Floyd Co. now hometo Four Petal FarmBy Sister Kathy Curtis From Breaking Beans: a series by Community Farm Alliance

Earlier this summer, armed with a printout from MapQuest, a road map of Floyd County and directions from the farm own-er, I went looking for Four Petal Farm in Banner, Ky. After 25 minutes of driving back and forth on the two-lane, turning around twice on the “one-lane” and following what appeared to me to be a four-wheeler track, I was ready to declare myself lost when I saw the low tunnels - a sure sign I had found Four Petal Farm, the home of John and Cathy Rehmeyer and their daughters, Vivian and Caroline.

This was actually my third visit to Four Petal Farm but the first in its new location on Akers Branch in Floyd County. Cathy’s first venture into farming was as an urban farmer in the middle of Pikeville on one-tenth of an acre at the top of a hill in the middle of town. It was there where Cathy learned to grow food for her family and later her CSA customers all through the winter, using terraces and low tunnels.

Having seen all the work Cathy and John had done in Pike-ville, I asked her why they chose to move to a rural farm that had not been in production for several years.

“John and I grew up in rural America” Cathy replied, “and we had childhoods where we just roamed the woods. We wanted that for our kids — the freedom to explore and be outside.” John was raised on a “tractor” farm where they raised hogs, corn and soybeans, so vegetable farming was new to him. But after seven years of looking, he found the farm on Akers Branch on the internet.

What’s insideLocal foods surveys ........... 3 January conferences ......... 5

Coming upDec. 2-4 - Tennessee Local Food Summit, Tennes-see State University’s Avon Williams campus, Nashville, TN. Featured speaker: Joel Salatin. $125 in advance, $150 at the door. Visit tnlocalfood.com for details.

Dec. 3 - Community Farm Alliance (CFA) annual meeting, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Berea First Christian Church, Berea, KY. For CFA members and those inter-ested in becoming members. For more information, click here, or contact Victoria Wheeler at 859-940-2441 or victoria@cfaky.org.

Dec. 14-15 - Season Exten-sion Field Trip to Athens, OH; $30 covers travel, hotel, meals, workshop, and includes a CFA membership. Register by Nov. 30. For details, visit http://cfaky.org/event/season-extension-field-trip-to-athens-oh/

November 2016

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Brett Wolff, EditorChristy Cassady, Editor/Designer

Cooperative Extension Service | Agriculture and Natural Resources | Family and Consumer Sciences | 4-H Youth Development | Community and Economic DevelopmentEducational programs of Kentucky Cooperative Extension serve all people regardless of economic or social status and will not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ethnic origin, national origin, creed,

religion, political belief, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, marital status, genetic information, age, veteran status, or physical or mental disability.

Zealand Reds and they were “delicious.” As a city girl, that comment took me by surprise until I re-alized Cathy and John were raising their children to understand where their food comes from and that includes meat, too. There are also goats on the farm that apparently are a source of humor to the girls, especially when they “eat mommy’s hat,” and ducks that take a lot of care.

As we walked, Vivian, the eldest showed me the Earth Tone field corn, a beautiful “Indian corn” with blue, brown and green kernels that she was growing. She explained that “field corn was not what you eat on the cob but you have to let it dry out and then you grind it for meal to make corn-bread.” She got the seed from the Pikeville Seed Swap and would be saving some of the kernels for next year’s garden and some to swap. The rest was going to be made into cornbread for Thanks-giving.

Vivian also showed me her most favorite bean, “Aunt Bets” that she got from the famous Ken-tucky bean saver, Bill Best. “If you let them get really big inside, they are really tender and they taste really good,“ Vivian said with a grin. And then she and I ate some right off the vine.

“It’s not an ideal location for vegetable farming, especially year round vegetable farming like we do,” Cathy told me. “Vegetables need maximum sunlight. Our farm is at the head of the hollow with steep slopes on both sides. In the summer the sun doesn’t hit the first bit of garden until 9:30 and leaves it by 4:40. And it gets even less in the winter. And then there was the question of soil quality. It was a real leap of faith.”

As we walked the property, Cathy talked more about the soil quality. “It’s like a box of chocolates, ‘cuz you don’t know what you are going to get,” she remarked with a grin, pointing out spots with sand and right next to it a big clump of clay. There were even chunks of coal and what looked like concrete.

“We are pretty sure this is fill,” she said. “There is a gas well up above us and we think that the former owners of the property allowed them to dump fill here to create ‘flat land.’ We had a friend come out with his tractor and tiller and when he got to this part he just left it alone.” Cathy has planted that section in sorghum sudan grass to help break up the compaction and add nutrients so that some day that section of the field can be used, too.

