Chattanooga: Group’s organic effort flourishes on midriver farm

Ryan Power drives the all-terrain mule across the field, sweeping his right arm into the air as the vehicle passes through the garden gates.

“You are entering an enclosed space of magical food production,” he shouts over the roar of the engine. “Do you feel it?”

On an island in the middle of the Tennessee River across from Baylor School, four young friends are farming the same alluvial soil that humans have cultivated since the end of the last Ice Age.

The group began their work in January with the goal of providing locally grown organic food for Chattanooga.

And in the warmth of the September sun, the fruits of their labor are ripe for the picking.

In the quietly graceful way she seems to perform all tasks, Ashley Baggett, 24, collects red peppers in her straw hat, dumping the lot into a plastic bin, shaking out the hat and putting it back on her head. Kelsey Keener, 20, squats in the trough between rows, thinning beets, while Noah Bresler, 20, gathers the last of the summer’s heirloom tomatoes. Butternut, the farm’s yellow mystery mutt, naps in the shadow of the mule.

Walking down a row of purple and white-striped eggplant, Mr. Power, 24, stoops to pluck the ripe ones and check the leaves for aphids. He looks like a stalk of goldenrod, with his light red hair, straw hat, long-sleeved yellow shirt and tan corduroy pants.

“Look at that,” he said, pointing to a ladybug on the underside of a leaf. “That’s my pesticide right there.”

Alternative pest management is one of the central components of organic farming. In addition to relying on natural predators to keep pests down — an adult ladybug can eat five times its weight in aphids and a larvae can eat 20 times its weight — the group added aromatic plants such as basil and rosemary to the vegetable rows to ward off unwanted bugs.

So far, the approach seems to be working.

With only 2.5 acres under cultivation this year, the group provided more than 25 varieties of fresh organic produce to the 10 families in its Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA, program, and sold everything from arugula to zucchini at the weekly Greenlife farmer’s market and to restaurants such as 212 Market Restaurant.

“A Little Paradise”

What’s left over is canned for the winter or becomes the fresh-cooked meals the group makes every day.

Their kitchen is the kind of structure the Swiss Family Robinson might have built, with a skeleton of bare-skinned locust trees and a corrugated metal roof. Its screened-in walls seem to attract stray breezes, offering a shady break from the midday heat and an inviting place to eat and talk.

Bluish bundles of homegrown tulsi tea plants dangle from the rafters; the group’s wide-brimmed hats hang in a row from another.

In an green plaid garage-sale chair, Mr. Power sits with his legs crossed, picking a tune on the guitar. The smell of sautéed onions and garlic awakens stomach juices as Ms. Baggett cuts up Cherokee purple and yellow brandywine tomatoes on the granite countertop facing the field. Mr. Bresler hunches over a basket, picking kernels of island-grown blue corn that will be ground into flour.

Against the far wall, a bookshelf is lined with cookbooks and glass jars filled with grits, cornmeal, amaranth and Cherokee Trail of Tears black beans. At the propane stove in the corner, Ms. Baggett stirs a simmering pot of stewed okra, onions and tomatoes. A garland of cayenne peppers dries from the rafters overhead.

“I think of it sometimes as a little paradise,” she said. “We’re inside the city but also really far removed.”

Sitting down to lunch at the antique table, the group spreads sweet pepper preserves on corncakes and talks about how cold they were last winter, their goals for the farm and the experience of living on the island.

“I think we all feel like we’re having a very wholesome experience of being a human,” Mr. Keener said. “We’re using our minds and our bodies for what they were designed to do.”

The image of organic farmers living on an island in the river, however, has invited some stereotypes the group politely but firmly rejects.

“There was a guy we bought fertilizer from,” Mr. Power said. “And he kept calling us hippies and calling this ‘Hippie Island.’ But we had to explain to him, ‘We aren’t hippies because we care about the details.’”

If anything, part of what they love most about the island is its proximity to the city, which they are constantly reminded of by the sound of whistles floating over from the Baylor School practice fields and the rumble of crashing metal from a nearby industrial recycling facility.

They see their role as a positive antidote to abuses modern industry has wrought on the land and aim to be an educational resource as well as a source for locally grown food for the surrounding community.

“Being at the University of California at Berkeley, I was around a lot of criticism and protest,” Mr. Bresler said. “But for me, it was always lacking something, it didn’t feel enough, but what we’re doing here feels constructive. Most importantly, we’re taking care of ourselves, we’re taking care of each other and we’re taking care of the land.”

Part of that vision is realized each Thursday, when they cross the river with a boatload of freshly harvested produce for their CSA at Baylor School. In return for an investment of $600, members of the program receive a weekly installment of fresh fruits and vegetables from the end of May until the end of October.

“It’s just fun to see what’s here each week,” said CSA member Beth Ector, of East Brainerd. “I know it’s healthy and it’s fun to think, ‘What am I going to cook with this?’”

“Midlife Crisis”

It was precisely this relationship between farms and the public that inspired Larry Roberts, a science teacher at Baylor School, to fund the group’s efforts. In what he described as a “midlife crisis,” Mr. Roberts leased the island’s 22 acres from the Tennessee River Gorge Trust last fall. He turned it over to the young farmers, who had recently completed their studies at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California-Santa Cruz.

“A tomato that you get off Williams Island,” Mr. Roberts said, “is not a tomato that has been picked green in California and put into a warehouse and left in the warehouse until it was time to be shipped, and then the warehouse filled with ethylene gas to make the tomato turn red so that it looked like it was ripe and then packed and shipped to Tennessee.”

Out in the Williams Island field, sheep wagged their tails happily as the flock attacked the fresh grass. Every three days, the sheep are moved to a new pasture, a practice that gives the land time to rest and ensures a fresh supply of tender shoots for the flock to eat. The farm’s chickens come along afterward to pick through the grass, eating bugs and worms left over, a diet that gives their eggs a rich, meaty flavor.

Next year, the group hopes to expand the farm by adding a herd of goats for milk and increasing the number of sheep and chickens. They also plan to add two acres to the garden, double the size of their CSA and increase their outreach to area restaurants. Some restaurants have expressed an interest in their lamb meat, preferred by many chefs because of its mild flavor, Mr. Power said.

Six lambs were born on the farm this spring, the first one named Dogwood, a plump young ram with a new set of horns.

Mr. Power looked at Dogwood and laughed.

“I really love him,” he said. “It’s going to be hard to kill him. I think he’s going to be our Thanksgiving meal.”