This article originally published at The Assembly.
At Ten Mothers Farm in Cedar Grove, just north of Hillsborough in Orange County, Gordon Jenkins and Vera Fabian produce 50 to 60 varieties of vegetables, with the help of four full-time employees.
All but 5 percent of its output is sold to 300 families living within 30 minutes of Ten Mothers through a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), or produce subscription, program.
The farm grossed an astonishing $410,000 last year, despite the team taking off most of a hot, humid August. To put that figure in perspective, N.C. State University suggests $24,000 as an example annual goal for a hypothetical startup CSA.
While Ten Mothers’ financial success may be unique, in this state, the format facilitating it is not. Small-scale, intensive organic farming is happening across North Carolina. Cedar Grove alone is home to at least four other CSAs of similar scale.
But what sets Ten Mothers apart is how the two-acre farm has perfected the model to a degree that local food experts say they rarely encounter. Orange County agricultural economic development officer Mike Ortosky called Ten Mothers “the gold standard for CSAs,” saying he’d never seen any better.
In a sector in which it’s common for half of the customers to quit after one purchase, Fabian calculates their retention rate at 87 percent, a result of offering customizable boxes, staying in close contact with subscribers, and keeping a careful eye on efficiencies and crop yields.
From the Ground Up
Cedar Grove is more a state of mind with a rural post office than a geographic place with legal boundaries. Its bucolic, slightly rolling terrain has been at the heart of Orange County’s agricultural economy for more than 150 years. While there are still a few larger conventional farms raising grain, hay, soybeans, and even some tobacco, the land is now mostly occupied by smaller-scale farms and mini-mansions.
Affordable farming sites are increasingly difficult to come by in the Triangle, but there has been marked growth in CSAs and other micro farms. A glance across Cedar Grove, and on westward to Efland, reveals innovative small farms such as Elysian Fields, Open Door, and Sugar Hill bringing high-quality produce to market.
Statewide, direct-to-consumer agricultural sales rose more than 20 percent between 2017 and 2022, from just under $70 million to almost $87 million, according to the U.S. Agricultural Census. Mexico provides one out of every four fruits and vegetables sold in the U.S., so if President Donald Trump’s tariff plans cause prices to jump, small-farm sales could get even more popular.
Ken Dawson and Libby Outlaw jump-started the area’s organic growing movement at Maple Spring Gardens, a former tobacco farm, about 40 years ago. While the spouses have one child still on the farm, their daughter Sunshine, their operation sits atop Cedar Grove’s family tree. Ten Mothers is among its descendants. Jenkins and Fabian—also a married couple, both of whom just turned 40—spent two years working at Maple Spring Gardens.
Nowadays, Ten Mothers Farm—named for an Indian folk saying that “garlic is as good as 10 mothers” (and a 1980 Les Blank film about the plant)—Jenkins and Fabian host eager would-be farmers from as far away as England and as close as Elon University.
Those who can’t visit can watch YouTube videos going over every aspect of the operation. The videos detail what Ten Mothers grows, the tools used to grow it, and the software used to sell it. Last year’s net profit, after wages and expenses, was just under 1 percent, which is plowed back into operations.
In one short video, they explained how to “flip a bed,” or harvest a full 100-foot row of one vegetable and start up another crop on the same row within two hours. Showing the couple in action illustrates why their painstaking approach is another secret to their success.
Jumping Through Hoops
The couple met in Berkeley, California, in 2009 and bonded over a love of food while working under farm-to-table guru Alice Waters. Jenkins served as a chef at Waters’ renowned Chez Panisse, and Fabian was an educator in the Edible Schoolyard, teaching children how to garden and cook their own food.
Three years later, having relocated to Brooklyn, New York, they decided to trade city life for farming. Pursuing their dream led the couple back to California for a season, then to Maine, where they worked on Four Season Farm under two masters of small-scale, year-round, organic market farming, Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch.
At Four Season, Jenkins and Fabian realized they were enamored of life in a connected community in which people looked out for others’ welfare. They also learned they didn’t want to be isolated in a rural area, so they banded together with three friends to find affordable, suitable land near places with high-performing public schools and lots of locavores, including Fabian’s hometown of Chapel Hill.
“The demand for this type of high-quality food seems bottomless.”
Vera Fabian, Ten Mothers founder
They farmed on rented land in Orange County for three years before finally locating a 26-acre homestead across the county on Auburn Lane, eight miles north of Hillsborough.
