An introduction to the Chesapeake Fibershed
By Sophie Kidd
In a society dominated by fast fashion, it’s hard to look at a piece of clothing and imagine who—or what—is on the other end of the shears, the mills, and the sewing machines. Until recently, it seemed unlikely that there would never be a time where I could put faces to each step of the process.
Enter Fibershed.
This non-profit organization is working around the world to revitalize regional textile systems while fighting climate change. And these ecological and economic transformations aren’t hard to picture.
Fibershed’s self-proclaimed “Soil to Soil” approach connects the dots between all aspects of clothing manufacturing. Plants and animals provide fiber and dyes, which are then woven into fabric, then sent to a designer. Excess fibers are composted and applied to pasture and farmland, thus providing more nutrients for the plants and animals.
Since the organization began operations in Northern California in 2016, they’ve accomplished some impressive feats, including:
An estimated 45,000 tons of carbon drawdown through carbon farming practices
$1 million in investment capital used for regional manufacturing
45 Fibershed Affiliate communities globally
Luckily for us, we get to be part of the Chesapeake Fibershed, which includes DC and Baltimore as well as portions of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.
The affiliate community was started about three years ago after Marian Bruno, Gretchen Frederick, and Martha Polkey learned about what Fibershed was doing in California.
“The Fibershed out there in California is defined as a radius from a certain point,” Bruno said. “But on the East Coast, we're closer together, partly because of how our resources are organized. So, instead of having some artificial circle, we decided to follow the lay of the land. And that's when we decided on the using the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.”
Bruno says that right now, the Chesapeake Fibershed has a solid number of fiber producers with a variety of different types of wool. However, the area lacks processors. This makes it difficult to create the product from start to finish locally.
“A lot of our national local mills, most of which have been on the East Coast, have ceased operations because of competition from China,” she said. “So, these factories are sitting there and not doing anything. And it's going to take a really special effort to get them going again.”
Another problem the Chesapeake Fibershed has to tackle is raising awareness for their cause.
“You've probably heard a lot about the pollution the clothing industry causes. In this part of the country, there are so many small producers, but we live in a society that's not very attuned to buying local when it comes to clothing or fiber goods,” Bruno explained. “They think about it in terms of vegetables, but not so much for fiber. So another part of our mission is to really educate people on the benefits of local fiber.”
To help educate people, Bruno says they have started including cards on locally made products that explain where each step of the process took place.
“So, when a consumer picks up that product, they say, ‘Oh, Fibershed… what's that?’ and then the card shows them how so much of this product actually was produced quite close to where they're standing.”
The Chesapeake Fibershed is still relatively new, but they’re already making waves and redefining what it means to shop local.
How Agritourism Drives Loudoun’s Rural Economy
BY DOUGLAS ROGERS I VISIT LOUDOUN
The Boxwood Estate Winery is located in Middleburg, Virginia, and boasts 26.5 acres of sustainable vineyards planted with traditional Bordeaux varietals. Photo courtesy Great Country Farms
Drive west from Washington, DC toward Loudoun County, Virginia, and for 30 miles you’re in a tangle of urban sprawl. What was rural farmland only a generation ago is now townhouse developments, strip malls, toll roads and—as you nudge into Loudoun at Sterling and Ashburn—sleek, hi-tech data centers owned by Amazon and the like, through which 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic now flows.
A few miles further west though, just past Leesburg, a strange thing happens. As if crossing a border, the sprawl suddenly clears and you’re in glorious countryside: stone-fenced farm fields dotted with cows, horses and red barns; green hills carpeted with grape vines, forests of maple, oak and birch all around; Blue Ridge Mountains shimmering in the distance.
Loudoun contains worlds – there are few more geographically and commercially diverse counties in the US—and while the developed and hi-tech east offers all the fashion and amenities of urban living, it’s the rural tradition and agri-businesses of the west that nourish the county’s soul.
“We started our first business—Great Country Farms—in 1992,” said Bruce Zurschmeide, one of six children of Loudoun agri-business pioneer, Bob Zurschmeide, 83. “Loudoun had so few people then—the closest big population was Fairfax. We had no idea how popular it would become.”
