Trista and the students.

ids in Rappahannock County's public schools are growing things. In gardens at the elementary school and the high school and at another garden off-site, they’re raising apples, blackberries, watermelon, broccoli, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, spinach, basil, asparagus, and many other fruits and vegetables.

Last year, these student-run gardens provided 500 pounds of food for the local Senior Nutrition Center, cafeteria salad bars, and school fundraisers. The school gardens, which are cultivated primarily by students in horticulture classes, also give art classes a place to draw, English classes a place to study transcendentalist poetry, building classes a reason to construct sheds and a hoop house, and culinary arts classes fresh herbs and vegetables to cook with. Every year, a few high school students gain further experience as interns, cultivating the gardens through the summer.

The Farm-to-Table program, which integrates agriculture into the Rappahannock schools’ curricula, started in 2004. High school science teacher David Naser, says: “It began with trying to create an experience that would stimulate kids to have an interest in horticulture and agriculture, and get them thinking about jobs that would allow them to live here in the County.” Trista Scheuerlein, who directs Farm-to-Table, says: “We wanted to give kids hands-on experience so they realize you can actually make a living in agriculture.”

But can they really? Can these kids grow up to make a living the way previous generations did in Rappahannock— by farming?

The economic picture for farmers can look pretty gloomy. According to American Farm Bureau, only $0.19 of the average dollar Americans spend on food goes back to the farmers who grew it; other estimates put this figure at less than a dime. Small farms can barely survive on such a meager allotment, and each year one out of every 100 Virginia farms goes out of business.

The Farm-to-Table students take a lot of field trips, so they know how hard farming can be. At a recent trip to Lee’s Orchard near “Little” Washington, they learned that competition from overseas has driven the wholesale price of apples down to about nine cents per pound in recent years, which comes to just $4 dollars for a bushel. And the costs of running the farm are high: labor, insurance, taxes, equipment, sprays. Lee’s Orchard sells some apples at their farm stand and as pick-your-own, but given their large scale of production and a shortage of manpower for marketing, they sell most of their crop to the wholesale market.

“I felt a little sad for them,” said one boy when Scheuerlein later asked for the students’ reactions to the field trip. “From what we heard, it sounds like agriculture is not a good thing to get into,” Scheuerlein agreed. “This land has been in Farmer Lee’s family for generations. Over the years, he’s worked really hard to keep that land, because he believes in agriculture, because he loves what he does.” But will another generation want to take up the struggle to maintain the orchards?

The class was planning a trip to Williams Orchard in Flint Hill, later in the week. “You’re going to see a different model of an orchard, one that sells more local stuff and sells more directly to their consumers,” Scheuerlein said. “When you get there, I want somebody to ask how much they could get for a bushel of apples. Let’s compare those numbers.”

It turns out that a bushel of apples sold directly to customers, at either Williams or Lee’s Orchard, brings about four times the wholesale price. How much of a difference can that make for family farms?

Another agricultural enterprise that the classes visit is Waterpenny Farm near Sperryville. There, Rachel Bynum and her husband Eric Plaskin grow fruits and vegetables, with the help of interns who live and learn the business of organic farming each summer. “There’s still an image of farmers as being beleaguered and always having hard luck and never quite making it,” Bynum says. “And that’s definitely a story that still happens. But the potential is there, if you use a little savvy and you’re willing to sell directly to your customers, that you can have a quality of life that you enjoy as a farmer—a quality of life that you would want your kids to have.”

By selling their produce locally, Bynum and Plaskin make enough to support themselves and their two sons comfortably.

Across the road, at Mount Vernon Farm, Cliff Miller raises cattle, sheep, and pigs that graze on tall grass in hilly pastures overlooking the Blue Ridge. In a unique partnership between young farmers who needed land to get started and an established farmer who wanted to encourage local agriculture, Waterpenny holds a long-term lease from Mount Vernon. These farms offer a vision of all that we stand to gain or lose when small farms succeed or go under. They produce bountiful, delicious, healthy food. And the farmers act as careful stewards of an amazing landscape.

Mount Vernon is the farm that travelers on Route 231, a Scenic Byway, see as the road joins Route 522 near Sperryville—a striking view of large hills rising from a meadow. Much the same view will greet coming generations because Miller has protected 600 acres of the farm with a conservation easement. He also used state cost-share funding to fence livestock away from the stream corridors creasing his hillsides and to plant saplings there. Deer bound up the steep ravines to reach the woods at the crown of the hill, and the water flows down into the swift, clear Thornton River, where native brook trout thrive.

Miller’s family has owned Mount Vernon Farm since 1827, but when his turn came to take over, he decided to make some changes. “I care a lot about my animals,” he says, “and I didn’t want to sell them to where I knew they were going, which was the feedlots and then the slaughterhouse facilities and the traditional market.” So he started raising grass-fed animals, which lead healthy lives in the farm’s rich pastures.

His meats, which are free of vaccines, antibiotics, and growth hormones, cost more than the average cut at the grocery store, but Miller has plenty of customers because people find that it’s worth it. Both he and Bynum say that demand is not the problem; supply is the problem. They say customers are ready to buy good, local food when farmers are ready to grow it and sell it.