400 Life: The Food Issue September 2018

400 LIFE SEPTEMBER 2018

Meet Lise Ode social media influencer FAGAN’S BISCUIT BARN KEEPS SOUTHERN COOKING ALIVE THE DOUGHNUT SHOP OWNER WHO LOVES CHEESE FRIES

IN THIS ISSUE

from the editor This, as you can tell, is a food issue, but not in the traditional sense.

Sure, there is a recipe, and a tantalizing one in our regular 400 Eats feature.

Alexander Popp teaches you how to whip up White Chili Chicken (Page 16) with a side of corn bread. In a former life, one of my favorite snacks was a chunk of corn bread and chocolate milk from Whole Foods.

But food, of course, has much more value to us than just its nutrients, and that is what we set out to explore in this issue.

For the folks at Fagan’s Biscuit Barn (Page 9), food is a way to carry on the family name. For Fill Ministries (Page 18), it’s an environmental and economical mission. For Lise Ode (Page 4), it’s a way to connect with people and express love.

And just as how and what we eat has evolved, so has our magazine. With this issue we tweaked our recipe a little; we have a new name (400 Life) and a new logo (pretty fancy, right?).

But though our recipe has changed, the essence of this magazine is the same: telling you the stories that capture the essence of life in this vibrant corridor of Georgia.

Dig in.

Brian Paglia Editor, Forsyth County News

CONTRIBUTORS STEPHANIE WOODY, Publisher

18 Lise Ode: baker, social media influencer

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Fagan’s Biscuit Barn is truly Southern

9

400 Faces: Arpana Satyu-Burge

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ALEXANDER POPP, Staff Writer

400 Eats: White Chicken Chili

16

KELLY WHITMIRE, Staff Writer

Fill Ministries’ aquaponics farm

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BRIAN PAGLIA, Editor TRACIE PIKE, Production Manager BRADLEY WISEMAN,

Director of Video Production, Photographer

NATHAN SCHUTTER, Advertising Director CONNOR KELLY, Advertising ROSARIO WOLIVER, Advertising DEBORAH DARNELL, Advertising This magazine is a product of the www.ForsythNews.com

Advertising rates available upon request.

Call (770) 887-3126 or email marketing@forsythnews.com

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| THE LIFE | September 2018

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Up until now, Lise Ode has been everything to MomLovesBaking, her baking media enterprise: writer, photographer, videographer, editor, graphic designer.

Meet Lise Ode, the social media influencer who lives next door Story by Brian Paglia | Photos by Bradley Wiseman On a recent Monday morning in July, Lise Ode is photographing a cake.

In the kitchen of her west Forsyth County home, Ode sets up a miniature set for a photo shoot. Her subject is a four-layer, pink-painted vanilla drip cake she made over the previous two days. Chocolate buttercream frosting cascades over the top edges. Fresh flowers decorate the top. Gold specks dot the sides.

It’s a trendy cake, and Ode would know. Later that day, she posts pictures of it on the Instagram account for her blog, MomLovesBaking.com, where she curates photos and videos of exceptional, humorous, unusual and vibrant cakes, cookies and cupcakes she finds on social media.

But it is also how Ode, 52, makes money. Ode’s MomLovesBaking enterprise includes all the requisite vehicles of content distribution. She has the blog, Facebook page, Twitter

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| THE LIFE | September 2018

account, YouTube channel and Pinterest board. But it is Instagram that is perhaps setting her on a course to join the newest category of celebrity in today’s media landscape: social media influencer.

Ode’s following on the platform has recently exploded, from around 2,000 followers this past October to more than 118,000.

Companies and other aspiring influencers now pay her to be featured in a photo or video on her account, and the sudden growth has Ode brainstorming new ideas. Cookbooks? Courses?

Memberships?

“It’s getting to be out of control,” Ode says. “There’s so many things to do.”

