Cindi and Gary Conway have two major goals for their 65-acre C&C Farm Foods, a few miles south of Eureka Springs: 1. Be self-sufficient. 2. Feed people. While they sell at local farmers’ markets and through their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscriptions, they also give away a lot of food to local food banks.
“A long time ago, God moved me to give away food to the needy,” Cindi said. “There are a lot more homeless families, including those with kids, than you realize.”
Prior to moving to Eureka Springs, they donated food from their organic garden in Kimberling City, Mo., where they lived for the previous 12 years before settling here in 2014.
“We need to sell enough to pay for what we need to grow the food for ourselves and so we can continue to donate to food pantries,” Cindi said.
The Conways grow an amazing variety of food from apples and asparagus to watermelons and zucchini. They have 12 Nubian milk goats – each named – with the mother goats milked twice a day. Raw goat milk is sold at the farm in addition to numerous products from the milk including ricotta, mozzarella and chèvre cheeses, and different flavored ice creams.
“There isn’t enough good said about raw goat milk,” Cindi said. “It is easier to digest than cow’s milk. Someone who is lactose intolerant can usually eat goat milk products.”
Normally CSAs just provide vegetables and fruits, but the C&C CSA includes pastured eggs and goat milk every week. C&C also sells free-range broiler chickens and pastured pork. This year they also plan to start selling grass-fed beef and shiitake mushrooms.
Health and sustainability are part of everything they do. For example, after the 2009 ice storm, there was no power at the farm for 20 days. Now, in case of storms, they have a whole-house generator and a portable generator for the 2,000-square-foot greenhouse. They also grow food in a 3,000-sq.-ft. plastic hoop house.
In addition to a well, they have a 1,000-gallon water storage tank. The passive solar designed greenhouse uses an aquaponic system with a large fish tank in the middle with water circulated to irrigate crops. The fish waste feeds plants, and plants return clean water to the fish tank that contains bluebill and goldfish. Aquaponics uses only ten percent the amount of water as conventional outdoor agriculture.
“The future of ag is in aquaponics because of water shortages,” Cindi said.
The greenhouse uses a gravel bed for the plants, which grow up a string toward the ceiling. Plants are much taller than normally seen growing outdoors, and harvest times are extended because the greenhouse is heated. For example, they can harvest tomatoes off a plant for 1.5 to 2 years. The plant bed is also a great place to start tomatoes and other plants from cuttings.
They also are growing bananas and avocados in the greenhouse.
“We are getting closer to being self-sufficient,” Cindi said. “We don’t grow a lot of anything, but we grow a lot of different things. We do succession plantings to extend the harvest.”
Gary is a disaster claims specialist for an insurance company, and frequently gone for long periods for work. But as soon as he gets home, he’s out on the tractor repairing roads and building the new commercial kitchen they have under construction.
Cindi heads up the farm operation that uses organic methods, and has help from her sister, Paula, and a young couple, Brandon and Holly Mashek, who, with their two young sons, live at the farm. Brandon sells at farmers’ markets and Holly is an expert at wild foraging for edibles and medicinals.
“It is nice to have help,” Cindi says.
Still, she works long hours not just milking the goats, taking care of the other animals and gardening, but also processing the food. On a recent day she spent half the day tending plants and animals, and half the day processing canned peaches, tomato juice and sauce, and a double batch of pesto and blackberry swirl goat milk ice cream.
“Some days are easier than others,” Cindi said. “Nothing is growing normally this year. It is all or nothing. We have had vast temperature differences, a lot of rain, and less light, which can make the plants leggy.”
Cindi particularly favors purple varieties of crops like asparagus, tomatoes and peppers. Those have potent anthocyanines that been shown to reduce cancer growths by 50 percent.
This year saw a bumper crop of blackberries with 400 pounds picked off only 30 plants.
“If you pick them, you have to do something with them,” she said. “I made jams, jellies, juice, fruit rollups and goal milk ice cream from blackberries.”
It isn’t uncommon for someone to ask her if she is crazy. Why does she work so hard? Clearly, it’s something she’s very good at. But there are challenges. Each year is different. For example, there have been early frosts that killed the peaches until this year, when they finally got their first crop. But then they have had to deal with fire blight. While dealing with diseases organically is more of a challenge, Cindi said it is worth it because people’s health is at stake.
“It is good, clean food which is vitally important to health,” she said.
Each year different pests can be a problem. The first two lines of defense are insecticidal soup and neem oil. She also uses a fine white power, kaolin clay, as a preventative. Cindi says it confuses the bugs.
One thing that consumes a lot of time is record keeping that includes when and what varieties they plant, any problems, and harvest information. She keeps meticulous records on the registered goats including how much milk they give each day. A couple of nannies are particularly good milkers, producing up to two gallons per day.
“Showing that my goats have good bloodlines and make more milk than the average makes them easier to sell,” she said. “Like dogs, horses and cows, goats can communicate with you. They all get treated like kids. They are kind of spoiled. People think goats always try to escape. But if they are happy, most stay where they are supposed to.”
The farm relies heavily on guardian dogs to keep the animals safe. Their guardian dog, Liza, had a litter of 11 this year. Currently they have nine of their guardian dogs for sale that have been trained to defend all kinds of animals.
For more information, send an email to candcfarmfoods@gmail.com.