It is easy for Dominique Kostelac to forget the troubles of his former life as he meanders down the old wagon trail on his 33-acre farm outside Charlottesville. There are the plastic tubes he uses to tap the maple trees for syrup. Here is the island in a forgotten river where he found the remnants of a dugout canoe, which he imagines could be as old as the Indians. This is where the persimmon trees grow so heavy that a shake of the branches releases their bounty.
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Margaret Thomas
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FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
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Despite debt and other struggles, Dominique Kostelac believes his enterprise is a “game changer” for local food.
He moved to Holly Tree Farm five years ago with his wife and three kids when he was still a high-flying real estate developer cashing in on the housing boom. What followed has become an all-too-common story: The bursting of the bubble — and perhaps his own overexuberance — left him millions of dollars in debt and facing foreclosure. Or, as Kostelac puts it, “we did a big face-plant . . . and we were stranded here.”
As it happened, that face-plant was right into some of the most fertile soil in Virginia. A longtime foodie and serial entrepreneur, Kostelac is convinced that his old neighbors in yuppie Washington will pay premium prices for produce and meat from the small farmers who are his new neighbors. Now, in this refuge from his failures in the city, he sees opportunity — in the leaves of the grapevine that wraps around his front gate, the morel mushrooms that sprout beneath a shade tree and the wild raspberries that grow faster than ones he planted — that he might have overlooked before.
“Like when you go blind,” he says. “You start hearing better.”
Forming a farm club
Kostelac weaves past water coolers filled with maple sap, ignores the tray of apple cider donuts on the stove and plops in front of two laptops squeezed onto a tiny table in the kitchen in his basement. This is the headquarters of Arganica Farm Club.
Note the word “club.” One point Kostelac is adamant about is that Arganica is not a CSA, or community-supported agriculture. In that model, customers commit to buying portions of a harvest. That ensures farmers have buyers for their crop but limits customers’ control over what or how much they receive.
Instead, Arganica customers pay a fee ranging from $30 for a month to $250 a year to join the club and can buy basil ($3.25 a bunch) or brisket ($29.25 per pound) or bagels ($6.25 for six). Groceries are then delivered to their doorsteps in handmade white-washed wooden crates.
The seeds of Arganica were planted two years ago as what Kostelac calls “make-work.” After losing his shirt in the housing market, he was left with too much free time and hunted for ways to stay busy. The answer, he realized, was all around him. The farm was covered in driftwood and branches that he collected to stoke the fires that warmed the house. Why not gather the rest and sell it?
Kostelac named the enterprise Black Bear Wildwoods. He tied the branches with string made of hemp and called it sustainable. He hired many of the workers who had helped him refurbish homes in Washington to collect and deliver the bundles. Wood that didn’t sell was burned to boil down sap from the maple trees.
At winter’s end, the fires burned out. But Kostelac was just getting started.
“Why would we stop this great thing we got going?” he thought to himself. “Everybody needs work, right?”
Soon he was scouting local growers of heirloom tomatoes, calling small pig farmers and meeting with artisan breadmakers. He cobbled together a shopping list of about a thousand products, primarily from local producers.
One of them is Tom Weaver, whose family has been farming since an ancestor bought land in Orange, Va., from James Madison in 1819. Now, much of the land has been given over to raising white sows and Duroc daddies without hormones, antibiotics or nitrates under the name Papa Weaver’s Pork.
The first orders from Arganica were for 10 or 15 pounds of meat, Weaver said. Now they ask for as much as 200 pounds and pay him each week — crucial income during the winter when the farmers’ markets, another important outlet, are closed.
“It’s really ballooned for us,” Weaver said.
For him, Arganica is a no-risk proposition. That’s because Kostelac bears the burden of estimating his customers’ orders. Guess too low, and he’s out of stock. Too high, and he’s stuck with food that won’t sell or, worse, goes bad. He picks up the food from each vendor, trucks it to the District and takes the loss if it’s not up to snuff.
In the past few months, Arganica has expanded to Richmond, Hampton Roads and Charlottesville and now has its eye on Baltimore. A recent Groupon promotion netted more than 2,000 new members, boosting Arganica’s roster to more than 10,000. The sheer volume can quickly overwhelm the staff of roughly 70 full- and part-timers struggling to keep pace with demand, making even the smallest glitch feel monumental.
Today’s crisis: a broken printer.
If the customer orders aren’t printed, they can’t be packed for delivery. Kostelac logs in to a video chat with his brother and business partner, Tom, who lives in the Czech Republic and helped develop Arganica’s computer system. Kostelac likes to say he’s running a 21st-century business from an 18th-century farmhouse.
“The printing cutoff is soon, Tom,” Kostelac says. “They’re sweating bullets.”
Arganica office manager Heather Riggleman pops in from the room next door and sticks her head in front of the camera. “Hi Tom. I’m freaking out. I’m gonna turn to all capitals on Skype.”
The staff rushed the job to a print shop in Charlottesville, but they’re already behind schedule. Just another item for a to-do list that’s growing faster than crabgrass.