We’re sipping a crisp glass of Byde Your Time craft lager on the al fresco patio of Dirt Farm Brewing, the craft ale outpost of the Zurschmeide empire on steep slopes of the Blue Ridge near historic Bluemont. Bruce and his wife Janell opened the brewery in 2015 on a portion of the land Bob purchased in the 1970s. Bob worked for the CIA and was a weekend “dirt farmer”—hence the name of the brewery. The original building on the property, a 1940s fieldstone hunting lodge, now serves as the tap room for fruit-forward ales, stouts and lagers, all produce sourced locally.
The view from the patio tells more of the family story: On 100 acres of vine-covered slopes adjacent to Dirt Farm is Bluemont Vineyard, opened in 2005, and overseen by Bruce’s brother Mark, while at the foot of the mountain is Henway Hard Cider Co, opened in 2019. As with the wine and beer, the cider is made from fruit grown on the farm. Bringing it all together, on 300 surrounding acres, is Great Country Farms, which is the business that started it all. An iconic destination for Loudoun families for nearly 30 years, it features wagon rides, pick-your-own opportunities, a corn maze during harvest time and a bountiful farm store. Combine all four businesses and several thousand visitors might come through on a summer weekend.
The Bluemont General Store dates back to the 1840s and is a fun spot to kick back and have lunch or an ice cream cone on the porch after a morning hike. Photo: Douglas Graham/Wild Light Photos courtesy Visit Loudoun
The view from the patio tells more of the family story: On 100 acres of vine-covered slopes adjacent to Dirt Farm is Bluemont Vineyard, opened in 2005, and overseen by Bruce’s brother Mark, while at the foot of the mountain is Henway Hard Cider Co, opened in 2019. As with the wine and beer, the cider is made from fruit grown on the farm. Bringing it all together, on 300 surrounding acres, is Great Country Farms, which is the business that started it all. An iconic destination for Loudoun families for nearly 30 years, it features wagon rides, pick-your-own opportunities, a corn maze during harvest time and a bountiful farm store. Combine all four businesses and several thousand visitors might come through on a summer weekend.
“We have been fortunate to have been doing this a long time,” said Bruce Zurschmeide. “And if you don’t like the weather in Loudoun, all you have to do is wait a minute, it will change!”
Rebecca Brouwer, owner of Shepherd’s Corner Farm in Purcellville, Virginia, prepares the wool from her sheep and fashions beautiful scarves.
The wineries, breweries and farms that span Loudoun’s rolling countryside are contributing millions to the local economy, showing that agri-business is big business for the county. According to a study by the Institute for Service Research, Loudoun’s agritourism businesses brought in 1.2 million visitors in 2018, generating a total economic impact of some $413.6 million. About 40 percent of those visitors were from outside the region. An additional survey by the Loudoun Wineries Association, Loudoun County Economic Development and Visit Loudoun found that wineries and farm breweries hosted nearly 800,000 of those visitors, collecting an estimated $30.7 million in revenue.
“Agritourism is a vital piece of Loudoun’s economy and not only puts substantial money back in the economy but also provides unique experiences for visitors and residents alike,” Visit Loudoun President and CEO Beth Erickson said.
As DC’s Wine Country®, it’s no surprise that Loudoun wineries bring in much of the traffic, but the appeal is beyond tasting fine wine—it’s a glimpse into a conserved way of life.
“I had an epiphany that the quintessential preservation of a harvest is a bottle of wine – it can last 30 years,” said Jenni McCloud, the owner of Chrysalis Vineyards at the Ag District near Middleburg, the largest producer of Norton grapes in the world. McCloud’s 412-acre conservation area includes her vineyard, a creamery and tasting room/produce market at which visitors sample wines and other items grown on the farm. “It’s a powerful thing when a visitor asks where this drink came from, to be able to point to a vineyard and say: ‘right over there’.”
