Under late August’s partial lunar eclipse, friends old and new gathered in a small clearing in Cuyahoga Valley National Park for a celebration at Oxbow Farm and Market.
The space, which was overgrown with brush just a few years ago, was now transformed. In one corner, music played from a hay wagon stage as laughing children ran barefoot through the grass. In another, four walls of fiber and textiles were being woven by hand, slowly taking shape into a room. Food, grown just steps from there, was shared amongst partygoers.
“Watching music, and eating local food, and learning about local textiles and fiber, and the sun going down, and we’re all here together, and then the full moon rising,” says Beth Werlin, co-owner of Oxbow Farm and Market. “And it was just so magical!”
For the past 10 years, Beth and Kyla Werlin have been building something special in the Cuyahoga Valley: a working farm, a local-focused market and, increasingly, a place where people come not just to buy food, but to spend time, all roughly just 11 miles outside of downtown Cleveland.
What began as a small farm stand with little more than land and an idea has grown into a small, diverse ecosystem of crops, livestock, local vendors, workshops, music and community.
For the Werlins, the anniversary isn’t really about looking back. If anything, it has made them more aware of what’s still possible.
“In some ways, it still feels like it’s just getting started,” says Kyla.
Starting From Scratch
Over a decade ago, Beth and Kyla were brought together by their love of localized food and a mutual desire to start a food co-op in Northeast Ohio.
Kyla, who grew up in Boston, discovered her love of farming in college and never looked back. Beth grew up in rural southern Ohio, surrounded by farms, but didn’t start working on them until her early 20s. Both women eventually worked on a variety of different farms including urban, historical, and non-profit, and worked with diverse populations such as refugees, teenagers, and people with disabilities.
“With food…everybody eats, and everywhere in the world, there’s agriculture. Everyone can connect with this thing. So, it’s a really good connecting point.” Says Kyla.
While the initial co-op idea did not come to fruition, the Werlins began to think bigger.
“I used to journal about, you know, I want to have a farm, I want to have a diversified farm,” Kyla said. “I want to have an orchard and sheep and all of this, and it was kind of just like a dream journal.”
Eventually, opportunity came in the form of a long-term lease through Cuyahoga Valley National Park’s Countryside Initiative, a program created in 1999 to preserve and revitalize the valley’s agricultural landscape and farming heritage.
In 2016, the couple was awarded a 60-year lease with the park, becoming one of only nine farms allowed to operate in CVNP. That year, the Werlins moved onto the roughly 16 acre property at the end of August, and while their plans were big, they knew they had to start small.
“There was nothing here. It was a blank slate when we moved in,” says Beth. “Every single thing has been built or planned by us, which years ago was kind of hard to see, like how do we get there to where we are.”
Over the next decade, Kyla and Beth built much of the farm themselves and with the help of family and friends, slowly growing their offerings.
Their livestock includes lamb, chicken, Icelandic sheep for wool and meat, ducks for duck eggs, and turkeys for Thanksgiving meals.
Along with their livestock, the farm offers seasonal vegetables and you-pick flowers while in season. A variety of goods are produced on the farm as well, such as pottery with clay pulled from the Cuyahoga River and yarn from their sheep.
Starting with a small farm stand, Oxbow eventually opened their market building, selling not only what Oxbow produces, but also goods from dozens of local farmers and local businesses, such as Bay Branch, Cody Gray, and Weaver’s Truck Patch – most sourced from within roughly an hour of the farm.
“We always hoped it would be better and better,” Kyla says. “And I think it has.”
More Than Summer Tomatoes
The idea of eating locally is easy enough to embrace in summer, when tomatoes, corn, cucumbers and flowers are everywhere, and farmers markets seem to happen daily. The harder question is what happens in January.
Oxbow’s answer is that local food has to be a lifestyle rather than a novelty.
“Support the farms and producers and shops year round,” Beth says. “Not just in the height of summer. Not just when lettuce is in the news”
The market is open year-round, five days a week, and the Werlins have spent the past several years building relationships with other growers and producers so that customers can continue finding regional food outside of peak growing season.
For them, that’s important because they want people to think about local food as part of their normal grocery routine.
That can mean making Oxbow, or maybe another local farm store, the first stop for part of a grocery trip, then going elsewhere for what isn’t available locally, they say.
Rather than deciding on a recipe and then searching for every single ingredient, the Werlins suggest starting with what’s available and in season, then figuring out what to make. Or maybe even trying something new.
“Living seasonally is so fun,” says Kyla. “You’re enjoying the fruits and the foods of each season.”
For a region with a growing network of local food producers and a growing demand for that, small changes in habits can have a larger effect.
“For the Cleveland local food scene, there’s a huge, huge potential.” Beth adds.
Why Local Matters
After reports of lettuce-linked cyclosporiasis cases in Ohio this past May, the Werlins say they noticed increased interest in local salad greens and other locally produced food.
“It’s not 100% foolproof, but there’s less opportunity for contamination and recalls and illness and things like that when it’s more locally distributed,” said Beth.
