- No matter where you live, big city or small town, there's nothing like a visit to a farm to lift your spirits.

Add in a farm store and some fresh meats and produce, and you've had quite a day at Hickory Nut Gap Farm.

[gentle music] - I'm Jamie Ager, and we are at Hickory Nut Gap Farm.

My great grandparents moved here in 1916, so the family's been here for, you know, over 100 years.

And then we sold that in about the '90s, and then my wife Amy and I came back to the farm, and I always say we were young and idealistic about saving the family farm and making it work for us.

We are now in our late 40s, and we're still idealistic about saving family farms and making agriculture work for people.

We raise grass-fed beef, so we have beef cattle, we have pigs, pasture-raised pigs, and then we do some pasture-raised chickens as well, and every Thanksgiving, we sell a lot of pasture-raised turkeys.

And so when you come to Hickory Nut Gap, we have our farm store, which is open five days a week, so you can buy local meats that are all pasture-raised, no antibiotics, no hormones, regeneratively raised products that we really celebrate with our community, and invite people to come touch and feel agriculture, learn about agriculture.

We really want to encourage people to learn about what we represent at Hickory Nut Gap.

- It's a fun place to come out and just have, you know, have a picnic, have a nice walk.

Kids and family can enjoy coming out, seeing our animals doing great, having the best life possible, and we carry local groceries, and a lot of people come out to support us, the community, and Western North Carolina.

- I found that, like, my favorite time to come is in the fall, because they have so many events going on.

I think today is the Big Barn Market, which has a bunch of vendors, so my daughter and I have just been walking through and shopping.

It makes it feel really nice to buy locally and support the Fairview community especially.

- I like how it's really family friendly.

There's a lot of things that you can do here, like ride horses and go on hay rides and check out the Farm Store.

I think it's really fun.

[gentle music] - So the aftermath of Helene was really just a month of triage just to kind of get things back where they needed them.

- [Yukio] There were big rivers everywhere, 'cause we have small creeks running around, so I couldn't get down here by walking or car.

- [Jamie] Ashworth Creek swelled so big, essentially took out all the fence lines and the corral systems and roads on the farm, and so all of our water lines were essentially knocked out as well.

- [Yukio] Our first priority was to save the animals and making sure all the animals are doing great.

- And we did lose one batch of chickens.

We do rotational grazing with our chickens, and one of the batches was in the line of fire for that flooding, and so those birds didn't make it, but the rest of the farm was okay.

- [Worker] Come on, Chowder!

- We did have one pig who was in the corral, and we got her out in the middle of the flood, and luckily, a walker who runs the farm day to day got a good video.

Chowder's pretty famous now.

We have T-shirts about Chowder and stuff like that.

We still are rebuilding the bridge across the creek.

We're fixing all of our roads finally.

The farm's starting to feel like it's back to normal.

But it's been a year, and I think there's still some work ahead for sure.

- I'm from the area, and so every place that we value as a community that was able to be saved or rebuilt means a lot to us.

It's collective identity of individual families and legacy properties like this one.

It's really happy to see when members of the community, especially upstanding members of the community, are able to make it and have a farm that supports so many other local farmers.

- So we really see Hickory Nut Gap as an opportunity to reintroduce our, you know, rethink our food system around a company with deep values around the land, the animals, and the people, and to me, that's a beautiful opportunity to reconnect with consumers, earn trust, and ultimately be in relationship with one another, because I feel like at the end of the day, humans thrive best when we have good, healthy relationships with each other.

And that's really our hope and desire here at the farm.

- Hickory Nut Gap Farm is at 57 Sugar Hollow Road in Fairview, and they're open Wednesday through Sunday from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

For more information, give them a call at 828-628-1027, or go online to hickorynutgap.com.