Juneberry Ridge is Judy Carpenter's Regeneration - Charlotte Magazine
She’s led a pioneer’s life—in business, philanthropy, trap shooting, economic development, and more. At 80, she’s found a new territory to explore. Judy Carpenter, 80, owns and operates a 750-acre farm in Stanly County, North Carolina, called Juneberry Ridge. The farm is a nationally recognized model of regenerative agriculture, a technique designed to replenish the soil rather than deplete it. Carpenter, a self-described introvert and self-confessed self-proclaimed introvert, began her career in the trap shooting industry in 2008 with a 72 acres of land and built her own five-stand trap range, Lucky Clays. She also offers free teaching sessions to farmers and students interested in alternative agriculture. Juneberry is also a destination for the state’s agritourism industry, providing a respite for visitors from cities losing green space to development.
Опубликовано : 4 недели назад от Jim Morrill в
I arrive at Juneberry Ridge on a soggy day in October after driving through small towns and past open fields in rural Stanly County. Off Old Cottonville Road, I turn up a long gravel drive lined with sugar maples, then pull up to the hilltop and an imposing house of thick Douglas fir. There, I meet Judy Carpenter.
Carpenter, 80, owns the house and the 750-acre farm it overlooks. A self-described introvert, she’s soft-spoken and unassuming, with short blond hair and plentiful energy—she works out three times a week—that belie her age. She’s small in stature but, in her own way, as imposing as the house. We hop into a Gator with two staffers and set off for a tour of Juneberry, a farm that’s far more than a farm.
We head down the hill to a huge greenhouse. About 100 Stanly County third graders move in small groups through a dozen stations, where they hear presentations on everything from soil conservation to the ecological cycle of honeybees. Education is a big deal at Juneberry. “I’m learning constantly because there’s so much to know,” Carpenter tells me. “I’m just fascinated with it. I think the science drives me as much as anything.”
Carpenter never planned to be a farmer. She grew up in Charlotte, attended school in Switzerland, and held multiple jobs for her father’s welding supply company. She’s managed a bar, run a hotel, taught welding, and worked for a major developer. A champion trap shooter, she ran a multimillion-dollar corporation and became a generous philanthropist. Much of her success came in fields typically dominated by men.
In 2008, she took a young friend to a Charlotte-area trap shooting range. The friend, a novice, missed the clays but hit the trap house twice. The club pro screamed at them. The friend turned to Carpenter and said, “Why don’t you just go find some property and put up your own trap field, and you won’t have to deal with this idiot.”
Carpenter found 72 acres in Stanly County and built her own five-stand trap range. She called it Lucky Clays. From its start, she says the place “just morphed.”
“I didn’t decide to go into the farming business. I decided to have farm animals,” she says. “(Somebody) said, ‘What animals would you not get attached to?’ I said, ‘Fish.’”
She started with fish tanks, greenhouses, a gasification system to supply power, and a house to stay in when she’s not home in Charlotte. (Her 7,100-square-foot log house was built in Idaho, disassembled, and shipped to Stanly County in 17 trucks.) Now, Juneberry is a nationally recognized model of regenerative agriculture, a technique designed to replenish the soil rather than deplete it. Like produce, chicken, and fish, regenerative farming itself is a Juneberry product—it offers instruction, often free, to farmers and students interested in alternative agriculture.
The property is an hour east of Charlotte, not far from Lake Tillery. Half the land is covered with stands of trees, including hickory, poplar, and chestnut. Unlike many farms, it has no plowed fields of corn or open pastures of livestock, and use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers is minimal. Instead, most crops grow in expansive greenhouses. Rows of herbs and lettuce rise on tables in beds of soil or water. Gurgling tanks hold thousands of trout and tilapia. Outdoors, flocks of chickens, turkeys, and ducks and herds of sheep and pigs roam in movable enclosures, providing the land with natural fertilizer.
Juneberry—named after the blueberry-like fruit that grows on the land—is a classroom, concert setting, wedding venue, nature retreat, weekend getaway, and farm-to-table dining experience. As a destination in the state’s growing agritourism industry, it’s an economic development tool and respite for visitors from cities losing green space to development. Carpenter is pioneering new models of agriculture and hospitality she hopes will benefit future generations of farmers in North Carolina’s biggest industry. She’s also rediscovering her passions.
