How one woman’s quest for healthy eating inspired a return to her rural roots and a new path in agriculture
By Anna-Rhesa Versola | Photography by John Michael Simpson
Valarie Jarvis has beef with meat. The geriatrics nurse, who grew up in a “no stoplight kind of rural” area, returned to her farming roots after changing her perspective on food.
Valarie holds a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Virginia and was working as director of nursing at a skilled nursing facility when her brother was diagnosed with colon cancer.
“He was the one who started teaching me about food and its correlation with our bodies,” she says. “You would think that we would learn this in nursing school, but most doctors and nurses aren’t trained on nutrition and how our food really affects our bodies, particularly the chemicals and the additives.”
Valarie says her brother, who worked in computer science for a company in Research Triangle Park, shared research articles and published studies about the correlation between certain additives and cancer. “He was very much a fast food guy,” she says. “You know, busy working long hours, fast food at every meal. I watched him go from that to a very clean diet.”
Her brother went on a medical leave of absence and took the time to carefully prepare his meals. The cancer went away. He returned to work and his previous lifestyle.
“The cancer came back, and he didn’t survive it that time,” Valarie says. That was in 2012, and she began delving into the materials her brother had shared. “It literally altered me,” Valarie says. “I was still working in the nursing home, and the more I learned, I was like, ‘This is probably the reason that most of my patients are sick.’”
She began paying closer attention to the nutritional value of food and how it was processed, choosing to avoid meat from animals treated with antibiotics and preservatives.
Recollection
Valarie grew up in Spencer, Virginia, where her father and grandfather grew tobacco. Valarie’s dad also raised pigs, butchered them on the farm, and stored the meat in a freezer. She recalls how the meat her family raised tasted differently than the processed meat she would buy from the grocery store.
“It tastes nothing like the meat that I had back then,” Valarie says. She decided she wanted to consume chemical-free meat but couldn’t find organic meat producers nearby. “So at that point,” she says, “I might as well just grow my own pig.” As her personal hobby expanded, Valarie started selling the meat to offset costs. It wasn’t long before Valarie’s husband, Immanuel Jarvis, supported her interest in developing the project into a side business.
“Not only did I want [a source of ] meat, but I felt like I had the opportunity over time to solve that problem for other people,” Valarie says.
“We just wanted to eat better,” Immanuel agrees, “so then, we kind of just took a deep breath and started plowing through it.”
The couple formally established Jireh Family Farm in 2017; two years later, they formed a nonprofit, Jireh Farm Foundation, as an outpost for animal husbandry, homesteading and educating the public about natural foods. By 2020, both Valarie and Immanuel had left their jobs to farm full time. Today, their services include agricultural summer camps, farm-to-table dinner experiences, adult herbal classes and more.
Rejuvenation
Immanuel is president of the Frederick Douglass Foundation of North Carolina and has spent most of his career in sales. He was a real estate investor in 2016 when Valarie came across the property that would become their 4-acre homestead adjacent to Mystic Farm and Distillery on Mineral Springs Road. “I saw the intrinsic value of this place,” he says of the 3,200-square-foot home. Their family renovated the four-bedroom, threebathroom brick ranch to suit their needs, including expanding storage space downstairs to accommodate a commercial brooder for hundreds of chicks and a second kitchen area with multiple chest freezers. Immanuel also applied for and received grants from the Durham County Soil and Water Department and the North Carolina Cooperative Extension to upgrade the electrical wiring for the whole house and to install solar panels for the on-site market shop.
“We’ve done a lot,” Immanuel says. “We’re just that family that’s always pushing to the next level. There’s always progress to be made.” The couple added a new structure on the farm last year where they butcher and process meat from ducks (from a companion farmer), turkeys and chickens. “To create high-quality food en masse and be able to scale it up, there’s more infrastructure, more paddocks, more barns and things like that,” Immanuel says.
In the front yard, about 100 chicks peck on a grassy lawn inside a large chicken tractor, which can be moved to another section of grass when needed. About a dozen rabbits lay in a long hutch in the side yard in sight of seven large pigs in the nearby pen. Twenty goats roam a larger section by the hen house, where 100 egg layers roam their area. Next to the covered carport is a storage building and a separate roadside shop with several chest freezers of meat and coolers for eggs, plus other farm products for sale to the general public.
Renewal
Immanuel estimates that the farm produces about 4,000 pounds of meat and eggs each month; he and Valarie expect to increase productivity.
“We have been incredibly blessed with an opportunity to get in more contract work,” Immanuel says. “Right now, we have a contract for 300 chickens a month, and that’s a lot for us.”
Immanuel expects to have about three dozen turkeys later this fall in time to raise, pre-sell and process for Thanksgiving. Similarly, they will move hundreds of pounds of pork, Black Angus beef and chicken.
“We don’t move goat meat that much,” Valarie says.
“We’re going to start, because I have a reason now,” Immanuel says, chuckling about how the goats escaped their pen while the family was away; a neighbor kindly herded the goats back onto the farm, but not through the original gate. “They just ate my garden,” Immanuel says.
“They’ve literally destroyed everything in it, like grape tomatoes and peppers. I’ve picked at least two [goats], and I think there’s another two I’m going to send to ‘freezer camp.’”
Valarie says the garden usually includes herbs for her tea remedies, which she sells while educating people on how plants and foods can help with ailments. “If I teach people how to alter their diet, they can improve their blood sugar levels, which affects their organs and can prevent diabetes,” she says, noting the chronic disease runs in her family. Valarie grew up caring for her diabetic grandmother, who later developed Alzheimer’s disease, an experience that Valerie says inspired her to become a nurse with a focus on geriatric care. She expresses concern about a growing body of medical and clinical research on “Type-3 diabetes,” a term some scientists proposed to describe Alzheimer’s because they believe insulin dysregulation in the brain may cause dementia.
“It’s just a big circle of what we are eating,” Valarie says. “Like we’ve heard for a long time, we are what we eat. Truly, we are what we eat.”
