The only thing that has come close to this quality of eggs are the one-half dozen eggs we received each week when we belonged to a local CSA – Community Support Agriculture.  The color and taste can’t be beat.  How I would love to have some chickens in my own yard for both the quality of the fresh eggs and to provide my sons with some of the experiences I enjoyed as a kid.

If you are in the same mind frame I’m in, have no fear.  I recently ran across this website/blog , Chicken Coops Plans.  It contains almost everything you would want to know about building a chicken coop and raising chickens for personal use and enjoyment.

Several residents and owners at Bundoran Farm have expressed an interest in having a few chickens around their house.  I can’t wait to see this happen.  It would be a great addition to this Charlottesville Va real estate.  Not only is it 100% compatible with the overall vision for Bundoran Farm, I look forward to swinging by in the morning, helping them gather their eggs and perhaps even enjoying and nice sunny-side up egg breakfast.

In addition to providing an overview of the project vision and a brief history of the property, Hay goes on to describe how the vision is being fully realized as development activity proceeds.

“When you enter Bundoran Farm, you will see cattle grazing peacefully on acres of pasture and cattails swaying gently around the ponds. Gravel farm roads cross gurgling streams on well-constructed bridges with timber railings, and meander off into the woodlands. Tasteful wooden road signs mark the routes at each fork in the road. It is difficult to believe that you are actually in a residential development – a preservation development – and at the same time, on working farm.

Using the Tillman House built by Maple Ridge Group as an example, Hay also goes in great detail how the homes are designed and built in an environmentally friendly manner. All house built at Bundoran Farm are required to meet EarthCraft standards, the green building standard for residential construction in Virginia.

“Homeowners are encouraged to build homes with a scale and style that complement the landscape of the region. An example is the Tillman House. It is designed by Russell Versaci, one of the several architects and design professional in the Bundoran Farm Guild.

The site plan for the Tillman house was designed to protect and nurture the land. Non-permeable surfaces such as asphalt driveways were avoided to prevent runoff. Instead, permeable surfaces create a rain garden, keeping the rainfall on the property.

During construction, Maple Ridge implemented a recycling program for all the debris created in the process. Steve Nicholson, Maple Ridge’s managing partner, added that their company-preferred building practice exceeds the demand of the EarthCraft standards.”

Hay concludes the article by speaking with Fred Scott whose family stewarded the Bundoran Farm land since the 1940’s. “Scott feels that he has place his family homestead in good hand and insured its future.”

Virginia Sportsman Magazine – June – July 2010

First, there is a conviction among the developers that, if properly integrated (or insulated), farming in its various forms need not be extinguished when residential uses are introduced.

Second, and more important, the residents of these communities have made the determination that, in 2010, a working farm adjacent to their homes is an amenity, not a nuisance.   This is a remarkable shift from even ten years ago, when a residential amenity was fairly well understood to be a golf course or a pool.

At the Baldwin Center, we try to track and understand, at least in broad strokes, the many approaches currently underway (the article mentions a hundred projects) to pair residential uses with productive uses of rural lands.  It is clear, from this article and others, that we are in the midst of a moment of incredible innovation and change in two businesses: agriculture and land development.  How these many models succeed and fall short over the next decade will likely be a critical contribution to our discussion on the future of rural land.  Stay tuned.

Over 150 people attended this Forum to learn about everything from the latest trends in specialty crops, how to use social networking as a marketing tool, how to direct market a product, to new innovations in the Mid-Atlantic region.  There were also panel discussions on innovative uses of large acreage tracts, and folks presenting successful projects around the region. 

These types of workshops are incredibly useful to both established farmers as well as people that are contemplating a new agricultural venture.  The lessons learned can help direct someone into growing a particular crop, using new and more efficient tools, and learning from other people’s mistakes.  For us working on Bundoran Farm, not only do we have an opportunity to be exposed to and learn about innovative programs that we may what to explore here on our property, but we also great to meet and rub elbows with others who care as much as us about preserving productive agriculture lands.  Its great networking opportunity for people to establish new connections.  And to top it all off, a wonderful lunch was served that featured products from local farmers!

This Forum was co hosted by the Offices of Agricultural Economic Development and Cooperative Extension in Clarke, Fauquier, Frederick and Loudoun Counties, Virginia, Berkeley and Jefferson Counties, West Virginia, Potomac Headwaters and Shenandoah RC & D, Virginia Cooperative Extension and WVU Extension.

I love watching the young calves romp around.  They remind me of large puppies, make me smile and probably lower my blood pressure too.

