Sustainable agriculture and education at Terra Kotta Farms
Start with a dream, add water (and hard work) and watch Terra Kotta Farms grow
Out in the boonies of Leesville is not where Atlanta native Allison Stapleton imagined she’d end up. Much less, on a farm.
“I’m a city girl. If you’d told me 20 years ago that I’d be a farmer, you’d have been crazy,” she says.
Crazy or not, that’s exactly what she and her husband, Scott, and their three children have been doing since 2012.
Terra Kotta Farms, their 20-plus acres smack in the middle-of-nowhere-Midlands, where heirloom tomatoes grow deep red and juicy, and chickens, goats and kids (human and Nubian) run around, is first and foremost a happy place, and a welcoming one, which is really the whole point of their kind of farming. The Stapletons are not just growing a bevy of non-GMO organic produce, or selling free-range chicken, eggs and amazing goat cheese, they’re growing people’s interest in sustainable agriculture and healthy eating. Terra Kotta Farms is planted with hopes of educating and encouraging others to try growing things themselves.
Allison, a certified nutritionist with a healthcare background, and Scott, a former military officer who grew up in a South Carolina farming family, combine their passions—health and wellness and a love of working the land—to make Terra Kotta a place of inspiration and homegrown, homesteading goodness.
“We want people to come walk around freely, experience different facets of farming and see what sustainable farming looks like, smells like, feels and tastes like,” says Scott. “Ideally we hope others will realize they can start a backyard operation of their own. The demand is definitely there.”
A Fresh Start
In contrast to Allison’s surprise at becoming a farm mom, her husband is living his dream.
“I knew in fifth grade that I wanted to produce food and do it sustainably,” says Scott, who remembers being dismayed when fellow farmworkers were warned about putting their hands close to their mouths and faces after spraying crops with chemicals—“yet we were putting that on things people will eat,” he says. At the time, organic farming was not mainstream—“only freaks in California”—and besides, his family discouraged his interest in anything agricultural, organic or not.
“They insisted I go to college and get a ‘real job,’ far from here,” he says. And so he did.
After graduating from the University of South Carolina, where he earned a degree from the Darla Moore School of Business, Scott spent the first part of his career as an Air Force officer, “but I knew all along that ultimately I wanted to farm, and used the opportunity to travel the world and see what sustainable practices look like elsewhere.”
After retiring from the service, he moved to Spartanburg, where shortly before meeting Allison (whose mother happened to live across the street from him), he’d bought an old derelict farm on the outskirts of town and was slowly chipping away at bringing it back to life.
“Allison would be visiting her mom on Sundays and see me come back all filthy from working out there, and finally asked me what I was up to.”
The first time he invited Allison to come out to that scruffy land to see for herself, she pulled up in her Volvo, slightly circumspect, and said “Wow, you sure it’s safe to get out of the car?”
They fixed up the ramshackle farmhouse on that property and lived there for the first few years of marriage. Though a family farm was always their 10-year plan, Scott’s main crop at the time was harvesting rainwater, a sustainability practice that he began researching and dabbling in around the late 1990s, when water quality and drought issues were becoming global concerns.
Limited water resources were like a bad disease, Scott discovered. “People know they have it but don’t want to talk about it,” he says. However, he knew that when one inch of rain falls on an average 2,000-square-foot home, the roof run-off yields 1,250 gallons of water—enough to flush the toilet 26 times a day for one month.
An accredited rainwater professional who served two terms on the American Rainwater Catchment Systems Association board, Scott engineered efficient, affordable systems that transformed recycled Heinz and Mount Olive industrial pickle barrels (imported from India, and otherwise headed to the shredder or landfill) into cisterns, and began installing rainwater systems across the Southeast, with demand skyrocketing during the severe Atlanta drought of late 2000.
The need was huge.
“I had no idea there are so many people in South Carolina without potable water,” he says—due largely to dry wells in the Upstate and the Midlands or to salt infiltration in the Lowcountry, and while the work was satisfying in terms of sustainability, the travel was exhausting.
“It was running us to death—we’d install systems in Mt. Pleasant one day, and Georgia the next,” says Scott, who had by then centralized his rainwater operation to 20 acres in Leesville.
In 2012, he and Allison decided to simplify, and while still doing rainwater consulting on the side, it was time to embrace that dream and 10-year plan of turning their Leesville property into Terra Kotta Farms—the “K” a nod to their then-newborn daughter, Kennedy (now 8), the younger sister of Jack (14) and Margeaux (11).
See and Feel
Today harvested rainwater keeps Terra Kotta’s fields well-irrigated, and the family’s focus on sustainable practices has broadened to everything from organically grown produce to beekeeping to classes where Allison shares her nutrition expertise with those interested in learning more about healthy eating.
“We knew our mission would be simple yet unique,” she says. “We saw that people wanted more than to just buy produce at a farmers’ market, but to know where their food comes from, how it’s grown and how the vitamin and mineral content in organically grown fresh produce meets your body’s nutritional needs,” she says.
People were hungry to learn, they found. And so, Terra Kotta has evolved into an inclusive show-and-tell experiment of sorts; 400-some visitors will come explore their farm on any given day. Some come to pick up their weekly basket (Terra Kotta offers a Basket Pick-Up service as a modified CSA) and others just to explore or to take part in programs ranging from summer farm camp for kids to cooking classes for kids and adults. The Stapleton crew, who will soon welcome an adopted Haitian daughter, are all hands on deck, with their kids, who are homeschooled, pitching in with all the farm chores.
“I think the food movement has evolved from homegrown to local to organic, and now the emphasis is on transparency, which has been our philosophy from day one,” says Scott. “We absolutely want people to come walk around, see what a rain garden looks like, what compost feels and smells like. They can watch us process chickens, or take part themselves. Whatever they’re interested in—the whole principle is that this is the real deal.”
By offering behind-the-scenes access and demystifying where food comes from, the Stapletons hope that Terra Kotta Farms will serve as an incubator for other small farms in the region.
“We would love to see more people farming locally, the way it used to be,” says Scott. “We can’t grow enough here to meet the demand—we live in a true desert. There’s no access to fresh food close by. People can either drive an hour to get to Whole Foods, eat at Bojangles or come here. And when they do, they tell us, ‘wow, I feel so much better eating your stuff.’”
But the answer, he and Allison believe, is not the traditional industrial food model of getting bigger and growing more.
“To keep it sustainable, we need 20 small farmers in a 25-mile territory,” Scott says. That may not be a recipe for getting rich as a farmer, but that’s never been the Stapleton family’s goal.
“If people walk away from visiting Terra Kotta and feel better about their food or do something healthier for their children, then that’s paycheck enough for us.”
