Sandy Lerner on her Ayrshire Farm near Upperville.

No longer neglected, the manor house at Sandy Lerner's 793-acre Ayrshire Farm in the foothills of the Blue Ridge.

hen Sandy Lerner purchased Ayrshire Farm in 1996, the 793-acre, Upperville estate possessed “all the old neglect of prospect.” That poetic, late-18th-Century phrasing is from Jane Austin’s Emma; and spending time with Sandy Lerner, as the magazine’s editors did recently, is to time-travel: not only backwards into an earlier century but also forward into an environmentally conscious, sustainable future.

“It was overgrown land,” she says of Ayrshire when she bought it, but Ayrshire enabled her to farm. “I wanted to farm,” she said—not just own land. And by farm, she does not mean what she calls the “industrial production” of most food that is produced in the United States today.

In 1992, she established a foundation to lease Chawton House—the 400-year-old Austen family home in Hampshire, England—and to establish the Centre for the Study of Early English Women’s Writing. But, as the co-founder of Cisco Systems, Sandy Lerner is perhaps best known as a high-tech entrepreneur. She also founded Urban Decay cosmetics, which never used animal testing and whose edgy promotional slogans included, “Does pink make you puke?”

A long-time philanthropist and advocate of animal rights, Lerner remains passionately committed to organic, humane farming and the preservation of farmland and open spaces in Virginia’s Piedmont. The Virginia Organic Producers and Consumers’ Association is her creation. Ayrshire Farm’s magnificent fieldstone manor house, which she restored, has become the site for her annual “Beastie Bazaar,” benefiting abandoned and neglected animals, as well as for special events showcasing organic farming – most recently Heritage Turkeys (see sidebar). Ayrshire Farm (www.ayrshirefarm.com) also hosts cattle farming association meetings and equestrian events, including carriage rides.

In nearby Upperville is her restaurant, Hunter’s Head Tavern (www.huntersheadtavern.com), whose most acclaimed dishes are fresh farm products direct from Ayrshire. In Middleburg, her Home Farm Store (www.homefarmstore.com) offers farm-fresh organic products for home dining.

To have made all this happen—often in the face of huge obstacles—requires “bloodymindedness,” a British expression of which Lerner is fond. Without that trait, Ayrshire Farm might now still be run down and overgrown or, worse, carved up into residential housing lots. And all farms throughout the Piedmont would be the poorer without Sandy Lerner’s wit and wisdom on their side.

So, how do you go from Silicon Valley entrepreneur to Virginia Piedmont farmer, from Cisco to organic farming?

Actually, the big transition was from farming to Cisco, or at least from our small farm in the Sierras to graduate school in LA and then Stanford. Moving back to a small town and back to farming was the easy part.

But why Virginia? Why not go back to farming in California?

A lot of reasons.… I like the font on the license plate, I am a jouster and the state sport of Maryland is jousting, but mostly because there is water here and farms that are large enough to farm but not large enough to be interesting to the agribusiness cartel.

But why go back to farming? Farming is generally not considered a sport of the idle rich.

Roger that. In America today, 14% of farmers live below the poverty line, and it’s getting worse. In the last 10 years, prices at the farm gate have declined 9%, while consumer food prices have risen 30%. Like everything else, farming is a lot more fun without a budget. However, I do think I’m a pretty typical farmer in that there’s no way to quit once you start—it’s in the blood. So, until someone comes up with a 12-step program for us, we are probably going to be farmers. Having said that, America loses 1% of its farms each year. Think about it: In the next century, the U.S. will be entirely dependent on foreign food. In 1900 45% of the population was working in agriculture; today it is less than 2%, and the census bureau no longer counts farming as a separate occupational category. Farms and farmers should be considered a rare and valuable national resource; regrettably, this is not the case. And the only segment of the farming population that is actually increasing is the number of women going into farming…. Go figure. But if farming takes money rather than makes money, why do it? That’s about eight good questions. I’ll address the one about why I farm, given the postwar farming economy. From my point of view, there is both a historical and a moral imperative: First, historically, it was the wealthy landowners—in America, think George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—who could afford to conduct experimental agriculture. People who were trying to eke a living out of the land could not risk trying new theories or technologies. Agricultural research has always been the responsibility of landowners with disposable income.

From a moral perspective, if you count all public and private sector money spent on agricultural research, a small fraction of 1% in the United States goes toward the development of sustainable agricultural models. To those of us who believe that sustainable agriculture is the only viable long-term agricultural model in terms of the land and our health—which really are the same thing as, like it or not, we really all just eat dirt in one form or another—the galling thing is that we have to pay taxes to subsidize chemical agriculture and then pay personally to fund research into new tools to help us undo the ravage to our environment and our health caused by chemical-based agriculture. And even this doesn’t address the moral outrage of the factory farming of food animals.

What about farmers’ markets? Prices are pretty high there, at least a lot higher than the supermarket, right? And the price of organic food seems a lot higher than conventionally produced food.

Let’s first address farmers’ markets: The average farmer in America is now over 60 years old, and 59% of farmers have full-time, offfarm employment; the median farming income is around $11,000 a year. So, this means that older people who are already working two jobs now have to haul their produce and stand outside for hours on their day off and hope someone comes and buys it. This seems a bit speculative on all counts and probably not likely to be a significant part in the restoration of the local food chain.

The other short answer is that farmers sell at wholesale and buy at retail. Surprisingly very few farms actually produce food—they produce “food components,” like soybeans or corn or wheat—so today’s farmers have to buy their food just like the rest of us. This has always struck me as rather surreal.

As to prices for organic food, if you consider the subsidies paid to the agricultural conglomerates and the public money which pays for everything from research into herbicides, pesticides and the antibiotics (70% of which end up in animal feed) to the highways used to truck the food, to the environmental clean-up of our air and water caused by modern agriculture, I’m not sure that organic food is more expensive—you just pay all of the bill at the cash register. And, again, this doesn’t count the cost that we all pay in the loss of life and productivity from illness caused by systematically poisoning the earth with pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers, all of which ultimately end up in the air we all breathe and the water we drink, and the concomitant loss of antibiotic drug effectiveness against those illnesses by overuse in the food chain. My personal guess is that organic food is a real bargain, if one fairly counts all of the costs.