Page 100 - Flathead Living Fall 2014

WeLL
Margaret De Bona gives a tour of County Rail Farm in Dixon.
It’s an interesting location, suitable for a new farm with modest organic ambi- tions, a marriage of old traditions and the new, connected world.
For County Rail Farm owners Margaret De Bona and Tracy Potter-Fins, it wasn’t so much that they selected the land as the land reached out and grabbed them, offer- ing an opportunity to slide seamlessly into the agriculture life in Western Montana.
On a Sunday in August, the farm’s rest day after the busy pace of the Saturday farm- ers market in Missoula, Tracy, Margaret and Coda – a blue heeler and English shepherd mix – had an easy start to the day, showing visitors around the farm.
Tracy, 27, hails from Idaho and Margaret, 30, from North Carolina, though neither had a background in agriculture before starting County Rail, other than working on a large farm in New York.
They were both living in the Hudson Valley when Tracy felt the age-old pull to move closer to home.
“We decided to move west and start a
farm,” Margaret said.
On the way back to Idaho, they stopped in
Missoula, and stayed with friends in Moiese, near the National Bison Range. They met Steve Dagger, who was married to Jane Kile, one of the pioneers of Montana’s sustainable organic farming movement.
Jane died in 2010 after a battle with ovarian cancer, and Steve was looking for someone to lease the Dixon farmland.
“He liked what we had to say” about their farming philosophy, Tracy said, and by November 2010, they were planting their gar- lic and started full-time farming in February and March of 2011.
Eventually, the farm would bloom into producing salad greens, arugula, artichokes, asparagus, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, eggplants, shallots, basil, broccoli, beets, car- rots, onions, and much more.
Farming is one of Montana’s oldest and deeply rooted traditions, when people learn the rhythms and moods of the environment to coax enough food from the soil to feed family and friends.
Tracy and Margaret are in their fourth year of taking up the yolk of that tradition, hav- ing produced thousands of pounds of organic produce from their farm.
There’s a noticeable difference between their chosen farm life and the lives of those born into it; mornings aren’t excruciatingly early, work goes on until the early evening, and the women have made a concerted effort to have lives outside of the County Rail bound- aries, even if that just means going dancing once a week or bartering fresh goat cheese for banjo lessons.
“We’re figuring out how not to burn out, how to make this sustainable,” Tracy said. “We work really hard to keep our job some- thing that we enjoy.”
In Montana, there were nearly 58.8 mil- lion acres of farmland in 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Of that land, just over 4 million acres are farms with women as the primary operators.
County Rail is part of an even smaller group when taking into account the relative newness of the farm and its organic status.
98 FLATHEAD LIVING | FALL 2014
PHOTOgRAPHy By gReg linDsTROM