The Farmers of Wheatland, 1973 -- now

In the beginning, my parents rented many acres in the Tysons Corner area, fields that had been part of dairy farms, mostly. This was in the 1960s and 70s when this part of Northern Virginia was changing fast. These farms were no longer active and the aging owners were selling them to developers. They were glad to rent their fields to some new young farmers who would mow the weeds and watch over the property. We grew corn and pumpkins on fields that eventually turned into suburbs. It was just a brief interlude between cows and houses when those fields grew straw and beans and tomatoes. 

In the early 1970s, just about ten years into their farming career but only about two or three years after farming became a full time occupation, our parents started to look for a piece of property to buy that would secure this farm with some good land. They knew a real estate guy named Darryl Wright who searched for the right place, and he found it in Wheatland, 30 miles northwest of the home farm in Fairfax County.  There were four hundred acres owned by Stewart Petroleum, mostly open but with maybe 100 acres of woods.  The price was $873 per acre. Nowadays that much money would buy you a half a house in Fairfax County.

So my parents assembled a group of friends to make this purchase, since no one family had that kind of money.  My father's lifelong friend Charles Moutoux bought 44 acres with his new wife Sue. John and Melissa Graybeal, friends from college, bought 100 acres, and some new farmers named the Plancks bought 50 which later became 60.  There is something wrong with this math (I got these numbers from the Moutouxs) because the Newcombs ended up with 180 acres. Everyone else decided to buy what they could actually afford, or what they would be able to pay for even if everyone else dropped out. It was a balloon payment, five years interest only, everything to be paid after five years.  Pretty risky business, given that the Newcomb farm was only barely making a profit by this time.  But the idea was that the land would increase in value enough in those five years and the Newcombs would then have enough equity to borrow against, and would be able to make that payment. Dad did sell 10 acres to Timothy pretty early on, partly to decrease our debt and also to find a way to anchor Timothy in our midst. A legendary blueberry patch was planted and still has Timothy's name.

By now this was the third piece of property my parents had purchased. My father always said that you should never buy anything unless the soil was good.  The soil on the Wheatland farm was excellent for vegetables, if a little rocky and rolling.  Some parts were better than others, but all parts had good soil. I imagine that when they divided up the property, my dad had studied the soil maps and he picked out the 180 acres that he wanted the most. But as I say, all the different parcels had great attributes.

This property was immense.  It was one mile from the eastern edge to the western edge.  There were tenant houses sprinkled around in various states of disrepair.  There was one well at the house in the middle that became the Plancks' house, and there was a water pipe that went almost a half mile downhill to the Spangler house.  There was also a well at the Aronholt house on the northern border. All of these houses came with people in them.  

For the first 20 years or so, we mostly grew corn and string beans and pumpkins and we battled the waving fields of Johnsongrass.  The Moutouxs didn't really use their land at first since they had peaches growing on other farms. The Plancks started their farm about six years after the original purchase, and the Graybeals mostly used theirs as a country retreat.  The Plancks really settled in and started to build a whole farm. For us, Loudoun was an outpost, a destination, not a place to sleep overnight.

Dad used to conscript Mary Ann Spangler to ride the beanpicker. She never pretended to enjoy the work, but she was at home while her boys were at school and he knew she was underemployed. She had met her husband Johnny when he was stationed in Germany, and she had come to this godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere. Johnny was a mechanic at a tractor dealership down  the road and the days were long and boring for Mary Ann, so she reluctantly got onto the back of that noisy beanpicker and watched for rocks and turtles and snakes as they came tumbling down the chute, along with the beans (and swore in German when they did fall down into her basket).

We drove out to Loudoun every morning in July and August to pick corn and haul it back to Fairfax County where the customers were. Western Loudoun was still mostly farms -- hay and Black Angus cattle and soybeans and miles and miles of field corn. Eastern Loudoun was quickly getting filled with houses and chain stores. In the early days, there were about six traffic lights between the Tysons farm and the Loudoun farm and there was very little traffic. Over the decades, the Virginia Beef fields turned into server farms and office centers and we could not count the number of traffic lights on Route 7 anymore.

