Maverick is launching a new initiative called the Farm Incubator and Grower Program (FIG). The FIG program is aimed at building local food capacity, farming and entrepreneurial skills, and cooperative markets. FIG will mentor aspiring young farmers in Watauga and Ashe counties and connect them with land and resources to continue farming in the community. Modeled on the “business incubator” idea, the program is aimed at local youth interested in learning organic farming and local marketing techniques. The training is structured around an intensive two-year live-in internship in which participants learn every aspect of running a small, diversified farm: from planning the season’s crops to running Maverick’s Community Supported Agriculture and restaurant-supply businesses. On successful completion of the training, Maverick works with the young farmers gain access to land, financing, equipment, and a ready-made markets to launch their own farm enterprises.

For the High Country to establish a robust and economically accessible local food system, more land will need to come under cultivation, more people will be needed to work that land, and more distribution channels will need to be created for locally grown food. The FIG program works to address these problems by helping launch what every local-food system needs: economically sustainable small-scale farm enterprises.

Because viable local food systems are often constrained by a lack of both land under cultivation and new farmers, FIG will collaborate with local landowners, land trusts, and town and county governments to identify land that could be rented at below-market rates or deeded as common agricultural property. To this end, participants in the FIG training will not only farm, but will also be involved in a critical educational project to examine the social, political, and economic structures of land ownership that often make it difficult for farmers to retain land in agricultural production and for young aspiring farmers with limited capital to access land. While small-scale agriculture is often framed as the antithesis of economic development, the FIG initiative seeks to reframe the terms of economic development and re-place food production within communities.