La Plata, MD - Don’t look now, but one couple is proving that successful agriculture doesn’t have to mean a huge farm with rolling acres.

Karl’s Farm in La Plata is a small 6-acre plot on the far side of Charles County’s more rural and quiet countryside.

Karl and Paula Wiegland have a modest enterprise, and through Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) have converted their small 6-acre spread into an organic provider of nutritious food the likes of which you won’t see on your grocery shelf.

“I sort of grew up with gardeners,” Paula, a transplant from Suffolk, England, said. “My parents both gardened. My grandparents worked a farm. We always had a garden. The children had to weed.”

She said when she and her husband moved to America in the late 1970s, she was disappointed in the vegetables she found at supermarkets.

“They were all old and sold as fresh,” she noted.

When the couple moved out of their Waldorf apartment and bought their small 6-acres spread in 2004, it was overgrown with sapling trees.

“They covered the whole place,” Karl recalled.

They took it upon themselves to clear a portion of the land by hand in order to grow their own crops.

“We got the opportunity to buy a good bit of land,” Karl said. “We just had to compromise by living in a very old farm house.

“When it became a farm, people would show up when it was ready to eat,” he explained. “We offered them growing space but no one wanted to do that. So we decided to form a CSA.”

Paula noted that CSAs are a growing trend in the country.

“All we do,” she said, “We don’t sell to restaurants or supermarkets. All of our sales are done through shares.”

“It’s sort of our niche,” Karl added.

"It's a great model," agreed Dr. Christine Bergmark, executive director of the Southern Maryland Agricultural Development branch of the Tri-County Council for Southern Maryland. "Each grower does it a little different."

The practice began emerging about 10 years ago.

The Wieglands initially had truckloads of compost delivered to the farm in order to get started.

“It’s a continuous thing,” he said of composting organic matter to create nutrient-rich fertilizer. “It’s amazing how much it takes. You see how much vegetable crops take up yearly. A little bit of land produces an immense amount of food and organic matter. It does take a long time to build up the soil. As much as possible, we till it back in.”

While the couple enjoys and likes sweet corn, it is one crop they don’t grow, he admitted.

“It’s a heavy feeder,” Karl said. “Plus, it takes up a lot of space.”

They learned to compromise with four-legged invaders, which can create havoc on a garden. Significant fencing keeps the deer and other critters at bay. The only real predator they have to contend with is the groundhog, which burrow underneath the root systems and destroy whatever they come into contact with.

“They can do a lot of damage,” Karl noted.

Paula said that while you can get just about anything these days in your local supermarket, many organic farmers believe that beautiful produce you get at the supermarket doesn’t contain trace minerals and vitamins produce once did. Part of what they do, she said, is to make people more aware of what they eat.

“Part of our job is to educate people,” she explained, “how and when to eat certain things.”

The couple said they would like to have about 75 members in their group, they currently serve about 55 customers.

“We deliver to our members,” Karl said, adding that in Washington, DC, where the bulk of their customers reside, a lot of their members use mass transit and don’t even own vehicles.

He is seeing a lot more competition for their services, Karl admitted.

“When you’re involved in delivering in DC, you can see how much competition there is,” he said, noting that other local farms are seeing declines in memberships due to online services that now deliver food.

“Our numbers are down by a third,” he said, noting most of that dynamic has occurred in the past three years.

Members pay $600 at the beginning of the season for a summer’s worth of fresh organic vegetables. They offer summer crops and fall crops.

Not so long ago, they had 100 members, but there wasn’t as much competition then.

“It’s a relationship, not a business transaction,” Paula stated.

The couple started out with three Dexter cows, but drought and the high cost of hay curtailed that effort.

Although Paula stressed they are not certified organic, the Wieglands do not use chemical fertilizers of any kind in growing their crops.

“Having worked in retail for a number of years, for me personally, you really get to know about chemicals and pesticides and how much of it people put out,” Karl noted. “You learn how dangerous it is and how uneducated people are. It is pervasive. It’s a massive amount of this stuff when you see how much of it goes out onto the land.”

"What is really needed is education and using less of the herbicides and perticides," Bergmark agreed, adding that everything from lawn chemicals to weed killers can have long-term effects on landscapes and waterways.

Bergmark admitted that Maryland doesn't necessarily make it easy to become a certified organic farmer.

"To become certified you have to go through an annual inspection and fill out forms for everything you grow," she said, adding that the process may be too much for some.

That hasn't stopped folks like the Wieglands from carving their little niche market in their rural Southern Maryland home.

Contact Joseph Norris at joe.norris@thebaynet.com