|
Local Farmer Brings New Taste to Cafeteria
by Matt Davis
Kathy and Dewain Mackey (photo collage)
Registered cattle and lettuce
|
Lettuce grown in water? Dewain Mackey has been in the farming business nearly all of his life. Now he is getting into a technology phase that is bringing a lot of recognition in Madison County.
Mars Hill College students are now eating his locally-grown lettuce instead of lettuce trucked in to the college cafeteria from elsewhere.
Mackey is a local farmer who lives on Fred Holcolmbe road about six miles north of the college. When Mackey is not busy with the cattle farm, he is busy with his lettuce, bib lettuce. This type of lettuce is grown hydroponically, which means it is grown in water instead of in the ground. This also means that it has no herbicides or pesticides, so it is completely harmless. He uses a greenhouse and can produce year round.
Mackey took out a loan to build his greenhouse after doing a cost breakdown analysis with Carolina Farm Credit, which was interested in financing a greenhouse. The lender had worked with a farmer in Clay County who had grown produce hydroponically. There is also a farmer in Yancey County who grows hydroponic lettuce. He was providing it to the Yancey County school system until a new food manager decided that bib lettuce was too expensive. That farmer has currently shut down his greenhouse for the winter but plans to reopen in the spring.
Mackey has been growing this lettuce since April 2004. He knew that lots of schools and institutions were using it, so he decided to "check out the Internet and see what I could find about hydroponic growing and how accessible it really was." Since he knew that the tobacco industry was in decline, he decided to concentrate on something else.
He originally heard about hydroponic growing through the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project. ASAP is a non-profit organization that has become deeply engaged in helping tobacco farmers begin to plant something else.
Once the lettuce really started taking off, Mackey started marketing his product to Madison County Schools. Once he had all of the schools in the county buying his product, he thought about supplying Mars Hill College. Aubrey Raper, who is an adjunct sociology instructor at the college, a farmer himself, and good friends with Mackey, connected Mackey with Kenny Barefoot, director of the cafeteria. Barefoot liked the lettuce and decided that, even though it cost a little more, he would use it because it was so cleanly grown. Barefoot also likes the idea that the product is grown locally. He would prefer to serve more local produce just so the college and the community can be more close-knit.
Before Barefoot could serve the lettuce, he had to go through Chartwells, the company that provides the cafeteria food. Chartwells is owned by a company named Compass Group, and another company called Foster-Caviness Foodservice in Charlotte provides the food to Compass Group. Barefoot had to go all the way to the top to get this local lettuce approved for the Mars Hill cafeteria. He also had to make sure that Mackey carried proper indemnity insurance covering his product.
Since only ten percent of cafeteria purchases is produce, Barefoot knew that he had nothing to loose. He has been serving Mackey's lettuce in the cafeteria since October 26. Barefoot is planning to have Mackey provide iceberg and romaine lettuce as well.
HOME
| 