Soil quality is a topic Cathy never tires of talking about. “The farm had been hay cropped for de-cades and the soil was just worn out. When we first started working the field, we walked it one day after being freshly tilled and found one meas-ly earthworm in the entire bottom. I knew it was going to be a challenge even without a soil test.” Now, after only one year, there are earthworms all over the place.

As we walked around the farm, Cathy’s daugh-ters showed me their rabbits, Eliza and Henry. (Apparently the girls had just seen My Fair Lady prior to getting the rabbits.) I asked the girls more about the rabbits and found out they were New

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Four Petal Farm low tunnel production of lettuce and greens (front) and beans on trellising (back). The photo, taken at 10:30 a.m., shows the shadows the Rehmey-ers must contend with on their Floyd County farm, which is located at the head of a hollow with steep slopes on both sides.

Photo by Sister Kathy Curtis

Back at the farm house, I asked Cathy why she was farming. “To make money” was her immedi-ate response. “John is our full-time farmer. We are counting on making up that salary that he transi-tioned out of in March by being very intentional about planting things that already have a home.”

While still in Pikeville, Cathy started growing pro-duce for The Blue Raven, a restaurant in Pikeville that supports local farmers by purchasing directly from them. “Matt (the owner of The Blue Raven and its sister restaurant Sliced) featured our pro-duce on his menu. When we moved to the farm, he wanted to continue using our stuff. He wanted to

use our tomatoes and basil for a Four Petals Farm Pizza at Sliced. I said we can do that. He wanted summer squash as a side for the Raven. I said we can do that.”

She told me that too often folks new to growing food to sell get it backward. They plant and then try to figure out where to sell it. “We focus on growing stuff in the summer that has a destina-tion already. Farmers markets are great but they cannot be the only thing to make farming a viable income for people, to make a living out of.”

As our time together drew to a close, I asked Cathy where the farm name, Four Petal Farm, came from. “Well,” she said, “there are three things. We are known for our winter gardening which is primar-ily vegetables from the brassica family —broccoli, cabbage, turnips, radishes — and brassica flow-ers have four petals. But we are also growing year round now in all four seasons. And there are four of us in our family. So the Four Petals are very symbolic.”

To learn more about all-season gardening, Four Petal Farm and Cathy in general, visit her blog, Mother of a Hubbard.

--Breaking Beans: Appalachian Food Story Project is an ini-tiative of Community Farm Alliance to tell the story of how local food and farming in Eastern Kentucky can contribute to a bright future in the mountains. Read the stories at cfaky.org/blog.

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Photo by Sister Kathy CurtisCathy Rehmeyer, farmer and an associate professor of pathology at the University of Pikeville, received her Ph.D. in plant pathology at the University of Kentucky.

By Tim Woods, Jairus Rossi, and Alison Davis, University of Kentucky

There are many aspects to a local food economy. Local foods are distributed through various market channels and community food activities, as well as supported through an assortment of branding and promotional activities. Recent surveys of con-sumers in Lexington, KY were conducted parallel to a national survey on perceived performance of various aspects of local food systems (LFS). The following table provides a measure of perceived

performance for each LFS component. The index provides a measure of Lexington benchmarked against other consumers from small cities (50-250K).

Overall, Lexington has been scored higher than its peer cities. LFS components where Lexington scored the highest in absolute terms include local brewery promotion, farmers markets, and CSAs. Lower performance scores were associated with local food and low income communities, food banks, farm to school, and in ethnic markets.

A Local Foods Vitality IndexLexington scores highest in local brewery promotion, farmers markets, CSAs

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Benchmarking reminds us that consumers gen-erally see local food performance measures vary across all components. The indexing allows us to see how a city like Lexington may compare to how consumers score each aspect in like communities across the country.

Local food system development has been an im-portant focus of many agencies in the Lexington community. An index like this will hopefully be available periodically to help both establish priori-

Notes: performance scores were measured on a 1 = “extremely poor”, 2 = “poor”, 3 = ”average”, 4 = good” and 5 = “excellent”. A “don’t know” option was provided and omitted here for purposes of the index measure. Each index is measured as the LEX score/Small Cities score x 100. A total of 80 surveys were completed for Lexington and 260 for other small cities in the U.S., although the corresponding N for each index varies based on the frequency of omitted “don’t know” responses. This data is preliminary as additional data is in the process of being collected.

ties and measure progress. An index like this will also be helpful in understanding how LFS per-formance measures vary by urban vs. rural com-munities as well as between types of consumers.

This survey was funded in part by the UK Food Connection, the Kentucky Horticulture Council, the UK Food Systems Innovation Center, and a UK CAFE Research Activity Award. Further sur-vey work and analysis continues and additional information may be obtained from the authors.

