An incident at a farm facility in Macon County last week left one worker dead and caused the hospitalization of more than a dozen people.

At the end of every crop’s season, farmers pick the fruits or vegetables that are pretty enough to sell in the grocery store. Once they are done, they plow under the leftover produce. 

Get to know your local farmers and learn some tricks from green thumb masters during the annual Jackson County Farm Tour and Garden Walk from 1 to 5 p.m. this weekend, July 20 and 21.

The tour takes participants from sheep farms to urban gardens on a self-guided agricultural jaunt across Jackson County. The event gives the public a chance to meet the farmers who grow and raise their food. It is put on by the Jackson County Farmer’s Market.

This year, Bill Holbrook will start drawing on the “old man pension” — as this local tobacco farmer likes to refer to Social Security. At 66 years old, Holbrook is one of the older, if not the oldest, tobacco growers left in Haywood County.

Frank King is on a mission to find the perfect meat. King, the owner of King Bio Natural Medicine, holistic pharmaceutical company based in Asheville, is testing and researching different types of animals that will prosper in the Western North Carolina climate while at the same time provide nourishing steaks and burgers.

As the small, all-terrain vehicle drew near, the buffalo snorted and then lowered its massive head. It shuffled its feet, kicking up red dust into the Western North Carolina wind.

“Don’t worry,” said Mike Ellington, manager of a buffalo ranch in Buncombe County and former rodeo clown. “He’s doesn’t want to fight. But he’s getting ready in case we want to.”

You’d be hard pressed to name a state-run entity more closely aligned with the region it serves than the Mountain Research Station in Waynesville. The work going on there is important for the agriculture economy and critical for the emerging crop of growers trying to specialize in exotic and specialty varieties. And researchers at the farm continue to provide direct help to farmers growing crops and livestock that have for years been the traditional mainstays of mountain agriculture.

Perhaps just as important, the Mountain Research Station promotes the lifestyle that will continue to make this region unique. More and more residents place a high value on rural areas and green space, and farms are just as much a part of this movement as wilderness areas. This means doing what we can to help small and large growers remain profitable.

The products from those growers are often going straight into homes. Many who live here are more than willing to pay a little extra for high-quality and tasty foods that come local farms, and many groups and organizations are promoting this lifestyle. As the grow-local, buy-local philosophy gains steam, it builds and strengthens the micro-economies in our rural communities.

It was just a few years ago (2008) that state lawmakers suggested closing the 410-acre research station. Regional supporters fought back hard. Joe Sam Queen, at that time a state senator and now running to return to Raleigh as a state representative, was among those who rallied for the research station.

“We have a diversified agricultural sector with small producers,” he said. The research station provides vital help to these growers, he argued. However, the much-larger farms in the eastern part of the state often carry more political clout.

The Mountain Research Station survived. Bill Skelton, director of the Haywood County Cooperative Extension Office, says the test farm does important work and does it well. He cited its work to improve the cattle herd in the region, while also touting its crop research.

“They put those questions in the ground and see if they can find answers,” said Skelton.

Current work “in the ground” —35 separate research projects — includes tests on what could be new crops in this region like broccoli, truffles and canola (for alternative fuels); continued work with Fraser firs (the first experimental Frasers in North Carolina were grown at the Waynesville farm in the 1970s) and heirloom tomatoes; a project to improve weed control for organic farmers; and continued research to help cattle producers.

“We are becoming more diverse. It’s important that we remain cutting edge. We need to be ahead of the game,” said Mountain Research Station Director Kaleb Rathbone.

The test farm is succeeding at doing just that — staying “ahead of the game.” Let’s hope this economic engine for WNC is here for another 100 years.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Testing canola varieties for biofuel. Growing truffles. Finding hemlocks and Fraser firs that can survive the scourge of the adelgid. Determining best practices for organic heirloom tomato production.

