Members of this year’s 72-hour Permaculture Design Course at Fern Hollow Farm.

Members of this year’s 72-hour Permaculture Design Course at Fern Hollow Farm.

SOMERSET – Sustainable farming has boomed in recent years, resulting in a strong network of farmers with environmentally friendly practices. For Somerset and the surrounding area, Fern Hollow Farm offers a model of sustainability for the community.

Born in 2015 from a small yet successful fundraising campaign that earned 114% of its goal, the farm was the idea of couple and business partners Olivia and Erik Peterson. After meeting each other at a permaculture design course at Solid Ground Farm just outside of Athens, the couple was inspired to start a farm that was structured around permaculture.

“(Permaculture) is a design philosophy, especially used in agriculture, to design really harmonious systems that kind of balance care for the Earth and care for people,” Olivia said, noting how she grew up in Somerset and didn’t really expect to stay in the area until the opportunity of a permaculture farm arose. “Having a living laboratory for this kind of design was what we wanted to do, and so we started (the farm) after that.”

When it was initially started, the farm hosted a planting event and was able to plant 92 fruit and nut trees in one day with the help of about 30 volunteers. Now Fern Hollow has an incredibly integrated farming system, where chickens, ducks and sheep fertilize the land and certain plant species, rather than pesticides, are used to ward off pests. Erik explained that while agriculture is essential to human civilization, it’s also one of the most polluting human activities.

“I think the question that (permaculture) poses is… what if we grew food in a way that was harmonious with the ecosystem and built community and it was healthy, nutrient-dense food that supported communities and the ecosystem in the process?” Erik said, explaining how conventional orchards commonly use fungicides and herbicides, huge amounts of water, and had a large energy footprint, ultimately being toxic to the environment and humans. “Our ‘Food Forest’ here requires maybe less than two weeks of work per year and produces nutritionally-dense food that works with the ecosystem,” he explained.”Because it mimics nature, it creates an inherent balance.”

Native pollinator plants, medicinal plants and even endangered plants are grown at the farm, and Fern Hollow is working on becoming a United Plant Sanctuary. The Natural Resource Conservation Service also recently gave the farm two high tunnels through a grant, and Fern Hollow plans on putting those tunnels to good use by planting winter greens.

“I think both of our backgrounds really led us to wanting to create solutions for a lot of the big problems we see, whether it’s climate change, food insecurity or just the disconnection between people and the natural world,” Olivia said. “We really thought this farm could be a solution for a lot of those things… We’re a farm that is trying to ‘grow community,’ trying to connect people back with nature and good food.”

Fern Hollow also practices permaculture through a ‘people care’ lens, expanding efforts over previous years to bring people out to the farm and connect them with their food and land. Olivia and Erik work as part of a teaching team to educate visitors through classes and workshops on topics ranging from beekeeping and herbal medicine to mushroom production and farm yoga. An intensive permaculture design course was recently launched in August, where visitors travelled from as far as Washington to stay at the farm for 12 days, and Fern Hollow plans to host another course next year. To top it off, the farm also offers design and installation services for permaculture systems, and hopes to get a geodesic dome built for events and workshops to be held in.

In the 2020 season, Olivia estimates that Fern Hollow had a total of about 1,200 visitors, which is high community engagement considering the pandemic. Visitors from outside of the region really enjoy not just visiting the farm, but checking out Somerset and the surrounding area’s gorgeous trees and rolling hills while they’re in the area. As agritourism grows, Fern Hollow hopes that agritourists increasingly stop by the farm to attend classes or even just look around, especially as the apparent need for sustainability grows.

“Over the last two years, it has become apparent how inherently fragile centralized food production is, and I think that a lot of people are looking more toward local farms and what they can do in their own backyards,” Erik said, calling it a kind of wake-up call. “And it’s so great to see all these other producers showing up in our neighborhood and in the region. We’ve been getting together with other local growers and having potlucks and we’ve flirted with the idea of creating a food Co-op, as well, which would bring a lot of synergy to make local food competitive with big food in terms of sourcing for restaurants and consumers.”

Next year, Fern Hollow also hopes to work with their network of Perry County growers and put together a ‘farm food truck’ to cooperatively source produce from local farmers with similar ethics. Farm-to-table meals are also on the menu for Fern Hollow, a program where farms provide produce for community members to come together and share and learn about food over a meal. An open house event is also on the horizon for next season, and the farm is excited because previous open houses have been a full day of music, food and different sustainable workshops bustling with around 200 community members.

Primarily, though, Fern Hollow hopes to become a hub for the community in the coming year, and will offer scholarships for local people in order to incentivize sustainable practices when it comes to food production and community building.

“A great quote by one of the co-founders of permaculture says, ‘Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple,’” Erik said. “... ‘The only ethical choice is to take responsibility for our lives and the lives of our children.’”

Learn more out at www.fernhollow.org.

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