Elmwood Stock Farm

If Elmwood Stock Farm were a song, and each family member improvised on a different instrument, then the weekends would sound like the chorus.

Cecil Bell raises beef and tobacco, his son John raises vegetables, his son-in-law Mac Stone works off the farm and raises organic livestock with Cecil’s daughter Ann, who additionally markets the whole family’s harvest.

From the Lexington Farmers Market on Saturday, which Ann and Mac work together, to Sunday dinner at Cecil and Kay’s house, weekends are when the family reconvenes from their disparate weekday schedules to get back in harmony with one another. “It’s nice to remember we are a family, and not just in business together,” says Mac.

The Bell family has been in agriculture for six generations, mainly growing tobacco and beef. Cecil owns 450 acres, his dad owns 150, and Mac and Ann rent another 200, all in Scott County, Kentucky. Throughout Bell history, each younger generation has branched off from the parents and bought land nearby to start raising the same two primary crops. But when John and Ann returned to the farm, both in 1994 after graduating from college, things had changed.

First, land value around the Bell property had risen steeply due to suburban housing development, preventing Ann or John from buying new land. Second, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had cut by a third the legal limit on how much tobacco any one farm could plant, according to Ann. So she and her brother were going to have to find new crops to grow on their dad’s land.

John set his sights on wholesale production and planted 50 acres of pumpkins, peppers, potatoes, tomatoes and sweet corn to harvest and ship to a Kentucky growers’ coop, where it is washed, packed and sold to large grocery stores. His wife Melissa works off the farm.

Ann, meanwhile, with a bachelor’s degree in consumer economics, started growing salad mix, herbs and other high value products to sell at the Lexington Farmers’ Market, becoming one of its first vendors. A few years into her venture, Ann met Mac Stone at a gathering of sustainable farmers and soon married him.

She passed on her organic vegetable production to John, while she and Mac focused on building an organic, pasture-raised meat business. The couple has 200 laying hens, 3,000 chickens, 25 heritage (less hybridized) turkeys and 100 standard turkeys, and 20 sheep. All of the poultry are certified organic and the sheep are transitioning to organic as the farmers devise a reliable method to control parasites.

Cecil has a quarter of his Black Angus cattle certified organic, and sells the meat through Ann’s marketing network. The rest is sold off as livestock, and he has 35 acres in tobacco.

John and Ann’s plan when they began farming the family land was to experiment side by side with direct and wholesale marketing, and switch to which ever worked better. As it turned out, both siblings were successful, and found they could help each other out with different approaches to the market. With Cecil’s beef, the Stone couple’s lamb and poultry, and John’s organic vegetables, Ann has a wide array of fresh, organic products to offer at two farmers’ markets five days a week, 12 restaurants and a couple consumer buying clubs.

While Ann farms and manages the marketing full time, Mac farms evenings and weekends and works nine to five as director of Kentucky State University’s research farm.

“I train the competition,” he laughs, explaining his program helps small scale producers learn organic farming and direct marketing techniques. Indeed, as evidenced by the thriving 75-vendor Lexington Farmers Market, small-scale, diversified farms like Elmwood Stock Farm are flourishing in central Kentucky. It’s kept Mac and Ann on their toes.

When Ann began selling tomatoes at the market, she was among few. Now the number of vendors with beefsteak tomatoes has doubled, and the family has switched to producing heirloom tomatoes, old-fashioned garden variety tomatoes that come in myriad shapes and hues. Mac and Ann also expanded their types and cuts of meat. All the beef is grass fed, but the couple also offers fattier steaks from cattle also fed organic grain. “People like the more marbling more than they realize,” Mac noted, adding that others prefer the lean, wholesome, strictly grass-fed beef.

Working with a small, local butcher shop, the couple has introduced a line of organic beef bratwurst and Italian sausage links. Mac and Ann have also offer a diversity of services. They make home deliveries off-season when the farmers’ market is closed and take care of their chefs by delivering custom-packed boxes with small quantities of a variety of vegetables.

Proof of a symbiotic relationship, the Stones and the chefs discuss the growing season in advance and the restaurants’ menus are built around the farm’s harvest schedule. “They only put chicken on their menu when we have it available. That makes me feel pretty good,” he said.

But the good relationships come after harsh learning experiences in earlier years. Ann once made an agreement with a local grocery chain to grow vegetables. She bought thousands of transplants, put several weeks of labor into growing them, and just two days before she was due to make the first delivery, the stores canceled the deal.
“We ended up with a lot of product and no place to go and that’s when we joined the farmers market.” Now she and Mac enter relationships only with buyers with an enduring commitment to supporting local, organic agriculture, who are not just price shopping.
In addition to a wide range of comestibles, Elmwood Stock Farm will soon offer a non-food product. Making use of several Kentucky race horse farms in the area, the family gathers horse bedding to mix with vegetable waste in long windrows, built and turned with a front-end loader. They check moisture and temperature of the heaps regularly, and harvesting finished compost within 10 weeks.

The product is tested by a state chemist for nutrient levels and pathogens, and sold in bags and bulk--even spread on customers’ pastures for them. Ann is glad to make use of the manure which might otherwise be stockpiled, leaking pathogens and nutrients into ground water.

Beyond making their livelihood in sustainable agriculture, the Bells are adding their voices to the chorus of many more voices for the land throughout the nation. Between Cecil, Ann and Mac, Elmwood Stock Farm is or has been represented in the leadership of Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group, American Pasture Poultry Association, Partners for Family Farms, Organic Farming Research Foundation, Southern Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, and locally with Kentucky Sustainable Agriculture Community and Kentucky Horticulture Council.

For Mac, the benefit of civic engagement is staying informed and inspired by innovations within the sustainable agriculture movement. Furthermore, he is an activist at heart. “We’re going to be relegated to the sidelines unless we can get some critical mass of likeminded thinkers,” he said, explaining Americans need to come back to an appreciation of real food.

“You are what you eat. We lived off the land for tens of thousands of years and just in the past 50 we’ve just gotten into this processed stuff… I have the responsibility to at least give people a chance at better health by offering [healthy food].”