The Farm’s Story
Some of the best things in life aren’t planned. When Clara Zander found a 200 acre rental property in the fall of 2019, 30 minutes outside of Asheville, North Carolina, it was settled in that moment that she would start farming there. That property birthed what came to be known as The Wild Way Farm.
After a year of homesteading and learning more about the land, in 2021 Clara started producing FDA inspected, pasture raised quail, farrow to finish pastured pork, and tri-purpose chickens (for meat, eggs, and feathers). In the middle of 2022, the landowner decided to sell the property, and by November of the same year, the farm had been relocated just 4 minutes from the original property, to a small, steep, 10 acre parcel.
In order to move the farm, she decided to dissolve the pastured quail operation; with no available pastureland it wouldn’t be possible to raise the birds to the same standard of care. She also greatly reduced the size of the pig operation for similar reasons.
After months of shifting perspectives and approaches and trying to integrate with the new landscape without success, Clara and The Wild Way Farm were offered a new home at Timshel Wildland, the demonstration site of Robinia Institute and the Virginia Savory Institute hub.
At the beginning of April, 2023 The Wild Way Farm landed at Timshel Wildland. Here, the two entities are working together to rewild the landscape, and integrate their cattle, chicken, and pig operations to benefit the whole, all while pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a truly regenerative system.
Meet Your Farmer
Clara Zander is the farm’s founder and operator, and has been raising poultry since the age of 9. She spent her summers during high school working at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in New York, learning as much as she could about pasture based livestock production and farm to table eating. She was hooked.
During and after high school, Clara spent time traveling around the US, 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. How do we produce food in a way that not only protects the natural world, but encourages it to thrive? How do we develop a farm system that supports our local human communities, as well as our wild ones? How do we use ecological farming practices to mitigate human related impacts to our climate?
Clara continued to look for answers to these questions at Warren Wilson College, where she earned degrees in Sustainable Agriculture and Conservation Biology. Her senior thesis studied the impacts of rotationally grazing chickens in forested ecosystems in Western North Carolina.
In the fall of 2019, Clara found the land that would become The Wild Way Farm, 200 acres nestled into a cove in Little Sandy Mush.
In the spring of 2021 she founded The Wild Way Farm LLC, with the intention of farming with respect to the natural world, and creating 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.
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?
In the fall of 2022, Clara lost the land that gave rise to the farm. After facing the land access crises that currently exists in the Asheville area head-on, she moved briefly to a 10 acre parcel in the same valley as the original farm.
Thanks to Daniel and Morgan Griffeth, the co-owners and founders of Timshel Wildland, the demonstration site and home of Robinia Institute and the Virginia Savory Institute hub, Clara has found a new home for herself and The Wild Way Farm in Wingina, Virginia.
Farming alone is a daunting task, and she is now blessed to be able to share land, ideas, and growth with these two incredible individuals.
She is grateful for the opportunity to live a life connected to the natural world, and to provide the best possible life and care to the animals she tends, while subsequently rewilding herself, her animals, and the landscape.
