In the beginning, there was neither earth nor water, plants nor produce, but only a dream, an insistent dream, one that recurred to Lori Birckhead again and again during the years of 2007 to 2010. The dream featured vivid images of a pond and a pasture, a garden and a stream, and even came with its own voiceover, a narration which Lori took to be of divine origin. Paraphrased, the wording went something like this: “Buy land. Grow food. Give it away.”
Lori, a middle-aged mom who lived in a comfortable suburban home in Hendersonville, woke up Jim, her husband the dentist.
“Honey, God wants us to buy a farm, grow food, and give it away.”
“Go back to sleep, dear.”
Jim’s advice seemed reasonable, and, for a time, Lori remained reasonable. After all, she knew nothing about farming; she managed the office and the accounts at Jim’s dental office and tried her best not to kill the couple’s few houseplants in which she took only the most minimal interest.
Still, the dream kept coming, as vivid and insistent as ever: “Buy land. Grow food. Give it away.”
Lori, a woman of deep faith, was convinced the dream genuinely conveyed a divine truth, albeit a deeply inconvenient one. She tried to placate the commanding voice by spinning the dream’s injunction with her own exegesis, one that wouldn’t disrupt her comfortable pattern of life too much: She began volunteering at soup kitchens.
But no go. The dream wasn’t fooled. Its unambiguous instructions kept coming: “Buy land. Grow food. Give it away.”
Lori came to terms that her protestations of lack of qualifications to farm were of no avail. She and Jim took the leap of faith in 2011, buying 97 acres in Joelton in the northern part of Davidson County, and went to work, racking up rookie mistakes that would fill a book. Still, she did not give up. Just the opposite. Lori dug in — figuratively and literally — and persisted. She tapped into the expertise of Jeff Poppen, the legendary “Barefoot Farmer” and adopted organic, biodynamic farming practices. Soon, the newly minted grandmother and rookie farmer would be walking the rows of By Faith Farm’s donation garden slinging compost tea like a champ. Good things began to grow, so much so that the problem became not the production of fresh produce, but its distribution. “I was working on the farm and then driving all over town to deliver to shelters,” Lori recalls. “Sometimes there would be no one there to receive the fresh food, or sometimes their pantries would already be full. It was a problem. Our mission was and remains to supply the highest quality, chemical-free, freshly picked produce — real nutrition for those in need.”
It was a problem solved in 2015 when By Faith Farm partnered with Second Harvest and, soon thereafter, their Farm to Families volunteer program.
“Our harvests have increased tenfold,” Lori exclaims, her initial excitement about the farm not having abated in the slightest. “It’s been nine years now, and I’m still ecstatic when seeds actually pop up.”
“This farm is every person that comes here,” she says. “Every kid. Every tenant farmer. Every volunteer. It’s not about me. And it’s not even just about growing food. It’s about grace. It’s about gratitude. It’s about talking about God.” Amen, we say, to that.