“I was reading Mother Earth News when everybody else was growing pot in their basements,” she says, referring to the magazine devoted to sustainable living and self-sufficiency. “If the rest of the world kind of goes by the wayside, we could live here without too much trouble.”
She’s motivated in part by fear. She’s read Lights Out, Ted Koppel’s 2015 book about the threat of a cyberattack on the nation’s power grid; and Silent Spring, the 1962 Rachel Carson book that examines human threats to nature. “That made a huge impression on me,” Carpenter says. “We’re trying to bring the world back out of its silence.”
Regenerative farming is designed to respect the land. The terrain is contoured to reduce runoff and leave more water in the ground. Trees are planted in patterns designed to curtail damaging infestations. Plants are left to compost at season’s end. Healthy soil removes carbon from the atmosphere, which improves air quality and curbs the effects of climate change.
Last summer, about a dozen farmers came to Juneberry for an eight-day course on “holistic management” funded by its educational foundation. It was led by a Virginia farmer accredited by the Savory Institute, a Colorado-based organization that began using natural methods to regenerate African grasslands and now fosters them on farms around the world.
The course taught farmers how to evaluate the effectiveness of regenerative methods. Juneberry itself has been certified through Savory’s Ecological Outcome Verification protocol, which uses metrics to gauge if ecological functions and soil are improving. “They’re doing things the right way,” says Bobby Gill, Savory’s director of development and communications. “They’re giving back to the land, and the land is getting better because of their actions.”
Back in the Gator, we bounce along winding farm roads to a smaller greenhouse. Inside, we put on disposable hairnets and enter the aquaponics room. (Aquaponics is a mashup of hydroponics, in which plants grow in water, and aquaculture, fish farming.) In a setup reminiscent of Rube Goldberg, pipes carry clean water into a large tank filled with tilapia. From there, gravity takes the water through a series of filters that remove most of the waste and deliver the nutrient-laden water to large tables of produce. The water, purified by the plants, flows back into the fish tank. The cycle repeats.
Sam Fleming can appreciate that. He’s executive director of a nonprofit called 100 Gardens. Started by the late Charlotte architect Ron Morgan, its goal is to introduce aquaponics to schools and foster STEM and career skills in students. The group has 20 aquaponic gardens in schools, including nine in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, as well as in three prisons.
Last summer, he brought two dozen teachers from CMS high schools, UNC Charlotte, and schools in three neighboring counties to Juneberry. “They are sort of a pioneering organization,” he says. “They’re demonstrating solutions for a lot of environmental (problems) around agriculture and fostering a lot of young people who want to do this work.”
As part of an expanding agritourism industry, Juneberry hosts nature walks, bird-watching, farm-fresh dining, and getaways in cozy wooded cabins with queen beds. It has drawn the notice of state lawmakers from both parties. In 2023, the legislature gave Stanly County $2 million to extend sewer lines to the property, which will allow Juneberry to construct a restaurant and inn. They’ve given $1.2 million to Juneberry’s educational foundation, which offers high school and college academic credits.
“(Carpenter) is as liberal as I am conservative,” says Sen. Todd Johnson, a Union County Republican. “It’s a bipartisan thing. We have a common interest in agriculture and food security and supporting this industry.”
Carpenter’s father, Jim Turner, was a salesman who lived in Charlotte. During the Depression, he traveled the Carolinas for Black & Decker. He decided he wanted to stay closer to home. So, in 1941, Turner founded his own company, National Welders Supply, from the trunk of his car. His timing was good. The company began to meet the growing demands of a wartime economy.
From its first storefront on South Tryon Street, Turner’s company became the largest independent distributor of welding supplies in the United States. Judy, born in 1943, grew up in the business. Her mother changed her diapers on boxes of welding rods.
Jim Turner had a salesman’s personality. He was as outgoing as his daughter was shy. “Somebody had to watch my father be an extrovert and be his audience,” she tells me.
