Dogwood Hills Guest Farm

"How did I end up here?" I thought to myself as I walked down the gravel drive to the dairy barn, flanked by three Great Pyrenees and a single duck.

Three months earlier, I'd been teaching English to immigrant students and living two hours away from my hometown. Then COVID gave me an extra week of Spring Break. Then an extra three weeks. Then school was canceled all together. By the time I realized how serious the situation was, I'd moved out of my apartment and moved home to the farm. The more time I spent helping my father feed cattle and my mother plant her vegetable garden, the more I missed the animals and the smell of earth.

But how can you miss something you're with right there in that moment?

It's hard to explain, but I mourned the time I'd lost on the farm, and couldn't help but feel I had made a mistake in my college years, choosing Creative Writing and English as college majors instead of going into agriculture like everyone else in my family. For three years I taught, and so for three years I had forgotten everything I had learned about farming, but it slowly came back to me like riding a bike.

Something you never forget.

When I moved home, I became happier. My ghost-white skin darkened to a golden pink, my hair grew out, I bought 28 chickens, and most importantly, I started writing again. I started project after project on the farm till I ran out of ideas and energy, then I thought, "Hey, how can I use writing, literally my only real skill, to help other people discover this life?" So I came up with a harebrained idea.

I wanted to interview the best of the best, the farmers in the area who were the undisputed champions of their chosen crafts, whether it be raising Alpine goats or honey bees. I thought that maybe I could give others exposure, build up the number of people willing to talk to me, and maybe learn a few tricks of the trade while I was at it. After all, I was a member of the Searcy County community again, so I needed to do something positive with all my spare time, right?

So to answer the question, that's how I ended up here.

"So, do you want to give it a try?"

I looked down at Grace perched on the edge of small milking stool. She squeezed milk into a shiny silver bucket at break-neck speeds. She didn't even have to look.

"You know what, I'd love to. What's the trick?"

"Squeeze then pull. You won't hurt her."

I took Grace's place on the milking stool. I'd tried milking once on a goat. I hadn't gotten so much as a slow drip. On a cow, I was hoping for better results.

"Okay," I said. "Would you mind videoing this? My mom grew up in the backwoods. She knows how to do all of this stuff and will laugh herself to death when she sees this."

"Sure. It's whatever you want."

Grace was used to indulging tourists. After all, her mother was president of the Arkansas Agritourism Association. They'd both been on PBS, featured in Arkansas Life Magazine, and I had arrived at 7:30 that morning just to give the interview more time, as the Pepler family had a farm tour scheduled for 11:00 later that morning.

Like I said, I wanted to interview the best of the best.

I looked on in amazement as the milk shot from the teats into the bucket. Not only was I actually milking for the first time in my life, I was actually hitting what I was aiming at!

I could see the appeal of the agritourism industry to outsiders looking in. I grew up on a farm myself just forty minutes from the Peplers. Our farm even sits on the ruins of an old dairy, but my family raised beef cattle. With the rise of factory farms and competitive pricing, many of the common, local dairies dried up, and the experience was lost to me.

"I'm hitting it most of the time," I said, smiling stupidly to myself. "Here, I better give it back to you. How long does the 'morning routine' normally take you anyway?"

I slung my camera back across my body.

"Two and a half hours, maybe less now that we have help," Grace said, absently lifting her chin, a motion to the curly-haired farmhand working outside the barn.

I followed Grace around for an hour, shooting question after question at her, each she answered automatically as we wove through ducks, geese, dairy cows, horses, alpacas, and chickens, until eventually I skidded to a stop in front of a lemur. It was leaping around its enclosure screeching with delight as it watched the curious baby chicks scurrying below. At first I thought for sure I was mistaken, that it was a rouge raccoon, but as I gaped there for a whole sixty seconds, there could be no denying that it was in fact a lemur.

"A lemur? You have a lemur?"

" Oh yeah," she said simply. "That's Zaboo."

"How'd you get a lemur?"

I'd worked in tourism for 3 years during my summer breaks from college with the Buffalo National River, and I knew how trying chatty tourists could be, but I suddenly found myself on the other end of the spectrum, and the youngest Pepler was nothing but patient with me.

I had the opportunity to interview Mrs. Ruthie Pepler, the matriarch of Dogwood Hills, in (and I cannot stress this enough) THE most beautiful kitchen I have ever seen located just above the dairy barn. I was fortunate that, despite all her success, she was willing to talk to me, a blogger just starting out. She even fed me homemade yogurt and scones.

That's right.

Homemade yogurt.

I asked her, "You've been on PBS and in Arkansas Life Magazine. Tell us a a little bit more about that. How does that feel?"

Mrs. Ruthie replied, "It's been interesting. We've been working with Kat Robinson for a while and also the people at Arkansas Life, so this has kind of been a longstanding relationship, so I feel like a lot of things were in the works already. When we had this COVID pandemic come along, all these things were already in place, so the timing was just perfect [referring to interview and photo shoot with Arkansas Life Magazine] and we just finished our projects and put it out there. I think it's the stuff people need to hear right now about being prepared, about making your food ahead of time, working with what's on hand, and basic skills. All those things are what we cover, so it is kind of very natural for us on the farm."

"That's really wonderful that you guys get to share something positive in the media today for people to see. So," I said, motioning between the camera audience and Ruth, "I understand you guys are from New Jersey. What made you want to resettle in the Ozarks?"

Ruthie laughed.