A walk through the fields of the Mountain Research Station will find dozens of projects in process as researchers experiment and push the limits of what the land can produce. The research station, with a more than 100-year history of figuring out new and better ways of farming, is in the midst of redefining itself while staying true to its traditional agricultural roots.

The Mountain Research Station is run by the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and is one of 18 such test farms in the state. This one is the westernmost in North Carolina.

“We are becoming more diverse,” said Kaleb Rathbone, the superintendent of the Mountain Research Station. “It’s important that we are cutting edge. We need to be ahead of the game.”

Rathbone, however, is quick to add that the 410-acre station isn’t moving away from conducting conventional farming research.

“We’re not doing less of the beef cattle and tobacco — we’re actually doing more there, too,” he said.

But these days it’s the alternative, organic, new-age and exotic farming going on there that is capturing the public’s imagination. That work and the ensuing gee-whiz factor helps ensure that the Mountain Research Station, which faced the possibility of closure just a few years ago, is likely to continue for the next 100 years.

Ultimately the point of the Mountain Research Station is to improve farmers’ bottom line in an increasingly more difficult farming environment.

SEE ALSO: Does this grow here? The answer holds key to farming future

Whether it is better tomato yields per acre, less crop loss from blights, growing organic which fetches higher prices than conventional, breeding calves with better traits so they in turn fetch more at the market, or moving toward more lucrative niche crops so local farmers don’t have to compete in the cut-throat world of large-scale commercial, corporate farming — all of this is aimed at helping farmers be able to keep farming.

The Mountain Research Station underpins the agricultural trends of the region, from tobacco to Christmas trees. That Cadillac of Christmas trees, the Fraser Fir, was developed here for farmers, and is now one of the region’s most lucrative crops.The test farm presents farmers with common-sense solutions to real-world problems.

Broccoli and truffles

On any given day, the test farm is dotted with researchers checking on their crops and test plots. On this day last week the weather was particularly warm and sunny and Emily Bernstein and her crew were lathering on the sunscreen. They had 4,000 to 5,000 broccoli plants to get into the ground, a task made easier with the help of a tractor and transplantor being operated by horticulture supervisor Chris Leek and another station worker.

The crew is taking part in a five-year effort to develop broccoli varieties suitable for the East Coast. Most of the broccoli was developed for climates and conditions out West.

What this means, as most any local gardener could explain, is that broccoli bolts when it turns consistently warm. As a result the broccoli-growing season here is truncated to spring and fall growing only and farmers can’t cash in on this potentially lucrative cash crop.

Bernstein said the project started last year with a broad screening of 40 to 50 varieties. More screening is being done this year. A dozen of the most promising varieties will be picked for further testing.

“Will this grow here and can it take the heat?” Bernstein said in a succinct explanation of the research being conducted.

Broccoli will be grown five times from now until July. Once plants are mature, the crew will move through the plantings with a scorecard. They will rate the bead size of the broccoli head, the shape of the dome (an ice cream cone shape is preferred), uniformity and color.

Bernstein is also the research specialist on another Mountain Research Station project — an attempt to find out if Black Perigord Truffles can successfully be grown in WNC. That, for now at least, is a less labor-intensive project than the broccoli. The crew planted Filbert, or American hazelnut, trees three years ago, she said. The roots of the trees were inoculated with truffle spore and the soil was heavily limed to make the soil pH more alkaline. Everyone now is simply waiting the necessary five to seven years to see if truffles do indeed grow. If they do, WNC could find itself with a very lucrative cash crop indeed, courtesy of the Mountain Research Station.

A stable research situation

It’s still early in the day but Ben Smith, an entomologist, is hard at work with three colleagues in a small office at the Mountain Research Station last week. Smith’s job seems daunting: develop Fraser firs and Eastern and Carolina hemlocks that can survive the adelgid attack, an insect infestation that has nearly wiped out hemlock forests. Meanwhile, its near cousin the balsam woolly adelgid has caused the Fraser fir to become a threatened species.  