Judy graduated from Myers Park High, then spent a year at the American School in Lugano, Switzerland. She returned to study business administration at now-defunct King’s College in Charlotte and, with a degree in secretarial science, worked for the family business. Judy left in the late 1960s for Atlanta, then Texas and California, before she returned to work as a “one-girl office” in the Charlotte headquarters of the Rouse Corporation, a national developer.
One day in the early 1970s, she found a box of shotgun shells that her ex-husband had left in her car. She tried giving them away but was urged to try to shoot them herself. That triggered her accidental debut into the world of competitive shooting, a field dominated by men. She bought her first shotgun, a 12-gauge Remington Model 870 Pump, and began shooting competitively in 1974. In 1977, she won women’s state trap shooting championships in Georgia and North Carolina, then a Southern regional competition against shooters from seven states.
In 1987, she became National Welder’s board chair while her father remained CEO. A few years later, her only brother, groomed to lead the company, had to leave for health reasons. Her father died in 1998. When Carpenter’s third husband, Jerry Carpenter Sr., died in 2006, she had decisions to make. “When he died, I said, ‘What can I do?’” she recalls. “My language, frankly, is not fit for a really nice golf course. I’m likely to say, ‘If you’ve got to go to the bathroom, there’s a tree.’”
The following year, she sold National Welders to the industrial giant Airgas for tens of millions of dollars. A lot of that money, at least $40 million, has gone into her Stanly County farm. As she did long ago with her father, Carpenter shuns the spotlight. She’s quick to deflect attention and credit onto others. “I’m what they call a visionary,” she says. “But visionaries rarely get anything off the ground. And so you have to get people … who can actually make things happen.”
For Carpenter, that’s Suzanne Durkee, Juneberry’s CEO, and Ashton Thompson, its chief operating officer.
Durkee, 64, who lives in Charlotte, retired early as a manager with General Dynamics. Before her corporate turn, she ran a marketing company. Bright-eyed and energetic, she met Carpenter in a gym in 2016, heard about the farm, and offered to write a business plan, a project she thought would take two weeks. It turned into a full-time job. Now, she manages a staff of around 50. Thompson, 34, arrived in 2013 fresh from horticultural studies at N.C. State. A Stanly County native, his first job at Lucky Clays was as a farmhand whose duties included mowing the lawn. Now he runs Juneberry’s farming and hospitality activities. A self-described problem-solver, he’s given to quoting the writer Wendell Berry, an advocate of small farming and land preservation.
Carpenter encourages MacGyver-like experimentation: If one thing doesn’t work, try something else. An early experiment started with 4,000 shrimp. It turned out that shrimp in tanks end up eating each other, which is why they turned to fish. Carpenter gives her staff the freedom to fail. “We’re in a constant state of evolution here,” Thompson says.
About five years ago, Durkee brought a dozen staffers together in the two-story conference center, which overlooks a small lake. Lucky Clays no longer seemed the best name for a farm that had moved way beyond trap stands. They also felt the need to consolidate their farming and hospitality businesses. Carpenter kicked it off with a question: What inspires us?
“(She) said, ‘I want to see this planet better than when I arrived,’” Durkee recalls. “It was one of the most inspiring things I’d ever been a part of.” Employees still consider Juneberry a startup, and at the retreat, they came up with a goal as ambitious as any from Silicon Valley: “To change the way the world grows.”
“She likes to be around people with ideas and with enthusiasm,” Durkee says. “She just finds a way to be supportive. … She doesn’t see (herself) as the most important part of the equation. Yet we all know we’d be nowhere without her.” Employees recount stories of her generosity and support.
“I’ve never had kids,” Carpenter says, “so I kind of consider this group my family.”
After a lunch that includes Juneberry pie, we return to the log house where we started. It looks down on the shooting stand, conference center, and tree-covered acres. Carpenter has arranged for the farm to continue long after she’s gone. A woman who’s broken barriers and accomplished so much in her life hopes Juneberry can continue to be an agent and model of change, proof you can preserve the environment, run a successful business, and still live well.
“We can’t change the whole world, but we can change our corner of it,” she says. “That’s kind of what I want my legacy to be—doing something where people will take seriously that we need to leave the earth in better shape than it is today.”
Jim Morrill is a writer in Charlotte who covered politics for The Charlotte Observer from 1983 until his retirement in 2020.