tyler Florence, a native 

of Greenville, who is a food network star, cookbook author, and restaurateur. He is most known for his 

show, Tyler’s Ultimate, and now as host of the Great Food Truck Race. Chef Sean Brock, whose 

restaurants are in Charleston rather than Upstate, is a native of Appalachian Wise County, Virginia, and 

winning rave reviews for his cuisine. He told an Appalachian food blogger that “I’m so proud of where I 

come from that it hurts.” Brock is bringing attention to Appalachian cooking in coastal South Carolina. 

PigeonPie Films in Greenville specializes in documentaries that portray the positive and unique aspects 

of Appalachian culture and society, including its foodways. “We believe that the beauty, sights, and 

sounds of Appalachia deserve to be preserved and shared with others.”
68

TENNESSEE SYNOPSIS

Appalachian Counties: Anderson, Bledsoe, Blount, Bradley, Campbell, Cannon, Carter, Claiborne, Clay, 

Cocke, Coffee, Cumberland, De Kalb, Fentress, Franklin, Grainger, Greene, Grundy, Hamblen, Hamilton, 

Hancock, Hawkins, Jackson, Jefferson, Johnson, Knox, Lawrence, Lewis, Loudon, McMinn, Macon, 

Marion, Meigs, Monroe, Morgan, Overton, Pickett, Polk, Putnam, Rhea, Roane, Scott, Sequatchie, 

Sevier, Smith, Sullivan, Unicoi, Union, Van Buren, Warren, Washington, and White.

East Tennessee has long been a land of farmers. National Public Radio’s Noah Adams wrote an article in 

2010 about the number of Century farms, those owned by the same family for more than 100 years, in 

the mountains of Tennessee. In Sullivan County, the Massengill-Bell farm dates back to the 1700s and 

remains a cattle farm; in Johnson City, the Lone Pine farm retains only ten acres, all the rest gone to 

development, but the owners do raise all-natural beef and free-range chickens; and in Greene County, 

Still Hollow farm has turned to agritourism for survival. Although the owners of Still Hollow struggle to 

maintain the farm while they live away, they plan to keep passing it on to their children. They say, “We 

told our boys. You don’t inherit something when someone dies as much as you’re born to it when 

you’re born. They inherited this land the minute they were born. They grow that inheritance. But they 

will have a treasure. Hopefully.”

While some families struggle to hold onto farms, increasing numbers of young people are turning to 

farming to make a living. In East Tennessee’s Monroe County, Jerry and Vanessa Barr, who didn’t grow 

up farming, chose farming. Jerry Barr says, “Agriculture to me is not a job, it’s a lifestyle.” They raise 

dairy heifers, hay, straw, and a small amount of wheat for grain on about 550 acres. Vanessa Barr 

credits social media with helping them learn from other farmers, share their own experiences, and “take 

the mystery away from what a farmer is.”

A number of organizations in Appalachian Tennessee are helping farmers reach new markets and 

connect even more with one another. Gaining Ground, an initiative of the Benwood Foundation in 

Chattanooga, works to increase the number of local food growers and their production capacity, 

educate citizens about the value of buying locally-grown food, and increase access to healthy, locallygrown food throughout their community. They award grants to creative local food reform projects. 

Another Chattanooga-based project is Crabtree Farms, founded in 1998 as a public/private partnership 

to renew urban agriculture. Their main priority is local food and farm education for community 

members and school children. In 2009, their Farm-to-School programs reached over 700 students; they 

offer Future Farmer internships, Farmer-for-a-Day programs, Community gardening training, and Farm 

Field Days. Crabtreee Farms produces the local food guide for the area (“Taste Buds”), operates a farm 

stand and CSA, and participates in Chattanooga area farmers markets.

Rural Resources, based in Greene County, is a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and 

improvement of agricultural land, preserving rural heritage, and developing a locally sustainable system 

of producing and marketing agricultural products. They offer Farm Day Camps, Farm and Food Teen 

Training, a farm internet service, a Mobile Farmers Market, and the Four Seasons Grazing Club for local 

livestock farmers.

The Jubilee Project in Hancock County, a United Methodist Mission, is dedicated to improving the lives 

of farmers, many of them former tobacco growers, and to helping small businesses. They helped form 

the Clinch Appalachian Farmers Enterprise (CAFÉ), a member-run organization of 20 farmers who grow 

mainly for public school and restaurant markets. They conduct training on subjects such as hoop houses 

and high tunnels, solar heating, composting, and other topics. For a time they operated the Clinch-
69

Powell Community Kitchen to assist developers of value-added food products; the kitchen now 

prepares food for needy youth and elders in three counties.

Unicoi County, just outside the Tri-Cities area, celebrates its agricultural base with the annual Apple 

Festival, Strawberry Festival, Ramp Festval, and the Farmhouse Gallery and Gardens (an agricultural 

business and tourist destination). With a recent ARC grant, they plan to open a community kitchen and 

business incubator for value-added food products. 

Colleges and universities in Tennessee also contribute to local food development. The University of 

Tennessee, the land-grant institution, offers an array of agricultural programs and is home of the 

Agricultural Policy Analysis Center. The Knoxville campus also is site of the University of Tennessee 

Culinary Institute, a program responding to the growing need for chefs. The program director explains 

that “by 2012, for every 100 chefs, we’ll need 120 replacements.” Students at the university grow 

produce at the Organic and Sustainable Crops Unit and sell them at the UT Harvest Market. 

East Tennessee State University (ETSU) has students involved in documenting agricultural history and in 

2011 partnered with nearby Milligan College to present the East Tennessee Local Food Summit, bringing 

together consumers, producers, students, educators, elected officials, and others interested in local

food. ETSU recently opened a farmers market on-campus and produced a film titled, “Ramps and 

Ruritans: Tales of the Revered and Reeking Leek of Flag Pond, Tennessee.” Fred Sauceman, who works 

in the ESTU President’s office, has authored numerous books about regional foodways. A group of 

young people in the Johnson City area in 2011 launched “Build It Up East TN,” a non-profit working to 

create and support a comprehensive food justice program in East Tennessee by reclaiming food culture. 

They plan to offer workshops on food preservation, food insecurity, and Appalachian history, 

community gardening assistance, and a “Holler to the Hood” project to connect rural and urban 

communities. They intend “to reclaim our region’s food sovereignty and revive the spirit of 

independence in Appalachia.”