"A lot of people don't want to risk starting up a new business, especially in the middle of nowhere!" I continued. "And you're not even in Marshall, you're miles out of it, right?"

"Right," Ruthie said. "We're about fifteen miles from Marshall, but we're also from Marshall on the Buffalo River, so it is a nice spot to be. Originally we thought we were moving from New Jersey to New Hampshire to open a Pastor Retreat, so we were actually asked to come work for a girls ranch here. I was a residential therapeutic facility, so we lived on campus and we helped the girls in the program. I worked as a nurse, my husband worked as an administrator, so that's how we wound up here, and we ended up staying here. We bought this piece of property and there was nothing here. Except our house."

Ruthie went on to explain the process of building the farm. It all started with Dewdrop. Dewdrop and I had met several years before when Grace and I were showing together at the county fair. Dewdrop is, of course, a dairy cow. Grace, as fate would have it, had a milk allergy tied to the fly tags used in commercial dairy cows. To eat dairy, the family had to buy her all organic products, which proved expensive, so one day the family sat down together and said, "Hey, why don't we just buy a cow?" And that was that.

With a youth loan from the USDA, Grace bought three heifers and slowly began the process of building up her herd. Not only did Grace pay off the loans twice, she also built Farm Service Agency credit. Using her second loan, Grace took a refrigeration carrier and turned it into a controlled environment to grow fodder, specifically barley which adds more cream to the milk.

"The farm usually averages one family a week, but there's been a big jump," Ruthie said, "and I think it is going to continue because people want to know how to do it.

'How do you do what you do every day? How do you milk a cow? How do you have chickens?' All of a sudden, they want to know about sustainability."

"So have you noticed," I asked, "since COVID-19 hit that people are planting more victory gardens and farming because they are preparing for the worst or that they're just like, 'Okay, I wasn't prepared for this and I need to learn it now?'"

"Right, and I think that they're home," Ruthie replied, "and that they needed something to do also. People that weren't working from home suddenly had the ability to do that. They were suddenly cooking from home because the restaurants were closed. Everybody suddenly had to figure out how to do stuff that they weren't doing."

"I was asking Grace," I said, switching gears, "what percent of the food you consume here comes from the farm?"

"Most of the stuff we produce here is the dairy, so we have all of our herbs, I get in my grains, and people ask me if I sell butter or if I make it, and I don't sell it but I do make it if we have extra cream during the summer and it is usually served to our farm-stay guests at our farm-to-table dinners, because we go through so much butter."

Ruth rose from the table and went to one of the many fridges in the kitchen, the one closest to the stove. She took out a large block of butter, as big as the ones you can buy from Sam's Club. She showed me the antique mold, fashioned with dovetails, that she used to compress the butter into it's shape.

"Do you make it like all the old-timey Ozarkans do, just shaking it and shaking it in mason jars till it firms up?"

"Right," she said. "Our kids like to do that."

"Before I go, I wanted to ask you, you're the president of the Arkansas Agritourism Association, so what does that entail exactly?"

"Oh boy, agritourism is everything from farm education to hands-on activities. Everyone thinks of a corn maze or a hay ride, but it’s everything from u-pick, farm stands, educational tours, vineyards, farm to table and even what we do here with a farm stay. We [Arkansas Agritourism Association] also have an old cotton plantation down in the Delta. They're doing a whole museum about how the farm ran, what the people did there, their lives and their history. That's all agritourism."

"Finally, what do you hope that people take away from staying here, because as I've noticed, this is not a fake farm. It's beautiful, but it is not all done up for show. This is a for real working farm. Do you hope people gain empathy for farmers and what it is that we do?"

"I think, first of all, what they realize that what we do is hard," said Ruth. "One of the things we explain to the kids is that we don't get a day off. Christmas morning, I'm out there putting my coat on, my overalls, and I'm going out to the barn and milking the cows because the cow doesn't know it's Christmas. This happens every day. The chores happen every day, even if you're not feeling well, you're going out and you're doing that.

"But mostly, kids walk into the chicken coop and they reach under the chicken to find an egg and they're surprised that the egg is warm, or they're milking a cow and some splashes on their arm, and they're like 'Why? I expected it to be warm!' Then I'm like, 'Okay, let's talk about that. Why did you think the milk would be cold?' Then they'll say 'Well the milk at the store is cold, milk comes from the store,' and you explain it comes from the cow, and all of a sudden they realize that."

I couldn't resist, remembering a particularly nasty fight I'd gotten into in elementary school with a city kid.

"Do you ever get kids who wonder where the chocolate milk comes from?"

"Yes! We had one little girl, God bless her," Ruthie laughed, "And Gracie answered her so carefully and tactfully, but what the little girl said was, 'Does your brown cow give chocolate milk?' And Gracie said 'No, dear. But if you want, we can take it upstairs and make it chocolate milk!'

"I hope when people leave, all of a sudden they notice the farmers market they've been driving by for ten years and think, 'Oh, I'll stop and get my vegetables there!'"

I closed out my interview by thanking Miss Ruthie again and walked to say goodbye to Gracie in the fodder house. On my way there, I stopped to smell the wind blowing through the mint, say goodbye to Zaboo the lemur, and wondered aloud if someday my own farm might become a facet of the agritourism industry.

It's wonderful to see farm education happening in your own backyard, and it's even more wonderful to be on the receiving end of down-home Southern hospitality...

All the way from New Jersey.