Growing Green Farms a Return to Old-School Agricultural Sustainability

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

Growing Green Family Farms sits on a slope in Townville, and it’s pastoral on this windy day where the land folds softly toward a distant treeline and the new house—white and gabled—looks as if it has been there since before the highway signs were green. This is by design.

Nathan Vannette, who owns the farm with his family, will tell you that the house is a kind of fiction meant to feel true.

“We were looking for an old farmhouse, as that was our aspiration,” said Vannette, explaining that they loved “the character and the story” that come with a place where other people have already cooked dinner and argued and watched storms move in. When they couldn’t find land that came with a farm house, they had one built and then began the slow work of backfilling its history: antiques, particular family heirlooms, photographs on the wall, all arranged to give visitors the sense that the place has been settled for a hundred years.

The farm itself is spread across ground that Vannette describes as “perfect” for what they wanted to do. His brother owns the property across the street; a “large caravan” of family moved down from Michigan, and they had been intentionally combing the area for land that would keep them close to one another and within easy reach of Anderson, Pendleton, and the other small Upstate towns that now form their customer base. When this particular property came up for sale, they made an offer, grateful, later, for the way the topography turned out to suit greenhouse rows and open fields alike.

The farm’s official name—Growing Green Family Farms—sounds like a brand focus-grouped for a co-op shelf, but the story behind it is more narrow and personal.

“A lot of it started when I was really young,” Vannette said. His parents gave him a corner of the yard in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to start a flower garden, and then, not long after, he took on the family’s vegetable garden. By 14, he had moved from the backyard to a local hydroponic farm, first as a volunteer, then as an employee, tending rows of plants whose roots sat not in soil but in carefully balanced nutrient solutions.

In college, he studied small business management and, at the same time, started his own farm to pay for his education, blending spreadsheets with seed trays in a way that now feels like rehearsal.

“Fifteen years later,” Vannette said, “we are well established here in South Carolina.”

Part of the draw was climatic: winters in Michigan impose a natural brake on small farms; the Upstate’s longer growing season offers more room to experiment. Part of it was family logistics. His grandparents were snowbirds, and the move south was, in its way, a compromise: far enough down to spare them the long drive to Florida, close enough to the hills and lakes that the younger generations wanted.

Growing Green is, in its daily habits, quietly doctrinaire.

“We specialize in growing fresh produce, focusing on regenerative agricultural techniques,” Vannette said. The list that follows is both familiar and exacting: no pesticides, no herbicides, no-till beds, everything done by hand. In practice, it means that the farm’s workers—many of them young, some of them from the family’s church—spend a good part of their days on their knees, pulling weeds, setting transplants, and working compost into the soil with tools that require wrists, not hydraulics.

The farm’s current diversity is seasonal but broad.

“This time of year, we have everything from your lettuces, kales, radishes,” Vannette said. In the greenhouse, they are starting tomatoes and peppers; in the open ground, they will move on to squash, cucumbers, and okra, a Southern inevitability. “Just about any produce that you can think of, we try to grow,” he said, sounding less boastful than faintly daunted by his own list.

The difference between their produce and what sits in the grocery store bin, he insists, is not just a matter of marketing.

Supermarket vegetables are typically “five to seven days old” by the time they reach the shelf, he said, and much of their nutritional value has already leached away in transit. At Growing Green, nearly everything is harvested within 24 hours of delivery, which both maximizes shelf life and, according to customers, produces lettuce that lasts “ten to fourteen days in the refrigerator.” Because they are “conscientious of every element, from what goes into the soil to what we’re putting on the plants,” he said, they can say with unusual confidence that their produce is free of synthetic fertilizers and sprays whose residues “don’t necessarily wash off” under the tap.

If the farm’s philosophy is rooted in the soil, its business model is scattered across the Upstate. Around Anderson, the easiest way to find their produce is through the Clemson Area Food Exchange, an online farmers’ market with a drop-off site in downtown Anderson and others in towns across the region. There is also the more traditional route: restaurants. Vannette ticks off a list of downtown Anderson kitchens—The Common House, Sullivan’s, Maki Sushi, Earl Street Bar & Grill—that buy their greens and other crops, along with roughly 20 local restaurants across the Upstate.

They haul a portion of the harvest to the downtown Greenville farmers’ market, where their stall is one among many but distinguished by the particular claims on its chalkboard. For customers who prefer to come directly to the source, there is online ordering through growinggreenfamilyfarms.com, with pickup either at the farm gate or at a downtown Anderson location.

There is also the quieter backbone of their finances: community supported agriculture. Through the Upstate Growers Cooperative, a CSA program they participate in, customers buy shares for eight, twelve, or sixteen weeks of produce up front, providing “financial capital to buy our seeds, our amendments for the soil, and get things growing before it gets to your plate.” The cooperative is a network of like-minded farmers who share both a growing philosophy and a desire to reach local communities without surrendering to the logic of scale.

