The emailed directions tell you to “go past the mailboxes on the left, down a hill, across a stream and up a hill.” Once you do, you find there are lush green fields surrounded by ancient hardwood trees reaching tall into a pale sky.
“Pass the first old white block house on your left,” the directions instruct. “Veer a little right at the rooster statue on a tree stump. The old white block house on the left is ours.”
After a few more moments of driving on gravel, there it is, the rooster statue—a proud concrete ornament on a sawed-off tree—and that must be the white block house. It’s tiny from the front, a single-story cinder block A-frame from 1939 with three bedrooms and a tin awning extending over the porch. The chimney is unfurling smoke this morning, scenting the air with sepia memories of a time long past. And right on time, a real, living rooster crows in the near distance.
Getting out of the car, you wonder not where you are but when you are. Each step onto the moist soil and stone path leading to the front door takes you further back in time, into history, when people lived on acreage, not on lots, and shared the land with livestock and crops.
We are in 2016, not 1939, yet this place has the same authenticity of its historic past.
And where are we? We’re in Great Falls, adjacent to the national park—you can hear the Potomac River when the day is still—and we are surrounded by the stately mansions Great Falls is famous for, though you can’t see them from this hill.
What you can see are some playful goats, a busy pen of guinea hens and sheep behind an electrified fence. The two coops are alive with 150 chickens, and their pale green and blue eggs are plentiful each morning.
“I’m told we’re one of the last four working farms in Fairfax County,” says Chris Guerre, the 42-year-old who runs the farm with his wife, Sara, also 42. “We’re one of the only ones that grow all year.”
The farm—with its assortment of vintage tractors in the former milking room, a clever greenhouse made entirely from reclaimed construction materials and bales of hay undercover in a shed—is a remarkably disproportionate expansion of the Guerres’ original foraging adventure, the On the GOurmet food truck that is permanently parked near the well-worn pickup trucks by the shed.
The food truck was a part-time pastime for the Guerres, who met and married when they were both key executives with Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts. Their first home was a staff house on the Wolf Trap property in Vienna, so the joke now is “we always have to live adjacent to a national park,” Guerre says.
They began to grow in their Vienna backyard some of their own produce for sale in the food truck at weekend farmers markets and realized they could probably raise enough to sell in a retail outlet. That led to the opening of the Maple Avenue Market in August 2009, two doors down from the landmark Vienna Inn.
When a customer, who is now their landlord, asked if they would be interested in living on her property and working the land, the Guerres, always up for an adventure, chucked their 9-to-5 jobs—after 10 years for him (resigning in 2009) and eight years for her (she left in 2012)—and traded in their suits and pencil skirts for coveralls and jeans to work as first-time full-time farmers.
“I didn’t mean to do this, but I took a bunch of clothes to the dry cleaner after leaving Wolf Trap and forgot about them,” Guerre says as WAMU-FM’s bluegrass station plays, apparently constantly, from speakers in the barn. “I never went back to get them.” He doesn’t miss the clothes because out here, where there is muck and dust and chicken manure to shovel onto furrows, a button-down shirt and khakis does you little good.
“It seems like 40 years ago,” Guerre says, doing the math between the time he left Wolf Trap and the time he took up the tractor and plow.
So now, at the appropriately named Maple Avenue Market Farm in Great Falls, they grow, in organic-equivalent methods on the 2.5-acre hillside field, some 100,000 carrots, an assortment of beets, radishes, lettuces, cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, kale, spinach and a rare salad green called mache, among other produce. And in the greenhouse there is cilantro, chamomile, basil, fennel, bitter melon, rosemary and other herbs, spices and tender plants.
It would be enough of a revolutionary act to call the Guerres a leading edge in a do-it-yourself young farmer movement, as NPR did in a 2013 broadcast, but there’s more.
In fact, your Northern Virginia schoolchildren very likely have enjoyed fresh food from the Great Falls farm, and if not, they very well may do so in the coming school year.
And that’s where the future meets the past.
On a Monday at Glebe Elementary School in Arlington, Chris Guerre stands behind a folding table in the cafeteria and dispenses cooked greens to students. He’s shucked off the coveralls of the farm for a short-sleeved shirt and jeans, and with his dark-rimmed glasses, he looks more professorial than farmer.
Each Monday is Farm-to-School Day in Arlington, supervised by farm-to-school coordinator Angel Wallace McMahan, who sees that Maple Avenue Market Farm’s lunchtime exhibition rotates to each of the county’s 34 K-12 schools.
For the past three years, the Guerres have picked and prepared something fresh off the farm and delivered it in person to an Arlington school, making sure to connect with the kids and explain where food comes from and how it’s grown not far away but nearby.
“The education piece [of the program] is crucial,” says Amy Maclosky, director of Arlington school’s Office of Food and Nutrition Services. “Putting it out on the serving line isn’t enough. The kids have such a short period of time to eat lunch, where the food comes from isn’t really what they’re thinking about, so they don’t often know they’re eating local fruit or vegetables.
“The education piece is something we both felt really passionate about,” she says. “We thought if we put it out there and brought Chris in often enough, we would increase our consumption. And that actually is happening.”
