CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – After about two hours of public comment, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors late Wednesday night unanimously approved a Special Use Permit for The Barns, a regenerative farm project proposed by Katharine Gilman, to hold events on the property on the south side of Garth Rd. near Free Union Rd.
The applicants plan to build two small barn-like structures to hold workshops for community members that, “may revolve around learning about the apiary and the honey operation, learning about cut flower growing and floral design, learning about medicinal herb properties and tinctures,” according to their proposal.
“We are here with a wonderful team of ecologists, landscape architects and engineers who have worked to bring this life over the last two years,” Gilman said at the meeting. “We will transform our family’s current cattle pasture into a productive, ecologically diverse regenerative farm with soil and habitat enriched with native plantings, a native orchard, pollinator meadows, a flower garden, medicinal garden, and a culinary garden all of which will inform what we sell and the related educational workshop programming and community experiences we plan to offer on-site.”
The applicants will operate one-to-four workshops daily for 10-to-20 people but with space capacity of 36 people which includes the teacher, according to the proposal.
“The property will be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, with limited weekday programming and fuller weekend programming,” the proposal letter from Woolley Engineering said. “All activities and programs will operate between the hours of 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.,”
Weekend workshops would be held 1-to-2 times a month with up to 12 people, and the big concern from many of the neighbors who spoke to both the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors was about the provision of special events with up to 75 attendees 24 times a year.
“Oakencroft Farm, just three miles south of The Barns, demonstrates that farming, education, and events can successfully coexist, but scale matters,” said Dori Boudreau, who lives on Hunt Club Ln. which she described as “a stone’s throw” away from The Barns. “Oakencroft’s event programming is on par with The Barns, but it is offered on a property of 250 acres, and The Barns is projecting this level of visitor activity on a property less than 11 acres.”
In going through the numbers, Boudreau said, “My question here is whether it’s an event and whether it’s a workshop, it’s a lot of cars and a lot of people.”
Speakers also raised concerns of increased traffic associated with the property, which is also a national biking corridor, as well as more noise and light pollution.
“The fact is we live there and we have the same reservations that anyone would have who is near a functional event space,” Gilman said in response. “It’s also the nature of the work in that … when we’re working with live animals, with living plants and trees, with really cultivated investment that’s going to take us a few years to get in the ground and get stable. If we’ve got tons of folks walking over it, it’s just going to never actually be what we’re setting out to be which is a regenerative farm.”
She said the special use is not to have big events, but to open to the community and introduce others to permaculture.
The next morning, Jack Jouett Supervisor Sally Duncan said on WINA Morning News said there was, “a lot of misinformation that was spread about this project, and the sort of NIMBY trope of using traffic to oppose things.”
“I think people sometimes jump to worst-case scenario and not really do due diligence in thinking about what projects actually are like,” she said.
Duncan also said the board had a discussion on how difficult it is for agricultural businesses to make money.
“So, thinking of a modern agribusiness economy, what sort of things do you need? And they need to be able to do some of these non-ag events and workshops in order to make a farm economically viable,” she said.