Smith and his colleagues are taking a two-pronged approach. They are looking for resistant trees — you know they aren’t resistant, he noted wryly, if they’ve been killed by the adelgid. They are then breeding those trees to develop a resistant hybrid strain. The Alliance for Saving Threatened Forests is providing funding.

What’s taking place here is extremely similar to work done by the American Chestnut Foundation. That tree, once the mighty giant of our eastern forests, was a vital part of the forest ecology, a key food source for wildlife and an essential component of the human economy. In the early 1900s, a lethal blight, accidentally imported from Asia, spread rapidly through the American chestnut population.

Work started some 30 years ago to develop a blight-resistant tree, by cross-breeding a sliver of the immune Chinese chestnut with the American version. It’s now been accomplished, and forests are slowly being planted with the new American Chestnut.

Research like this takes a long time. Decades are likely to pass before a solution is found. And that’s why the Mountain Research Station is so critical — it serves as a dependable testing situation, Smith said.

“We would be in a very different position if the station weren’t here,” he said. “One thing that is extremely important in breeding is the long term. The earliest we could see results would be in seven to 10 years, it could be as long as 50 years. It’s important to have stable ownership of the land you have the trees on, or you can lose the test. The fact that we know this is going to remain available to us is really important.”

Robert Jetton, a fellow researcher, underscores Smith’s point: “Having a stable facility like the research station is the key,” he said.

Almost closed down

Just a few years ago the future of the Mountain Research Station hung in jeopardy.

In 2008 the Haywood County test farm was one of seven in the state recommended for closure because of a failure to meet profit and performance guidelines. That previous summer a bill in the legislature also proposed closure, but failed to win traction.

Former Sen. Joe Sam Queen, D-Waynesville, and other mountain legislators fought successfully to keep the research station open.

“We have a very unique situation. It’s quite different from the rest of the state,” Queen said of the reason he believes Western North Carolina needs its own research station. “We have a diversified agricultural sector with small producers. In the eastern part of the state they have huge farms.”

Queen said farmers turned out in droves to support the Mountain Research Station, adding fuel to the fire as the fight went on to save the facility. That level of support didn’t surprise Queen.

“I expected the farmers to support it, because for instance if you are a tomato farmer in this area, you are a tomato farmer because of the Mountain Research Station,” Queen said.

Queen pointed out that the station has done work developing the varieties of tomatoes grown here, how to grow them in WNC and how to protect them from various diseases. And the same thing is true, he said, for countless other farming enterprises: Christmas trees, beef cattle, blueberries, tobacco and more.

Bill Skelton, director of Haywood County’s N.C. Cooperative Extension Service, echoed Queen’s sentiment that the Mountain Research Station is vital to area farmers. He said the bull program, for example, has brought wholesale improvements to the quality of WNC’s beef cattle population. Each year the research station brings in 50 to 60 bulls and conducts performance trials. Researchers test for weight gain and growth, diseases, breeding soundness and other qualities. They even use ultrasound to gauge the quality of the ribeye a bull’s packing. The bulls are then sold to local cattlemen — who have made a safe bet that the quality of next year’s calves will carry the desired genetic traits of their father, and in turn will fetch higher prices at market. This has been going on for more than 30 years.

“The herd quality in WNC has tremendously improved because of that,” Skelton said, adding that the same thing is true of tobacco production and other crops.

“They put those questions in the ground and see if they can’t find the answers,” he said.

Planning is name of the game

As Rathbone talks he drives a large pickup truck along the roads of the Mountain Research Farm. A Fines Creek boy raised on a farm, he started working here when he turned 16.

“It’s pretty much home,” he said. And, in fact, Rathbone now lives in a house located on the research facility.

Rathbone became director a couple years ago, replacing Bill Teague, who had been there for some 30 years.

What’s immediately obvious, and what Rathbone pointed out, is how densely used the acreage here is: it seems that practically ever inch of space is home to some sort of research project.

Planning for each new 12-month cycle starts in December of the previous year. There are 35 research projects this year being conducted by 15 project leaders.

