A Farm for the Future

By Jim Morrill

For Ashton Thompson ’13, it all began with an obsession — and a chance encounter. The obsession was aquaponics, a method of growing plants in water enriched with fish nutrients. The encounter was with a woman named Judy Carpenter.

At an aquaculture conference in New Bern, N.C., in 2013, Thompson overheard Carpenter say she was starting an aquaponics system at her farm in Stanly County, just northeast of Charlotte, N.C. Ashton told her, “I would work really hard for next to nothing.”

So two days after graduating with a degree in horticultural science, Thompson began working as a farmhand at what is now known as Juneberry Ridge. A decade later, at 34, the Stanly County native is the farm’s chief operating officer.

Juneberry Ridge is one of the state’s most unusual farms and a burgeoning destination in North Carolina’s growing agritourism industry. Covering 750 acres, it practices regenerative agriculture, a method aiming to improve the land rather than deplete it. Most plants grow in greenhouses. Tilapia swim in tanks near the produce they help fertilize. Sheep and chickens roam in movable enclosures. Juneberry also hosts concerts, weddings, trapshooting and weekend getaways.

Education is part of the mission at Juneberry, which Thompson calls “a living classroom.” That’s true for him as well as the students and farmers who come to learn about everything from the ecological cycle of honeybees to regenerative farming. “There’s nothing more exciting to me than being able to learn something,” he says.

“. . . if we’re successful, we’re going to change the way the world grows.”
 

Thompson is also a teacher. He leads tours of the farm, and this year he’ll help teach a class on holistic farm management. A few years ago, he helped come up with a mission statement for Juneberry Ridge: “To nourish, educate and build a better future.”

“We said if we’re successful,” Thompson says, “we’re going to change the way the world grows.”