When Dorothy Batten graduated from UVA’s Darden School of Business, most of her friends headed for Wall Street, careers in banking and marketing. She had a different destination.
The Oakencroft farm and winery were for sale, and Batten wanted to save the 250-acre site.
“My parents were friends with the previous owners – the Rogens – so I always knew this property and always loved it. When it came on the market it was not under easement, had a lot of building rights on it, and I just did not want a developer to get ahold of the property.”
The land had been used to raise cattle and grapes, but Batten – who had a long-standing interest in conservation – had another idea: an approach called regenerative agriculture.
“Luckily Logan was already doing sustainable cattle management, and I just said to him, ‘Let’s just try things,'" Batten recalls.
Logan Collins is the farm manager. He knows a lot about how to enrich land with cover crops, compost and mineral supplements – how to rotate cattle and sheep across the property – allowing them to graze and leave fertilizer behind.
And it’s that rich soil that he hopes will help the grape vines, pear and apple trees and berries to ward off pests and survive weather extremes.
“A healthy plant can defend itself," Collins says. "We just need to give them the tools to do that.”
“The problem is when a vineyard has been sprayed for 40 years, they don’t have any defenses,” Batten adds.
So they till to support nutrients that will, in turn, support plants.
"If there’s no oxygen down in the ground, you’re not going to have good fungal growth. You’re not going to have the microbes that you want to grow," Collins explains. "The goal is just to make a more resilient system, no matter what happens.”
And they’ve planted thousands of trees in former pastures, providing shade and holding soil in place when the land floods.
“Last September, take for instance, we had two 100-year storms within five days of each other," says Batten. "Our property is like a big bowl, and we have all these streams that feed into it, and so you have to manage all that rainwater that comes in at one time.”
Which brings us to the beavers. A pair had constructed a dam along one of the streams, prompting Batten and Collins to build two more.
“Creating natural brush breaks in the stream, so the flooding gets further out in the fields and gets absorbed, and then hopefully raise the water table so that during the drought times there’s more access to water," Batten says.
They have two solar arrays on the property – providing power to the farm, and neighbors are invited to contribute to their compost-making effort. Batten offers farm tours to the community and to guests at the stylish new conference center she created in an old cattle barn. The winery’s tasting is busy each weekend, and dozens of people have joined the farm club which delivers wine, grass fed beef and produce each spring, summer and fall. One other, more personal plus – Batten says she loves living at Oakencroft.
“Listening to the bird life in the mornings, and listening to the neighbor’s rooster, and listening to the turkeys. I can hear the cows, I can hear the sheep, I can hear everything from my back door, and it’s just the most beautiful symphony!”
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