The Mountain Research Center itself employees 10 fulltime workers and four or five temporary workers during the summer. The workers take care of the day-to-day operations and are joined on the test farm by researchers and their crews.

Rathbone is optimistic about the facility’s future.

“We’ve got great community support, and because of the work that we do and the impact we have on the producer it brings value to the community. We’ve got a strong future ahead of us,” he said.

That said, Rathbone noted that it’s difficult to put a dollar value on the work done at Mountain Research Station. The loss of the station, he said, would be hugely significant to agricultural interests in WNC.

“It’s the cost of lost opportunity if you don’t have a facility to do the necessary research,” Rathbone said.

A storied history

In an era when agriculture was king, the Mountain Research Station was founded 1908 to help farmers improve their bottom lines. It was located at that time in the Swanannoa Valley in Buncombe County, and was one of the earliest stations of the 18 in North Carolina eventually established.

The station initially conducted soil surveys and tests; commercial fertilizer was tested and rates and production use was researched. Testing and the development of corn, wheat, apples, vegetables, small grains, forages and other crop varieties were also areas of early research.  

In 1942, however, the U.S. Army selected the site in Swannanoa to build a hospital for soldiers wounded during World War II. Some of the land was sold and buildings were removed. So in 1944 the station was moved to its present site at Waynesville in Haywood County. Barns and buildings were built, land prepared for research, dairy cattle and poultry were transferred to Waynesville and crop research began again.

1950’s: The primary focus of livestock research efforts was directed towards work with dairy cattle and poultry, which at that period were very important parts of the agricultural industry in the mountain regions of North Carolina. Research efforts in crops were directed primarily to the crops that were most important to the economy of the area at that time. These were burley tobacco, corn and forage crops. A 12-acre apple orchard was established for the purpose of evaluating new varieties of apples and also to study pesticide use and management. This work was phased out in later years.

1960’s: Work with dairy cattle and poultry continued during the 1960’s, but the agricultural economy of the area was changing as poultry production moved to other areas of the state. The poultry work and dairy work were phased out.

1970’s: Burley tobacco continued to be the main cash crop in the mountains and research efforts were continued and increased in this area. Trellised tomatoes made an appearance. Efforts were also made to determine the feasibility of new cash crops that might be successfully grown in the area, including sunflowers and sugar beets. It was discovered that the Fraser, which is native to the high mountains of North Carolina, was the prime species for Christmas tree use and could be successfully cultivated and marketed for this purpose. The first experimental Christmas tree plots for Fraser Firs in North Carolina were established at the Mountain Research Station.

1980’s: The station continued efforts to diversify its research program. Livestock research dominated the station with the addition of a Performance Bull Test program that began in 1980. Blueberry varieties for mountain climates and soils were developed as well as raspberry varieties that could tolerate cold climates.

1990’s: Station facilities, fields and infrastructure were renovated or updated. Sheep and goat research was conducted. Conservation tillage, non-native grasses, small ruminant forages and grazing trials were researched extensively. Eight Burley tobacco varieties were developed and released during the 1990’s and early 2000’s.

2000’s: Leaf lettuce, slaw cabbage, herbs, heirloom tomatoes, specialty crops (peppers, gourds, sunflowers) pumpkins, organics and bread wheat were all part of the station’s research program and trials to farmers find new crop alternatives. A cow/calf research herd was established. The herd is used to demonstrate and research management variables on calf production and carcass data. Extensive goat diet and nutrition, production, and grazing trials were continued.

David Burnette and his wife Diane do things the old way.

“One thing just led to another,” David said of the couple’s self-sufficient lifestyle.

On this day, while David shows a visitor around the couple’s Haywood County homestead, Diane thins out sorghum seedlings in preparation for planting hundreds of the tiny plants this week. All told the couple will tend about an acre of sorghum, made up of different varieties and with different maturity dates. They’ll harvest the sorghum in the fall and make over a hundred gallons of molasses to sell and give away.