Planting a seed For those who ascend from obscurity to prominence in this social media age, it often takes a combination of serendipity and

calculated work to break through a saturated marketplace. After all, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are into the billions of users on their platforms. That might seem like a big enough media world to find a place in it for some. Others might see a non-stop avalanche of consumption too chaotic to penetrate.

When Ode started her blog, she didn’t care about any of that.

Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, her family moved to Tallahassee, Florida when she was 5. Ode says her mother didn’t buy baked goods or sweets other than for special occasions, so it was up to Ode to make them. She started with brownies and cookies when she was 9. Her grandmother would get her elaborate birthday cakes. She remembers one designed like a princess with a skirt for the cake and a doll on top. “That kind of planted a seed,” Ode says. By high school, Ode was baking all the time.

Ode’s professional career varied. She got a degree in fashion merchandising but found she disliked the retail store environment. She went back to school and got a degree in graphic design, working for the National Enquirer among others. But all the while Ode was baking and often brought her recipes into work.

“I would be the favorite for a while,“ Ode says, “but at some point people would get sick of me and be like, ‘Stop bringing this stuff in. You’re making me fat.’”

Ode stepped away from her graphic design career after starting a family (she has a daughter, Savannah, and a son, Luke), but she still wanted to make some income on the side. Ode’s husband, Jay, suggested she start a blog. By then, in 2006, blogs were the upstart media platform. According to a Technorati State of the Blogosphere report, there were 50 million blogs on the internet at the time.

Ode was reluctant. “That was so foreign to me,” Ode says. “I had just gotten Facebook.” She started a cake business out of the family home instead. It was called Pretty In Pink, and Ode made wedding cakes and elaborate cakes, much like her grandmother had. She made a cake that looked like a camera, another that

looked like a car.

It started out fun, but after four years Ode got burned out. The work was laborious and stressful and took over her weekends.

When the family decided to move from Florida to Forsyth County in 2011, Ode closed Pretty In Pink.

The holy grail The Pillsbury Bake-Off was started in 1949 by the Pillsbury Company. The first one was called the Grand National Recipe and Baking Contest. Grand prize was $25,000, and the rules were simple: create an original recipe using one Pillsbury product.

By 2013, Ode’s cake business had been closed for two years.

She did graphic design work for Jay’s printing business but still baked. Ode had already entered the Pillsbury Bake-Off in 2004 but didn’t make the cut of 100 finalists. Still, she continued to watch it on TV. “I thought it’s impossible to get in these contests,” Ode says. “What are the chances? It’s like winning the lottery.”

Ode resolved to enter again. She spent months testing recipes.

This time she got in. And though Ode didn’t win the contest, her participation gave her a jolt of inspiration. “I realized that, well, maybe I have some authority now,” Ode says.

So, in December 2013, she created a blog. For the first year, in 2014, Ode gave herself a project: she would make every Pillsbury Bake-Off winning recipe, 52 of them since 1949 — one a week.

A web designer set up her site. She bought a used Canon Rebel camera for $250 and some artificial lighting. She created social media accounts.

And so on Jan. 7, 2014, Ode published her first post: “No-knead Water Rising Twists - Recipe #1 of 52 Grand Prize Recipes in 52 Weeks!”

The formula for the post would look familiar to fans of recipe Continued Page 6

September 2018 | 400 LIFE |

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blogs. Ode went step-by-step through the recipe, with an anecdotal introduction and zoomed-in photos of the process. Posts followed for Orange Kiss Me Cake, Starlight Double Delight, My Inspiration Cake, Open Sesame Pie. Ode’s blog grew slowly. “The first year I didn’t have many followers,” Ode says. “Maybe 10.”

But she was persistent. Her photography improved, which helped with her popularity on Pinterest. In the blog’s second year, in 2015, MomLovesBaking was getting 30,000 monthly views.

That benchmark helped Ode connect with an advertising network to place ads on MomLovesBaking.

Then Ode hit upon the holy grail: a viral post. She’d just recently attended a workshop for food photography in Minnesota and soon after received a commission for a sponsored post; Ode would get paid to publish a recipe using a company’s product.

