For Earth Day, we’re releasing a three-part miniseries on sustainable farming in North Carolina. Elias Guedira ’26 and Stella Smolowitz ’26 of the Morehead-Cain Scholar Media Team traveled to Tryon (Polk County) to understand more about the food we consume and those who produce it. The two co-hosts spoke with representatives of a farmer’s market, the founder of a creamer, and Carolyn Roff Henry ’87 of Tryon Mountain Farms. The alumna moved back to her hometown to take over the family business after a career in the food industry. On this episode, she also shares how she and her husband, Tracy, have found a niche through their specialization in seasoning salts and simple syrups, as well as the importance of stewarding native species while exploring new flavors. She also shares advice for how anyone can support local agriculture.
For Earth Day, we’re releasing a three-part miniseries on sustainable farming in North Carolina.
Elias Guedira ’26 and Stella Smolowitz ’26 of the Morehead-Cain Scholar Media Team traveled to Tryon (Polk County) to understand more about the food we consume and those who produce it.
The two co-hosts spoke with representatives of a farmer’s market, the founder of a creamer, and Carolyn Roff Henry ’87 of Tryon Mountain Farms. The alumna moved back to her hometown to take over the family business after a career in the food industry.
On this episode, Carolyn shares how she and her husband, Tracy, have found a niche through their specialization in seasoning salts and simple syrups, as well as the importance of stewarding native species while exploring new flavors. She also shares advice for how anyone can support local agriculture.
After graduating from Carolina with a bachelor’s in English, Carolyn worked with Cargill Incorporated in Food Sales. The alumna earned a master’s in food science from North Carolina State University and a Postgraduate Diploma in Commerce from Lincoln University in New Zealand. She worked as a food scientist at Sealed Air Corporation before building Tryon Mountain Farms.
Special thanks
The Scholar Media Team trip (the first of its kind!) was made possible by Carolyn, who hosted the scholars for the visit. Thank you, Carolyn, for your hospitality and support!
Music credits
The intro music is by Scott Hallyburton ’22, guitarist of the band South of the Soul.
How to listen
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The Catalyze podcast is a series by the Morehead-Cain Foundation, home of the first merit scholarship program in the United States and located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The show is directed and produced by Sarah O’Carroll, Content Manager for Morehead-Cain.
You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram at @moreheadcain or you can email us at communications@moreheadcain.org.
(Carolyn)
We’re standing in one of the gardens on the farm. So in this garden, we have blue sage, which we use in a flower power mix with different bachelor’s buttons and pineapple sage. There’s some weeds here that are actually things that we eat in the spring. There’s sheep sorrel, there’s henbit, there’s dead purple nettle. All sorts of things that people think are our weeds are actually edible and very nutritious. We’ve some oreganoes and some rosemary and some mint. Again, those all get used in the products we make on the farm.
(Elias)
Welcome to Catalyze. I’m your host, Elias Guedira from the class of 2026.
(Stella)
And I’m Stella Smolowitz from the class of 2026.
(Elias)
Joining us today is Carolyn Roth Henry from the class of ’87. Carolyn is the owner and operator of Tryon Mountain Farms, a family farm located in North Carolina. We’re currently sitting outside with Carolyn on this pleasant March evening. Carolyn, how are you feeling today?
(Carolyn)
I’m glad you all came to visit us.
(Stella)
Awesome. Can you also tell listeners exactly where we’re sitting right now and where your farm is located in regards to North Carolina?
(Carolyn)
I love it. We’re sitting on the front porch, not quite in the rocking, well, I actually am in a rocking chair, in Tryon, North Carolina. Tryon is a tiny little town on basically the border of North and South Carolina in western North Carolina, about an hour from Asheville and about 90 minutes from Charlotte, North Carolina.
(Stella)
We’re so grateful that you’ve extended an invite for us to stay in your cottage and given us a guided tour of the farm.
(Elias)
In your own words, how would you describe your business? What kind of products do you sell, and what sets you apart from other competitors?
