Meet Your Farmer
Curious where Clara is now? Click the button to learn more.
Clara Zander is the farm’s founder and operator, and has been working in sustainable agriculture for 17 years. She started by breeding rare poultry at the age of 9, and at 14 began working at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, where she spent four seasons learning about pastured livestock production and farm to table eating.
During and after high school, Clara spent time working on farms in Martha’s Vineyard, Hawaii, Virginia, and around New York state. She was fascinated by the intersection of ecology and conservation biology with sustainable agriculture. She learned more about livestock production and dairy, market gardening, perennial fruit production, organic vegetable production and the operating systems that make these systems function and thrive.
Clara attended Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, a work college where she became a certified heavy equipment operator, worked on the Garden Crew, maintained her own full diet homestead off-campus, and earned degrees in Conservation Biology and Sustainable Agriculture. Her senior thesis studied the impacts of rotationally grazing chickens in forested ecosystems in Western North Carolina.
In the spring of 2020 she founded The Wild Way Farm LLC on 200 acres in Little Sandy Mush, North Carolina. She intended to develop a farm system that would not only provide high quality meats, eggs, and feathers to her local community, but would challenge the traditional sustainable farm model.
She allowed questions like these to guide her operation: What does it look like when we try to close every loop in our farm system? What happens when we utilize livestock breeds that are tailored to our land, and how do we develop that connection over time through a focus on epigenetics? How finely can you tune a farm system to the land it occupies? And how can those adjustments to the typical regenerative farm model benefit the farm business?
Clara dissolved the farm after the 2023 season, following severe challenges related to land access.
While she is no longer actively farming, Clara now works as a consultant through Wild Way Consulting LLC, where she helps other stewards to begin and improve their operations. Clara continues to utilize her lifetime of experience to develop systems around the country that are resilient, dynamic, and unique, to support not only the farmers that run them but the environment that supports the operation.