While they saw an uptick in customers coming in for salad greens recently, Beth and Kyla say in general they’ve seen a heightened interest in anything grown or produced locally and organically.
“I think people are coming in for other stuff with everything going on in the news. It’s like, oh, great, people are waking up to local food, that it actually can prevent illnesses,” says Kyla.
With recent federal funding cuts, record breaking food-borne illness outbreaks could be harder to mitigate or control, the recent cyclosporiasis cases have also renewed questions about how Americans understand where their food comes from and how far it travels.
The Werlins aren’t claiming local food is a perfect solution to every problem in our modern food system, but they do believe there’s value in knowing where food comes from and who produced it.
When a customer buys something at Oxbow, the distance between producer and consumer is often much shorter, and much more transparent, than at most conventional grocery stores.
“You can see what we’re doing,” says Beth.
Instead of using chemical fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides, the Werlins use practices including mulch, composted manure from their animals, microbe enhancing sprays, and natural pest repellents such as garlic.
They try to use nearby water sources and rainwater to nourish their plants and livestock as much as they can. They also rotate their sheep and other animals consistently to allow them to graze on grasses, trees, and shrubs, rather than giving them hay.
“The river is over there across the street. The lake is, like, 10 miles that way, and it’s very specifically based and informed by the geography and the national park, and the history, and the watershed,” said Beth.
“Following the land and taking the lead from what’s already there.”
Much of the work at Oxbow involves experimentation, and the couple is reminded often of the need to be flexible and try new things.
“It’s proven that it’s really hard to grow fruit trees down here, like in the bottom of the valley, but we’re still planting trees,” Kyla said.
“There’s a model we’re loosely basing this off of,” Beth adds. “A permaculture orchard, which just means many different types of things growing.”
This year’s late frost provided a reminder of just how unpredictable farming can be. Peach and cherry crops around Ohio were hit hard, including Oxbow’s peach trees. Diversification gives a farm more options when conditions change.
“We’re not just focusing on one or two crops,” said Beth. “That’s not as resilient if something goes wrong.”
For the Werlins, regenerative agriculture is a priority, as they say it allows them to work the land in a way that allows it to continue producing naturally.
A Farm for Everybody
Local goods are not the only reason people come to Oxbow. In recent years, the farm’s community gatherings, skill-sharing events, and creative workshops have become increasingly central to its identity.
Their ‘Final Fridays’ series brings together local food, music and a different theme on the last Friday of each month, Spring through Fall. August’s final Friday, ‘Fiber Fest’ put on with Rust Belt Fiber Shed, brought together weaving, local artists, and fiber education.
Their workshops, which usually run from April until October, are intended to showcase the skills and share knowledge from the community, including classes on things like home-brewing and canning to pottery.
The goal of the events is for people to connect with their community and nature, and to maybe learn something new, rather than just getting people to buy things in their market, the Werlins say.
To them, the farm was never intended to be a place where people simply pull into the parking lot, buy vegetables and leave.
“They can come and enjoy the picnic area anytime they want,” says Kyla. “We want people here enjoying the outdoors.”
“It’s our farm, but your national park,” Beth adds.
People have come to Oxbow from all over, from the suburbs and the inner city, they say, to experience agriculture. That’s something that, to them, is beautiful.
“Everybody’s a stranger until they’re your friend,” said Kyla.
The Next 10 Years
The future of Oxbow includes expanding craft workshops and children’s programming and eventually building an indoor space that could host classes year-round.
They envision something resembling the folk schools of the larger Midwest and southern Appalachia: a place where people can learn practical skills including crafting, gardening and other ways of working with local materials; spoon carving with local, found wood, or weaving baskets out of the willow grown on the property.
It’s another version of the same philosophy that has shaped the farm from the beginning: connect people to the place where they live.
“There’s lots of ways to use the environment and the plants that we’re growing in our environment to make beautiful crafts,” says Kyla. “ I think, for both kids and adults, we should be interacting with our environments a lot more than we are.”
To them, the river, the watershed, the soil, the trees and the surrounding park all become part of the story.
Even the farm’s name is rooted in its surroundings, inspired by the distinctive oxbow curve of the Cuyahoga River near the property.
“It’s kind of like a really serendipitous moment over there,” Beth says. “Our farm is very informed by our watershed and water quality, and our hopes for the future, for, like, a cleaner river leading to a cleaner lake.”
Their seven-month-old son, Jonah, is already as much a fixture on the land as their young farm dog, Milo. For the Werlins, he represents something else Oxbow has grown into: a place where another generation can grow up with the farm.
“Lots of breaks with the baby,” Beth says. “It’s fun, though. We’re excited to have another generation that’s going to come up on the farm.”
For the Werlins, the perfect future for future generations isn’t necessarily about creating a world where everyone buys everything from a farm. But more about creating enough connections that local food, local businesses, nature and community become parts of everyday life.
And when asked the world they’d like to create?
“Local food, local music, beautiful sunsets, looking at the moon at night, supporting your community,” says Beth.
(Oxbow celebrates its 10th anniversary with OxbowFest on Sept. 25. Find more details here.)