Harvesting apples for Henway Hard Cider at Great Country Farms. Photo courtesy Great Country Farms
One of the enduring charms of the area is that agritourism spans large empires like the Ag District and Great Country Farms to smaller entrepreneurs creating unique products for visitors to take home. Working out of a rustic 18th century log cabin on 10-acre Shepherd’s Corner Farm, fiber artist Rebecca Brouwer makes exquisite handmade scarves, wraps and shawls from wool sheared from the 20-strong herd of Swedish-breed Gotland sheep she and husband Dennis raise on the property. Brouwer uses a unique felting technique that combines delicate colored fabrics with the light-as-air wools. The result? Intricate floral and peacock-feather designs that would not look out of place in Vogue.
One of the enduring charms of the area is that agritourism spans large empires like the Ag District and Great Country Farms to smaller entrepreneurs creating unique products for visitors to take home. Working out of a rustic 18th century log cabin on 10-acre Shepherd’s Corner Farm, fiber artist Rebecca Brouwer makes exquisite handmade scarves, wraps and shawls from wool sheared from the 20-strong herd of Swedish-breed Gotland sheep she and husband Dennis raise on the property. Brouwer uses a unique felting technique that combines delicate colored fabrics with the light-as-air wools. The result? Intricate floral and peacock-feather designs that would not look out of place in Vogue.
“I feel incredibly fortunate during these challenging economic times to live in the countryside and have a business and a product I can keep making,” Brouwer said. (Buy her work during Loudoun’s Spring and Fall Farm Tours, on the Purcellville Artisan Tour or at Loudoun Farms Marketplace: https://loudounfarms.org/marketplace/)
Of course, agri-businesses can also mean food, and western Loudoun produces artisanal foodstuffs aplenty. While much of it is sold at weekend farmers markets at One Loudoun, Brambleton and downtown Leesburg, you can also pick up fresh produce from rustic roadside farm stores any day of the week in the west—if you know where to look. Head to western Loudoun’s town of Hillsboro for fresh produce, meats, vegetables and dairy from Stoneybrook Farm Market. Located in the heart of this historic town, the market features products from its 45-acre farm as well as sandwiches, salads and baked goods that are perfect to grab and go for a picnic at a nearby winery.
Over on Hamilton Station Road between Route 7 and 9 near Hamilton, is the jewel-boxed sized roadside store of Loudoun’s Spring House Farms, offering the tastiest grass-fed beef and pork and poultry products in Loudoun. The store is so small you may have trouble getting a slab of bone-in rib eyes out the door. But small or not, like other agri-businesses out west, the shop nourishes the soul.
For more information on agritourism businesses in Loudoun, visit www.visitloudoun.org
2020 Silver Lining ~ It still looks to be good year for wine
“Wine is a living thing. It is made, not only of grapes and yeasts, but of skill and patience. When drinking it remember that to the making of that wine has gone, not only the labor and care of years, but the experience of centuries.”
It is hard to imagine that we will be capable of separating reflections of Virginia’s 2020 wine vintage from the diverse, disruptive, and frightening global events of the year. While COVID has not and will not change the way we grow or make wine, it has changed nearly everything else about the wine business, in a way that might not last forever, but will surely echo into the coming years. What will this year’s wines remind us of?
There have been some silver linings in a year which has included so much sickness and uncertainty. We’ve seen a heightened mindfulness of the value and benefits of small business, local employers, and the cyclical nature of local industry. The call to arms surrounding small restaurants during the early days of the COVID shutdown was a great beacon of hope, as was the increase in CSAs and purchases from small farms, the reevaluation of regional food supply, and the explosion of the new “curbside pickup” from businesses that nobody would argue are essential to survival, but that most people would argue are businesses we desire to be surrounded by, and that enrich our community.
It may be naïve to believe that this perspective will outlast the virus itself, but I am hopeful that the disruption to the economy will remind us of the truly profound benefits to keeping money circulating locally, the impact that a dollar spent on a business that employs the community, that pays taxes in the community, and that improves the community can have. The wallet has always been a powerful way of voting.
