Table to farm

Guy Ames spends his days in a nursery. This one isn't fancy -- it has black plastic on the ground, blue sky as a roof, sunshine for warmth and chickens, cats and dogs roaming freely through it. Neither do its occupants coo, crawl or get colic. But just as though they were human children, the tender young starts receive Ames' nurturing attention. He hopes each will grow into a strong, sturdy sapling, in this case one resistant to diseases and insect pests.

That's the only way to grow organic fruit in Northwest Arkansas, says the owner of Ames Orchard near Elkins. And he's spent a lot of effort and a lot of time -- more than three decades -- trying.

The first secret to a successful nursery, he says, is propagating those disease- and pest-resistant varieties. That means letting go of European ideals and "growing what works here."

The second secret is "patience, patience, patience." It's a three-year process to get the tiny trees ready to leave the nest and another five to six years before they can be expected to bear fruit.

But Ames is committed to the idea that "if local is best, then your own backyard is the very best," he says. So he'll be encouraging visitors at the first-ever Tour de Farms to buy from area vendors -- whether at the farmers markets around the region or at Ozark Natural Foods in Fayetteville, which is sponsoring the event. But he'll also encourage them to consider growing their own.

Going organic

A "Navy brat" born on Guam, Ames was 19 and his brother 18 when they came to Arkansas with $3,000 and an old pickup truck. It was during the Vietnam War, and "our peer group pretty much thought the world was going to end," he remembers. Their intention was to "get back to the land and set our souls free."

"We thought we were headed for Kentucky, but it was darn pretty here," Ames says. So they bought "the worst piece of land in Northwest Arkansas" -- near Harrison -- then about a year later, Ames moved to the community of Deer in Newton County. He tried to plant an orchard, he recounts, and "successfully planted it." But he couldn't successfully grow fruit.

"In the summer of 1980, I realized I didn't know what I was doing and came to graduate school at the University of Arkansas," he goes on. "I was lucky to get an assistantship with Roy Rom. I still wanted to do organic, but I had realized the Rodale guy (J.I. Rodale, considered by many to have been the force behind organic farming's mainstream popularization and birth as a social movement in the United States) was leading people down the primrose path.

"Roy was very amenable to all this -- or he humored me -- and designed a good master's program for me."

Rom, emeritus professor of horticulture at the University of Arkansas, speaks eloquently about the challenge of growing fruit trees in Northwest Arkansas. When settlers arrived, he says, there were no apple, peach or pear trees.

"Every one of those fruits is an immigrant, just like the people who brought them with them when they came," he explains. "This part of the country was mostly forests and open meadows, so when the settlers came, they brought food with them, and one of the foods they brought were fruits they could grow here. They brought apple trees in their covered wagons just they brought their tables and chairs and children."

Like Ames, the settlers faced the challenges of "adaptability to the area, knowledge of the producer and then being able to cope with all the problems associated with a monoculture," meaning fruit trees were the dominant crop in the region and all the trees were closely related genetically, Rom says.

"The apple and the pear and the peach were not native to this climate, so could they adapt? For example, peaches respond to spring weather, and they bloom too early and then we have a frost. So they are not well adapted, climatewise. An apple is a little more adapted climatewise with respect to bloom, but they often need more cold weather than Northwest Arkansas would provide. They have to find a niche in the climate and have to be managed. To be productive, they need a lot of tender loving care, like raising a child."

By finding and cultivating varieties that are hardy in the region, growers like Ames have found ways "to get around the impossible," Rom says.

"The other problem we have to get around is human beings," he adds. "They are so attuned to perfection, they will reject an apple in a grocery store based on looks, just like we judge people. So organically, we have to approach the challenges from two standpoints: How can we reduce the amount of damage that insects, diseases and lack of water can do? And also how do we convince the public that we should not totally judge a fruit by its cover?"

In the late 1990s, Ames gave up. He was growing apples with the bare minimum of pesticides he could, and the result was neither organic nor cosmetically perfect.

"I didn't want to spray any more. And I couldn't (sell) the apples. There weren't enough people that understood the dangers of pesticides to the degree they were willing to buy my cosmetically imperfect apples."

He went to work teaching English in the Farmington School District, and the orchard -- apples, Asian pears and European pears -- stood, untended, waiting and growing stronger. When he returned to the orchard three years ago, the trees that had survived were perfect for propagating -- and the fruit as near perfect as it could be for sale.

Table to farm

During the first decade of the 21st century, farmers markets -- and the corresponding interest in local growers -- grew explosively. In 2000, there were 2,863 markets listed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and in 2013, there were 8,144. At the same time, "food cooperatives once again experienced growth-driven, intense consumer interest in alternatives to a market system that might not serve their needs," the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives reports. "The most extensive impact food cooperatives have recently had on the grocery industry has been their pioneering introduction of natural and organic food."

Now, says Alexa McGriff, marketing director for Ozark Natural Foods in Fayetteville, co-op members "want to meet the people who are making their food. Sometimes it's hard to relate to the idea that your food doesn't magically appear on a shelf. It's important to create that connection to the food. It makes you want to purchase local when you know those people slaved away all day to make that food for you."

McGriff heard about a farm tour in Florida and brought the idea to Pauline Thiessen, produce manager for the 43-year-old, 10,400-member co-op. Thiessen works with more than 40 local farmers, and the farmers committee enthusiastically "came up with an idea to do this in a fun way."

On May 17 and 18, eight farmers -- including Guy Ames -- will welcome visitors to their farms, where they'll talk about herbs, composting, straw-bale greenhouses, four-season farming, pasture poultry, starting a farm and backyard fruit production.

Visitors will pick up their passports at Ozark Natural Foods beforehand and later be eligible for prizes. But more important to Thiessen is that "when they come to shop for food at the co-op, they'll remember going to that farm, seeing how much effort it takes, and they'll know the people their grocery dollars are supporting. It reinforces that whole connection."

"Oftentimes," Rom says, "when I buy an apple (at a big-box store), I'll look to see the country of production, and it'll say Chile. Immediately my mind turns to what the grower's property looks like. I wonder what he looks like? I wonder what kind of family life he has. These are things I will never know. To that extent, my life is denied a little joy I would have had buying locally.

"On a population basis, I'm not sure that everybody in the world can have this kind of satisfaction. I'm not sure they need it. They need nutrition. We can afford to have the nourishment of body and soul."