Ode made a chocolate turtle poke cake: caramel poured on a rectangular yellow cake with chocolate frosting, chopped pecans, chocolate chips and extra caramel drizzle on top.

Using tips from the workshop, Ode’s photo “was one of the best pictures I had done,” she says. She pinned it to Pinterest, posted it on Facebook, and the hits started coming.

“That picture it’s still sending me traffic,” Ode says.

‘Living the dream’ Media’s rapid evolution can test content-makers. Ode has been up to the task.

In the blog’s third year, in 2016, Ode was just getting comfortable with photography. Then videos became prominent. Ode hired Continued Page 8

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a blogging mentor who recommended she focus on growing her Facebook audience. The account eventually got up to 50,000 followers but mysteriously stalled.

No matter. Ode shifted her focus to Instagram this past October. Ode says it’s her favorite social media platform, a perfect combination of Pinterest’s curating prowess and some of Facebook’s connectivity in a visual-centric format.

Ode also discovered Instagram’s efficiencies.

She posts five to seven times a day. With over 100,000 followers, Ode can charge $500 to post one picture with a company’s product in it, as opposed to the effort of a full blog post. Ode does shout-out posts too; she charges $55 for a photo, $125 for a video. And as her number of followers increases, so does the price. But Ode says she is careful about what companies she works with. Their products must fit her brand. She emphasizes bright colors, fun, “things that are pretty,” and wacky concepts for kids.

Up until now, Ode has been everything to MomLovesBaking: writer, photographer, videographer, editor, graphic designer. But that is changing. She recently hired an assistant and brought on seven new contributors to the blog, a group of family and friends

who will write on other lifestyle topics like parenting, DIY, Christian living. That should free up time for her to focus on the next phase of MomLovesBaking.

She hopes to develop online courses for cake decorating and growing an audience on Instagram.

It’s all come so far from Ode’s first days into MomLovesBaking.

Early on, when she told people she was a food blogger, Ode was met with blank stares. “I had to really explain it, and explain it again,” Ode says. “I still felt like they didn’t understand what I was doing.”

But Ode does. To her, this moment now makes sense. Her study of fashion, her experience with graphic design, the editing at the National Enquirer — it all gave her the tools to create MomLovesBaking. “Everything I’ve done over the years has pointed me in this direction,” Ode says.

At the center of it all remains the food. Baking, Ode says, has always been a way for her to connect with people and express love. To her, the best part is giving her work away and seeing the smiles. She finds the act of baking therapeutic, too.

And if she can make money doing it? Even better.

“I’m just doing something I really enjoy and making money at it,” Ode says. “That’s living the dream.”

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Sisters-in-law Martha Quintana, left, and Deana Fagan, right, have operated Fagan’s Biscuit Barn, one of south Forsyth’s most popular breakfast and lunch spots, since 2006, but the family’s history and legacy in the area go back much farther.

Family Tradition The Fagan family and Fagan’s Biscuit Barn keep traditional, Southern cooking alive in Forsyth Story and photos by Kelly Whitmire

I

t can feel sometimes like every restaurant calling itself farm-to-table has a checklist of needs to both keep up with the current trends and make it feel authentic, like chalkboards, a barrel or two and drinks served out of mason jars.

But for the Fagan family and Fagan’s Biscuit Barn on Peachtree Parkway, the food speaks for itself and farm-totable is more of a family tradition than a popular trend. The Fagans are one of Forsyth County’s oldest families and cook classics, like chicken and dumplings, country-fried steak and gravy and, of course, biscuits, like grandma used to make.

Continued Page 10

September 2018 | 400 LIFE |

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The Fagans are one of Forsyth County’s oldest families and cook classics, like chicken and dumplings, country-fried steak and gravy and biscuits.

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| 400 LIFE | September 2018

In fact, they’re still using her recipes, along with some other classics.