Loudoun County is a beautiful place. In a fertile valley surrounded by rocky, well-drained ranges, it is a place that has a lot to offer from an agricultural standpoint. I am fortunate to work in an industry that is in many ways the very epitome of community. The very idea of wine, for most people, is communal – enjoying a bottle together over meals, sharing in a discussion, relaxing with a friend; down, in fact, to the very vessel itself: a single bottle from which many people drink.
When my wife and I first opened our tasting room in Loudoun County, the power of the community was palpable. It was bigger and more touching and more important to my life than I would have ever guessed. We viewed our industry, suddenly, as not just the winemakers and vineyard workers, but the brewers, vegetable farmers, distillers, cheesemakers, chefs, waitstaff, hosts and hostesses, Bed & Breakfast owners, caterers, and on and on. Our industry is everybody working to keep Loudoun County expressive of itself, an interesting place to live and visit, and a region using its resources in a way that is unique and good.
With the shutdown of early 2020, our community became a true force. Guests, customers, friends, neighbors—our entire mailing list reached out with support simply because they did not want us to be gone. They—and I—wanted businesses to exist that make their community rich and interesting and unique.
We are now, as I write this, picking the last grapes from the 2020 vintage. This vintage has, for Walsh Family Wine, been a great success—we enjoyed a relatively dry spring and summer, and, ignoring a frustrating week or two in August, a dry picking schedule, which is something we aren’t always fortunate to have in Virginia. For us, that equates to wines which are more expressive, more dense, and in general of a higher quality than when we struggle to ripen under wet conditions. These types of growing seasons are a blessing, and they give us something that, in a small way, expresses this place.
I am often asked what my favorite part of growing wine is. I have had many answers over the years, but this year, my favorite part is time. Growing wine connects you to time in two very distinct ways. First, there is the immediate: the daily, hourly, weekly, both through the close connection to the subtleties of weather and also the tasks themselves. Pruning a vineyard requires working on a new vine every five minutes, over and over and over again, for months. Shoot thinning is the same. Hedging the same. Each task is similar in that it requires a marathoner’s patience. Meanwhile, similar to the marathoner, you become intimate with the weather, sunrise and sunset, shifts in wind, each new blossom.
Then, there is an annual viewpoint of time. Each year is a single block. For a winemaker, a vintage is an agglomeration of all those circadian moments, bundled into a phrase like “2020” and expressed as a bottle of wine. That wine reflects a lot of things: the weather, the site, the grape, some new winemaking techniques, perhaps, and the blend put together by the team. And, for the rest of any winemaker’s life, that is how the year will be remembered. In that bottle, reflecting those things.
We are just beginning to press new red wines from the 2020 vintage. They will now go into barrel where they will mature and develop. In this COVID year, this year that has given us so much to remember in a negative way and not want to look back on, there are two pieces of time that I hope we hold on to with reverence. First, let us remember the community, the understanding and cooperation of our community and neighbors. And second, the wines. Let’s enjoy them for years to come.
“At Walsh Family Wine we produce vineyard-specific wines from our vineyard sites in Loudoun County, “ says Nate Walsh. “We believe strongly that the aspect of wine growing most worth pursuing is the sense of place. As such, our vineyards are managed and our wine is made with methods that we believe best showcase the strengths and idiosyncrasies of our vineyards. This is an endeavor that we believe will keep us busy for a lifetime. We farm 50 acres of wine grapes on five distinct sites, all in Loudoun County, Virginia.
The featured wine at Walsh Family Wine this winter is their 2019 Dutchman’s Creek Cabernet Franc, a bold, full-bodied red blend from Dutchman’s Creek Vineyard in Lovettsville, VA. For more information, or to plan a visit, please visit www.walshfamilywine.com.
Nate Walsh is a career winegrower. Starting as a cellar rat at Horton Vineyards in Central, Virginia, he went on to work in vineyards and wineries in the Willamette Valley and Central Otago before spending seven years as the winemaker and vineyard manager for Sunset Hills Vineyard in Purcellville, Virginia, during a time of large expansion. It was during this time that he began searching for a site from which he knew one could create truly premium Virginia wine.