Even institutions such as prisons are helping develop local food. The local jail in Scott County has a small 

garden behind the jail where inmates grow produce and use it in their meals. At the Knox County 

Detention Center there is a garden, known as McCulley Park, that has been producing food for inmates 

for nearly four years. The work is done by women inmates, including planting and harvesting, growing 

heirloom tomato seedlings in a donated greenhouse, and caring for chickens, goats, and donkeys. One 

of the officers says many of the women inmates who ask to be on the crew have little, if any, gardening 

experience, but “many have left with learning life-long lessons.”

Wine production and distilling has been increasing in East Tennessee, just as it has in other parts of 

Appalachia. Two wineries recently opened in the Tri-Cities area in Blountville, Countryside Vineyards 

and Winery and Corey Ippolito Vineyards. The oldest licensed winery in Tennessee, Highland Manor 

Winery, is located in Jamestown on the Cumberland Plateau. The Ole Smoky Tennessee Moonshine 

distillery in Gatlinburg is the first federally licensed distillery in the history of East Tennessee. 

Increasing numbers of markets and grocers carry local foods. Three Rivers Market in Knoxville has 

operated for over 30 years, selling local, organic, and naturally grown foods, which they also serve at 

their in-store café. They offer workshops for what they call Urban Land Scouts to teach good land 

stewardship.

Blackberry Farm and the Inn at Blackberry Farm have become a mecca for foodies from throughout the 

South. The farm, which grows the food for the two restaurants of the inn, boasts a chef, master 

gardener, baker, cheese maker, forger, butcher, jam lady, chocolatier, restaurant manager, and 
70

sommelier. They offer cooking schools and special epicurean events, and they host the annual dinner 

and meeting for the Southern Foodways Alliance. 
71

VIRGINIA SYNOPSIS

Appalachian Counties: Alleghany, Bath, Bland, Botetourt, Buchanan, Carroll, Craig, Dickenson, Floyd, 

Giles, Grayson, Henry, Highland, Lee, Montgomery, Patrick, Pulaski, Rockbridge, Russell, Scott, Smyth, 

Tazewell, Washington, Wise/Norton, and Wythe and the independent cities of Bristol, Buena Vista, 

Covington, Galax, Lexington, Martinsville, Norton, and Radford.

Virginia has a history of farming that extends to the Founding Fathers of the United States. Washington 

situated his farm to face the mountains, turning his back on the old world, and Jefferson and Madison 

created their farms in the Blue Ridge mountains. Farming was central to their lives and the ways in 

which they shaped a vision for the country.

In more recent years, Appalachian Virginia’s development of local food systems has come to national 

and international attention, first through best-selling books and then as a place of best practice. In 

2006, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma became a #1 New York Times Bestseller and its “star” 

became Joel Salatin, a farmer in Swope, Virginia, whose Polyface Farm provided the country with a 

mandate for food with a face, a place, and a taste. (In 2009, Salatin won a $100,000 Heinz Award for his 

alternative farming practices.) Then in 2007, Barbara Kingsolver published Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, 

which also became a New York Times Bestseller. She recounts the story of her family’s journey to live 

off food from their own mountain farm in southwest Virginia or from neighboring farms for one year. 

Her message was “eaters must understand how we eat determines how the world is used.” The 

locavore movement had found a vibrant center in the mountains of Virginia. More recently, Jim 

Minick’s The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family has drawn attention to his organic, 

blueberry farming in the New River Valley, where he also teaches at Radford University.

Though these books brought the spotlight to Appalachian Virginia, many had already been toiling in the 

local food fields for some years. Anthony Flaccavento, now a nationally known speaker on the local food 

movement and other sustainability issues, founded Appalachian Sustainable Development (ASD) in 1995 

in Abingdon, a nonprofit dedicated to developing healthy, diverse, and ecologically sound economic 

opportunities in southwest Virginia and East Tennessee. ASD, now headed by Kathlyn Terry, has many 

programs including an aggregation facility where produce is washed, graded, packed and shipped to 

local consumers. Their certification and branding program, Appalachian Harvest, helps consumers 

identify local food in the many regional supermarkets where the produce is sold. ASD also provides 

education and training programs for farmers and consumers. Flaccavento, now the founder of SCALE, a 

sustainability consulting service, and an organic farmer himself, has been designated a Hero of the Food 

Movement by the IATP Food and Society Fellows, among other national honors. In 2010, he published 

“Healthy Food Systems: A Toolkit for Building Value Chains” and “The Transition of Appalachia,” an 

article on sustainable local economies for the Solutions Journal.

The Abingdon area recently welcomed the new Heartwood Center that opened in 2011. Heartwood, 

deemed “Southwest Virginia’s Artisan Gateway,” is home to Round the Mountain, southwest Virginia’s 

artisan network and the Crooked Road, Virginia’s heritage music trail. In addition to art, craft, and 

music, the center also houses a restaurant and café that uses locally-sourced food in traditional 

mountain recipes such as soup beans and cornbread.

South of Abingdon, Floyd County is home to Sustain Floyd, a nonprofit created in 2009 to build on the 

community’s assets to create a sustainable future. They have a permanent farmer and artisans market, 

the Floyd Community Market, with goals of developing the local food system and local 
72

entrepreneurship. A Farm-to-School program has established a relationship between local growers and 

the school system to provide a market for the farmers and learning opportunities for school children. 

SustainFloyd has been investigating the feasibility of building a food processing facility and a dairy 

processing facility. Floyd also has a Tasting Room at which visitors can sample locally produced wine, 

beer, cider and mead and hosts an annual Taste of Floyd festival.

In Blacksburg, Virginia Tech, as Virginia’s land-grant university, offers a diverse array of agriculture 

programs on-campus and through the extension service. As students on campus became more attuned 

to local foods, they formed the Virginia Tech Sustainable Food Corps to bring local food into the dining 

halls and to offer students more information on the need for sustainable eating. The university has 

reached beyond the campus to offer grants to local high schools for innovative projects in growing and 

marketing alternative crops. The College of Agriculture, as well as other units in the university, have 

teamed with Grayson LandCare, Sustain Floyd, the Virginia Farm Bureau, the Virginia Departments of 

Agriculture and Consumer Services, of Conservation and Recreation, of Forestry, the USDA Natural 

Resource Conservation Service, several county governments and others in a major collaboration called 

the Blue Ridge Plateau Project that includes Whole Farm Planning, pastured cattle and sheep, and an 

emphasis on balancing farm profitability, community stability, and environmental vitality. With an ARC 

planning grant, the group is developing plans for an abbatoir in the area.

