Maverick Farms is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting family farming as a community resource and reconnecting local food networks in the High Country of North Carolina. Since our founding in 2004, we have worked in a variety of ways to fulfill this mission: providing educational, for-credit university internships; starting the first community supported agriculture (CSA) program in the High Country; producing regular “Farm to Table” dinners; holding educational farm-to-fork cooking classes; coordinating kids days; hosting an outdoor life skills camp each summer; selling fresh produce and prepared foods at the local Farmer’s Market; and selling directly to area restaurants.

In 2005, Maverick Farms rolled out the High Country’s first CSA. In 2009, Maverick opened the CSA to the area’s other small-scale vegetable farms, launching the High Country CSA, a multi-farm CSA and the first one in a rural area to get federal approval to accept Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT/formerly known as food stamps) as payment.

The Farmer Incubator and Grower (FIG) program was the next step in fulfilling Maverick’s mission of bolstering the local-food economy. With the High Country CSA, Maverick developed a scalable market suited to new vegetable farmers. FIG creates a community-based educational farm designed to train and equip a new generation of farmers who can revive the High Country’s agricultural economy and provide its citizens with a bounty of healthy food.

Because we see injustice as the food system’s most crucial issue, we are dedicated to transforming food and farming practices to support cooperative dynamics between the economy, ecology, society and politics.