cfsa farm tour duke forest ecovillage

Last Friday, as part of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association’s annual Sustainable Agriculture Conference, I went on a farm tour focused on how agriculture and community can come together. There were three sites on the tour. This post deals with the first stop, Duke Forest Ecovillage.

Consisting of 36 acres and twelve homesites, this community presents a somewhat unique development model. The requirements for the homes are fairly strict in that they must meet certain energy efficiency requirements and be almost completely solar powered.

Another interesting part of the development is the small farm component. Together with the homes, the developer is also building a three acre market farm to serve the community and also to sell at markets outside of the community. A full time farmer will live in the development and respond to the communities food needs.

Currently there is only one home built. The developer, Allan Rosen, lives here and directs the project on site. If you are thinking this is a great idea for a community, you might be right. Current development models are very devastating from an ecological perspective, and this seems to offer a very strong alternative. However, simply from a price perspective, this project is about as bourgeois as a farm can get. With a two acre home site going for $140,000 and a solar home price tag of $300,000 to $400,000, you would have to be in it for the ambiance and not the politics. Don’t get me wrong. This is a great model, but it is geared towards the upper middle class and is not affordable for most of us.

The farm is divided into several 1/2 acre tracts. The above picture is two of those tracts. Tony Kleese (former CFSA executive director), the farm consultant on this project, has worked to greatly improve what started out as very poor soil. To give an example, Tony has brought the pH up from an average of 4.1 to 6.1. That is a manageable pH if the organic matter content is also increased. The cation exchange capacity, a measure of how readily available the soil nutrition is to the plant, has been increased on average from 2.5 to 10 with the goal of getting all the plots over 10. Calcium was improved from 13 to 70 with a goal of 65. It goes on and on from there. This was in a period over a little over a year.

The future orchard is 1/8 of an acre.

One good thing about the scale of this farm is that there is no need for a full sized tractor. All of the land can be maintained with walk-behind gas/diesel powered tools.

This isn’t a development that I could ever see myself living in. It would have to be a totally different structure. If the lots were $5,000, the biggest house you could build was 1000 square feet, and the farm was run by all the inhabitants, then maybe I could get behind it. As this development stands, it still has a separation of the food growing process from the producer and the consumer. Yes, the farm is in the community but the community is not participating in that farm other than financially.