A similar partnership led to construction of the Alleghany Highlands Agricultural Center in Monterey in 

Highland County that serves farmers in Highland and Bath counties of Virginia and Pendleton and 

Pocahontas counties in West Virginia. The local extension agent noted that the facility “will provide the 

entire region with infrastructure for local livestock producers to market locally grown products, branded 

meats, further processing of meats, as well as traditional marketing avenues. This is a big step in 

sustaining our agricultural heritage and stimulating our local economy with new jobs.” The Donald 

slaughterhouse in Lexington, closed for some years, reopened in 2010 with a waiting list of farmers.

In Scott County, in extreme southwest Virginia, several farmers began raising sheep after the decline of 

tobacco. The Scott County Hair Sheep Association, founded in 2000, now has a partnership with Food 

City, a 100 store supermarket chain to sell their lamb products. Border Springs Farm in Patrick County 

has become well-known for its lamb in the kitchens of fine chefs. In Lexington, Virginia, at Washington 

and Lee University, students have a Campus Kitchen in which they prepare food to send home with 

school children in backpacks, so they have food to eat over the weekend. The university also has a 

strong commitment to local food; in 2009, they increased their purchase of local food from 25% to 32% 

from the previous year and from 8.5% in 2007-8. The campus coordinator for the project notes that 

Washington and Lee used to buy apples from Washington State that traveled 3,562 miles to Lexington; 

now, apples from Nelson County travel only 68 miles.

Appalachian Virginia is home to numerous wineries that also offer food and attract many tourists. An 

economic impact study released in 2011 found that between 2005 and 2010, the wine industry in 

Virginia doubled its impact to nearly $750 million, with jobs increasing from 130 to nearly 200 and 

spending on winery tourism increasing from $57 million in 2005 to $131 million in 2010. There are also 

numerous ciderworks (such as the Murray Cider Company in Roanoke) and craft breweries (such as the 

New River Brewing Company in Ashburn and the Shooting Creek Farm Brewery in Floyd County) 

scattered across the Virginia mountains. Highland County is known for its maple syrup production and 

the annual Highland Maple Festival. 

Restaurants that feature local food have sprung up all over the mountains of Virginia and have found 

national notoriety. Barbara Kingsolver and her husband Steve Hopp operate the Harvest Table 
73

Restaurant in Meadowview, serving local food and selling local goods. Zynodoa Restaurant in Staunton 

uses local purveyors, whose names and farms they proudly display, and they sometimes have special 

events such as a program featuring Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm (they use his meat products) and a 

documentary film about his life. The Palisades Restaurant in Eggleston is an annual site for the James 

Beard Foundation Celebrity Chef dinner, and the Hotel Roanoke in Roanoke uses locally grown food in 

its dining areas. Numerous famous chefs have come from Appalachian Virginia, including Sean Brock 

from Wise County, who has restaurants in Charleston, South Carolina, Barry Maiden from Saltville who 

owns the Hungry Mother in Boston (named for Hungry Mother State Park in Marion), and Jack McDavid 

from Clinchport who owns restaurants in Philadelphia. Some food producers have become famous, too. 

Allan Benton of Scott County received the Jack Daniel’s Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southern 

Foodways Alliance in 2007 for his dry-cured country ham, served in many famous restaurants across the 

country. 

 
74

WEST VIRGINIA SYNOPSIS

Appalachian Counties: All counties. Barbour, Berkeley, Boone, Braxton, Brooke, Cabell, Calhoun, Clay, 

Doddridge, Fayette, Gilmer, Grant, Greenbrier, Hampshire, Hancock, Hardy, Harrison, Jackson, Jefferson, 

Kanawha, Lewis, Lincoln, Logan, Marion, Marshall, Mason, McDowell, Mercer, Mineral, Mingo, 

Monongalia, Monroe, Morgan, Nicholas, Ohio, Pendleton, Pleasants, Pocahontas, Preston, Putnam, 

Raleigh, Randolph, Ritchie, Roane, Summers, Taylor, Tucker, Tyler, Upshur, Wayne, Webster, Wetzel, 

Wirt, Wood, and Wyoming.

As the only state that is fully in the Appalachian region, West Virginia has taken advantage of its 

statewide interconnectedness to propel it to one of the leadership positions in Appalachia in the 

development of local food systems. From federal government installations to family farms, expansion of 

local food interest has reached even the smallest communities in the Mountain State.

Near Beckley, the Appalachian Farming Systems Research Center, part of the United States Department 

of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, is a laboratory that develops knowledge and technology to 

increase the profitability of small-farm agricultural enterprises in the Appalachian region while 

enhancing soil and water quality and environmental integrity. They help farmers fill niche markets and 

they assist with challenges of climate, steep terrain, and eroded soil. Their current priorities are climate 

change research, carbon sequestration, food safety, and global food security. Additionally, they 

maintain an archives of photographs, documentaries, and narratives about Appalachia’s agricultural 

history and heritage. Other federal installations, such as the Martinsburg Veterans Administration 

Medical Center, use locally sourced food in their kitchens and offer internships for culinary students 

from a local community college. The Center even hosted a “Taste of Appalachia,” in 2011 that featured 

local produce, local rainbow trout, and local grass-fed beef.

Trout farming and other aquaculture has become big business in West Virginia, which is home to the 

U.S. Trout Farmers Association. Supported by the work of the Freshwater Institute in Shepherdstown, 

there are numerous fish farms in West Virginia, including High Appalachian, a trout farm in Raleigh 

County and West Virginia Salmon and Trout in Mingo County, which uses water from reclaimed coal 

mines to raise the fish. High Appalachian and the Mountain Aquaculture and Producers Association in 

Tucker County are the state’s two processing facilities for fish. A recent decline in the world’s caviar 

supply has brought a new market to West Virginia’s fish industry, filling the void with trout caviar.

