Weather helps boost farm visits

By Kirk Ross
Staff Writer

CHEESE IT — Volunteers dish out the cheese samples for some of the thousands who visited Chapel Hill Creamery and other local farms on this year’s Piedmont Farm Tour. Photo by Kirk Ross

Nothing like good weather to boost prospects around the farm, and for the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association’s annual spring farm tour a beautiful weekend certainly helped.

Roland McReynolds, CFSA’s executive director, said the tour is going to be a record breaker.

“It was a fantastic weekend, outstanding for CFSA and for sustainable agriculture in our area,” McReynolds said. “We’re still tallying up the numbers but we had 2,000 people on the tour last year and 7,400 farm visits, and we expect to far exceed those numbers.”

Volunteer hours were up as well, McReynolds said with more than 600 volunteer hours going into the effort. CSFA should also see a sizable increase in revenue from the $20,000 it took in last year.

“It looks like we’re going to break all the records,” McReynolds said. “This was just a great community effort.”