David said he’s always had an interest in old timey ways and things. That interest is in full evidence at their home on Dutch Cove Road outside of Canton. There are dozens of plows that David has saved from being turned into metal scrap, plus various cultivators and horse-drawn sleds. These aren’t just on the farm for appearance sake, however.

The Burnettes use workhorses to do much of their plowing and cultivating. They also raise chickens and pigs, one of their sons raises Boer meat goats on the homestead, plus they operate a sawmill and sometimes log land using the team of horses.

David remembered that his father always kept a horse or a pony. But his first experience in working animals wasn’t with horses. Instead it came when David used a bit of broken harness to make a collar for a goat. David soon had that goat pulling a Radio Flyer wagon around the farm. That beginning with the goat led into a lifelong fascination with working horses.

“I like to fool with them,” David said. “To me there’s a lot of satisfaction not to be dependent on anybody’s oil, foreign or domestic.”

David uses the horses to plow and cultivate on the farm. He was getting ready to use them in the next day or so to cultivate his potatoes. Throughout the year he’ll mow hay with the horses, too. David and Diane are popular figures at the Cradle of Forestry, where each spring they participate in a living history event, “Old Time Plowing and Folkways.” The couple in April plowed the Cradle of Forestry’s vegetable garden for the benefit of visitors. Many who watch have never seen horses work like this before, David said.

“A lot of people don’t know where their food comes from,” David said. “There was one lady, who was 30 to 40 years old, who’d never seen a horse before. People are disconnected.”

Making a start

When he was 12 years old or so, David and a friend built a log cabin together, and that interest in building and making things led David into taking machinery at Asheville Buncombe Technical College. He later took classes such as welding at Haywood Community College. He learned basic blacksmithing from a fellow that lived in the area.

“I wanted to be able to do it all,” David said.

Today David teaches hand-wrought metal in the professional crafts program at Haywood Community College.

David took a keen interest in his father’s farm as he grew older, which is the same land where he and Diane live today. David as a young man started cutting hay and working the property. After he and Diane married, David bought a colt, a draft-horse mix, and started working with her on the farm. He and Diane were growing tobacco then and found they needed more horsepower, however. They bought the colt’s half sister and paired the two as a team, marking the beginning of David’s ongoing venture into working horses. Diane, as well as David, works the horses.

Staying connected to the land

Soon the couple bought a team of Belgian colts and broke them to working, too.

David said it took him two or three teams, however, to find ones that truly suited him. The horses temperaments have to match up with the owner, he explained. You might have one team that likes to work fast, another more slowly — it takes time to find exactly the right ones, he said.

“They have different attitudes,” David said. “You have to get horses that are suited to you, that matches your personality.”

You also have to try to pair your team as closely as possible, though he noted “you’ll never get a perfectly matched team.”

David tries to match his team in terms of temperament and height and build. Unlike some folks, he doesn’t worry much about color. That’s just aesthetics, and that doesn’t really count for much when you’re really working them in the field.

David said there seems to be a lot of fairly new interest among people wanting to learn about working horses.

“There seems to be a resurgence of people getting into it,” David said, adding that this has meant it’s becoming easier and easier to find equipment for horse-drawn teams. Even new equipment is being invented these days, he said, as more and more folks get involved.

“I think this is as good a time as it has ever been to get into it and practice it,” David said.

David believes that people wanting to work with horses would be well advised not to also keep tractors on hand, though he does. That way, the horses are always being worked and the person working them doesn’t have an excuse to go crank up an engine-powered machine in place of the horses. David does use tractors, and with his background in machinery and welding he’s able to keep all his machines up and running.

“Horses like to work,” David said. “A tractor will just sit under the shed and be there a week later.”

Permaculture has become something of a catchword in farming and homesteading circles, a grand concept — but one usually unfulfilled in hands-on practice — of layering one’s land with a variety of edible plants that will feed you or your animals.

