Shiloh Avery is co-owner of Tumbling Shoals Farm in Wilkes County, North Carolina for the past 18 years and will be co-presenting a workshop at ASAP’s 2025 Business of Farming Conference (Feb. 22, 8:30 A.M. – 4:00 P.M. at Blue Ridge Community College in Flat Rock, NC). Along with Jason Roehrig, the workshop titled,”You Can’t Do It All: Hiring and Keeping a Productive Team,” will take a deep dive into employee recruitment, retention, and management.
When did Tumbling Shoals begin and how long have you been farming?
We (Shiloh and Jason) started farming on this land in 2008—this is our 18th season. Before that, we had a practice farm on borrowed land with borrowed equipment in the triangle area. That is where we grew up in our farming career and we were selling at the Durham Farmers Market. We went to Central Carolina Community College for their farming program and found ourselves surrounded by various small sustainable farms making a living off growing food on a small scale. We have been farming for just over 20 years now!
How does having a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) impact your business?
We really like the CSA model, especially now that we transitioned to a customizable CSA that folks can pay for weekly. From a farmers perspective, you know how much to grow and you have folks committed upfront. It’s nice to know when I am planting seeds in the greenhouse that there is already someone who will consume that. From the customer’s perspective, it’s really freeing—we are bringing local organic vegetables close to them, but it’s wide open in that they can skip a week if their fridge is still full with veggies from the previous week and know that they will hold well because they are so fresh. They never have to get something they don’t like and they can pick what’s in their box based on season. It’s a great partnership between the farmer and community. In my humble opinion, customizable is the only way to go. These days, having customizable software has made it easier for us—before that came into play, we were going to phase out our CSA program because it was getting too challenging to manage.
Our CSA is about 60% of our production. We are growing, both in terms of space and number of products, in our team and facilities, but also in our CSA. We are hoping to move towards a mostly CSA farm in the next 10 years. We like farmers markets and it’s a good way to connect face to face, but it can be more unpredictable than a CSA.
Can you give us a sneak peak into your Business of Farming Conference workshop: You Can’t Do it All?
My role on the farm, mainly, is what I title as Happiness Manager. I will talk about strategies to keep and retain a good, solid, and high performing team along with what I have learned in the behavioral economics world. With an intentional shift in our thinking, we first thought of ourselves as farmers growing produce but really we are farmers growing people—other farmers. As we bring people into this team, we share a passion for feeding people and growing food and we want to keep those people happy, healthy, engaged, and here at the farm. Currently, we have an amazing and high functioning team—we like to think it wasn’t just luck that people have stuck around. Part of that is our intentional shift to focusing on our management skills and making sure our employees are cared for, so I will be sharing some of those strategies and breaking them down. Jason will cover more of the legal, tax, and recruitment elements including where to find information and how to deal with payroll, but really this workshop is focused on retention and employee management.
Do you have any tips for new and beginning farmers?
Something we love about farming is the learning curve never really goes away. In giving tips to new and beginning farmers, I would say if you are going to grow your farm beyond yourself or immediate family (without employees), think earlier about building your management skills. Even now, there is a lot of business and production support, but you will end up managing people, which is a skill to highly consider developing. I think it made a world of difference for us. We wish we turned to it sooner, but are grateful for the paradigm shift. We wanted to have people stick around and not have to rehire every season, so we had to build our skills in managing people, not just in farming. Yes, we were solving problems with plants, but we need to be able to solve problems with people too. My advice would be to seek out those skills earlier.
What are you excited about for this growing season ahead?
We have so much going on and so much to be excited about! Today, we were covering a heated greenhouse. We have access to more land this year and to a new growing space so we are growing a wider variety of crops that we usually are able to. Being who I am and what my role is, I am very excited about my team! They just amaze me. They have really stepped up as we have grown, taking on more responsibility and roles to help the farm thrive together.