By means of a short poll, we came up with a list of some of the top things to do in, and with, the snow at Bundoran Farm. 

• Take your sled out of your attic and pretend you are on the Olympic luge team as you glide across the pastures and by the orchards.
• Make what you think is the world’s biggest snowman with your friends, kids and/or grandkids. If you are really ambitious and creative, you can make a snow cow too. 
• Watch the shadows grow across the snow covered pastures as the morning rises in the east, shrink during the day, and grow long again as the sun sets in the west over the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
• Drive, ride and/or walk on the Bundoran Farm roads that, due to the diligent efforts of the farm management team, are plowed well in advance of surrounding roads.
• Enjoy time with your neighbors next to a warm fire, over a hearty homemade stew made with fresh ingredients from one of the many local “farm to table” sources, with a nice bottle of wine from a nearby vineyard.
• Marvel in the nearly heroic efforts of the farmers to keep their cattle well feed with the hay they cut and put up the previous summer.
• Listen to the serene, almost “sounds of silence’, interrupted by the babbling of a nearby stream, the call of a far off bird or the whistle of the wind passing through the branches of the hardwoods.
• Discover and follow the tracks in the snow created by abundant wildlife that inhabits this protected landscape or make new tracks in the virgin snow for someone else to discover and follow.
• Sit back, relax and ponder the beauty of it all and relish in the realization that this is your place and your time with a way of life on a land that works.

Please let us know what you think we should add to the list by e-mailing us at info@bundoranfarm.com.

The study’s authors conclude that the wisdom of putting your money in stocks or topsoil depends on when you invest, and how long you hold.  What I find most interesting is that it’s apparently pretty darned close. Close enough that the study’s not really conclusive, which makes the recent news about hedge funds buying farmland across the world sound slightly less nutty.  Which makes me wonder: why there aren’t people from Edward Jones calling me at dinnertime to sell me acreage, just for a change of pace?  And why is there an exchange in New York where guys bark at each other to buy and sell shares, but no equivalent in Des Moines or, for that matter, Charlottesville?

I mention this because folks who make their home here at Bundoran Farm own not just a home, but a slice of a large and productive farm, which is managed (professionally)  in common.  The idea, of course, is that the protected and managed agrarian landscape adds to the value and security of the owners’ home, with the ancillary benefit of protecting most of this arresting landscape and local-food capacity for the long term.  Maybe it’s the other way ’round?

Where do we go with this?  Posited the fleece clad Bob Baldwin as he stood next to a blank whiteboard facing the fifty or so participants in the inaugural conference of the Baldwin Center for Preservation Development.  The empty whiteboard served literally and figuratively as the blank slate that Baldwin hoped to fill up in the next ninety minutes with concepts, conclusions and concrete next steps as he played the role of facilitator at the closing plenary session of the Center’s two day Inaugural Symposium—Residential Development and the Working landscape: Collide, Contain, Coexist, or Coalesce.

Robert H. Baldwin, Jr., “Bob”, has an open demeanor and a self-deprecating sense of humor that puts the participants gathered in the second floor meeting room of the newly constructed Baldwin Center at ease. Baldwin succeeded his late father as the President of New Hampshire-based Qroe Development, who, with Charles Adams and Celebration Associates, is the Co-General Manager of Bundoran Farm, the 2,300 “Preservation Development” project located in southern Albemarle County about fifteen minutes from Charlottesville.

 Bundoran Farm is now, and will continue upon completion of the development project, a working farm. In fact, 90% of the Farm’s acreage will remain as open space. On this unseasonably bone chillingly cold and damp two day stretch in late October, a thick fog of low lying clouds mask the Blue Ridge just to its west and Bundoran’s Angus dotted fields of fescue and orchard grass and the large orderly rows of apple trees climbing the rolling hills of its working orchard operation.

Located at Bundoran, the Baldwin Center for Preservation Development houses a non-profit foundation with the mission to showcase innovative practices in rural land use planning and development, agricultural preservation, and environmental stewardship.  Named in honor of Robert H. Baldwin, Sr., a pioneer in the use of development to preserve New England farmland and the early visionary for Bundoran Farm, the Center, designed and built by GeoBarns of Vermont, is a modern riff on the traditional barns found on the property.  The structure features a full length front porch and offices on the first floor and an open meeting room on the second, the venue for the conference, which highlights an expansive light filled ceiling of arched trusses and a windowed pergola.

