Eric and Melissa Brown
NE Iredell County
Honey

Eric began beekeeping as an employee of another beekeeper in 1998. Melissa grew up on a family farm, and worked on a non-profit, organic, demonstration farm in 1999 and 2000.

They began farming together, multiplying out their colonies to a small commercial scale, and selling at the farmers' market in 2004 after they got married and bought our first two-thirds of an acre. They purchased their current 43-acre farm late in 2007.

To name their farm, they promised a jar of honey and a bottle of mead to the friend that could recommend the best farm name. They chose Milk and Honey Farm because it symbolizes the rich blessings of a way of farming grown out of, founded in, and respectful of God's gift of the land. Plus, Eric and Melissa especially love both milk and honey.

When asked why they farm, Eric responded, "Partly because we love working with our hands in the outdoors. We also especially value good, wholesome food. More fundamentally, we believe in agrarianism, which is to say we want to build and support and seek the rewards of the kind of economy that's consistent with good food, healthy ecosystems, and healthy communities."

Eric and Melissa farm full-time with help from their two young children as much as they're able and occasionally from friends and neighbors.

In terms of what they produce and offer to their customers, Milk and Honey Farm's goal and focus is moreso to provide everyday food than anything special. They do, however, value diversity very highly, and seek to grow an especially diverse variety of products. Eric and Melissa seek to farm according to the traditional organic principles of recycling the nutrients to the soil that they take from the soil, of overcoming pests and diseases by promoting the health and vigor of plants and animals instead of using poisons, of not contributing to waste and pollution, of building independence from non-renewable inputs, of relying on sunlight to fuel the biological processes that provide energy and growth, and of respecting -- not exploiting or drawing down -- the "social capital" of the community. They farm without the use of any synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, de-wormers, artificial steroids, hormones, antibiotics, etc.

Their long-term vision is to further diversify their farm (especially so as to realize the synergistic benefits), to better adapt their farming to the unique abilities and needs of their land, to develop the farm as part of a more self-sufficient farming community (i.e. independent of inputs tied to industrial exploitation of people, communities, and ecosystems), and to provide for a multi-generational level of stewardship.

Notes from Eric about His Honey

Of course, honey is naturally special, but what makes our honey special compared with other honey is crudely summed up on our sign: "Unheated honey produced without the use of antibiotics, chemical pesticides, repellents, or fumigants." These legalistic standards don't define our philosophy of farming; rather these standards are just the easiest to contrast with conventional practices in black and white terms. It's the meaning of the legalistic standards on our farm sign that we want to explain presently.

When we say our honey is "unheated," we mean we bottle all our honey without heating it or letting it come in contact with any heated surfaces. (The often abused and haphazardly defined buzzword is "raw.") Heat is commonly used in honey processing to aid in uncapping honeycombs, to separate honey from wax "cappings," to facilitate the pumping and filtering of honey, and to delay future crystallization. In order not to scorch the honey, destroy the delicate flavor compounds of the honey, or cook unwanted flavors into the honey, we don't use heat for any of these purposes. Instead we uncap our combs with an unheated "cold" knife and allow our cappings honey to separate simply by gravity. For selling liquid honey we're fortunate that the kinds of honey made in our area naturally crystallize quite slowly, so the common reason for "pasteurizing" honey really doesn't even apply to us.

Antibiotics are commonly used by beekeepers to control foulbrood disease and also for nosema disease. As with other farm animals and with people, widespread antibiotic use in beehives is leading to resistant bacteria, which is leading beekeepers to use stronger and more persistent antibiotics. We had to deal with a few cases of foulbrood in 2005 and 2006, but we did so without using any antibiotics. We were able to avoid the use of antibiotics largely because we monitor our hives carefully, and we were able to remove and burn the infected combs before the disease spread too far.

Chemical pesticides are used in beehives chiefly to control varroa mites. Recent scientific reports suggest that the registered chemical miticides (fluvalinate and coumaphos) are even more toxic and risky than once thought. Many beekeepers also use illegal chemical concoctions, using, for example, chemicals in beehives registered only for external use on livestock. In theory many beekeepers believe there are ways to keep these chemicals out of the supers they harvest their honey from, but in reality these chemicals are extremely pervasive and persistent. These chemicals are the easiest to find in tests, particularly of the wax. All "foundation" wax commercially available in the United States now contains detectable levels of these chemicals. Our mite management is based instead mainly on manipulation of natural growth cycles. We maintain a relatively large number of "nucs" (less than production strength colonies), for instance, because they're naturally inhospitable to varroa mites.

Butyric anhydride (trade name "Bee Go") is a nasty smelling chemical used by many beekeepers to drive the bees out of the honey supers prior to harvest. The bees dislike the smell so much that they flee in the opposite direction of the stinky "fume pad," allowing the beekeeper to harvest the honey pretty much free of bees. We use "escape screens" to get the bees out of our supers prior to harvest. An escape screen is simply a board placed between the honey supers and the rest of the hive with a kind of built in maze. Escape screens work as a kind of one-way door. We place the escapes on our hives, then come back later and harvest the honey after the bees have exited.

Paradichlorobenzene is very commonly used by beekeepers to fumigate stored honey combs to prevent wax moth damage. Concerns about PDB's possible carcinogenic nature have led to it being outlawed in some countries and at least one state, but it's still used regularly in North Carolina and in most states. Instead of using PDB or other chemicals, we deal with wax moths by segregating brood combs (that attract wax moths) from our honey combs and either storing susceptible combs on the hive (where the bees can keep the wax moths out) or somewhere cold enough to suppress wax moth activity.

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Milk and Honey Farm