“When we started, we were thinking biscuits and burgers, that kind of thing,” said co-owner Martha Quintana. “It was like, well, what can we add to that? We just basically added what we knew, which is Southern cooking, and we used mostly our grandmothers’ recipes, we mostly used our church cookbook recipes and Deana [Fagan’s] developed some recipes along the way that fall into that same type of food.”

In 2006, Quintana opened the restaurant with Deana, her sister-inlaw, though the family history in Forsyth County goes back even further.

“Our ancestors actually settled here in 1828, and they came from North Carolina. We’ve always been curious why did they stop here,” she said.

That date doesn’t just make the Fagans one of the oldest families in Forsyth County it means they were already here when the county was founded in 1832.

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In fact, the family has been on the same tract of land as the restaurant for generations.

“They were actually able to claim about 4,000 acres of land that started here where we are and went all the way up to Hwy. 9 on both sides of the road,” Quintana said.

Since the early 1900s, the immediate area around the restaurant has had a Fagan family business: first, a general store operated by Quintana’s grandfather, Avery Carlton “A.C.” Fagan in the 1920s, then in the 1950s a convenience store ran by her father, Bill Fagan Sr., known for its biscuits and burgers.

“We were like, ‘we really want to keep something alive here. We want to keep the Fagan legacy of having a business here in this particular area,’” Quintana said.

So, in 2006, the biscuit barn opened in a Forsyth that had seen unprecedented growth and apparently brought with it lots of new families hungry for real Southern food.

“The first day, we knew we were in trouble because we opened up at the cash register and the line went all the way to the grass,” Quintana said. “My husband, at 2 o’clock when we closed, actually had to stand in the drive-thru to stop people

from coming through.”

The store remained popular and expanded to its current size in 2009. The expanded space means they can hold more than just diners.

“I think this has also helped to have that community feel,” Fagan said. “We have lots of groups meet. We have some Bible studies in the morning, we’ll have some mens’ groups during the day; we’ve got quite a few groups that meet.”

Fagan said the meals are typical of what they would serve their family, and the family was “pretty surprised” to find out how much the food resonated with the community, even getting arguably the highest compliment in Southern cooking.

“We hear a lot, ‘Oh, this tastes like my grandmother’s,’” Fagan said. “There’s no greater compliment than ‘it tastes like my grandmother’s.’ We take great respect in that.”

While staying true to the classics, Fagan said there are some updates, such as meals for those with food allergies and some to keep up with changing tastes. “I think folks’ flavor profile change a little bit over time,” she said. “For instance, we developed a breakfast burrito. I mean, that’s not something that my grandparents ate, but it is something that is very popular, especially with drive-thru and takeout customers. But, it still has a Southern flair to it because we use our sausage in it, but we’re also using green chiles.”

Those green chiles, like many of the vegetables at Fagan’s, come from a two-acre family farm less than a mile away, which was plowed by Bill Fagan Jr., Fagan’s husband and Quintana’s brother.

The farm now grows tomatoes, watermelon, okra, squash, zucchini, peppers, corn and more. The restaurant’s porch is also

home at times to a farmer’s market, even if not all customers were used to fresh-grown food.

“We had some customers, especially last year, that said, ‘How do you get the corn out?’” Fagan said. “Because they had never seen it.”

In the dozen years, the business has been a family endeavor with Fagan’s kids currently handling the farming and landscaping, “anything with a tractor.” Quintana said her kids also worked in the restaurant in high school and college.

That family has grown over the years as regular customers have frequented the restaurant.

Laurie Ellis said she has been eating at Fagan’s for about 10 years and has been a frequent customer, especially when she worked nearby.

“Our office was down the street, but I would eat here probably three out of the five days,” she said. “They have a great variety of food, and if there’s something that you don’t want for their daily specials, they always have two specials a day.”

Fagan said some customers are there so frequently, employees will check on them if they don’t come in or ask her to sit with them if the customer is having a bad day.

“We have dozens of folks who come every day for breakfast, then they come back after that for lunch,” Fagan said. “We have the most loyal customers and they’re awesome.” “...to be almost family,” Quintana added. “If they don’t come in, we get worried.”