Besides produce, Guerre has been known to bring in live chickens to demonstrate where the (hard-boiled) eggs that they’re enjoying come from. He also brought one of his vintage tractors to an outdoor festival, which turned out to be a popular attraction. With all the kids climbing on the tractor and taking photos, “you would have thought it was Mick Jagger,” Maclosky says.
Clearly, suburban children are fascinated with the connection to something from a rural environment. And that, sometimes surprisingly, includes the food.
Both Guerre and Maclosky say the kids eat everything served up by Farmer Chris, including unlikely things such as kale, cabbage, sauerkraut, purple onions and beet soup. “The beet soup was a bit of a surprise, but they do like it,” Maclosky says. Leftover produce, such as kale, “we’ll serve during the week so kids keep trying the kale and get exposure to it a couple of times,” she says.
Maple Avenue Market Farm isn’t the only nearby vendor Arlington deals with. In fact, Maclosky says she buys 56,000 pounds of local produce a year from regional farms, and she anticipates the number to grow as the farm-to-school program expands. As for the impact on her budget—local food is costlier than mass-market commodities—Maclosky isn’t fazed.
“There’s a balancing act,” she says. “But we’ve decided to focus on the best quality food, local food and fresh produce. We’re balancing that with other things, and so far it’s OK … I think it’s been a good investment.”
Expansion plans begin soon. “This year we hope to do a traveling salad bar in addition to farm-to-school day,” she says. “And I hope to have on that salad bar all local produce.”
Right now, Guerre hands out a variety of farm-fresh samples from his folding table in the cafeteria, but in the future, he and other local growers could be responsible for providing the bulk of what Arlington kids eat behind the food line.
And not just Arlington. If Rodney Taylor has his way, regional farms such as the Guerres’ may be responsible for an additional 149,000 meals a day in Northern Virginia.
“I’m most known for the salad bar, what’s considered the farmers market salad bar,” Taylor says. “It was the first of its kind in the country in 1997. It actually predates the farm-to-school movement.”
Taylor is the new director of Food and Nutrition Services at Fairfax County Public Schools, and he is bringing with him the salad bar concept he pioneered in two large school systems in Southern California. And he intends to supply those salad bars with produce from local farmers.
In California, he says, “I could directly provide fresh produce at the peak of its season, provide access to all children and help small farmers who are struggling or going out of business with an untapped market, selling their produce and pumping money into the local economy. There’s belief that every dollar spent on a farmer generates three times that amount, and I believe that.”
His goal in Fairfax County “is to get kids off highly processed foods and teach them to be lifelong healthy eaters.”
Taylor met Chris Guerre in Guerre’s role as chairman of the Fairfax County Public Schools Health Advisory Committee—he’s in his third year as chairman. “Chris was the first farmer I got in touch with,” Taylor says. “We got him signed on as the first farmer. Now we have two other farmers, and I’m seeking grant funds to hire a salad bar coordinator, and then we can get more farmers on.”
Taylor’s vision for salad bars goes beyond that, way beyond. “We will put salad bars in all 141 elementary schools,” he says, adding two per month in the coming year. He also says the after-school program and free summer meals for kids program will benefit from the fresh produce as well.
“The commitment I’ve made is I’ll buy from any small farmer in Fairfax County, and the truth is I could buy from every farmer in Virginia and still not have enough to [fulfill] the 149,000 meals we provide each day,” he says.
As for the impact on his division’s bottom line: “I have demonstrated you can have healthy children and a healthy bottom line.”
The Maple Avenue Market, like the farm that provides some of its wares, is a throwback. The wooden crates, reclaimed and repurposed furniture, popcorn machine (free while you shop) and Rock-Ola jukebox stuffed with vintage country and honky-tonk 45s set a scene from 1950s Mayberry, maybe earlier. As a capper, on the second and fourth Fridays there’s an evening bluegrass jam in the back of the store, just to confirm the anachronistic mood.
The folding sign on the sidewalk on busy Maple Avenue in the heart of bustling Vienna reads, “Greens, Ice Cream, Cheese, Beer.” Next to it is a display of potted seedlings, with more in the back. Inside there are cases of loose potatoes, cold milk, stone-ground grains and a wide selection of beer and wine in addition to a case of humanely raised cuts of meat, from grass-fed beef and bison to pork and lamb to chicken and fish.
In the back is a licensed commercial kitchen, where the Guerres prepare recipes for sale and for serving to students.
With the constant demands of thousands of plants and creatures at the farm, the 60 hours a week they put in at the market and the expanding school outreach, not to mention their thoughts on revving back up the On the GOurmet truck, the Guerres have an additional obligation: The March 11 arrival of their first child, George Joseph Guerre.
It can be overwhelming, they admit, but they’re getting used to it.
“We work harder now,” says Sara, who confided to missing friends and co-workers, not to mention the occasional beach vacation. “I try not to think about it,” she says.
“We have to keep everything moving, every day,” says Chris, who is responsible for the maintenance and operation of the 15 engines needed to run a small farm. “You have to love it.”