The pair initially planned on selling their output at farmers markets, but they found that the region’s two most successful markets in Carrboro and Durham were closed to new vegetable growers. So, they reasoned they would be better off business-wise with a CSA. With investments from 34 friends, the couple launched their venture.
On a rainy day in December 2018, Fabian and Jenkins disassembled their hoop houses, a type of lightweight greenhouse, and resituated them on Auburn Lane. After all, 124 members of the community they had forged were anticipating vegetable boxes in May.
Mounting Demand
The search for water began immediately. Fabian and Jenkins brought in a local dowser, or “water witch,” who’d had some success at four other nearby sites. She pointed to a site at the woods’ edge, but the driller refused to take his rig across a muddy field for fear it would bog down, so they had to settle for her second choice. That well yielded less than two gallons a minute—only enough to serve the house that they hadn’t built yet.
Another dowser was summoned to bring his water-finding stick from the North Carolina mountains. He picked the same site that the driller balked at. A CSA subscriber in 2020 offered to finance the drilling of this second well with “vegetable collateral,” by paying in advance for 10 years of weekly vegetables.
They hit a gusher at 300 feet, producing plenty of water to irrigate the farm and produce highly desirable vegetables.
“The demand for this type of high-quality food seems bottomless,” Fabian said.
The couple doesn’t have the time, space, or urge to expand the operation beyond the 300 families they currently serve. Instead they focus on efficiency throughout the CSA year, starting in April with mostly leafy greens and root crops, through the more typical spring snap peas and various lettuces, then tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, beans, squash, and eggplant in the warmer months, with more greens, broccoli in the fall and winter months.
The weekly produce box costs $37 and contains an average of seven crops. It’s supposed to feed a household of one to three vegetable-loving people.
The couple walk the fields on Thursdays with their 3-year-old son, Cal, and staff members to determine what’s ready to harvest. On Fridays, they post the choices online for CSA subscribers, along with a newsletter with recipes, illustrations of tasty-looking preparations, and updates on farm activity.
Their online store offers opportunities to swap items subscribers don’t want for produce they don’t grow, supplied by nearby farms with which they have agreements. Don’t like kohlrabi? You can instead order more familiar potatoes or onions provided by Open Door Farm, located just down the road. Want bread? They’ll source it from Boulted Bread in Raleigh. Grits, pancake mix, wheat berries, and flour are other add-ons from Red Tail Grains, about 18 miles away in southwest Orange County.
Orders are tabulated and finalized with CSA-specific software, which also prints customized labels for each box and retains subscribers’ histories, helping Jenkins and Fabian to fine-tune production each year.
Still, there are some challenges that the farm can’t overcome. Ten Mothers cautions on its website that if your family is not committed to eating a lot of vegetables, this CSA is not the right fit for you.
Healthy Returns
Ten Mothers Farm is divided between open fields and 11 unheated hoop houses. These Gothic-arched, polyethylene-and-aluminum structures, also known as high tunnel greenhouses, are readily available in kit form and can be erected by two people in a day.
Ten Mothers’ more elaborate, larger hoop house, dubbed “the Mothership,” contains its pack-and-wash house, tool storage, cooler, and seed-starting area. Fabian notes the Mothership is far cheaper than the conventional barn they keep meaning to build.
Weekly van deliveries of their ever-changing cast of vegetables are spread across 11 sites in Carrboro, Chapel Hill, Hillsborough, and Durham. Each personalized, labeled, reusable box contains a compostable inner bag, easily removed from the box; customers flatten the boxes for retrieval.
One of those pickup sites is a front porch belonging to Lucy Gorham, a loyal customer in Carrboro. Gorham receives a food discount in exchange for use of her porch, which she donates to subsidize memberships for those who need financial assistance. When Jakob Gollon came by Gorham’s place for his weekly produce, he praised Ten Mothers as “by far, the best-run operation with the highest quality produce from any CSA I’ve been with.”
Ten Mothers has a 200-person waiting list for 2026. If that sounds remarkable, it also is to Fabian and Jenkins.
“We’re doing better financially than we ever thought possible,” Fabian said.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly said Ken Dawson and Libby Outlaw have one child. Only one of their children works at the farm.
Blair L. Pollock is a 45 year resident of North Carolina who first moved here in 1976 for grad school at UNC-Chapel Hill. He initiated public recycling programs for Orange County in 1987 and, in retirement, is an avid but mediocre vegetable and fruit gardener.