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400 faces

Arpana Satyu-Burge Co-owner of Dutch Monkey Doughnuts

S

ome of the tastiest treats can be found at Dutch Monkey Doughnuts, operated by husband and wife team Martin Burge and Arpana Satyu-Burge, where you can find made-from-scratch doughnuts with no artificial flavors just off Peachtree Parkway.

After moving from New York, where the couple worked at restaurants across the city before Martin became executive chef and Arpana executive pastry chef at the Metropolitan Opera House, the couple moved to Forsyth County to be closer to family and opened Dutch Monkey in 2009 after seeing a need for high-quality doughnuts in their own back yard.

Satyu-Burge, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute’s Pastry Arts and International Bread Baking programs and former intern of chef Bobby Flay, took some time out of her busy schedule to talk about a few of her favorite foods, places and things to watch.

What is one of your prized possessions? “A work-related prized possession is our baker’s scale. I think electronic scales are kind of all the rage right now, but we have the old-fashioned balance scale and that’s what we weigh all of our ingredients on. It’s the kind of scale I used at my very first pastry job, so I kind of have an emotional attachment to it. If the entire place burned down, I would go hunting for that scale.”

Happy place? “We go to the gym a lot. We go to CrossFit Dynamo. We go right down the street. It’s three minutes away.

That’s where Martin and I love to be when we’re not here.”

Vacation spot? “We just went to Italy, which was pretty great. I think that may be my new vacation spot.”

“We just went to Florence a few months ago and it was amazing and [we] didn’t want to come back … The food was unbelievable.”

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Favorite Dutch Monkey doughnut? “Buttermilk Cake. That’s an easy one: that’s just our standard cake doughnut, kind of like a glazed version that has a little bit of a crisp glaze on top. It’s the easiest one for us to make, honestly, and, I think, our finest work.”

Favorite non-baked food? “Cheese fries. I’m on a lifelong quest to find the world’s best cheese fries. There are some seasoned waffle fries at a diner in upstate New York … Then the Texas cheese fries at Chili’s. If I’m having a really hard day at work or things aren’t going well, that will brighten my day up real quick.”

Favorite TV show? “It used to be ‘Third Rock from the Sun’ with John Lithgow and French Stewart. That was awesome. Now, ‘Modern Family.’”

Favorite movie? “‘Office Space,’ for sure.”

Favorite book? “’Personal History,’ by Katherine Graham. It’s a book about the woman who was married to the publisher of the Washington Post, and then her husband committed suicide and she had to take over. It’s just a really great biography.”

Favorite band? “Lyle Lovett and his Large Band. He’s from Texas, and I’m from Texas, and I just love his music. There’s a Lyle Lovett song for any occasion.”

Favorite opera? “I liked Aida. It was probably my favorite. We never got to see them, but sometimes when we did banquets we could hear the music piped into other parts of the building. We rarely got to see the opera. I don’t think we went to one opera while we were there because we were working every opera.”

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400 eats

Fall is coming White Chicken Chili

One of my earliest memories is of sitting in the kitchen of my childhood home on a dreary fall day, looking out at the rain while my parents cooked chili and cornbread for my siblings and I. I remember the smell of cooking beef, onions and garlic, and the taste of the piping hot cornbread slathered with butter and honey straight from my mother’s old cast iron.

Even today, on a cold and rainy day, I still think about that memory and how cozy it was.

For this edition of 400 Eats, I chose to bring you a slightly modified version of the classic chili and cornbread meal — with a Latin influenced White Chicken Chili with Jalapeno cornbread on the side. This meal is definitely a different taste than classic chili, but I think what makes it great is the mix of creamy, savory flavors and zesty spices.

For this meal you will need a slow cooker, an oven and some sort of baking dishes for chicken and corn bread. For cooking the chicken, I suggest a baking sheet, and for cornbread I strongly suggest a cast iron skillet or muffin tin.