 Despite his welcomed lack of the usual facilitatorspeak of “share withs”, “new paradigms” and “perhaps we should continue this line of conversation off-lines”, Bob Baldwin’s prodding and open ended questions does engender the dialogue and suggestions that he aims for. His white board starts to fill up. The Symposium’s invited participants came from all over the country with a variety of backgrounds, including: farmers, developers, non-profit land conservation organizations, government officials, and leading academics, in order to gather at the Center and share their experiences, perspectives and expertise related to the preservation of working agrarian landscapes.  The combination of disciplines and perspectives provided for in depth discussion of how the private sector can foster rural land preservation with market driven solutions and limited residential development.  In addition, the group explored how these solutions compare with, compliment and/or conflict with other preservation tools.

Notable among the participants and speakers: Professor Elizabeth Brabec, Chair, Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Massachusetts; Dr. Jill Clark, Director, Center for Farmland Policy Innovation at Ohio State University; Professor Bruce Dotson, Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Academics and Senior Associate, Institute for Environmental Negotiation at the University of Virginia School of Architecture; Mr. Bob Lee, Executive Director, The Virginia Outdoors Foundation; Mr. Rex Linville, Land Conservation Officer, Piedmont Environmental Council; Mr. Tayloe Murphy, former Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources and former Member of the Virginia House of Delegates; and Professor Richard B. Peiser, Michael D. Spear Professor of Real Estate Development at Harvard Graduate School of Design; and a very large elephant in the back of the room.

Nobody could accuse the Baldwin Center of including only cheerleaders and sycophants to the Symposium.  Rex Linville, whose employer, the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC), has championed the use of conservation easements by encouraging the use of Virginia Land Preservation Act as a tool of preserving open space and farmland throughout the Piedmont, was a very visible and vocal opponent of the Bundoran project during its zoning and approval process with Albemarle County.  As noted in the Summer 2008 issue of this magazine, the PEC disagreed with what they viewed as the premise and the concept of “preservation development”—particularly the notion that the ultimate economic value of farmland rests with its development potential.  Rex Linville and the PEC argued that the proper land use for Bundoran and similarly situated farms lies with its continued purpose of agriculture and forestry, not housing.  Linville did ultimately concede that the Bundoran development team did “do a good job of siting houses and roads” and that the project scale of 108 new houses was certainly preferable to the 160 houses that would have been allowed under Albemarle County’s land-use regulations.  However, Linville and the PEC still disagreed with the use of Bundoran Farm as a place to accommodate the growth of the County and situate one hundred plus houses.

In his opening remarks on the previous afternoon, Bob Baldwin, Jr.   highlighted the challenge facing preservation development and the challenge that he wanted those gathered to explore in the coming day: “When it comes to the mixing of residential development and farms, historic exurban settlement patterns seem to have reflected either a collision of the two uses, resulting in an unhappy outcome, or containment of uses, a subtly hostile approach. We believe that if planned right, the uses could, at the least, peacefully coexist and very possibly coalesce into a mutually beneficial arrangement. The Symposium’s goal is to explore that hypothesis.”

Award winning author Witold Rybcyznski’s book, the Last Harvest documents the dilemma faced by farmers and large landowners in communities and counties such as those in the Virginia Piedmont.  Faced with development pressure and its economic rewards due to population growth and the desirability of living in Virginia and its proximity to the nation’s capital, many of these farmers and landowners “would prefer no development, but if is to happen, they want the option of selling their land”.  As Rybcyznski notes, this transaction is often referred to as the “last harvest”.

Bob Baldwin, with his concept of Preservation Development and Bundoran Farm, seeks a solution for landowners that lies somewhere in between the social, environmental and the more limited economic benefits of conservation easements, as promoted by groups such as the PEC, and the loss of the rural landscape as a result of the “last harvest”.  Baldwin is “betting the farm”—Baldwin’s hypothesis and business plan for the Bundoran Farm project depends on the predicate that home buyers will appreciate the beauty of the Farm, the guaranty and protection of its open space and the concept of a true working farm as a self sustaining “amenity” and, most importantly, will be willing to pay a 25 to 30% premium for it.

During stimulating and lively discussions over the previous day, the participants were challenged to interpret the value of farmland in new ways and assess the critical components and issues that emerge when integrating rural land preservation and residential growth. While it was widely acknowledged that very significant gains in farmland protection have been achieved throughout Virginia and the country, all agreed that more needed to be done and could be done, particularly in light of the strengthening Local Food Movement.

Using the New Urbanist movement (Seaside in Florida and Kentlands in Marylands, as examples, and its evangelists in the architectual team of Duany and Plater-Zyberk) as inspiration, participants encouraged the Baldwin Center to take a leadership role in exploring and presenting rural development models that could benefit farmers, new residents, and rural communities as a whole.