Luckily, Sylva native and permaculture expert Zev Friedman is available to help sort the reality from fantasy. Friedman, who lives in Weaverville and runs Urban Paradise Gardening, will hold a two-day workshop this coming weekend, Dec. 3-4, on permaculture practices. The cost of the program is $75, with the workshop running from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. both days. Mountain BizWorks is sponsoring the program.

Friedman focuses on whole-system design of water savvy landscapes that yield valuable foods and medicines and provide for other human needs with a minimum of external inputs.

Friedman’s workshop will take place on a farm owned by Ron and Cathy Arps of Sylva. The couple is well known in the local agrarian community — the Arps pioneered the now popularly used Community Supported Agriculture plan in these westernmost counties. CSA’s are a means for farmers to exchange produce for purchased shares, in practice meaning those participating buy-into the farm by paying for produce at the beginning of the growing season. You then share in the risks and windfalls of that season through the CSA. The Arps have successfully fed families for more than a decade from their intensively managed small farm just off Cope Creek Road.

Friedman toured the farm recently with the couple, laying the framework for the upcoming workshop.

“This could be a pretty good workshop for getting some things done,” Friedman said, adding that it’s important that people who attend get “hands-on” experience with such work as removing invasive plants and so on. This, he explained, will translate to lessons for working their own properties.

The trio let the land help dictate the shape of the workshop, perhaps the first lesson those interested in permaculture must learn. Workshop attendees will learn about site assessment and design, information they can take back to their own properties and, hopefully, put into practice.

A stream beside an existing pasture seemed perfectly destined for a streamside forest garden, Friedman explained, perhaps with raspberry plantings or comfrey replacing the invasives dominating there now.

The existing forest area could transition to a nut, timber, craftwood and animal products system.

In addition to nitty-gritty work, Friedman views the workshop as an opportunity for local farmers, homesteaders and those generally interested in permaculture to discuss economic niches and various business opportunities. Not to mention, he said, the opportunity to network with like-minded people.

Use what works

Touring the Arps’ farm, Friedman quickly identifies what’s there now — along the stream beside the pasture and on up toward the garden, there is a heavy infiltration of walnut trees.

That leaves two choices: cut them out, or plant edibles that can co-exist with these native plants. Sure, walnut trees provide food for people and animals, but walnuts also exude a substance caused juglone, which inhibits other plant growth. Tomatoes and potatoes, particularly, suffer tremendously when grown anywhere near walnut trees — these members of the ultra-juglone sensitive nightshade family show “walnut wilt” just when the gardener believes they might just harvest a beautiful crop.

The Arps aren’t keen on cutting down trees, no matter how inhibiting they might be to other plants. Instead, the couple and Friedman decide co-existence is the way to go. That means that raspberries, elderberries or comfrey, are obvious choices. Raspberries and elderberries provide berries for people and wild creatures. Comfrey provides fodder for animals, plus is an excellent source of potassium in the soil if used for mulching. Both plants defy the presence of juglone.

“Plant big long rows of comfrey, and scythe it down,” Friedman said. “You could harvest it six times a year.”

And this is the type of information homeowners can get through Friedman’s workshop.

Say what? Explaining permaculture

Permaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and agricultural systems that is modeled on the relationships found in nature. It is based on the ecology of how things interrelate rather than on the strictly biological concerns that form the foundation of modern agriculture. Permaculture aims to create stable, productive systems that provide for human needs; it’s a system of design where each element supports and feeds other elements, ultimately aiming at systems that are virtually self-sustaining and into which humans fit as an integral part.

Source: Wikipedia

Want to participate?

What: Two-day workshop on intensive forest farming.

When: Dec. 3-4 in Sylva, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day.

Where: At Ron and Cathy Arps’ Vegnui Gardens farm.

Why: To learn how to put your land to work in a sustainable fashion.

How much: $75 for each participant. Food and beverages provided, but bring your own eating utensils, plates, and cups. Space is limited and pre-registration is required. Payment of workshop fee will reserve your space.

To register: Contact Sheryl Rudd at 631-0292 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..