Meet Your Farmer

Clara Zander is the farm’s founder and operator, and has been raising poultry since the age of 9. She spent her summers during high school working at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in New York, learning as much as she could about pasture based livestock production and farm to table eating. She was hooked.

During and after high school, Clara spent time traveling around the US, working on farms in Martha’s Vineyard, Hawaii, Virginia, and around New York state. She was fascinated by the intersection of ecology and conservation biology with sustainable agriculture. How do we produce food in a way that not only protects the natural world, but encourages it to thrive? How do we develop a farm system that supports our local human communities, as well as our wild ones? How do we use ecological farming practices to mitigate human related impacts to our climate?

Clara continued to look for answers to these questions at Warren Wilson College, where she earned degrees in Sustainable Agriculture and Conservation Biology. Her senior thesis studied the impacts of rotationally grazing chickens in forested ecosystems in Western North Carolina.

In the fall of 2019, Clara found the land that would become The Wild Way Farm, 200 acres nestled into a cove in Little Sandy Mush, North Carolina.

In the spring of 2021 she founded The Wild Way Farm LLC, with the intention of farming with respect to the natural world, and creating a farm system that would not only provide high quality meats, eggs, and feathers to her local community, but would challenge the traditional sustainable farm model.