A Novel Approach to Saving the Family Farm

The story of Panorama Farm and the family that tends it started out like most: Jim and Bunny Murray moved to this piece of land in Earlysville, with its arresting view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in 1953 and raised eight boys. Incorporated in the late 1970s, the farm stayed in conventional agriculture through the late 1990s, working in cow-calf, steer, sheep, and hay operations.

The market situation in the early 1990s drove the Murrays to evaluate alternatives. Concerns about mad cow disease were peaking, fertilizer costs were spiking as a result of a trade imbalance with South America, and the price of beef was hitting bottom. They began by selling off several hundred acres and using those funds to cover operating costs, but that was not enough.

Abandoning Conventional Farming

Steve Murray, one of the Murrays’ grown sons active in the farm’s operations, tells the story of his 100 heifers, who were successfully sired by a proven type of cattle. When these grassfed cows reached 300 pounds, he was forced to sell them for the price at which he had purchased them. That disappointment led Murray to “distance himself from factors he had no control over.” He defines the family’s next steps as “the abandonment of conventional agriculture.”

Murray acknowledges that for many, the possibility of selling the farm to a developer is unfortunate but real. But he encourages farmers in this position to look “at the fringes and evaluate as many possibilities as you can, no matter how crazy they seem.” Says Murray, “Agriculture has to look beyond conventional means to find niches that will help create more sustainable systems.”

Case in point: The Murray family threw a broad net—evaluating everything from a soccer complex, to an executive education center, to a pet cemetery (albeit the last option was a bit tongue-in-cheek). These options were problematic because they would have changed the character of the farm, but the solution presented itself not long thereafter.

When Life Gives You Yard Waste . . .

When the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority invited Murray to bid on taking the leaves it collected from around Charlottesville in 1995, he had absolutely no experience with compost. He went ahead and ran a pilot project with the city and made every possible mistake—like using too little water and too much nitrogen from poultry litter. But once he got it right, he advertised his compost in the newspaper, and the product “vaporized,” as he puts it.

Panorama Pay-Dirt was founded not in response to environmentalism but rather out of necessity. However inadvertently, a profitable, ecoconscious, responsible business was born.

. . . Make Compost

The majority of the business’s revenue comes from individual customers. Other clients include landscape contractors and commercial flower growers. Master gardeners are a particularly supportive bunch, Murray notes. In addition to generating compost, the farm produces and sells double-ground hardwood mulch and a combination of compost and mulch. The compost includes yard waste, such as leaves and brush from Charlottesville, and poultry litter from Dyke, in Greene County. Farm equipment (to move and turn the compost, which keeps it aerated), fuel, manual labor, and the staff’s acquired knowledge complete the input list. It normally takes three and a half months to process the compost completely, so that plants will fully benefit from the available nutrients. The farm is in “scramble mode” during its busiest time of year, from the middle of March through May.

In a recent development, the University of Virginia’s Facilities Management, its Office of Environmental Health and Safety, Aramark (the university’s dining service contractor), and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality are partnering with Panorama Pay-Dirt in a post-consumer food-waste composting pilot program—part of UVa’s Sustainable Dining Program. Panorama takes approximately 700 pounds of food waste per day from UVa’s Observatory Hill dining hall under a permit that allows for a conditional exemption for accepting post-consumer food waste for educational purposes. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship that allows UVa to work toward its sustainability goals even as it provides materials and experience to Panorama Pay-Dirt. Murray is working on perfecting the recipe for the UVa-based compost batches, and he expects the entire process to last six to eight months per large batch. This is a work in progress, since the waste from the dining hall fluctuates over the year and the wood-based carbon source used in this program takes longer to decompose.

Composting & Sustainability

The promise of composting is twofold: it turns waste into a beneficial product and thus closes the loop of the food system, and by diverting valuable resources from landfills, it reduces the carbon and methane generated by decomposition. Communities in central Virginia are not yet pursuing policies, incentives, and educational endeavors that support visionary models—such as the three-bin system in San Francisco, where home composting is widespread and green waste is collected at curbside—but perhaps that will change with creative “agripreneurs” like Steve Murray, who show that green can also be profitable.

Anne T. Bedarf lives and gardens in Albemarle County, where she and her husband are currently experimenting with a four-person CSA on their land near Monticello. This summer they will be volunteering at three music festivals, advising organizers on waste reduction, recycling, composting, and sustainability awareness.