As featured in the 2024 Winter Edition of the Yadkin Valley Magazine

Interviewee: Shiloh Avery, Tumbling Shoals Farm
Written by Elisa Phillips

Tumbling Shoals Farm is a roughly 15-acre certified organic farm located in the rolling hills of Millers Creek, North Carolina. Shiloh Avery and her partner Jason Roehrig purchased the property in 2007. “We stepped foot on the property and said, ‘We are home.’ And that was it. We’ve been here ever since,” Shiloh said with a smile. Shiloh and Jason officially moved onto the property in a camper on New Year’s Day in 2008. The farm was recently purchased by an investor which will allow the expansion of operations to include more acreage, fruit production, and a year-round growing schedule. Shiloh and Jason will continue to serve as the farm managers.

Tumbling Shoals Farm staff members pose in a field. Farm manager Shiloh Avery squats down in the back row, third from left.

Shiloh, who has a degree in sociology, served as an agroforestry volunteer in the Peace Corps in Madagascar from 2000 to 2002 alongside Jason. Following her time in the Peace Corps, Shiloh attended Central Carolina Community College’s sustainable agriculture program. Though she initially planned to attend graduate school after the Peace Corps, she decided she wanted to pursue a more practical path to community service. “I wanted to actually farm,” Shiloh said. “I didn’t just want to theorize about farming.”

Tumbling Shoals Farm currently grows over 40 different vegetables plus blueberries. The farm sells directly to consumers through farmers’ markets in Boone, Hickory, and Charlotte, and through their harvest share program, which is a produce subscription program that allows customers to receive personalized boxes of seasonal produce on a routine basis. Harvest share members can pick up their produce boxes from locations in Boone, Lenoir, Hickory, and Wilkes County. This short food supply chain allows the farm to maximize the amount of customers’ food dollar that gets reinvested in the farm.

According to Shiloh, produce diversity is important to provide customers with variety, but it also serves as a form of insurance in the event of a crop loss. “If you’re just mono-cropping tomatoes and late blight comes, you’re in trouble,” she said.

When asked why Tumbling Shoals Farm prioritizes organic growing practices, Shiloh said, “We came at it from an environmental perspective, customers are more from a health perspective, I think. And it’s quite honestly the only way I know how to grow.” More recently, she has shifted from a primarily environmental approach to prioritizing organic growing practices in an effort to keep farm staff safe. “It’s all about the people, protecting these people,” she said.

However, if it comes down to choosing between an organic versus local product for personal use, Shiloh chooses local. “I love peaches,” Shiloh said. “I’m going to buy peaches that are local. Local is more important to me than organic.”

Tumbling Shoals Farm staff busy harvesting produce

Shiloh shared that trends imply the demand for local foods will persist, but future farmers will have to overcome the unpredictability of changing weather patterns. She recounted learning of forecasts over twenty years ago which predicted climate change would cause the southeastern United States to experience cooler and wetter summers. At the time, she didn’t understand what that would mean on the ground. “I do now,” she said. “I’ve even seen it in my 20 years here, that we don’t follow the normal weather patterns…Though this year we got a little heat wave, last year we got no heat wave in June, and it stayed cold, like we almost never got into the 90’s. We were in the 80’s almost all summer. The okra hated it, the peppers hated it, all those summer heat loving crops were way down in production.”

Storms are also more severe, according to Shiloh. “Like that ‘hundred year flood’ that we’ve had three times since we’ve been here,” Shiloh said. “Storms are just crazier. Maybe it’s not more overall rainfall…but it’s all at once. It rains harder and faster and our existing waterways can’t handle it. It can’t absorb into the soil, so it’s rushing across fields.”

Reminiscing on a 2013 flood, Shiloh shook her head: “We were standing in a field knee-deep in water and Jason looks at me and he’s like, ‘When do we call it quits?’ And I was like, ‘Not today.’ And then it happened again in 2020. And then last year we had an unexpected flood.” Shiloh predicts these changing weather patterns will influence the types of crops grown in the region. “The cooler, wetter summers are going to have to change some of the things you grow,” she said. “You know, we may no longer be an okra producing farm.”

When asked how farming has shaped her perspective on work, Shiloh shared, “Most people don’t get into farming because they’re ‘people people’… but as it turns out, this type of farming, which is labor and income intensive for a small space, you depend on a lot of people. So your job that you started out thinking was playing in the dirt and talking to, or tending to, plants turns out really to be managing people. I don’t think a lot of people are prepared for that. I don’t know that I was really prepared for that.” She shrugged, “But, luckily I like people, so that’s worked out well for me.”

In fact, Shiloh likes the people she works with so much she wants them to stick around. Whereas many farms employ temporary workers to accommodate the ebb and flow of growing seasons, Tumbling Shoals Farm aims to keep their employees long-term. “We used to turn over the full crew every year, and part of that’s a symptom of this being a seasonal position,” Shiloh said. “I started to think about that and ask, ‘Does it really have to be that way?’ So we made an intentional shift in our people management strategy and started to see a return on that…I’m hoping to keep this crew, like forever. Part of that’s luck, and part of it is the philosophy of treating people as whole people and putting those people and their happiness first.”

Tumbling Shoals Farm landscape

By selling Tumbling Shoals Farm to an investor, Shiloh and Jason aim to establish a system where they can hand the farm over to the next generation of farmers at the end of their farming career. “Access to land and capital is the biggest barrier to entry [for aspiring farmers],” Shiloh said. “It’s an exit plan for us that allows this [property] to still be in farming. Because a lot of farmers depend on–and we were going to be one of them–the sale of the land for their retirement. And [the buyer] is usually not another farmer, because who has the money to buy a turn-key operation?…That’s a rare person who has access to that kind of capital. So this removes that from the equation, in theory.”

Farming is a unique line of work in other ways. “One thing I really like about farming, especially this kind of farming, is it uses both your physical body and your mind, whereas most work is more mind, less physical. Or you could have, I’m gonna call it ‘grunt work’, that is just physical. Farming is both, and the learning curve is consistently steep,” Shiloh said. “Just when you think you’ve figured things out, mother nature throws a new thing, like a new strawberry disease or a new insect or crazy weather patterns. If you think you’re good at growing something, try growing something you’re not good at growing and try to figure that out.”

Above all, it is the relationships that the farm fosters, both with customers and between staff, that makes Shiloh proudest. “It’s the people, and the people returning,” she said. “I’ve had some customers with us since the beginning, and we weren’t great growers in the beginning…That says a lot to me.” She shared that both current and former farm staff come together to float tubes on the river at least once a month during warmer months. “Those relationships make me feel like we’re doing some good things here.”

If you would like to learn more about Tumbling Shoals Farm, check out their website, Instagram (@tumblingshoalsfarm), or Facebook page. Find them at a farmers’ market near you or join their harvest share produce subscription program to receive delicious, local produce on a regular basis.