— Content and photos by Alexander Popp

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Chili ingredients • Chicken breasts - 1 pound (two breasts) • Yellow onion - 1 whole • Garlic - 2 cloves • Chicken broth - 32 ounces • Great Northern beans - two 15 ounce cans • Green chiles - Two 4 ounce cans • Corn - One 15 ounce can • Salt - 1 tsp • Black pepper - 1/2 tsp • Cumin - 1 tsp • Oregano - 3/4 tsp • Chili powder - 1/2 tsp • Cayenne pepper - 1/4 tsp • Fresh cilantro - 1 cup • Cream cheese - 2 ounces • Half and half - 1/4 cup

Cornbread Ingredients • Jiffy corn muffin mix - two boxes (For stupid cheap, easy, no-fuss cornbread Jiffy can’t be beaten) • Eggs - 2 whole • Milk - 2/3 cup • Fresh Jalapeno - to taste

1.Your chicken will make or break the chili, so the first step is to prepare and cook your chicken. Take both chicken breasts, wash and dry them thoroughly and rub them down with 1/2 tsp cumin, 1/2 tsp chili powder, 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper and 3/4 tsp oregano.

2. Bake chicken breasts at 400 degrees, for 20 minutes or until each is cooked thoroughly.

Let the breasts cool completely and then pull each into strips.

3. Add pulled chicken to the slow cooker, add salt, pepper, 1 tsp cumin, 1/2 tsp chili powder, 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper and 3/4 tsp oregano.

4. Stir in your diced onion, corn, garlic, Great Northern beans, chiles and chicken broth.

5. Cover the slow cooker and cook it on high for 3.5 hours. The spices of this meal are definitely something you can take some liberties with. My advice is to let your chili cook for three hours and then start tinkering with the different ratios. But be careful with cayenne, it is easy to overdo it (If that does happen, you can always add in a touch more half and half in the next step to cool things down.)

6. When the chili is just about done, 30 minutes to go, combine the cornbread ingredients in a mixing bowl and whisk until the mixture is thoroughly wet. Mince the fresh jalapeno and stir into the batter. Like the spices, you can adjust the jalapeno for taste.

7. When the chili is done cooking, stir in the cream cheese and half and half, cover and continue cooking until the chili reaches your desired thickness.

8. Enjoy!

September 2018 | 400 LIFE |

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Stephen Daniels, co-founder of Fill Ministries with wife Suellen, walks through the greenhouse on the 6-acre farm in east Forsyth.

Fruitful start

Fill Ministries co-founders reflect on months of growth at their east Forsyth farm Story and photos by Alexander Popp

I

t’s been nearly four months since Fill Ministries and Meals By Grace cut the ribbon on their first aquaponics greenhouse and according to co-founders, Suellen and Stephen Daniels, the operation is growing like a weed and producing fruits left and right.

So far, the Fill Ministries 6-acre farm in east Forsyth still only consists of one 156- by 35-foot greenhouse and several open-air rows of berry bushes and terrestrial plants, but eventually, they plan on expanding the operation to as many as eight greenhouses on the property.

Each greenhouse at the farm contains three long rectangular bays of water, each only a few inches deep and filled with sheets of floating plastic foam in the water, covered with hundreds of holes into which a single plant is planted.

At capacity, Suellen Daniels said that each greenhouse has the ability to produce more than 100 pounds of vegetables every week, and can produce year-round regardless of the weather.

Currently, volunteers harvest about 100 pounds of romaine and

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between 5 and 25 pounds of tomatoes each week.

Vegetables from the greenhouse go to the Meals by Grace Client Choice Pantry, and any overage is sold into the community to turn around and buy new products for the pantry.

Suellen Daniels said that while things have gone smoothly the last few months, they have had to adapt and change as problems like machinery breaking down and plants dying have cropped up.

One large obstacle he said they had to overcome with some of their clients at the food pantry was that many just don’t know what to do with greens, because they have never had access to them.

“It’s probably an outgrowth of not being accustomed to healthy eating,” Stephen Daniels said. “If you were to ask our families, ‘How many salads do you eat a week?’ They’ll say, ‘what’s a salad?’”

