Michael Meets a Tamworth

Michael & I just returned from a weekend in Athens, GA, visiting Farm 255 restaurant, and their affiliated biodynamic farm, Full Moon Farm. Farm 255 is a casual farm-to-table restaurant in the center of Athens. Athens is, first and foremost, a college town, and Farm 255 embraces that spirit: live music many nights a week, fairly low pricing, a full range of prices for liquor and beer, a modestly priced wine list, and Sunday brunch.

The restaurant seats about 150 Their kitchen is open and the bar is the physical highlight of the restaurant. The bar and much of the furniture was made by the owners.

The striking thing about this restaurant, that brought us out for a look, is that most of its food — including meat — comes from its own farm, which is a 5-acre biodynamic farm on a 100-acre research plot.

Jason Mann With Very Young Chicks

The project is led by Jason Mann, who is the farmer and a graduate student in Ecology at UGA. He also (if I have this right) teaches biodynamic farming classes to UGA students and members of the community [note, December 2009: one commenter says I have this wrong, although the commenter seems to have an agenda, so I take it with some grains of salt, see the comments below]. Several folks we ran into in Athens had worked a little on the farm or planned to, and were very excited about the project.

Rye used as a cover crop to provide carbon to the soil

Compost for the Tams

Jason (aka Jay) is a Cal grad from San Diego, and while he was in the Bay Area he worked developing a system of urban food gardens in San Francisco. That’s a project we intend to undertake in our area, so of course that was another reason for interest.

We spent our first night touring the restaurant, eating there, and observing its operations. Their food is excellent and unpretentious. We stayed long enough to watch the place transition into a live music club, where the tables and chairs were pushed out, the lights went very dim, the band started up, the place filled up with younger folks, and the beer started being poured in plastic cups. It was pretty amazing for such a high-minded but casual restaurant to be so fun to different crowds at different times of day.

The local Q

Michael outside the local Q

The Full Moon Farm property’s original smokehouse

Michael always takes his photo-ops by the smokehouse

Green Garlic

I ate this seconds after shooting it

The second day we briefly toured Athens, ate some barbecue, and then took an extensive farm tour, with lots of education about the many ecological practices at work in biodynamic farming, and lots of hanging out with charming cows and pigs. Then we made some sausage from the ground pork they have on hand from their farm’s pigs, and Jason cooked a meal made almost entirely with food we had picked that day — asparagus, lettuces, herbs. Needless to say, it was tasty as all get out.

We ate this too, it is Jason’s homemade jowl bacon

We observed a lot of interesting stuff, and much of the little stuff we learned will filter out through our place in the coming months. In the bigger scope, however, it is obvious we have a few key priorities.

1) Solidify supply of the meat we want to serve. This became a real challenge for us when the local processor closed, and we need to better meet it.

Posters from a charrette regarding developing organic agriculture in Georgia

2) Further develop our involvement with local farming. In part, this means continuing to work closely with our existing farm partnerships such as Wingshadows Hacienda. But also we think it’s time for us to begin developing a network of gardens and farms in the midst of our community, both in North Park and beyond.

Fun comes first

3) Bring the Linkery spirit to the people, more broadly than we do now. What really struck us about Farm 255 is that people are coming there for all sorts of
reasons — to see a band, to have a delicious brunch, to try some new bourbon, to have dinner with their family — but over time are exposed to the audacious and uplifting idea that a community can be in touch with its land and its food, and each other. In our current location, our small space has limited us to serving a fairly narrow segment of our community. But we believe that our expansion into our new space will allow to reach out to more people. We plan to offer things like a casual sandwich shop for lunch, additional lower-priced & casual menu items, more session drinks and a comfortable lounge area, and infrastructure to support parents of young children.

Thank you, Jason and everyone we met for your very kind hospitality and for sharing your amazing project with us.