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6 Jul, 2017

Music For The Ears, And Food Security For The Neighbors Raising Awareness For Carolina Farm Trust Initiative

By |2020-09-09T10:47:24+00:00July 6, 2017|News|0 Comments

Charlotte farmer Paul Brewington is featured in the documentary “The Farmer that Feeds Us,” which highlights community efforts to eradicate food insecurity. A fundraiser will be held July 8 in Historic West End with the soul/funk band Groove 8.

How much do Charlotteans think about food?
Carolina Farm Trust is bringing a feast to Historic West End on July 8 to raise awareness and funds for food security. Party with a Purpose is a day party at Mosaic Village designed to engage the community regardless of budget. Local soul/funk band Groove 8 will perform, and local beer will be available from Three Spirits Brewery.

Later that evening, the Wadsworth Estate serves as the backdrop for a feast benefiting Brewington Farms.

“In case one event wasn’t stressful enough, we decided to do two, because I really wanted to make sure that we incorporated the whole community,” […]

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5 Jul, 2017

West End Event Will Celebrate Farms And Fun

By |2020-09-09T10:47:24+00:00July 5, 2017|Farmers, News|0 Comments

Pack your lawn chair and head to the West End this Saturday for a day of fun and food that will help support local farmers.

It’s a great opportunity to meet, greet, and eat while helping to improve food access in the city’s underserved areas.

While development is brisk on the west side of Charlotte, “food deserts” remain. Farmer Paul Brewington is one of the anchor vendors of the newly established Rosa Parks Farmers Market that serves the area. He’s a vocal proponent for the foods that are still hard to obtain for too many residents. “There is a quite a difference between the taste of fresh produce that is grown locally or a hundred-mile radius; a few hours old versus three to seven days old,” he says.

Zack Wyatt of advocacy group Carolina Farm Trust is one of the event’s organizers. He says, […]

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24 Oct, 2015

Carolina Jubilee 2015

By |2020-09-09T10:47:24+00:00October 24, 2015|Carolina Jubilee, News|0 Comments

“The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946…Until then, were was all the food?  Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.” -Joel Salatin.

Every year, we loose an alarming amount of land to the continuous development of highways, shopping malls, and other urban developments leaving less and less land for acquisition and expansion for our farmers. If farmers can’t acquire, expand, and grow, but our population still continues to increase, where will we get our food?  It will come from overseas, not down the street. It will come from big factory farms that are hazardous to our environment, mistreat our animals, and change the genetic codes of our food… It will… And it is… Wendell Berry states, “To be interested in food, but not our food […]

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22 Sep, 2015

‘We Hope To Influence People By Our Actions’: How One North Carolinian Plans To Save Local Farmers In The Carolinas One Farm At A Time

By |2020-09-09T10:52:21+00:00September 22, 2015|Farmers, News|0 Comments

When Zack Wyatt was laid off from his government contracting job in December 2014, he was mad — mad at himself, mad at those in his life, mad at his circumstance. But it didn’t take too long before he said passion got the better of him.

At just 35-years-old years old, Wyatt is a husband, the father of five children and the founder of Carolina Farm Trust, a new nonprofit organization that aims to protect farmland, support farmers in the Carolinas and foster an ecosystem of sustainable living. As Wyatt has said, “agriculture is long-term,” but as North Carolina relinquished hundreds of thousands of acres to urban and suburban development over the past few years, sustainable farming seemed pretty bleak.

Carolina Farm Trust, Wyatt told TheBlaze, is different from other nonprofits in that the organization doesn’t approach local farmers and say, “We want to help you, but you’ve got to do […]

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22 Sep, 2015

Carolina Jubilee Is A Music Festival, A Beer Festival, A Wine Festival, A Farming Festival

By |2020-09-09T10:50:14+00:00September 22, 2015|Carolina Jubilee, News|0 Comments

Here’s the idea: Hold a music festival, raise money to buy 40+ acres of farmland in Lincolnton and lease it to a farmer. Then, next year, raise more money, buy more land and support more regional farmers. And on … and on …

Will it work? Zack Wyatt thinks so. And he wants to prove it to you.

Wyatt, 35, started the Carolina Farm Trust earlier this year with a mission to “protect farmland and foster an ecosystem of sustainable farming,” according to its website. The group hopes to buy land and lease it back to farmers, giving new farmers access to land and allowing existing farms to expand, and support farmers in any way it can.