In addition to farm-raised food such as fish, West Virginia has been capitalizing on products from forest 

foraging as well. Ramps, the pungent wild leek that grows in mountain woods early in the spring, have 

become a delicacy far beyond Appalachia. Prices for ramps have risen and fears about over-harvesting 

have grown. Each year, Richwood, West Virginia, hosts the annual ramp festival called the Feast of the 

Ramson. Richwood, in Nicholas County, calls itself the ramp capital of the world, but there are ramp 

festivals all over West Virginia and in many other Appalachian states. In 2010, one couple in Richwood 

boasted that they had the only ramp farm in the world, cultivating seeds and bulbs and selling fresh 

ramps to customers as far away as New York City and Louisville, Kentucky. Along with ramps, hunting 

for morels and other wild mushrooms is another grassroots economic activity. West Virginia, according 

to the state’s division of natural resources, boasts 1,700 different species of mushrooms and other fungi, 

each species recorded and housed at Davis & Elkins College in Elkins. The popularity of the wide variety 

of edible mushroom species has now developed a small industry in mushroom production.
75

Community supported agriculture (CSA), in which consumers buy a share of the season’s harvest, are 

widespread across West Virginia’s 23,000 farms. But, farmer and Chef Dale Hawkins, of Fish Hawk 

Acres, a group of family farms in Rock Cave, takes it a step further and operates a Community Supported 

Kitchen (CSK). The CSK, developed to meet market demand, offers customers a wide range of prepared 

dishes and products, quite literally from soup to nuts. Hawkins also developed the New Appalachian 

Farm and Research Center on his own farm to develop new farm production and marketing strategies 

and provide training for farmers.

West Virginia has numerous outstanding organizations working on local food systems in local 

economies. The state Department of Agriculture assists farmers in all aspects of agriculture but has an 

especially vigorous program in marketing development. Their AgVentures logo helps promote 

agritourism across the state and they offer trade show participation and opportunities for international 

marketing through their “Heart of Appalachia” menus for foreign chefs that feature West Virginia 

products. The Small Farm Center at West Virginia University helps farmers with value adding, training 

for beginning farmers, farmers market management, agritourism, and animal production and marketing, 

including aquaculture. They partner with the West Virginia Farmers Market Association for the farm 

market curriculum. 

Beyond state government, others groups have taken leadership in local food work. The West Virginia 

Farm and Food Coalition, with funding from the Benedum Foundation, works to have a statewide

conversation about healthy, locally-produced food for all citizens, especially low income families and 

other vulnerable groups. They offer food news and opportunities, an internet network connection for 

food advocates, and many resources on food, nutrition, and agriculture. The Collaborative for the 

Twenty-First Century Appalachia brings together farmers, chefs, home cooks, community members, 

scholars, and others interested in local food in a variety of ways. They worked with the Department of 

Agriculture to produce a very popular tourism booklet called “101 Unique Places to Dine in West 

Virginia.” Each year they sponsor the Cast Iron Cook-Off that brings together outstanding West Virginia 

chefs with cooking teams to compete, using local ingredients, cast iron cookware, and traditional 

recipes. Recently, they have expanded the event to include a Pan-Appalachian Colloquium to bring 

together local food practitioners from many of the other Appalachian states for in-depth discussions, 

and they are including chefs and teams from other parts of Appalachia in the competition. The 

organization produced a toolkit on cultural and culinary heritage to help communities develop their own 

community cook-offs and agritourism. With a West Virginia Humanities grant, they now are 

documenting food heritage with their Food With A Story project.

Because of its industrial history of mining and steel in some parts of the state, West Virginia is home to 

many threads of ethnic cuisines (German,Swiss, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Welsh, African, Russian, to 

name but a few) and there are festivals devoted to many of them. Clarksburg holds an annual Italian 

Heritage Festival and the pepperoni roll is a food icon in West Virginia; Helvetia treats visitors to Swiss 

food traditions. There are close to twenty vineyards in the state, numerous bottled spring water 

operations, and a legal Mountain Moonshine distillery in Morgantown.

In 2009, British chef Jamie Oliver brought his food revolution television series to Huntington, West 

Virginia, which had been proclaimed the unhealthiest community in America for poor nutrition and rates 

of obesity and diabetes. He made many local folks defensive and angry but eventually won over many 

of them to the need for healthier, fresh food, especially in the schools. He noted that “they have never 

had food from scratch in their life.” Even before his programs, and certainly since then, the state has 

been exploding with local, healthy food initiatives. More recently, Andrew Zimmern, host of “Bizarre 
76

Foods” on the travel channel, made a second trip to West Virginia to sample local cuisine; he declares it 

one of the most distinctive cuisines in the country and says West Virginia is his favorite state in America. 

 
77

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A Agendas from Local Food Workshops

APPENDIX B Notes from Local Food Workshops
Appendix A

78

GROWING THE APPALACHIAN FOOD ECONOMY

An Appalachian Regional Commission Workshop on 

Sustainable Agriculture and Local Food Assets

October 6, 2010 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Blairsville, Georgia 

9:30 a.m.-10:00 a.m. Registration and Morning Coffee

10:00 a.m.-10:30 a.m. Welcome and Opening Remarks

John Cartwright, Appalachian Regional Commission

James Thompson, Georgia Program Manager, Appalachian 

Regional Commission

Jean Haskell, Whisman Appalachian Scholar, Appalachian 

Regional Commission

10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Bringing it to the Table: Stories of Successful Organizations

Brooks Franklin, President, Georgia Mountains Foodways 

Alliance; Director, Sustainable Mountain Living Communities, 

Rabun Gap, Georgia

Alice Rolls, Executive Director, Georgia Organics, Atlanta, Georgia

Charlie Jackson, Executive Director, Appalachian Sustainable 

Agriculture Project, Asheville, North Carolina

Anthony Flaccavento, Organic Farmer; Owner, SCALE, Inc.; Founder, 

Appalachian Sustainable Development, Abingdon, Virginia

Allen Arnold, Executive Director, Collaborative for the 21st 

Century Appalachia, Charleston, West Virginia

12:00 p.m.-1:15 p.m. Luncheon of Seasonal, Local Food, prepared by Culinary Program students of 

North Georgia Technical College

1:15 p.m.-1:30 p.m. Break

1:30 p.m.-2:30 p.m. Panel and Workshop Participant Discussion

How do you identify your community's food and farm assets and needs?

How do you integrate regional cultural heritage into the food economy?

How do you develop infrastructure (community kitchens, processing 

facilities, culinary and leadership training, etc.)?

What are helpful tools for creating healthy food systems?

How do you develop sustainable agricultural and culinary tourism?

How do you create sustainable non-tourism jobs in agriculture and local 

food ventures?

In what ways can ARC most effectively support the growth of 

Appalachia's local, sustainable food economy?