After seeing that many families were either not picking fresh greens or sometimes just throwing them out, Suellen Daniels said

they began to work with families to make sure that they knew what healthy foods look like and how to cook them.

“Step two is coming back with education,” Suellen Daniels said. “Education plays into this in a big way, teaching those who have never had what something tastes like and getting the kids excited about it.”

And people do seem to be excited about the farm, Daniels said that almost every day of the week they have volunteers from large workgroups that come for the whole day to single individuals that come for an hour, all wanting to give back and see the farm.

“We have volunteers every day, we work seven days a week because so many people want to come and play at the farm,” she said. “And during the school, we have STEM group after STEM group here to learn about how the farm works. It’s great.”

As she spoke, one such volunteer, 18-year-old Nidesh Kumaresan, walked up the driveway and set to work with Stephen Daniels in the greenhouse.

Kumaresan said that for him the volunteering started as a way to recover from a speeding ticket.

“I was trying to find places near my house, and [my] mom found it online with the Meals by Grace website,” he said. “And I’ve enjoyed it, there’s so much to do here ... I’ve learned about how the crops here work, harvesting, the whole process behind shipping out certain crops.”

With so much interest from the community and readily available help, the Daniels said that the next step for the farm is expanding towards being self-sustaining as a non-profit. She said that the goal of becoming self-sustaining would mean expanding the grow operation to four greenhouses.

“We want to be self-sustaining because as a part of our vision model, we want to lead by example. We want to show our fami-

Stephen Daniels helps a worker in the greenhouse.

lies that being self-sustaining is a great place to be,” she said.

“And we want them to get there, but we want to model that for them.”

Each of the greenhouses costs roughly $250,000 to build and outfit. They raise those funds from events, donations and constantly applying for grants.

Continued Page 21

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Suellen Daniels said they are halfway done raising the funds for greenhouse number two, which will be built right next door to the first. She said that eventually they will be formed into one giant “double hump” greenhouse.

They say that the second greenhouse is planned to be built within the next six months, putting them on track to be selfsustaining within the next three years.

After expanding the farm, she said that they also plan on consolidating the different aspects of Fill Ministries, pulling its different parts in from the corners of the county to a central location at the farm.

“We are still very much scattered,” she said, explaining that parts of their operations are spread across north and south Forsyth, keeping their trucks, volunteers and product traveling on a daily basis.

“We are a logistical nightmare all week long, with our truck and supplies and volunteers going in all different directions,” she said. “It will be just so much more efficient and effective for us to serve families when we are all in the same place.”

Continued Page 22

Suellen and Stephen Daniels cut the ribbon on their first aquaponics greenhouse nearly four months ago. They plan on expanding the operation to as many as eight greenhouses on the property.

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Beyond the farm expansions, the Daniels said that they have several other projects in the hopper that they hope with increased community engagement.

“We are always looking for opportunities to integrate the community,” she said. “Whether it’s the community that’s been marginalized, that may not have all the skills they need or families that may have sunsetted skills.”

In addition to opportunities for community groups, Stephen Daniels said they are still pushing their produce as a quality, safe product to local restaurant owners. Due to how their products are grown, none are subject to soil borne illnesses like listeria and E.coli, which other farms might fear.

“They can buy from us 365 days a year without any concerns about those typical things that you could get from traditional farms,” Suellen Daniels said.

“And foundationally, the product is a superior product,” Stephen Daniels said. “It has a great taste ... and we have a supply that we can repeat every week, year round.”

But most importantly, for every bag of lettuce or tomatoes that is purchased in the community, Fill Ministries can turn it around and feed more people different things they can’t grow, like macaroni and cheese, cereal or eggs, they said.

“Every time a person or a business purchases our produce, they are allowing us to feed more hungry children,” Suellen Daniels said.

Interested buyers can find produce from Fill Ministries through The Cumming Harvest online market, cumming. locallygrown.net.

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