Wheatland Vegetable Farms, owned by the Plancks, became a bustling business.  My dad died about ten years after the 400 acres were acquired. By then we were still growing row crops out there, and all the "small vegetables" were grown in Fairfax. We kept doing what we had been doing in Loudoun -- growing sweet corn and lots of  beans for another 6 years or so after he died, but we didn't have a clear plan.  I had a fateful conversation with a former worker, Ellen Polishuk, one October afternoon, when she was visiting after a few years working in California and some more time starting a small CSA operation near Charlottesville. She was despairing of every having the resources to be a real farmer. I asked her if she wanted to be the Loudoun farmer. It was a huge leap, and she made it.

After working and living on the Vienna farm for a season, getting re-inoculated with all the PVF culture and norms, she and her husband Hugh moved out to Loudoun to a house that we built for them and she started the huge job of reframing that farm.  It was a monumental task and she had to learn a lot every step of the way. About five years into it, she was joined by Heinz Thomet who came to help do the farming while Ellen had a baby. He made his mark by helping to lay out the fields in a new way, building miles of deer fence around all of the vegetable ground, building a concrete bridge that linked the vegetable fields to the equipment barn and shop, and planting windbreaks. He was trained to think in 50 year chunks, unlike the rest of us. Meanwhile Ellen learned about making high quality compost and led the way in making long term investments in equipment and infrastructure and she changed the way we entered the property (for years we drove through the Plancks' farm). The farm in Vienna kept on generating money while the Loudoun farm gained momentum and gradually started to make a real contribution to the financial health of the business.

The Johnsongrass was slowly beaten back and the cover crops and compost began to make a difference. Ellen built a greenhouse and started tomatoes and squash and sweet potatoes and many other crops, making everything more interesting. Eventually she stopped growing sweet corn because we were moving toward organic certification and corn was just hard.

It was never easy but it got easier.  You can only learn as fast as you can repeat a task, and sometimes you have to wait a whole year to get to try something again.  But other jobs are repeated weekly or monthly, and the learning happens more quickly. Ellen and the parade of workers continued to diversify the farm. We kept buying more equipment to support all the different crops.

Ellen began to want to move on to other work, so we hired and trained up two farm managers who brought our production and market totals to new heights. Meanwhile, over the fence rows, other farm businesses were growing up.  A flower farmer bought some of the Graybeal property. A new farmer bought ten acres from the Plancks. My sister Lani took over about 50 acres of Newcomb ground for horses and chickens and her fleet of trucks. Another new farmer wiggled himself into some rented ground north of the flower farm. Charles and Sue's youngest son and his wife started a year round full diet CSA, with dairy and vegetables and grains and meat. The 400 acres filled up with farms and farmers. We helped each other when help was needed. In recent years, two of my nephews have moved to the farm and are putting down roots in different corners, pursuing unique projects.  All the various farm enterprises have constructed buildings and greenhouses, some have animals, some are three season businesses. 

The Wheatland property is distinctive and unusual in the number of farms that are clustered together, holding their ground. Every time someone talks about selling land, we watch nervously to see what will happen. And so far everyone has sold their land to another farmer, or boundaries have been adjusted. After nearly 50 years of growing farms, our collective commitment to agriculture is well established. The Plancks did build a small hamlet on some of their property, but it has not interrupted the feeling of the farms, partly because it faces north to a road while the rest of us are linked by a network of internal farm roads.

After Ellen retired and the farm managers moved on, it became my turn to manage the farm. I came after my parents and Lani and Paul and Ellen and Heinz and Stacey and Casey, a long legacy of experienced farmers. I brought a team with me -- Jon, my nephews Stephen and Michael, and a few skilled and delightful workers who had worked in Vienna for years.  Six years into it, I know which fields I like best, what happens when it rains, how to manage the rotations and how big I want a tomato patch to be.  We have so much accumulated expertise now -- builders and mowers and mechanics and engineers and tractor drivers and soil managers and vegetable growers -- the farm has never looked more beautiful in the last 48 years. We are standing on the shoulders of all those who created this farm, and we are taking our turn doing the creating.

In fact, all of the Wheatland enterprises have accumulated a wealth of talent and all of the farms look beautiful. I don't know what will happen next. Perhaps this is the Golden Age of this farm community. Maybe we are at peak production and beauty. And maybe this era will last for another generation. But nothing stays the same for more than about a year, and the transitions are constant. Stay tuned.