2:30 p.m.-3:00 p.m. Summary and Recommendations
Appendix A

79

Strengthening Local Food Networks across Appalachia

An Appalachian Regional Commission Workshop on

Sustainable Agriculture and Local Food Assets

Friday, March 11, 2011

The Falcon Center, Fairmont State University/Pierpont Community & Technical College

Large Conference Room

AGENDA 

9:00 AM Registration and Morning Coffee/Tea

10:00 AM Welcome and Opening Remarks

John Cartwright, Director of Planning & Research, Appalachian Regional Commission

Ralph Goolsby, Manager, Local Capacity Development, West Virginia Development Office

Mary Hunt-Lieving, Senior Program Officer, Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation

Jean Smith, Director of Marketing & Development, West Virginia Department of Agriculture

10:20 AM Farm to Consumer: The Food Supply & Distribution Conundrum

Anthony Flaccavento, Organic farmer, Owner, SCALE, Inc.; Founder, Appalachian 

Sustainable Development, Abingdon, Virginia

10:40 AM Increasing the Yield: Supporting “Agri-preneurs”

Dale Hawkins, Chef and Farmer, Fish Hawk Acres; Founder, New Appalachian Farm and 

Research Center, Rock Cave, West Virginia 

Shared Soil: Appalachian Regional Collaboration

Jean Haskell, Ph.D., Whisman Appalachian Scholar, Appalachian Regional Commission

12:00 PM Local Foods Luncheon, prepared by Chef Brian Floyd, Chef Jay Mahoney and students in 

the Pierpont Community and Technical College Culinary Academy

1:00 PM Working Group Strategy Sessions

Food Supply and Distribution Issues (Moderators: Katie Hoffman, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, 

Virginia Commonwealth University; Anthony Flaccavento)

Development of “Agri-preneurism” (Moderators: Cindy Martel, Marketing Specialist, West 

Virginia Department of Agriculture; Dale Hawkins) 

Appalachian Regional Collaboration Issues (Moderators: Allen Arnold, Ph.D., Executive 

Director, Collaborative for the 21st Century Appalachia; Jean Haskell)

2:30 PM Summary and Recommendations

3:00 PM Adjourn
Appendix A

80

Strengthening Local Food Networks Across Appalachia

An Appalachian Regional Commission Workshop on

Sustainable Agriculture and Local Food Assets

Friday, March 18, 2011

The Pilot Center, 612 East Main Street, Pilot Mountain, North Carolina.

AGENDA 

9:00 AM Registration 

10:00 AM Welcome and Opening Remarks

Earl Gohl, Federal Co-Chair, Appalachian Regional Commission

Olivia Collier, North Carolina ARC Program, North Carolina Department of Commerce

Earl Sheppard, Mayor, Pilot Mountain, North Carolina

Jean Haskell, Ph.D., Whisman Appalachian Scholar, Appalachian Regional Commission

10:30 AM “Bringing it to the Table”: Examples of Successful Local Food Operations

Charlie Jackson, Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, Asheville, North Carolina

Hillary Wilson, Maverick Farms, Boone, North Carolina

Susi Gott-Seguret, Seasonal School of Culinary Arts, Madison County, North Carolina 

Jerry Moles, New River Valley LandCare, Grayson County, Virginia

12:00 PM Local Foodways Luncheon, prepared by Soppers Restaurant, Pilot Mountain, NC

1:00 PM Working Group Strategy Sessions (participants answer questions below in small groups)

• How do you identify your community’s food and farm assets and needs?

• How do you develop infrastructure (community kitchens, processing facilities)?

• How do you create sustainable jobs and added value through local food ventures?

• What are helpful tools and resources available for creating healthy food systems?

• How do you develop sustainable agricultural and culinary tourism?

• How do you integrate regional cultural heritage into the food economy?

2:15 PM Reporting Out, Summary and Recommendations

3:00 PM Adjourn
Appendix A

81

GROWING THE APPALACHIAN FOOD ECONOMY

An Appalachian Regional Commission Workshop on

Sustainable Agriculture and Local Food Assets

MAY 26, 2011 10:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m.

Farmhouse Gallery and Gardens

Unicoi, Tennessee

9:30-10:00 a.m. Registration 

10:00 a.m.-10:45 a.m. Welcome and Opening Remarks

John Cartwright, Director of Planning and Research, Appalachian 

Regional Commission

Johnny Lynch, Mayor of Unicoi, Tennessee; Wildlife Artist; Co-owner, 

Farmhouse Gallery & Gardens

Ron Coats, East Tennessee Regional Supervisor, Food and Dairy, 

Tennessee Department of Agriculture

Jean Haskell, Ph.D., Whisman Appalachian Scholar,

Appalachian Regional Commission

10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m. Struggle, Success & Innovation in the Local Food Economy

Larry Fisher, Director, Appalachian Center for Economic Networks (Food 

Ventures Center), Athens, Ohio

Mary Lou Surgi, Executive Director, Blue Ridge Food Ventures, Asheville, 

North Carolina

Kathlyn Terry, Executive Director, Appalachian Sustainable 

Development, Abingdon, Virginia

Tess Lloyd, Ph.D., Literature and Language, Appalachian Studies; 

John Lewis, Ph.D., Appalachian Studies, East Tennessee State University, Johnson 

City, Tennessee

12:15-1:00 p.m. Appalachian Foodways Luncheon, presented by Pat Lynch, Co-Owner, 

Farmhouse Gallery & Gardens

1:00 p.m.-2:30 p.m. Discussion Topics

Developing Agri-preneurism

Commercial Kitchens & Food Business Incubators

Food Supply and Distribution

Food Policy and Regulation

Appalachian Regional Collaboration

2:30 p.m.-3:00 p.m. Summary and Recommendations
Appendix A

82

Growing the Appalachian Food Economy

An Appalachian Regional Commission Workshop on

Sustainable Agriculture and Local Food Assets

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Melvin & Dollie Younts Conference Center, Furman University

3300 Poinsett Highway, Greenville, SC

AGENDA

9:00 AM Registration 

10:00 AM Welcome and Opening Remarks

Brittany DeKnight, Associate Director, Shi Center for Sustainability, Furman University 

Eleanor Dunlap, Lead Facilitator, LiveWell Greenville

Bonnie Ammons, South Carolina ARC Program, South Carolina Department of Commerce

Earl Gohl, Federal Co-Chair, Appalachian Regional Commission

10:30 AM Panel Discussion: Opportunities and Challenges to Growing Local Food Networks in the 

Upstate and Across the Appalachian Region 

Moderator: Jean Haskell, Ph.D., Whisman Appalachian Scholar 

Distinguished Panelists:

Peter Marks, Program Director, Local Food Campaign, Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture 

Project, Asheville, North Carolina

Dr. David Hughes, Assistant Director, Clemson Institute for Economic and Community 

Development, Clemson, South Carolina 

Fred Broughton, Marketing Specialist, South Carolina Department of Agriculture, Columbia, 

South Carolina

Dale Hawkins, Chef and Farmer, Fish Hawk Acres; Founder, New Appalachian Farm and 

Research Center, Rock Cave, West Virginia 

12:30 PM Luncheon, prepared with locally-sourced ingredients and is provided in part through the generous 

sponsorship of the Shi Center for Sustainability at Furman University and LiveWell Greenville. 

