On Sturdy Ground: Bentonville family starts farm after sailing seas

On a mild December morning, Joe and Mary Saumweber of Bentonville walked the remnants of their farm’s asparagus crop surrounding the high tunnels where strawberries grow.

They crossed the field where fruit bushes and orchards will grow. Nearby, beehives were abuzz with bees. Hogs and laying hens roamed freely in their respective fenced areas.

The Saumwebers developed plans to establish their 23-acre regenerative farm while attempting to circumnavigate the globe. They will improve the soil through this farming type and invite people to learn about it and experience it at Tuckaway Farm in the Ozark hills of northeastern Bentonville, just off Arkansas Highway 72.

In late 2020, the couple and their five children left Northwest Arkansas for St. Maarten to board Lolalita, a 65-foot catamaran. Starting from the Dutch island in the Caribbean Sea, they sailed 15,000 nautical miles on the more than two-year journey that ended in New Zealand.

“We went to some very rural areas of the world — islands that don’t see a lot of people,” Mary Saumweber said. “They’re living off the land. They don’t get to go to Walmart for groceries or a box of strawberries. They’ve been living and farming how they have for hundreds of years. Somewhere along the lines, we lost that when we moved into … big-scale agriculture and processes. We’re realizing through our research and study the effect that has on the planet and the food that we’re growing.”

The Saumwebers resolved to “improve the earth that we rely on for our nourishment.”

In January, they flew home from New Zealand and started work on Tuckaway Farm. Plans include hospitality and educational experiences, farm-to-table events and a retail produce stand. Lakeside rental cabins, an interactive livestock area and U-pick wildflowers are also in the works.

“We love food, so food is going to be a big part of our story,” said Joe Saumweber. “We’ve got a consulting chef out of Nashville (Tenn.), Chef Tyler Brown. He’s helping us design our culinary experience. We’ll have an on-site commercial kitchen that will allow us to do those farm-to-table events.”

He said the hospitality experiences are at least two years out, providing opportunities for eco-tourism. Guest families can rent cabins, tour the farm, and take classes on beekeeping or soapmaking.

He said that in the next three to five years, “when you think of local food, we’d like people to think of Tuckaway. We want to be the gateway to how people get a lot of their food locally. We want to partner with other great farms to help build a large membership organization where we’re helping with the logistics of getting food to people.”

VISITORS WELCOME
In April, the Saumwebers plan to open Tuckaway Farm to the public. The farm will offer memberships to receive weekly produce baskets or to purchase produce at the stand at discounted rates. Members can use credits to buy produce that will also be available at Bentonville Farmers Market. In the farm’s inaugural year, the produce went to three Bentonville restaurants: Conifer, Oven & Tap and The Hive.

Mary Saumweber explained that Tuckaway Farm will be unique from other regenerative farms because it will be open to the public. She said the farming type is prevalent in New Zealand, but the farmers there were too busy to allow visitors while the Saumwebers were on their adventure.

“People need to see and be able to experience first-hand what it looks like,” she said. “When we came home, that’s what we wanted to create. We wanted to create a farm that people could come to, and they could learn about the microbes in the soil, how to build soil health, why it’s important, and what it does to things growing in it.”

Joe Saumweber said offering a variety of regenerative systems at the farm is intentional because of its educational and experiential components. Next year, the farm will include a market garden where vegetables will be grown for sale. Visitors can buy the vegetables people expect to find at a farmers market. Honey from the bees, eggs from the chickens and pork from the pigs will also be available.

He doesn’t expect a lot of fruit yield next year from the bushes, such as blueberries and blackberries, and the trees, including pawpaws, as they’ve yet to be planted. But these native fruits will be available in the following years.

“Part of what we want to do at Tuckaway is grow the things that not everybody else grows,” Joe Saumweber said. “We’d rather grow things that Walmart doesn’t have. You can go buy your Honeycrisp [apples] and Bartlett pears. We’d rather have some differentiation.”

FUTURE FARM
Joe Saumweber said the farm’s scale “is where the next generation of farming is going to happen. It will be on a smaller scale … much more intensively grown, with less machinery and less carbon inputs. That’s the model of the future. We can do a lot here on our little 23 acres.”

The regenerative nature of the farm benefits the topsoil rather than stripping it of its nutrients. He said tilling soil destroys its microbiology, leaving nothing to take in the nutrients to allow crops to grow. As a result, fertilizers and sprays must be used to grow crops.

“What a regenerative farm does is try to harness the power of nature to do that instead of relying on technology and chemicals,” he said. “Our first step is to create beautiful, healthy soil that has healthy microorganisms in it that perform that process for us of taking nutrients, making them soluble and available for the plants to take up and to have nutrition.”

He added that a regenerative farm’s produce is healthier to eat. Also, the hand-harvested crops can be grown closer together because they don’t need room for heavy machinery.

“On a 30-inch bed space, we can grow five rows of carrots,” he said. “We’re planting much more densely, and because we’re using human power instead of machine power, we can make much better use of the land. We can fit a farm in a community instead of having 500 acres outside a community.”

He also highlighted other regenerative aspects of Tuckaway Farm. The coop where the chickens sleep nightly allows the ground underneath it to be fertilized by their droppings. The coop is on wheels and can be moved to areas where the fertilizer is needed. Also, the fenced areas for the hogs are moved to mitigate overrun land.

NEW ADVENTURES
The farm has two staff members who have previous farming experience. Aside from raising chickens, the Saumwebers had no prior farming experience. Joe Saumweber, who co-founded Bentonville software firm RevUnit in 2012, added that they had no sailing experience before sailing the high seas.

He said the journey took a lot of improvising or “MacGyvering,” when 1,000 miles from land in the Pacific Ocean. He maintained the Lolalita’s four diesel engines, hydraulic systems, sail controls and electricity. He noted completing repairs without Lowe’s or YouTube.

On separate occasions, the engine room flooded with water waist-high and caught fire, requiring three fire extinguishers to put out. In another incident, the boat lost steering. The culprit was a detached rudder.

“It took us a couple of hours without steering in the middle of the ocean. It always happens at night, too,” he joked. “It never happens in daylight when you can see anything.”

They faced the most challenging weather on the passage from the Bahamas to Columbia, with 35-knot winds from the side and 20-foot waves. They also lost power for a few hours.

After sailing to various Caribbean islands, they traversed the Panama Canal. They sailed to the Galapagos Islands, French Polynesia, Fiji and New Zealand in the Pacific Ocean.

Mary Saumweber said the family learned to live more simply and adapted to change as outside influences, like friends and after-school activities, were removed.

“The growth and change I think we had as individuals and collectively was more than we could have hoped for from our adventure,” she said.

“We went through the highest highs and the lowest lows any of us had ever had, and we did it together,” Joe Saumweber said.

COVID-related closures prevented them from circumnavigating the globe. Lolalita is undergoing repairs in New Zealand and is expected to be on the market early next year.