Courtesy of Arcadia Farm
“Farming is a calling in much the same way that the military is,” said Pam Hess, executive director of Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food & Agriculture, located in the Mount Vernon area. This year, Arcadia will see its largest class of veterans participating in its Veteran Farmer Program.
“You’re never going to get rich doing it. More and more veterans are enrolling with us. We’re filling a hole in the marketplace. Veterans want jobs where they can be close to their families and get rewarded for a hard day’s work. They want to see tangible results from their efforts,” Hess said.
Located at 9000 Richmond Highway, Arcadia operates on land once owned by George Washington — part of the Mount Vernon estate and later the Woodlawn Plantation. Arcadia, a non-profit, sits on the 126-acre site where the Woodlawn Estate museum is located. The organization promotes sustainable growing practices, serves as an educational site for farmers, and helps increase access to local healthy food.
“We launched the farmer program in the fall of 2015 and we are about to onboard our 2019 class of 42 veteran farmers,” said Hess. “We’re bringing in a class almost as large as the number we’ve trained.”
In addition to teaching veterans how to become farmers, the program helps them find affordable land, provides easy market access for the food they produce, and reinvigorates the farm sector with skilled new growers eager to begin their next phase of life.
The veterans who participate in the program gain enough knowledge about farming to walk away and start their own business. They learn about everything from irrigation problems to pest control to harvesting, Hess said.
Many of the participants say their favorite part of the program is visiting farms. “We visit lots of farms around the region — the field trips are their favorite part,” Hess said. “They develop their network. They learn the skills they need to at least be a vegetable farmer, regardless if they’re doing livestock or produce.”
The program opens their eyes to farming possibilities. “One marker of our success is people start with one idea of what they think they want to do and then they leave with a completely different plan, after they’ve fallen in love with a particular kind of animal or understand the physicality of vegetable farming,” Hess noted. “We expose them to all of this.”
Another piece of the training, she said, is learning from a talented business trainer, a CPA and tax lawyer who comes in four times a year to do intensive group training and offer one-on-one help.
Some of the training takes place at Arcadia Farm, where some of the vegetables that are grown are sold at mobile markets in low-income neighborhoods in the D.C. area. It’s also used as a laboratory class-room for the veteran farmer program.
Quarter-acre plots on the farm are also used for a farm incubator program. “The hardest part of getting off the ground as a farmer is getting the land, infrastructure and power,” Hess said, especially in the Northern Virginia region. “With this program, the farmers can use our land and create their own mini farm using Arcadia’s expertise.”
Arcadia also pledges to buy produce grown there at wholesale prices so that the new farmers can focus on learning to grow instead of worrying where to sell it, she said. Arcadia continues to help after participants have graduated from the pro-gram, with job and land opportunities.
Arcadia was launched in 2010 by Neighborhood Restaurant Group; the non-profit and its programs are now fund-ed with a mix of funding sources including government grants, corporate sponsors, fundraisers and tuition.
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2019 print edition of Alexandria Living Magazine. To subscribe, click here.
