For this budding farmer, incubator fosters growth

McClatchy Newspapers

CHARLOTTE, N.C.

Every week, Joe Rowland places a framed photocopy of a childhood note amid the spinach, eggs and kale on his sellers table at Atherton Market.

“I would like to be a farmer because you get to work outside,” Rowland wrote in the note he wrote at age 10.

“You’re your own boss; you don’t have a schedule. You don’t have to dress up and best of all I get to work with crops and animals.”

More than two decades later, the 31-year-old Rowland is on his way to fulfilling the childhood dream that started while spending summers working his grandparents’ farmland in Indiana.

He detoured first, into a bustling career in restaurant management.

Now, he’s leaving that behind for a different type of intensity: the life of a full-time farmer.

This is his first spring launching crops on the larger, half-acre plots reserved for the farmers-in-training at Elma C. Lomax Incubator Farm Park in Concord, N.C.

Last year, he began in the starter field at the park, where beginning farmers receive training and access to land and equipment to learn if they’re cut out for farming.

For Rowland, farmer training is a cool tradeoff in exchange for the 80-hour weeks in management, mainly in the Boston area and for a short time in Charlotte. Working in pubs meant long hours on his feet, gliding in and out of hot slippery kitchens, sometimes with his tie thrown over his shoulder, scraping dishes if someone called in sick.

He liked the fast pace. But the dreams he put in that long-ago note never left him.

“I wanted to do something a little more idealistic. I wanted to do something that helped, mattered ... more of a calling rather than serving people burgers and beers.”

These days, Rowland marvels at how a leaf of spinach tastes sweet right out of the ground. How a clump of red clay holds so many nutrients. The way bees, full of nectar, come in for a landing at the hive Rowland shares with other farmers.

He has a poultry business down the road, which means he brings dozens of fresh eggs with him to market.

Even the allergies are better: Crouching in his overalls for a closer look at budding garlic and potatoes, walking the field and working the land all clears the head: “You get out here, start that heavy breathing,” while inhaling a deep breath.

His career timing coincides with an uptick in consumer interest in locally grown food, despite the recent downturn in the economy.

Rowland was raised in Winston-Salem, N.C., from the time he was 2.

But summertime meant returning to Indiana, where he was born, to help out on his grandparents’ farm. Spending months helping raise cattle, grow corn and soybeans, and bale hay and straw was fine with him.

Around the time he wrote that note, he went to school dressed in overalls, like his farmer grandfather, for career day. He realized he could be a farmer, too.

In 2010, his girlfriend’s father showed him a news article about the Lomax incubator farm. He could get help learning the trade and crafting business and production plans. But the program had a long waiting list.

“I figured in 10 years I’d get an email saying farming is available.”

Rowland got the call a year later.

So in 2011, he began his journey with the incubator farm of learning intensive vegetable production — something he wasn’t exposed to during those summers in Indiana.

The sugar snap peas, onions, potatoes and more went in. Then he waited.

Rowland kept his fall and winter crops going all year on the incubator farm. For spring, garlic, potatoes, radishes and kale are already under way. Later he’ll plant rows more of tomatoes, peppers, basil and more already growing in the greenhouse and in an onsite enclosure called a high tunnel.

He’s still figuring out how to get his own piece of land, financed with produce sales and family help.

For now, on the incubator farm, he’s taking it all in — learning as much as he can from the program and fellow farmers.