Description
Notes for attendees:
- This will be a physical activity of walking and hiking around the farm grounds, wear appropriate footwear and outerwear.
- Please bring your binoculars or spyglass to get the best chance of spotting specimens.
- Our Farm Store will be open 10am-5pm. When attending classes, you will receive a 5% discount in the Farm Store & Butchery!
Featured Speakers & Guides:
Noah Poulos
Noah and his wife tend Wild East Farm in McDowell County, NC which produces pastured meats in perennial silvopasture systems. Noah is passionate about perennial food systems that are informed by ecological literacy. He is a farmer, writer, and educator that has gratefully called Western North Carolina home for many years. He looks forward to many years to come living alongside and learning from the agrarian community of this place.
Virginia Hamilton
Virginia is our Farm Director here at the home of the brand in Fairview. She received her BS in Environmental Studies from Warren Wilson College and her MS in Land Resources & Environmental Science from Montana State University. Prior to completing her MS, she was the assistant farm manager at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC for five years. She is interested in the ecology of working lands and any and all opportunities to invite landowners and community members to participate in the scientific process. She believes that working farms and forests are the key to thriving and resilient rural communities that are poised to support the communities around them. Virginia also spearheads our Ecological Outcome Verification efforts with the Savory Institute.
About the Savory Institute
The Savory Institute’s mission is to facilitate the large-scale regeneration of the world’s grasslands and the livelihoods of their inhabitants great and small, through holistic land management. Savory Institute is working in collaboration with research institutions and partners, to measure the outcomes of managing holistically, by monitoring the health of ecosystem processes, levels of permanent soil carbon, quality of life of the people, as well as financial vitality. Hickory Nut Gap is a verified Savory Hub as of 2021- to equip our partner farmers, local farmers, ranchers, and pastoralist communities with the tools and knowledge to regenerate grasslands in a localized context. To learn more about the Savory Institute, click here.