(Carolyn)
Our farm creates niche products. We grow 30 ingredients and do value-added products with those. We currently produce a line of five simple syrups, and these simple syrups include lavender syrup, spicy hibiscus syrup, fig syrup. They’re all flavors of our farm. Simple syrups are typically used in the world of mocktails and cocktails. We also produce six seasoning salts. The fun part of our seasoning salt is the salt is actually a solar dried sea salt from New Zealand, where Tracy, my husband, is from. We then blend the salt with different herbs we grow. So we have a spicy garlic salt. We have lemon basil garlic scape salt. We have red wine-infused salt with rosemary, garlic, and bay. So our goal is to create products that make a home cook or a home mixologist have fun and also season the food in such a way that the spices are there as an accent to make the food tastier and sometimes more aesthetically beautiful.
(Elias)
When we initially spoke at the Alumni forum, I recall our conversation and how we spoke about our shared love for gardening. Recently, I’ve been making attempts to grow zucchini and yellow squash in my garden. But every time I try the insects or weather seem to be getting to them first. Do you have any recommendations for varieties that I can be using or any tips?
(Carolyn)
The trick with any kind of squash is that they get attacked by an insect called a borer, and it’s not particularly pleasant, but you have to check the leaves every day and pull off little eggs so that your squash can grow to full size and produce.
(Elias)
All right, I’ll keep a good eye out for those.
(Stella)
I was just wondering, in your own words, we’ve heard a lot about your business this weekend, but how would you describe your business in a few sentences? Would you be willing to tell listeners what products you sell and what exactly is unique about those products?
(Carolyn)
I think the fun we have on the farm, and you have to have fun when you farm, otherwise it’s much of a chore. But we grow our ingredients, and in North Carolina, you can have a status called a North Carolina certified kitchen. And so once we grow, we harvest, and then we mix ingredients. So we do a seasoning salt, different seasoning salts, which have the herbs we grow, and different simple syrups, which are used for mocktails and cocktails, which have the ingredients we grow mixed in a simple syrup base.
(Stella)
So you’ve decided to do these like seed to bottle products, is what it says on your website. What exactly drew you to that business model?
(Carolyn)
This is the farm where I grew up, and my mother is still on the property, and when she hit the octogenarian years, we realized we needed to be on the farm to help her. And so as we came and started working the land, we saw a business opportunity. It definitely is a niche farming experience, but it is wonderful to be back on a property and enjoy growing sustainably and creating incredible food products for people to enjoy.
(Elias)
Now, you’ve already given us a tour of your farm and the town nearby, and I’ve come to grasp the understanding that a lot of the work here is done on a pivot and flow basis. Could you explain to listeners what that means and how your schedules are constantly changing out here?
(Carolyn)
I think farming breaks every rule you ever had for how you organize yourself on a daily basis. If you like control, farming breaks you of that. Mother Nature is not benign, and you have to learn to flow with what grows on your land. You have to learn to flow with when things break because you have to fix them. If you have a sick animal, that takes first priority. If you have a crop that’s being attacked by borer like zucchini, you have to immediately start dealing with that. So flowing and pivoting are skills that I think are very valuable to have, no matter if you do what I do as a farmer, but in life, you need to learn to flow and pivot and not hang on to things so tightly.
(Stella)
I think that’s a great lesson that us as college students should definitely take into account. So when you think back in time, did you ever envision yourself taking over this role, like when you were at UNC as a college student? And if so, how did Morehead maybe help you, inspire you, to take over this farm? And what lessons did you learn from being at UNC that you still use in your life today?
(Carolyn)
When I graduated from UNC with an English degree, I ended up working for an agribusiness company, Cargill. My first job was actually in Monticello, Minnesota. And from that point on, I have stayed in agriculture and agricultural pursuits for the majority of my career. Did I ever envision myself coming home to Tryon? I didn’t. I think the reality of what was in front of me making a change from a larger city to a small town is a bit of a culture shock. But at the same time, there’s so many sweet things about small town living and being on a farm and the richness is here. You just have to know how to appreciate it.
But to answer the second question, how did Morehead affect me with that? That’s a really deep question that I’m going to give you a short answer to. Morehead tells us that we can do great things, and we’re given so many tools to learn how to do great things. And so I would say that having received a Morehead 40 years ago this spring continues to resonate with me probably as every Morehead that’s listening, it resonates with you throughout your life.
(Elias)
You mentioned some of the sweet things being part of the main reasons for you returning to the farm. Could you talk about what those sweet things are and how they motivate you?
