Growing Together: Investigating Community Assets While Rebuilding a Local Food Economy in Fairview, North Carolina

This summer I will be working for three months on a small family farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains outside of Asheville, NC. Flying Cloud Farm (www.flyingcloudfarm.net) is a biodiverse farm which grows fruits, vegetables, flowers, and herbs for a direct local market through farmers' markets, a roadside farm stand, and community supported agriculture (CSA) shares. Isaiah and Annie Louise Perkinson have been farming the land for nine years.

I will explore the role of local food systems in building and maintaining community while working at Flying Cloud. Since local food communities require direct and intimate relationships between growers and eaters, I will study how local farmers manage the relationships that underlie their direct market approach. Through experiential research and interviews with key stakeholders, I will investigate two specific factors:

(1) the farmers’ vision of their enterprise, and

(2) the wider community’s vision of farming as a community and cultural asset.

This research will not only contribute to my own program of study in Southern Folklore, but to a comparative data set for a larger study of local food economies in the Piedmont.