The money for that, Wyatt hopes, will come from Carolina Jubilee, a music festival Oct. 16-17 at VanHoy Farms […]

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8 Sep, 2015

Do You Care About Local Sustainability? Introducing The Carolina Jubilee Farm Celebration

By |2020-09-09T10:47:24+00:00September 8, 2015|Carolina Jubilee, News|0 Comments

This adventure started for me at the beginning of the year. I got laid off from my job, a new start-up breaking into the wonderful world of government contracting. As with most people who get laid off, time suddenly slows down, the blinders come off and the reevaluation of your life starts to begin.

I grew up in a farming community. I loved and hated it. We had a pretty large garden, butchered a few hogs, got our eggs from our own chickens. My dad hunted and we got beef from the neighbors’ cattle farms. This is not to say we didn’t go to the grocery store, but when we did, it was to supplement what we did at home. I have fond memories of how I grew up and the only part I truly didn’t like as a kid was the work but those memories fade and only the […]

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28 Aug, 2015

Protecting The Land That Feeds Us

By |2020-09-09T10:47:24+00:00August 28, 2015|News|0 Comments

Are you savoring the farm to table movement? Love farmer’s markets? Think about this: While you are shopping and dining, North Carolina is losing more than 100,000 acres of farmland a year to development.

It is rare that reading an interview inspires me to schedule a meeting. Like you, I already have enough of those on my calendar. But when Zack Wyatt was interviewed on WBTV about his vision for Carolina Farm Trust on a Friday morning early in July, I couldn’t resist. And as it turns out he wanted to talk to me, too.

Recently I’ve been working on a plan for a Food Innovation District to catalyze the development of food businesses for many reasons, but one of them is to increase the demand for local food in the Piedmont region. We consume more than a half-billion dollars in produce […]

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24 Aug, 2015

Working for Change

By |2020-09-09T10:47:24+00:00August 24, 2015|News|0 Comments

Even though it seems like everyone’s lamenting pumpkin ale on the shelves and tweeting #StillSummer, fall is undeniably in the air. That means a lot of things: back-to-school and football1 and maybe even the urge to shift from the lazy days of me-centric beach time to a something a little more altruistic.

Volunteer opportunities don’t necessarily ebb and flow with the calendar, since worthwhile organizations could always use the help, but the 9/11 Day of Service is a big one for the Triangle. Coordinated by Activate Good, the initiative is in its fourth year and aims to bring together 2000 citizens in volunteerism and just plain kindness for more than 40 local causes.

As I was writing this story it occurred to me that volunteering can seem like the time equivalent of eating your veggies. Something that you do because you have […]

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10 Jul, 2015

Carolina Farm Trust plans to buy up land before developers do to preserve our local food movement

By |2020-09-09T10:47:24+00:00July 10, 2015|Farmers, News|0 Comments

I admit it; I buy produce at Trader Joe’s. Lots of it! I know it comes from Mexico and California and anywhere but here and the blueberries don’t even taste like blueberries, but I buy it because it’s there and it’s familiar and it’s cheap. And that’s precisely the consumer habit Zack Wyatt hopes to disrupt with Carolina Farm Trust, an early-stage organization aimed at protecting the farmland that feeds us here at home.

Every year North Carolina loses 100,000 acres of land to urban and suburban development making it harder and harder for existing farmers to expand their operations or for new entrepreneurial farmers to enter the business. Zack’s plan is for Carolina Farm Trust to buy up available land before developers do and then lease it back to farmers at reasonable rates.

Land is a limiting factor for a lot of family farmers, who live on a nationwide average income of […]

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6 Jul, 2015

Cornelius Resident Hopes To Cultivate Network of Farms, Fans of Good Food

By |2020-09-09T10:47:24+00:00July 6, 2015|News|0 Comments

By Dave Yochum. A 35-year-old Cornelius resident has established the Carolina Farm Trust to preserve not just farmland, but the agrarian way of life in North Carolina.

“We want to find farmers and match them up with land,” says Zack Wyatt, who lives with his wife  Abby and five children on Oakhurst Boulevard.

The brand-new Carolina Farm Trust aims to protect farmland, foster an ecosystem of sustainable farming and support the farm to table movement. Indeed, farmland is disappearing at the rate of 100,000 acres a year in North Carolina.

“We want to compete with developers for land, buy it, and lease it back to the farming community, to cover the taxes,” Wyatt says.

The fundraising goal for Carolina Farm Trust in the upcoming year is $300,000.

Wyatt is launching CFT with a bang. He plans to hold the Carolina Jubilee music and food festival Oct. 16-17 at Van Hoy Farms in Harmony, about 45 […]

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