Mean Std.  Dev. Mean Std.  Dev.

CSAs 3.4 1.04 4.01 0.873.33 0.99 3.62 0.923.46 1.03 3.73 0.953.35 1.05 3.62 0.864.09 0.84 4.25 0.85

Retail   3.38 1.05 3.02 0.952.95 1.14 2.64 1.213.28 1.11 2.85 1.09

3.34 1.19 3.54 1.022.96 1.07 3.14 12.99 1.19 3 1.053.38 1.18 3.16 1.022.68 1.12 2.36 0.943.19 1.08 2.79 1.05

3.52 1.05 4.29 0.713.14 1.05 3.72 0.943.03 1.15 3.38 0.933.11 1.09 3.37 0.983.38 1.07 3.53 0.93.33 0.96 3.24 0.92

Overall  Vitality 3.21 3.65 114

Private  Investment  in  LFS 108Local  Product  Diversity 104Price  Competitive   97

Local  Food  Promotion  Performance  Breweries  Promote  LFS 122Local  Food  Label 119Govt.  Support  of  LFS 111

On-­‐farm  Events 93Low  Income  Comm.   88Food  Banks 87

Community  Measures  PerformanceFood  Festivals 106Food  Education 106Community  Gardens 100

Farmers  Market 10489

Farm  to  School 89Ethnic  Markets 87

118Food  Truck 109Co-op  Grocery 108Restaurants 108

Lexington  Versus  All  Other  Small  Cities  Small  Cities Lexington   Index  

ComponentsMarket  Channel  Performance

KY Fruit and Vegetable Conference to offer something for everyoneWant to get your farm off to a good start in 2017? Then don’t miss the Kentucky Fruit and Vegetable Conference, scheduled for January 9th-10th at Em-bassy Suites in Lexington. The conference will fea-ture educational opportunities on production and marketing that will benefit established growers and beginning farmers. Pre-conference sessions on Sunday, January 8th, will include a Plasticulture Strawberry Short Course, and Vegetable and Tree and Small Fruit Round Table discussions. Mon-day and Tuesday sessions will include the Grape & Wine Short Course, vegetable production, tree and small fruit production, organic production, high tunnel and greenhouse production, farmers markets and wholesale marketing, and a “What to Think About Before You Plant” workshop brought to you by the Center for Crop Diversification. The workshop will feature decision-making publica-tions related to specialty crops, as well as a panel of growers and buyers from a variety of market channels.

The $40 conference registration fee includes a year’s membership in the Kentucky Vegetable Growers Association, Kentucky State Horticultur-al Society or the Organic Association of Kentucky, and entrance into the Grape & Wine Short Course and the What to Think About Before You Plant workshop. The conference trade show will feature approximately 50 vendors. For more information, visit the Center for Crop Diversification website at www.uky.edu/CCD/.

January conference roundup ...Also coming up in January are the Indiana Hort Congress (January 10th-12th in Indianapolis), the Il-linois Specialty Crops, Agritourism, and Organic Conference (January 11th-13th in Springfield, IL), and the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Work-ing Group Conference (SSAWG), which returns to Lexington on January 25th-28th.

For details about the Indiana Hort Congress, in-cluding registration information, visit https://

Thanks for reading, and Happy Thanksgiving!If you know someone who would enjoy our news-letter, or you’re not subscribed yet yourself, visit www.uky.edu/ccd/newsletter and click “Sub-scribe Now.”

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www.inhortcongress.org. To see the program and to register for the Illinois Specialty Crops, Agri-tourism, and Organic Conference, go to http://www.specialtygrowers.org/iscaoc-conference.html.

SSAWG will offer pre-conference courses and field trips January 25th-26th. The general conference sessions and the trade show will be January 27th-28th. SSAWG will be held at the Lexington Convention Center. The program and registration information are available at http://www.ssawg.org/january-2017-conference.

The University of Arkansas and the National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT) are partnering to offer scholarships to military veterans to attend the SSAWG Conference. Veterans in the Southern U.S. will be given priority. December 1st is the deadline to apply for scholarships. Visit www.ncat.org/armed-to-farm-events to apply.

SSAWG is offering a limited number of fee waivers to assist limited resource producers in the Southern U.S. to attend the conference. Qualified candidates are those who:

• absolutely cannot afford the conference registration fee ($199 through December 21st)• are farming commercially in the South or are planning to be farming in the South in 2017• have a sincere interest in sustainable or organic production.

Those who have never before attended a SSAWG Conference will be given preference for fee waivers. Deadline to apply is December 10th. The application is available at www.ssawg.org/fee-waivers.