Fairview, North Carolina

In business class their senior year of college, a North Carolina boy and a Kentucky girl crafted a partnership around 200 chickens, 50 turkeys and 360 acres of family farmland in the Appalachian Mountains. Within four years, they were married with a baby on the way, and owned 1,000 chickens, 350 turkeys, 60 pigs, 40 cows and 65 sheep.

This is the story of Amy and Jamie Ager, who manage 60 acres of clover and alfalfa-rich pasture on the land where Jamie’s great grandparents raised apples and mixed livestock nearly a century ago. It’s the farm Jamie grew up on, helping his mom collect eggs and pick raspberries to deliver to a nearby health food store. His dad operated a small dairy until 1990, when it finally got too expensive to maintain. Mostly, farming was a break-even hobby for his parents, both of whom had other jobs

But Jamie had a hunch that just maybe he could make a living farming… and so far, so good! Spring House Meats sales have doubled every year, according to Amy, and Jamie says they’ll be able to pay back all money they’ve ever borrowed by the end of 2004. It’ll allow them to invest back into the operation, buying more and better breeds of animals.The summer after graduation, as per the business plan, the couple set up a mailing list of customers interested in hormone- and antibiotic-free, pasture-raised poultry. They also worked for Jamie’s parents who owned small herds of sheep and cows. Amy was paid cash while Jamie earned equity in the herds. At the end of two summers, they were his.

Jamie and Amy rotationally graze the ruminants in summer and feed hay in the winter-no grain. They maintain a buffer zone with electric fencing between the grazing animals and a network of spring-fed creeks that criss-cross their land, to protect the water from pathogens. Hickory Nut Gap has won awards for good river stewardship for this effort, Amy boasts.

The couple doesn’t have sows, but keeps piglets purchased from a neighbor on quarter-acre plots to root up the ground like a plow would, so the farmers can follow with forage seeds to improve the grasslands. Grain supplements the pasture diets of both poultry and the pigs.

None of the animals on the farm receive hormones or routine antibiotics. And grass-fed is healthier than grain-fed beef because it is higher in cancer-fighting conjugated linoleic acids and Omega 3 fatty acids, Amy touts.

“The market in Asheville [N.C.] is just right for what we’re doing,” she said. Amy strongly believes animals should be raised humanely and in a way that enhances human health and the environment, adding that she likes “being able to provide that [kind of meat] to people who don’t have land to grow it on themselves.” They sell directly off the farm, at farmers’ markets and in stores and restaurants.

The couple has debated whether they should maintain such a diversified livestock operation but find balance in having different kinds of animals. While poultry is more labor-intensive and less lucrative than the bigger animals, the birds do a good job fertilizing the pastures. Also, Amy notes, a $10 chicken is much easier to sell than a quarter steer, although they also sell individual cuts, and Spring House Meats is the only gig around with free-range turkey. They raise heritage breeds, turkeys with an old-timey flavor and smaller breast.

For summer and fall help, Amy and Jamie enlist eager students from their alma mater. Warren Wilson College, in Asheville just a hop and skip from the farm, has courses in sustainable agriculture and prepares graduates to go into that field. The Agers hire interns each year, paying them in meat, eggs, a cash stipend and place to live. It affords the young couple a chance to get away for a weekend now and then and the interns benefit by getting a hands-on education in running a farm.

Besides helping with Spring House Meats, interns pitch in on other aspects of Hickory Nut Gap operations, such as the tending the roughly 20 horses Jamie’s mom keeps for a summer camp she runs on the farm and leading trail rides, or harvesting apples on a 15-acre orchard. An organic vegetable farm keeps Jamie’s cousin busy on five acres of the family land.

ike any good parents, Jamie’s are happy as larks to have him and Amy so nearby–and grandchildren on the way. For Jamie’s part, he’s proud to have turned around an “an old, run-down Appalachian farm,” by making it agriculturally profitable again. He doesn’t doubt the land would be sold off by now if it weren’t making money. Instead, housing developments all around the Ager’s property are benefiting from their proximity to a picturesque working family farm.