Despite the breadth of their reach, the operation remains small enough that the names of its workers can be counted and remembered. Vannette’s brother-in-law is his business partner, and this year they are formally hiring his father, adding a deliberate “multi-generational component” to the payroll. From their church—Christ the Redeemer, an Anglican congregation in Pendleton—they employ “about five to seven” from the kids’ ministry, who come out to work in what for them is both a job and a kind of living civics lesson.

In addition, the farm regularly hosts two or three Clemson University interns, a natural arrangement given their proximity to the campus and the presence of professors and extension agents who specialize in everything from soil science to small-scale marketing.

“Anytime we have a question, we can reach out to them,” Vannette said, describing the Clemson Extension Service as “an invaluable resource,” especially because the farm’s nonconventional, regenerative approach does not always fit neatly into standard guidelines.

Another set of workers arrives through Project Victory Gardens, a program that aims to connect military veterans with agriculture. Through a government initiative called Skillbridge, veterans can take on paid internships on the farm, spending several months getting their hands dirty and, in the process, “reassemble into civilian life as easy as possible.” Vannette describes it as a joy to watch them plant a seed and then stand, weeks later, over the harvest, seeing in that arc a kind of tangible reward that other jobs sometimes fail to provide.

For all its self-contained charm, Growing Green is not an island.

“We are losing family farms, and that is disheartening,” Vannette said. Land prices have climbed to the point where selling out can feel, for aging or debt-burdened farmers, less like a betrayal than a rational exit. His response, so far, has been to look for ways that his own success can be used to “bring other farms up.”

One practical version of this is logistical. The farm has begun delivering and distributing products from neighboring farms to farther-flung outlets such as the Clemson Area Food Exchange and the Swamp Rabbit Cafe and Grocery, allowing those farmers to “spend more time on their farm” while still reaching new markets. The long-term goal, he said, is to build a community of growers who share both resources and customers, lifting one another up rather than competing for the same small slice of attention.

Vannette’s own role in that broader network has expanded: he serves as president of the South Carolina Specialty Crop Association, which works to “allocate resources to specialty crop farmers such as ourselves.” The position has sharpened his interest in education, not only for fellow farmers but also for K–12 students in the region’s rapidly growing school districts. He imagines a future in which farm tours and classroom visits are as routine as harvest schedules.

On a typical week in season, the farm is less a secluded enterprise than a small campus. Groups arrive from the Anderson Free Clinic, from local schools, from homeschool co-ops and church orchards, all of them moving in loose lines between beds and greenhouses while Vannette or one of his colleagues explains what is growing where and why.

“We try to be as open with our farm, both our practices, but then also the location itself as possible,” he said.

Part of the motive is transparent recruiting.

“We’re trying to sow seeds to show that farming is a viable occupation,” he said, hoping that at least a few of the children or teenagers who walk the property will leave believing that a life spent coaxing vegetables out of the ground is not an anachronism. If they can “encourage or help someone along with that journey,” he added, they will have done well by their own aspiration to help other farmers get started.

Asked where he sees the farm in 10 or 20 years, Vannette laughed a little and admitted that, even three years ago, he would have underestimated the pace of change. The growth they have already experienced, backed by what he calls the “continued pour out of the community,” has allowed them to hire more full-time staff and to imagine themselves less as a single operation and more as an advocate for others.

In the nearer term— “within the next twelve to twenty-four months”—they hope to expand into value-added products: turning their peppers into hot sauce, cucumbers into pickled relish, and other surplus into jars and bottles that can carry the farm’s name into pantries. Slightly farther out, they talk about meat: grass-fed, grass-finished beef, pasture-raised chickens, all raised under the same regenerative principles that govern their vegetables. For now, with a young child at home, they are trying to keep their focus narrow enough that they can “succeed well” in the areas they already occupy, while still looking five to ten years ahead at offerings “the community is definitely hungry for.”

There are, too, crops that remain aspirational.

“I’d love to branch into some sweet potatoes,” Vannette said. Sweet corn is more complicated; he is still trying to “figure out a way to grow sweet corn without pesticides,” to outwit the corn earworms that leave the “silk corn” so many home gardeners reluctantly accept.

Like any modern enterprise, Growing Green exists as much in the digital as in the physical landscape. Its website allows customers to place orders and schedule pickups, while Facebook and Instagram offer a curated but candid window into “both the highs and the lows” of life on the farm. Vannette’s wife manages the social media, posting images of seedlings, mud, and occasionally failure, all meant to keep followers “engaged in the life of a farmer.”

On a walk around the property, Vannette pointed out greenhouse frames, rows of winter greens, the house that looks older than it is, and the property line that marks where his brother’s land begins. The whole thing is new enough that the fence posts are still straight, but there is already, in the way he talks about it, the assumption that it will outlast him.

In an era when family farms are, by the statistics, disappearing, Growing Green presents itself as a counterexample: a small, labor-intensive operation that has chosen the long road of direct sales, cooperative networks, and internships over the more anonymous efficiencies of scale. Whether it can remain that way is an open question. For now, on a mild Upstate afternoon, with lettuces in the ground and tomatoes in the greenhouse, the project feels, at least briefly, not like a hedge against decline but like a beginning.