1:15 PM Working Group Strategy Sessions (Instructions provided)

2:30 PM Summary and Recommendations

3:00 PM Adjourn
Appendix B

83

GEORGIA ARC WORKSHOP NOTES

How to identify community’s food and farm assets: surveys, polling; available research

sources; is there a single source to identify farmers--census, Local Harvest, foundations,

cooperative extension, online data.

How to integrate regional cultural heritage into the local food economy: Foxfire, 

ties to history (e.g., moonshine), anticipate negative perceptions, success with Georgia Made, 

Georgia Grown, website for ExploreGeorgia.com, incorporate numerous cultural experiences 

(food, music, dance, etc.), need photos of agri-businesses for promotion at visitor’s centers (send 

to www.drop.io/gapictureframes), reinvent fairs and festivals.

How to develop infrastructure: mobile processing facilities (disposal issues, etc.);

need for permanent processing facilities; consider processing hubs; do research, know state 

regulations and restrictions; consider unique processing (e.g., dehydration); frustrating and 

challenging regulations make processing difficult; big niche for local farmers; possible grant 

opportunities, need business plan. Use churches, schools, other facilities with kitchens that meet 

regulations, explore possibility of food policy for canned and dehydrated foods; regulations 

interpreted differently in different counties; would Appalachian Food Policy Council make a 

difference?; ARC and USDA could endorse this kind of discussion; look at distribution models 

with online farmers’ markets; Athens, GA, has a software package that addresses online 

purchases from farmers at Locallygrown.net. 

How to promote farms and other agritourism sites: internet sales tend to happen 

closer to larger, more progressive metropolitan areas (Lulu’s Foods, Richmond, VA; Local Food 

Hub, Charlottesville, VA).

How can ARC help: To great extent to follow lead of states; know your ARC representative for 

your state, your state ARC program manager, and members of local development districts; crossfertilize services; National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition has new online guide to federal 

funding for agriculture; if this workshop is helpful, let ARC know; examples of projects in 

sustainable agriculture that may have ARC potential for funding: asset-based development 

projects, look at ARC criteria; seed money or catalyst for further development; federal stimulus 

money for green agriculture-related projects (Georgia Food Policy Council from stimulus); 

Department of Labor green jobs initiatives; need to be vigilant about keeping sustainable farming 

at the forefront of green movement.

How to create sustainable agricultural jobs: growing interest among young people in 

sustainable agriculture; poor economy has created an interest; use an integrated production chain 

as much as possible; wineries are important agritourism businesses; need to evaluate education 

systems to determine how to interest young people in farming; farming supports incremental job 

growth; need to shift thinking about job creation in economic development to always include 

agricultural jobs. 
Appendix B

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WEST VIRGINIA ARC WORKSHOP NOTES

Food Supply and Distribution Issues

*One challenge is to help farmers and restaurants connect; farmers don’t always understand how 

much supply restaurants need (maybe 3 times what they grow); farm food may be more 

expensive, scaling up sometimes too hard on farmer.

*Another challenge is managing regulations for healthy food handling, meat slaughter, etc.; 

growers need education about GAPs (Good Agricultural Practices), local regulations may also be 

difficult in interpretation and application.

*Community development and economic development entities are currently driving the 

movement to sustainable development but often disconnect with farmers, extension agents, and 

others.

*Another challenge is introducing a new, local food product into market; one good 

newsletter/magazine is Growing for Market.

*Accessibility and convenience can be problematic for consumers and growers; consumers want 

food available at grocery store hours; some consumers and farmers don’t want to change 

behavior; most successful operations have pickup places or hubs that are about an hour from a 

farm to allow for easy aggregation; some consumers want products year round rather than when 

seasonally available in the local area but that changes with local food markets so people 

understand prices, availability of certain items, etc.; one farmers market in Ohio started with few 

consumers but after a time it began to thrive with 150-200 vendors now; people are being 

attracted more quickly because of national media attention to local food.

*Bottlenecks exist in certain parts of the local food chain; need to identify and ameliorate the 

problems in distribution; an example is plenty of slaughterhouses to process a pig but no 

smokehouses if the consumer wants smoked ham or bacon–an opportunity for agri-preneurs.

*Roads in the mountains can pose problems and changing fuel prices are a problem.

*USDA regulations for self-canned items from non-commercial kitchens can often be 

circumvented by freezing the products and often the regulations are local and not USDA.

*State departments of agriculture need to help small distributions businesses find distribution 

points.

*Assets and opportunities include: farmers markets that now take SNAP cards or vouchers for 

senior citizens; empty warehouse spaces in many states; small, independent grocery stores 

willing to work with local farmers; seeing people who are in the local food business as 

community assets.

*Strategies include more hubs for aggregation/distribution; community kitchens that meet 

regulations (though these are difficult to sustain because of cost and competition; renting, 

borrowing or sharing space (with beverage distributors, for example); solving problems for 

processing facilities for meat and fish; getting farmers to grow more and greater variety; build on 

existing distributors; using local branding and developing relationships between local producers 

and local businesses; identifying local markets (stores and restaurants) and approaching them to 

form partnerships; education of buyers through news stories, blogs, economic implications of 

buying local food, establishing nonprofits to help drive the effort; building supply to match 

demand such as WalMart’s pledge to take 25% local produce; building supply to build market 

(need list of local producers (in-state and neighboring states); reach out to existing producers; 
Appendix B

85

educate farmers on GAP issues; develop virtual communities such as WV Greenup Council, 

address job and community development (thegreenaccelerator.org); need more food hubs, need 

an Appalachian Food Policy Council.

