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Cathy Powell Cavender and Dennis the Menace
Cathy and her beloved horse, Dennis the Menace, an 11-year-old Haflinger Gelding.
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Cathy and Andy
Cathy Powell Cavender and Andy Cavender decided to “come home” to work the family farm.
One thing Cathy Powell Cavender knew for sure growing up on a farm was that she didn’t want to farm.
Her farmer father, H. Shirley Powell, was insistent that all three of his daughters go to college and Cathy did, at George Mason University, where she studied accounting and, as she puts it, “graduated with an English degree.” After some social services work, she took a job as an accounting clerk in the town of Topsail Beach in North Carolina, where her husband, Andy, had used his art history degree to start a landscaping business. Eventually she took a position with a construction company that built natural gas pipelines, a job that paid well, but took her away from home a lot.
“I had an RV and I traveled to job sites in South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Wyoming,” she recalls. “It was two or three, sometimes six months or a year, at a time and it got old after a while.” It was around the time her grandmother died in the early aughts that she and Andy began talking to her parents about what was going to eventually happen to the farm. Between subdivision developers and land conservationists sniffing around the historic property near James Monroe’s birthplace, and an acknowledgment that her father was getting older and not wanting to see his lifetime of hard work go to waste, a decision had to be made.
“My sisters and I got more serious about what would happen to the farm, trying to figure out the long term,” she says from her sunny kitchen in what was once her grandmother’s house. “How could we keep the land in the family? We had to have a plan and the thing that made the most sense was for one of us to go run the farm. My sister Amanda and her husband were about to open a restaurant in Richmond. My sister Rebecca lives with her family and works in Connecticut. We didn’t have children, so it just made sense for us to come home.”
By that time, she was working as vice president of the construction company, making great money but feeling burned out and on call all the time. “When I was working there, I was so miserable that I made a list of what Cathy wants. I wanted to see Andy more than twice a month. I wanted a horse and time to garden and do yoga,” she says. “Life is too short. The life I was leading at the time wasn’t going to cut it forever. Coming to the farm dovetailed with making our choice not to be slaves to the clock. And I was always a dirt person.”
Her love of dirt began on the piece of land that encompasses the twenty-five acres that her great-grandfather, Thomas Powell, bought for $300 in 1907 and that is now Monrovia Farm in Westmoreland County. A second parcel of twenty-five acres, where the house now sits, was purchased for another $300 with additional land bought in the intervening years, bringing the farm to its current 140 acres. Cathy’s father, H. Shirley Powell, took over the farm in 1973, working a full-time job and raising corn and cattle in the evenings and on weekends. He installed a fierce work ethic in his daughters. “Dad always taught us to get it done before someone asks you to do it. Grandma made butter and had a handful of cattle. We had a big garden and caught salt perch in the river. The farm wasn’t the operation it is now; it was more of a feeding-the-family kind of a thing,” Cathy recalls. That history was enough for Monrovia Farm to recently be designated a Virginia Century Farm by the governor, recognition that it is a family farm that’s been in operation for over a hundred consecutive years.
Today, Cathy and her family rent an additional 600 acres to grow crops. Everything the 150 Black Angus and Black Angus cross-beef cattle eat, they grow themselves. “We’re small but too big to be completely organic,” Cathy admits, citing the cost of organically farmed beef cattle as prohibitive to the restaurants and farmers’ markets who buy from them. They buy feeder calves from the livestock market and allow them to graze the surrounding pastures until they are finished off on homegrown alfalfa hay, silage (“It’s like cole slaw,” Shirley jokes) and small grains. Walking through the feeding barn, Cathy explains that the cows gain about three to four pounds a day for two hundred days. “These guys are the eaters; that’s their job.” When they’re not in the feeder barn, they’re in the charmingly named loafing barn, doing the other thing cows do so well.
The cows’ job is far easier than Cathy’s. “Really, all I want to do is go outside and work in the dirt, but I spend a lot of time on the computer, emailing, and working on sales. The direct marketing of our beef has tremendous potential. One challenge for us is to meet the restaurant buyer trade by always having animals ready to go to the butcher. Working a schedule brings the quantity so we always have something ready for buyers.” Last year they direct sold seventy animals and hope to direct market and sell 150 in 2014. Monrovia Farm beef is served at Denson’s Grocery in Colonial Beach, the Inn at Montross, Pendulum Fine Meats in Norfolk, Murphy’s Grand Irish Pub in both Alexandria and Virginia Beach, and Camden’s Dogtown Market and Lucy’s, both in Richmond.
Most days begin with Cathy and Andy on what she refers to as the “sweet potato porch,” an L-shaped space on the second floor of the farmhouse, reached via a unique pocket screen door and step down. The view is of the creek, her horse, and the hummingbird feeder. “This porch was one of the first projects when we moved up here,” she says from a rocking chair. “Grandma stored sweet potatoes out here, so this porch was never used socially. After the sweet potatoes dried a while out here, they were moved inside and stored in bags under the beds. Andy and I have coffee here in the mornings and talk about what we’re going to do each day. I worked so much before that it’s nice not to have everything be about work now. Of course, we’re working twice as hard here, but it’s nice to take some time for us.”
Andy has renovated much of the house, including the sunny third floor, which he’s converted to a sleeping attic for visitors and is now accessible by a spiral staircase. “One thing we’ve tried to do is open the farm to the family and our friends. We do a potluck in the spring and fall and invite everyone. Part of us being here is to preserve the farm for our family and for the next generation so they know where food comes from and what a cow is.”
The multitasking, ever-traveling former vice president seems to have found her niche in the very place she was determined not to end up. When asked how that happened, she doesn’t hesitate to explain what moving back to the farm has meant to her. “I got my horse and I’ve become a big bird-watcher. There’s a sense of openness and peacefulness here. It’s just really nice here. This is it; I’m all done.”
Monrovia Farm welcomes visitors, but because they are full-time farmers, ask that arrangements be made in advance by emailing cathy@monroviafarm.com or calling 910-540-4505. Restaurants and markets interested in carrying their Virginia-raised beef are encouraged to call or email.
This article appeared in the Spring 2014 issue of The Local Scoop Magazine, pgs. 11-13.