Written By Patricia Rouzer
At first blush, Sally Voris seems an unlikely farmer.
“What haven’t I done?” she said, laughing, when asked about her pre-farming existence.
Formerly a newspaper columnist, community activist and story teller, Voris did not grow up sporting seed in her pockets and dirt under her nails.
But earlier this decade, Voris inherited a one-quarter interest in the Taneytown farm her parents had owned since 1966. Although farming interested none of her siblings, Voris had always loved gardening. So she bought out their shares, became owner-operator of the 132-acre White Rose Farm and joined a gaggle of Carroll county growers who sell meat or produce to individuals and families who buy “shares” of their crops.
Together these producers – primarily small and medium sized farms – participate in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), a variation of the co-op concept in which individuals share in the expenses, risks and produce of local farm operations. Born in Switzerland, Germany and Japan of the 1960s, it is an apparently growing industry throughout the U.S. Most sell their produce directly from the farm; a few offer it weekly at various farmer’s markets inside and outside Carroll County.
All are dedicated to selling locally what they produce, thereby assuring the freshness and quality of their food to the consumers, dramatically decreasing energy costs required to transport their products to market, contributing to the local economy and connecting the consumer directly with individuals who produce what they eat.
What separates Voris from her more conventional CSA compatriots is her driving passion to provide not only healthy foodstuffs, but a generous helping of fresh air, sunshine and sense of community connection to her customers.
White Rose Farm offers those who buy “shares” the opportunity to collect and enjoy a variety of healthy, nutritious, freshly harvested food each week. But for those who elect to become members, the farm provides a physical and mental retreat to a simpler, quieter time where people connect with nature and each other.
Along with freshly harvested produce, members of White Rose Farm are free to enjoy and experience the farm on their own terms; whether that means watching the chickens hunt for insects in the grass or dozing lazily in a hammock. Some set up easels and paint the bucolic countryside. Others might bring family and friends for a picnic lunch in a quiet field. The farm is open from May through November.
“We have goats, pigs, chickens, turkeys, guineas and ducks (if the fox doesn’t get them),” said Voris. “In summer the gardens are beautiful and members are welcome to enjoy them. We just have a lot of nice country things.”
“The idea is that life should be wholesome on every level. It is wholesome food, a wholesome life style. It is a wholesome community,” she explained. “People’s lives are so fragmented and so frantic. I had the idea that people could come to this quiet place to get back in touch with themselves and with nature.”
In addition to opening the farm to members for informal visits, Voris has developed a variety of special events to bring people together in the rural setting. Each spring and fall Voris holds barn dances to mark the opening and closing of the harvest season. All comers are welcome, but attendance is limited and members have priority.
In midsummer, Voris hosts a “high summer feast” when a chef prepares fresh food from the farm for her guests. And there are other season-appropriate festivities such as “full moon celebrations.”
Voris’s Earth Mother, back-to-nature, bring-people-together philosophy reflects the impact of experiences from her youth. Growing up in Elkridge, Voris watched her “two-stoplight” Howard County town morph from country hamlet to quintessential bedroom community replete with townhouses, McMansions and suburban shopping malls.
As a divorced single parent, she raised her own child in the suburban sprawl, watching as neighbors rushed frenetically from work to home to kids’ ball games and PTA meetings.
Bothered by the detachment of modern life that permeated neighborhoods in her beloved hometown, she saw in her parents’ farm a way to provide a useful product: nutritious food grown using healthy farming practices, complemented by a respite from the stress of daily life.
But make no mistake: despite her passion to provide a sense of community for her members and shareholders, Voris is a serious farmer.
What she is not, however, is a certified organic farmer. That is a designation for which she clearly harbors a bit of disdain.
“I can’t use the ‘O” word,” she said. “In order to be a certified organic farm, you must document what you don’t do. I’m not using chemicals and other bad stuff. I’m not doing bad things. Rather than documenting that I’m not doing bad things, I’d rather spend that time doing good things. Organic tells you what food isn’t, not what it is. In my mind it’s the equivalent to the idea that just because a person is disease-free doesn’t mean he is healthy.”
Voris supplements and replenishes the soil using such organic matter as compost, leaves and manure. She plants a variety of vegetables, both commonplace and unusual. Her chickens, turkeys and pigs are grass fed and pastured. In addition to her produce, she sells eggs, pork, chickens and turkeys.
And she seriously studies farming. “The winter is when I take time to relax and read. It is also a time when I go to conferences and learn new things,” she said, recounting information about the benefits of eggs from chickens allowed to free range she gleaned at a recent conference.
“The ratio of (beneficial) Omega 6 fats to Omega 3 fats in eggs sold at the grocery store is generally 2 to 1; in free range chickens it is 18 to 1,” Voris said. “It isn’t just that the yolk of an egg from a free range chicken is a deeper, prettier, yellow color than the one you buy in the store, it is actually more nutritious.”
The same is true of vegetables and fruits grown in rich, healthy soil. “When a plant grows in really good soil that contains a lot of trace minerals, those trace minerals help plants develop complete proteins,” she said. When we eat those plants we get healthy.”
Voris has a generally low opinion of most supermarket food.
“I think many of our health problems are the result of the fact that much of the food we eat is junk,” she said. “I believe one of the reasons there is so much obesity today is because the foods we eat from grocery stores lack the right stuff. It isn’t grown in healthy, vibrant soil, so it isn’t healthy, vibrant food, even if it might be certified organic. And so we eat too much because our bodies aren’t truly nourished.”
Before the ground thaws, Voris sows seeds inside to jump-start the summer crops. As early as February the early spring rhubarb crop begins to show the bright red of its stems and deep green leaves. And although she enjoys something of a respite from November through April, Voris still must care for the livestock, keeping them fed, watered and sheltered.
She tends the farm herself with summer help from college interns and neighbors and area residents who work for three hours weekly in exchange for bags of food. At press time she was interviewing couples, hoping to find two people who would live and work on the farm.
White Rose Farm is not a “pick your own produce” operation. It is a genuinely cooperative operation; something very useful in these tough economic times. Shareholders either come to the farm to claim their harvested haul or can pick up their produce at a central location in Westminster.
From growing healthy food, to carefully tending the soil, to extending quiet generosity by giving financially strapped neighbors healthy but superficially blemished food that cannot be sold, to encouraging the appreciation for the beauty of a quiet summer garden, Sally Voris has clearly found her mission in nurturing bodies and souls.