(Carolyn)
I’ll put it back to you, Elias, last night when you came, you walked outside in the dark. You looked at the stars because the sky was black enough to see the stars clearly. The tree frogs, the bullfrogs, everybody was noisy at night. It’s a cacophony of sounds. We appreciate the beauty of a hawk flying. We appreciate the balance of bluebirds in our garden working after bugs. We enjoy our beehives, the bees that pollinate our vegetables and our flowers. There’s smaller microcosms than being in a big city and going to a concert or going to an art museum and engaging in those things. They’re just layer upon layer upon layer when you look at a small area, and learning to appreciate that and staying busy with it and continually engaged and excited about it.
(Elias)
And I recall our conversation last night, how we talked about how layers in big towns often diminish from the natural history of a place or the historical significance of it and how the land that we are actually standing on right now is Cherokee land. Can you tell us about some of the artifacts that you’ve found in your gardening and farming pursuits.
(Carolyn)
More recently, when you look at our land, anybody’s land, for a greater part, you can see where people have been here before. If you know it to look, a lot of plants that would have been brought, let’s say, by the Cherokees are still here and would have been used as medicine. And prior to that time, 6000 years ago, 7000 years ago, there are different stone points, atlatls, spear points, axe heads. We don’t find them all the time because we’re an upland area which would have been mainly hunting ground, some farming. But if you just look around you, you can see points of places where people have been here. And that sort of makes us realize as farmers the importance of continuing to be good stewards of our land just like previous years before.
(Stella)
So you just talked a lot about being good stewards of your land, and I think that’s something that a lot of farmers have told us this weekend that we visited. So what kind of sustainable practices have you integrated into your farm to make yourself a good steward of your land, and how have these practices impacted the scale of your production?
(Carolyn)
I think that when my parents moved to this property in 1964, which is almost 60 years, they embraced organic farming, which is sustainable farming, no chemicals, no pesticides on the land. And for me, as a sustainable farmer, it’s just really important to continue that way of farming. It is more labor intensive in many ways. There are tricks that maintain my workload, or our workload, I should say, such that we manage. But I just believe that having clean food from clean land is the way that I want to live my life.
(Elias)
And when we talk about clean food and clean land, a lot of that involves growing traditional native varieties. Could you elaborate on some of the heirloom varieties that you produce in your farms?
(Carolyn)
When we first started back on the property and began farming, we embraced heirlooms as a seed that we wanted to use for growing. Heirlooms are typically an open-pollinated seed that is pre-1940. And of that, there are so many people that are saving seeds nowadays. I am just one of the few that are trying to continue and save varietals that would have been grown decades ago that are rarely grown now. Another aspect of that is also Slow Food, which is an international organization. And they, too, promote equitable food sources, fair food, and promote, again, seeds, plants, seafood that are not being stewarded well. And as a final note, we do have several local organizations up here in western North Carolina that work hand in hand with farmers like me, ASAP, as well as the Utopian Seed Project, saving seeds that otherwise would be lost.
(Stella)
Carolyn, this morning we met a lot of friends that you have that are also farmers or work in agriculture. We first met Jessica and Maranda, who are from Travelers Rest Farmers Market, and then we traveled to Looking Glass Creamery, and we met Jen Perkins there. We really noticed that all of these farmers have a similar mission as you do of sustainability. How does sustainability foster community with yourself and consumers and other farmers?
(Carolyn)
Everybody’s passionate about creating a sustainable farming community where farmers are supported through the work of farm stores, farmers markets, such that they can connect a consumer to a farmer. And that to me did not exist fifteen or twenty years ago in the same way it does now. It’s very exciting that both from being a small entrepreneur or being a small farmer, like the farm store and the farmers markets, connect those things, which then creates community, just like Miranda and Jess talked about this morning. Our whole goal is to create community. So much is lost in small towns, and having the chance to bring back some of the community of people being able to meet on a Saturday to talk about the weather, talk about what they’re cooking, talk about family, we lose those connector points so much in the world we live in now. And I think that as small farmers and as people who care about community, we’re making that comeback.
(Elias)
Going off the topic of bridging communities to farmers, I was wondering if you had any experience or if your business currently employs community supported agriculture, and if so, could you explain on these experiences and explain to listeners what this model is?
(Carolyn)
My husband, Tracy, and I do everything on our farm. We occasionally have friends who come in and help us, but as we expand and grow, we may add more people. I think the biggest thing, though, that we do, we do not do agritourism specifically, but when we do allow people to come to the farm like you all visiting us today, we want to share what we have with you. I think that coming to a farm, coming to a place where there’s natural beauty is very healthy for the soul. And so again, when people buy our products, a lot of times it’s the relationship that we foster with them. And again, that feels very good to be good stewards of our land in sharing it, either visiting or in making the products that we make.