Bob Baldwin fills up his whiteboard with these suggestions—many reflecting the theoretical and academic bent of the gathering—for the Center: additional symposiums with planners and developers; dissemination of best practice information;  hosting of charettes for planning and design students; and, more concretely, underwriting and producing a White Paper on Preservation Development.

At the conclusion, Bob Baldwin conceded and asserted that the most important task for the Baldwin Center for Preservation Development was the ability to demonstrate that, through the prospective success of Bundoran Farm and other projects, rural development can “deliver”.  This is where reality versus theory and the only uninvited guest at the Conference comes in—that large elephant in the back of the room: the worst real estate market in generations.

When asked after the Symposium, Bob Baldwin acknowledges this reality, but confidently dismisses any suggestion of alteration to the plans for Bundoran Farm.  Baldwin believes demographics and values are on his side. In the words of Robert H. Baldwin, Sr., who died in a plane accident in 2006, and for whom he and the Center were named—“given the current market sentiment toward green development and sustainable development, it’ll (preservation development) practically be mandatory in the future”.  When does that future occur? Only that large tusked participant has that answer.

About the Author - Raised in Richmond and a resident of Old Town Alexandria, Ned Carter is a Managing Director with BlueLine Conservation, a Virginia Land Preservation Tax Credit brokerage, conservation finance and eco-services  firm.  He spends many of his weekends on his family’s farm in southern Albemarle County, just over the Southwest Mountains, from Bundoran Farm and the Baldwin Center for Preservation Development)

The Piedmont Virginian is a lovely magazine focusing on history, culture and preservation of Virginia’s rural heritage.  It’s always a good read, especially when they do the occaisional feature on Bundoran Farm or someone we know in the Charlottesville area.  This winter, Thomas Randolph has begun a fascinating new feature callled Deep Background.  In each article, the author presents a painting of a Virginia scene, and an essay showing how much we can learn about a landscape, an historical period, a farm operation or an ecological community from just one image. 

In the first (Winter 2009) feature, a seemingly simple horse-barn scene is unfolded to explain, among other things: why barns are red, why a horse barn might have a silo, why a fence is painted green, and a number of other conclusions about the history of a Mellon family property in Hunt Country. 

This is a kind of parlor-game version of the exercise the design team did in Southern Albemarle County when we conceived the Bundoran Farm project.  Our version took about a year.  Studying this landscape, we tried to understand why a place like this looks the way it does.  Why it feels special to cycle or drive through this valley.  We looked at images like the one above and asked a lot of questions:

How do we know we’re “in the country?”  Why are farm roads so much more attractive than subdivision roads?   Why were they built this way?  What’s the visual difference between decorative fencing and working agricultural fencing?  How do you know where to go?  How do you know who owns this land?

I submit you can answer these questions and more, simply by considering the image above.  I personally have a list of  ten conclusions about Bundoran Farm, but would be delighted if a reader comes up with one I haven’t thought of.  I’ll post my list in a couple of days. 

 Or you could just drive by and say “isn’t that pretty?”  And know that this landscape became this way, and will stay this way, for a reason.  And that’s really the point.

Lots of people are attracted to local food production, for reasons of health, taste, environmentalism, economic justice or sentimentality, but for a lot of them, the local attraction only extends to the plant kingdom (or maybe fungi).  Beef has, for a lot of enthusiastic carnivores, been kind of difficult.  Grass-fed beef has suffered as long as I’ve known about it from the reputation for being insufficiently tasty, relative to the grain-fed variety.  No more.

When we first met Collins, the first thing the team did was buy a couple of steaks (a flatiron and a ribeye, as I recall).  We hammered them on a hot grill at the office, and served them to our regular management meeting with a bowl of Leif Riddervold’s Bundoran-grown shitake soup.  I can tell you that I’ve been to pretty much all the great steakhouses and you will not find a much better ribeye steak than this one.  And I bought it out of a freezer.  A freezer in a garage.

Gryffon’s Aerie solved the grass-fed “problem” by building their own herd (it took about a decade, though I’m sure it felt longer) of milking Devons and a few other varieties.  Genetics of these cattle are more in line with the Argentine pampas-grazing style Collins and Ramona are attempting to emulate.  Results are, well, juicy.

Check out GA’s site, learn about the incredibly cool work they’re doing (check out “Ramona’s Bully Pulpit…”, and join the company of just about every celebrity chef you’ve heard of.  They’re all fans of this operation.  Save the drive to a top DC restaurant, and order a steak for a special night at home…