Developing Agri-preneurs

*Develop networks; educational outreach, market development

*Provide education on funding to agricultural programs and online

*Teach sustainable agriculture and soil management

*Provide information on trends, next hot products

*Make sure information is culturally appropriate for interest groups and way to rebuild 

community

*Cooperative, but local, branding

*Need equitable access to social capital and funds to create systems

*Need equitable and sustainable consumer education to create demand; make food and food 

production less wasteful, more efficient, more affordable for low income populations; do creative 

recycling.

*Develop complementary businesses in community compatible with small scale, sustainable 

farming; have to compete with subsidized farms.

*Barriers to production and distribution can mean opportunities for entrepreneurs who solve the 

problems.

*Farmers sometimes don’t see themselves as small businesses; provide classes at extension sites 

on accounting, managing regulations, marketing, etc. Appalachian Harvest is a good model; 

develop curriculum aimed at farmers such as Rural Action’s Market Ready/Retail Ready 

program; regionally tailor curriculum to Appalachia.

*Need to overcome resistance to try new ideas and to create confidence.

*Educate local, regional communities to value growers and products they produce and see food 

industry as key part of local economy. 

*Develop leadership programs specifically around farming and food system development; also

develop Followership programs.

*Have programs and competitions on agri-preneurship for youth at schools, camps, churches.

*Strategies: develop cooperative branding (elect board of directors; start producer organizations; 

develop human and social capital); marketing strategies need technical support; focus on one 

product or regional focus; producer and consumer education (develop online printable tool on 

available resources for producers such as Healthy Family Initiative; facilitate in-person contacts; 

educate through taste-testing; give free samples; interact with crowds who don’t go to farmers 

markets; educate food stamp recipients on local foods and how to cook them, create multimedia 

messaging; have in-school demonstrations and field trips for students; increase, “we need more 

farmers,” message and provide education on opportunities in farming); build a story with a 

strong identity, find a theme, use local community and culture, build value stream; increase farm 

policy literacy among farmers; have a Match.com for people and local food; get local 

government and local economic development groups involved in food movement; educate policy 

makers about local food and farming issues; encourage growers to be part of civic/business 

groups and engage with Chambers of Commerce; don’t ignore “urban” growers and consumers.
Appendix B

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Increasing Regional Collaboration

*Need education for youth and for farmers (through agricultural extension agents)

*Show opportunities; “farming–your next job,” show results, success stories, in local media and 

blogs on Appalachia

*Find match makers to connect farmers and markets

*Follow successful models

*Develop a toolkit for agriculture agents with “proof” that sustainable, local farming works

*Develop a branding through an Appalachian icon

*Empower farmers through education and enthusiasm; show them return on investment; Market 

Maker has those statistics

*Create an Appalachian Farmers Network for communication, information-sharing, standards, 

and disseminate information about joining at feed stores, Southern States, etc.

*Show links among food, health, drug use, crime

*Barriers to regional cooperation are state and local rules and regulations, lack of business and 

marketing knowledge among producers, communication barriers

*Connect food with economic development and tourism; create a subcommittee on food and 

tourism within the Appalachian Regional Commission Tourism Advisory Council; broaden the 

Cast Iron Cook-Off in West Virginia to a regional event.

*Foster greater literacy in food production and consumption and valuing of food preservation

*Encourage trend to visit/live on farms and help produce food–“come to Appalachia” campaign

*Identify and figure out how to use existing infrastructure across state lines.

*Identify and connect regional collaborators

*Conduct a regional study of gaps and opportunities for local food system development

*Need more state organizations to think across state lines and connect regionally; Appalachian

Sustainable Agriculture Project in North Carolina, Appalachian Sustainable Development in 

Virginia, the Collaborative for the Twenty-first Century Appalachia in West Virginia, Southern 

Foodways Alliance in Mississippi all reach across state lines.

*Need a centralized brand, mission, vision, association

*Massive amount of data around many topics (culinary work, economic development, 

agritourism, etc.) needs to be organized at state and regional levels.

*Funding agencies often drive regional collaboration

*ARC really only entity that promotes regional collaboration

*Civil War Trails project is good model for products and marketing

*Need a national media outlet (HGTV in Knoxville or the Food Channel) to do shows on farms 

and food in Appalachia.

*Need regional promotion to national media

*Create cultural demand for local foods through regional marketing

*Start collaborations among adjacent counties in neighboring states to get the ball rolling

*Create a Sister Cities program across the mountains to connect on farming and food best 

practices and turn into agritourism packages

*Develop a central database for agriculture and local food in Appalachia and an agricultural 

map, using state GIS offices

*Create a website with an Appalachian brand and share staffing and funding

*Create youth programs across the region, such as Appalachian Farm Apprenticeships, women to 

women farming, farmer-veteran coalitions.
Appendix B

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*Develop a listserv discussion group region-wide on farming and food issues

*Create a trade association or investment council
Appendix B

88

NORTH CAROLINA ARC WORKSHOP NOTES

Identifying Assets and Needs

*Develop a resource inventory, working with growers, consumers, NC extension service

*Use existing templates

*Look at successes and failures

*Need to develop more grower-to-wholesale/chef markets

*Need permanent tailgate sites and more farmers markets

*Assess location of markets; think about language used to describe assets

*Survey schools, hospitals, and other mass buyers

*Use agricultural census data, community food assessments, and ask key stakeholders

*Use the information to do food mapping

*Find resources and partners to provide capital

*Identify gaps in local food industry

*Connect with inventory of tourist assets, branding and marketing

*Link local food to local culture of community

Developing Infrastructure

*Define infrastructure assets and needs; transportation, distribution, broadband, shared use 

facilities (kitchens, warehouses, incubators, EBT/SNAP/debit

*Conduct feasibility studies on infrastructure

*Develop infrastructure in an incremental process

*Critical population mass necessary to be effective

*Need to have longevity and successional planning

*Need to develop leadership infrastructure, not just physical facilities

Creating Jobs in Agriculture and Tourism

*First step is to retain jobs, stabilize the agricultural economy

*Show farmers how sustainable farming can lead to financial stability, improved community 

service, and environmental sustainability

*Find ways to keep local money in the local community

*Factor in ways national energy costs and problems figure in the equation

*Marketing and sales need to be separate from farming operation

*Demonstrate for local community how food ventures generate traffic, commerce, and taxes

*Provide viticultural education

*For agritourism, local food restaurants need to be convenient and consistent

*Organize local restaurants and chefs to use local food and market it

*Use social media to connect growers, consumers, tourists

*Use the resources of state government such as local development authorities, departments of 

commerce, cooperative extension, etc.

