On fallow fields near the Battleboro community, a dream built on teas and bees is slowly taking shape, given a hand up by a national retailer with a local presence.
Ted and Tara Williamson of Tarboro recently received a $1,000 grant from Tractor Supply Co. through its partnership with the Farmer Veteran Coalition, a nonprofit organization that helps veterans embark on careers in agriculture. It was part of an overall $100,000 donation by the company to the FVC Fund.
The Williamsons are using the grant to help breathe life back into a 30-acre farm that’s been dormant for decades.
The name they’ve chosen reflects their nascent project: Restoration Acres.
“We both come from farming backgrounds,” said Tara Williamson, 53. “Even though we have white-collar jobs, we’re still drawn to farming.”
The Williamsons purchased the land, which has been in the family since the 1800s, from a relative, they said. They envision it as a home for their startup apiary, the Battleboro Bee Co., and as a planting ground for tea camellias. Why tea? For one thing, it’s an underdeveloped market, Tara Williamson said.
“There’s a misconception that you can’t grow tea in the United States,” she said. “But you can … and it’s healthier than coffee.”
Right now, there’s not much to see at Restoration Acres. There are a few rows of two-year-old tea camellias and a handful of hive boxes. Most of the land is wild and rutted, woodsy and dotted with a few crumbling structures, including a tumbledown shack that may some day be a gift shop when the farm is up and running and accepting visitors. The majority of the operation remains at the Williamsons’ Tarboro home, awaiting transfer.
At the farm, Ted Williamson looks over a stand of tea camellias. A starter group purchased from Tea Forest in Chapel Hill, they’re from far-flung locations like Southeast Asia and Russia.
“We’re testing different cultivars to see which grow best in our climate here in Eastern North Carolina,” Ted Williamson, 50, said.
It takes about five or six years for a tea camellia to yield usable tea leaves, he said. By the fall, they hope to have 100 plants growing at the farm site, with an eventual goal of 12,000.
There’s a synergy in raising tea and honeybees together, Tara Williamson said. Tea blooms during the fall when bees are storing honey for the winter, so pollination is enhanced.
“There’s a symbiotic relationship between beehives and tea camelias,” she said.
Ted Williamson started with two hives five years ago, and now has 100. Since bees are classified as livestock by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “I sometimes joke that I have 2 million head of livestock,” Ted Williamson said.
Only seven of their 100 hives are at the farm right now. There are a handful as well at their home, but the majority are currently being rented for pollination, to a watermelon grower in Wilson County.
“Our main income stream is pollination but we’re ramping up for honey production,” Ted Williamson said of Battleboro Bee Co. “And we also sell bees.”
The farm-to-be is dotted with “swarm boxes.” When a hive becomes overpopulated, part of the hive takes the queen and goes, leaving the stay-behinds to create another queen. With the boxes there, “they’ll have someplace to go instead of leaving the farm,” Ted Williamson said.
Pollination rentals hold a lot of potential as a revenue source, Tara Williamson said, especially in light of recent stresses on the bee population. “All the farmers we talk to around here say there just aren’t enough bees,” she said.
The two met in 2014 and married in 2015. Before that, Ted Williamson served eight years in the Army, first at Fort Sill, Okla., and then with the North Carolina Guard, before a training injury ended his military career in 2003.
Tara Williamson handles most of the clerical work for their young business. She saw the Tractor Supply grant available on the Farmer Veteran Coalition website. It’s the third one they applied for and the first one they got. “It encourages us to keep applying,” Tara Williamson said. “We’re trying to make connections with programs that help beginning farmers.”
A certified journeyman beekeeper with the NC State Beekeepers Association who’s studying for master beekeeper status, Ted Williamson is a mentor with Hives for Heroes, a nonprofit service organization focusing on sustainability, conservation and providing a healthy transition from service through beekeeping, according to its website.
The farm dream goes beyond their own aims. Tara Williamson is a licensed mental health therapist and Ted Williamson is a financial crimes investigator in the banking sector, he said. He cited studies on recidivism among financial fraudsters showing that backsliding is often fueled by the obstacles freed felons encounter in finding gainful employment and housing on the outside.
“Often, it’s not like they want to be the boss of the East Coast crime syndicate or anything,” Ted Williamson said. “It’s that they’ve got to eat.”
To that end, the couple say they hope some day to use the farm to launch second-chance programs for those willing to put their criminal pasts behind them. “With my being a mental health therapist, there’s a symbiosis there, too,” Tara Williamson said.
Right now, they’re fixing up their Tarboro home to sell it. An RV is already parked out front and ready to serve as their temporary home when they move to the farm, whenever that is. They attended “farm school” at the N.C. Cooperative Extension this spring and are in touch with an agent there who’ll be working with them.
Tara Williamson, an Ohio native, noted that while they both have farming in their family histories, none of their parents were involved in agriculture. “We’re both one generation removed from farming, so a lot of this we’ve had to learn on our own,” she said.
And what are they doing with the Tractor Supply grant?
It’s already spent on a rack storage system for 500 young tea camellias that had been overrunning the limited nursery space in their backyard. Tea camellias are a “shade-loving” plant, Tara Williamson explained, and the need to stay in nursery conditions for two years before they can go in the field. The camellias, some of them still at the sapling stage, are mostly offspring of some of the Williamsons’ older plants. She said a camellia purchased at a nursery can cost between $20-$60.
“We’re trying to do this without taking on a lot of debt,” she said.
“The Tarboro Tractor Supply has been really helpful,” Ted Williamson added. “They were about as excited about it as we were.”
Locally, Tractor Supply Co. has retail stores in Rocky Mount and Tarboro.
You can read about the planned farm at restoration acresnc.com.
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