Zac ’29 didn’t believe he needed to go to school to become a farmer. But after hearing from one of his friends, a non-traditional student, about some of the forestry classes Berea College offered, he wanted to audit a class as a community member. The only problem with his class audit was that if he were to audit a single class, it wouldn’t fit with his work schedule. With deep consideration, Zac went all in and enrolled as a full-time student.
“Even though it’s really cheap to audit a class as a community member, it doesn’t fit into a regular working person’s schedule to take three days a week, two hours out of each day, in the middle of the day to do something,” Zac said. “It’s not very conducive to having a job. So, I decided that if I wanted to study anything, I would need to go all in. I quit my job and became a full-time student. So far, no regrets. I’m really enjoying it.”
Originally from a town near Portland, Oregon, Zac always valued the ground beneath his feet and the environment around him. “It’s very green there,” he said, “and there were lots of parks. I really enjoyed being outside and being in nature.”
He recalls starting his farming journey growing vegetables in his mother’s backyard. “In high school, I became a vegetarian, and I was the only one who nearly ate any vegetables in my family,” Zac recalled. “I had to learn how to make food for myself, and then that created an interest in food in general, so I started a garden in my mom’s backyard.”
Zac loves to stay connected to nature in one way or another. He has traveled the country back and forth for seasonal farm work. When winter began, he would travel to warm places throughout the country and even went to Nepal and South America to escape the cold weather.
“I worked in Arizona, California and Oregon, but when I wasn’t working, I would have about six months of the year to travel. So, I’d work every single day for months straight, save money, and then travel for several months and live out of a vehicle.”
In 2019, Zac officially moved to Kentucky. “Being somewhere green with lots of water and greenery was important,” he said.
He first lived in Campton, Kentucky, home of the famous Red River Gorge. Later, he realized the land was too hilly and rough for him to start a farm. Looking for a place with the right conditions at a good price, he moved to Berea in 2020.
Photo by Timothy Housa ’27
“Of course, I had friends in Oregon, but I didn’t really know any of my neighbors,” Zac said. “It wasn’t until
I started doing seasonal farm work that I saw tight-woven communities in more rural areas. And that
was when I realized what I was really wanting to find: close-knit communities.”
Throughout his seven years in Kentucky, he planted roots by staying in Kentucky during the winter instead of fleeing to somewhere warmer.
“I spent so long avoiding winters and seasons, when I finally settled in Kentucky, it was the first time I’d been somewhere for spring, summer, fall and winter, and getting to know the plants and the landscape throughout the seasons,” Zac said. “Now that it’s been seven years or so, when you see the patterns of when things bloom and when the leaves fall, you know when the first snows usually are.”
He was lucky to find like-minded gardeners in the area. “I was largely just isolated on this small property in the rural area outside Berea,” Zac recalled, “But then I met some of my neighbors who are also around my age who had recently moved to the area and were also interested in farming. I still hang out with a lot of those people and grow food together with them today.”
With the COVID-19 pandemic raging throughout the country, Zac was truly isolated for a while. A few months after moving to Berea, he was invited to an outdoor coffee social where he met his neighbors, looking for members to join their gardening group. With this community, Zac was now a part of a group called the Food Fellowship.
Zac and 10 of his neighbors grow food together, providing at least six months’ worth of staple crops. “We get together and do some gardening for two to four hours, and by doing that, we can grow over 2,000 pounds of produce without any machinery or anything on several small properties of land,” he said.
Zac’s Food Fellowship works together to distribute the heavy workload of growing and producing staple crops across three separate plots of land.
One of the biggest problems the Food Fellowship faces currently is time. “Everyone’s just really busy working on their own things,” Zac mentioned. To solve this issue, he intends to build a cooperative farm after he graduates from Berea College. Not only will his Food Fellowship produce more food, but he intends to split the harvests to sell to buyers, sell to his community at reduced prices and donate free produce to his community.
“They say many hands make light work, so that would be my goal after school, to set up some sort of cooperative farm so that we can have strength in numbers and all produce food, but help each other in doing it, so that hopefully we might have more time to do other things in life,” Zac said about his future vision.
Comparing himself to a member of the Appalachian community, Zac recounts the values he has learned and what brought him here.
“I don’t know if I’ve been here long enough that a born-and-raised Appalachian would consider me Appalachian, but I love this place, and this is where I plan on spending the rest of my life,” Zac said. “I’ve been all over the world, and this is my favorite place I’ve been, and I chose to be here.”