*Stress the value of certifications such as GAP (Good Agricultural Practice) and organic

*Develop a campaign of public education at farmers markets to teach consumers true costs of 
Appendix B

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food and value of local food and local relationships

*Begin consumer education on local food with children and youth

*Use regional templates as guides, such as Appalachian Sustainable Development and Foothills 

Connect

*Learn to drive demand by getting people interested in local food, seasonality; build capacity

*Farmers need business plans to increase profitability

*Relationships are important; take buyers to farms, connect generations

Integrating Regional Cultural Heritage

*Use local knowledge about agriculture and food traditions in planning

*Use stories, not just facts, to convince growers, processors, and consumers of benefits of local 

food system

*Combine local music, storytelling, and art with food events

*Coordinate farmers markets with calendars of cultural events

*Link young or new farmers with existing farmers or landowners who may want to see their land 

farmed

*Find ways to appeal to diverse audiences, to increase numbers of buyers for local food

*Identify or develop community college, college, and university courses that use an 

interdisciplinary approach to understanding food and culture

*Farm experiences can sometimes give outdoor skills to troubled youth or just to help create 

regional identity

*Develop multi-farm CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) and an online ordering platform

*Work with local farms, wineries, chefs, food organizations to help educate tastes of consumers, 

creating passion for local food, then demand.
Appendix B

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TENNESSEE ARC WORKSHOP NOTES

How do we build local-to-local market activity?

*use media support, newspaper, radio, television, internet

*use church related activities

*holding public meetings

*choosing one local food item to highlight for one meal

*doing local meals to introduce people to farmers and foods

*presence at festivals and other local events, such as the Strawberry Festival, the Ramp Festival

*Know Your Farmer campaign; East Tennessee State University has photos, oral history, and 

other materials

*need customers and need to be open consistently 5-7 days a week

*food stamp grant to double money spent at local farmers markets

*need to determine how far farmers can drive to reach aggregation facility

What about pick-your-own sites?

*problems with customers who don’t treat plants well

*put in sections just for that purpose, other sections for farmer’s use

*use trellises and offer we-pick price

*advantage in late season when labor too expensive

*U-pick is weather dependent

*takes time to build market

*berries are better for this than beans

*need to have plenty of advertising

*winery in Blountville sells grapes

*be child friendly

*match kind of business to kind of sales you want

What do we do about aging farmers?

*training for young farmers

*Maverick Farms in Boone, NC is developing program

*organic grower’s school in Asheville, NC has apprenticeship program

*WOOFERS in Greene County is international program

*farm incubators

*program at Appalachian State University and USDA New or Young Farmers Program

*farmer/veteran coalition

*sometimes not able to train young people such as in FFA because of liability issues

*need to create celebrity farmers

*many young people would consider farming if they felt they could stay in their home

community, close to family, and make a living.

*build on renewed interest in regional traditions

*tradition has been for years that farmers have a “day job” but farm because they love it.

*need diversification

*FFA programs need more support and agricultural classes need more material on 

entrepreneurship and other business matters

*Agricultural extension services are being cut, underfunded; expensive five year learning curve 
Appendix B

91

for new agents

*Extension and Departments of Agriculture are very different; departments of ag are about

regulation

*Extension services are operated by state and some funding at local level; hard to convince 

government for more funding when farmers are only 2% of population.

*need to influence public policy on agriculture
Appendix B

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NOTES, ARC WORKSHOP, SOUTH CAROLINA

Question One: What do you see as the three best assets for your local food economy?

• Long growing season and climate

• Diversity of products grown

• Population density, diversity, education, interest, purchasing power

• Growing farm base

• Growing demand from knowledgeable and supportive consumers for “local” products

• Multiple organizations involved; good networks

• Natural resources in the area

• Amount of information and technical help available

• Supportive environment for large businesses; strong local economy

• Good communication and collaborative spirit among farmers, consumers, community, especially 

LiveWell group that has developed strong connections among stakeholder groups

• Supportive state and local government agencies, colleges and universities

Question Two: What are some specific ways these assets can be strengthened?

• More education for farmers and consumers and in public schools

• Shift from quantity to quality

• Develop cooperatives and infrastructure (GAPS, insurance, processing, value-added, commercial 

kitchens

• Clarify farming and food policies

• Provide affordable training for farmers, food safety training, and an amnesty program for 

producers and caterers

• Reduce turnover in safety evaluation staff, especially DHEC

• Better land use planning to ensure affordability of farm land and effective use of land space

• Reduce city regulations on community gardens and urban farms; clearer regulatory standards 

among government agencies and easier accessibility to forms and information

• Increase funding for local food programs and research new funding sources

• Promote community interest groups and events based on agriculture and local food

• Better coordination among existing networks

• More use of high tunnels, greenhouses, cold frames, and water management in summer

• Integrate SNAP benefits into more programs

• Form more public/private partnerships

• Strengthen land-grant system

• Provide more training and financial information

Question Three: What are the three greatest needs in your local food economy?

• Progressive system of regulation that fits various sizes of small businesses; farm friendly 

regulatory environment

• Better collaboration between growers and consumers through educational outreach

• Water, funding, USDA involvement

• Have policy watchdogs who review and translate legislation; advocacy network; reduce apathy
Appendix B

93

 

• Convenient farm to food buyer system

• Grant funding for operational programs, not administration or policy

• Food preparation and distribution networks, including commercial kitchens, storage, 

transportation

• Increase consumer demand for home cooking, fresh food

• More accessible land for farming, more farms, bigger labor force

• Question Four: What are some ways you can help address these needs?

• Central hub for good business models and other information

• Developing a farm incubator system, including apprenticeships and internships

• Improved access to capital (coops, CDFI’s, investment clubs, etc.), agriculture specific loan 

programs, tax benefits for leasing agricultural land

• Land-link program (CFSA)

• Have online catalog to promote local foods and specialty foods

• Conduct feasibility studies

• Seek major funding from a foundation to promote/market local food

• County agricultural economic development position

• Funder-driven collaboration

• Get farm programs (4H, FFA, etc.) back in public schools and in higher education

• Reciprocal agreements across states in the region and collaborative effort across agencies, 

institutions, and private entities targeting community kitchens, value-added products, and tax 

incentives

• Develop a media, social media strategy and campaign for programs on local food

• Become policy watchdogs; join organizations that advocate for local food systems; lobby 

chambers of commerce for resources

• Be emissaries for local food system, be vocal and involved.