(Stella)
So it has been so awesome being able to come to the farm and really see where my food is grown because I don’t normally have the opportunity to be exposed to farmers who are growing food that I may find in my grocery store. So I’m wondering if you have any tips for listeners at home so they can make educated purchases at their grocery store about local vendors. For example, what kind of labeling do you encourage consumers to look for on products?
(Carolyn)
Usually some of the larger grocery store chains have a Made in North Carolina signage on displays, which I think like the Specialty Foods Association in North Carolina, Made in North Carolina, the North Carolina Agricultural Department does a really good job of promoting specific North Carolina brands. So in the larger grocery store chains, typically you can find that particular designation and look for products. Moving down to different tiers, if you go to farmers markets and you want to find products, you simply get to know the different farmers, and you can obviously purchase from there. And beyond that, a lot of farmers do have what are called CSAs, and those are typically per season. They can be three times a year, two times a year, and you can sign up for a CSA and receive weekly meats and vegetables that just would be local to you. And I do encourage anyone who wants to get to know a farmer or wants to buy local, truly speaking, CSAs are going to be your best bet if you don’t have time to go to a farmers market on a specific day to receive quality produce from a local farmer.
(Elias)
Are there any certain types of farms that benefit more from CSAs in North Carolina than others?
(Carolyn)
Obviously, there are many, many different models of farming around the country. And CSAs typically are for your larger farmers who can support anywhere from twenty to 300 families per season. They’re very specific in their growing methodology. And it’s a bit of pressure because you have to be able to produce a bag every week, and you have to really do a lot of planning to make sure that your growing season works properly so that you continue to supply customers on a weekly basis with a diverse grouping of food. The beauty of a CSA is that you’re eating seasonally, and in grocery stores today, we can receive watermelons in December, and it makes me laugh because sometimes we have people asking for produce, never having experienced a cyclical season of what actually grows where we live. And you can get watermelon in December in North Carolina, it just won’t be a North Carolina watermelon.
(Elias)
And I’m just curious, what kind of practices do you use on the farm to analyze progress and customer satisfaction?
(Carolyn)
It’s a small business, so we do all the things that good business does. We keep weekly reports of our sales, we keep reports of everything. So we can basically analyze and know what products we sold, and we know how quickly we’re working through our ingredients. The first year when we first began the business, it was a bit of a crapshoot to figure out how much we should even plant, which every farmer has to figure out. But now we’re pretty detailed. We know pretty much to a fine science how many of one plant we’re going to plant for harvest to make the products we make versus another type plant. And I’m forever adding in a new seed because I’m curious about it. I guess that’s the one thing about being a farmer is you’re forever curious, and I think that’s what stokes my fire so much of the time is curiosity of what can be done, what can you do?
(Stella)
And I will tell listeners that Tracy and Carolyn were having us already try a new form of salt. And I won’t spoil the surprise if they put it on market, but look out for Carolyn and Tracy’s new seasoning salt. Elias and I have tried it and think it’s amazing. So we hope to see that hopefully on the market. So to kind of wrap up the discussion, Carolyn, we’re wondering that after growing up in a community of farmers and leading a farm yourself, what do you think is the biggest misconception that people have about farmers? And how can we better bridge the gap between agriculturalists and the people who consume their products?
(Carolyn)
That actually is a beautiful question to ask. I think being a farmer has given me the gift of being patient, whether or not I want to be patient. We are in such a “I can get it right now” world timing, and “I want it a specific way.” And things don’t grow a specific way. Things don’t grow, they do grow in a specific time, but maybe not to someone else’s schedule. And so the beauty of farming is that nature, you can’t rush nature making something beautiful, and you can’t rush nature growing things. And I think that we all need to stop and take a step back from the busy worlds we live in. That’s what farming really does for me. It makes me take a step back and have a greater appreciation for the food I grow and the food I eat and the food I share with other people.
(Elias)
As you may know, this episode is set to release on Earth Day. What is one piece of advice that you have for listeners to celebrate the Earth?
(Carolyn)
Since I have the podium to speak about how important it is, how important farming is, I would encourage everyone, if they have never gone to a farmers market, to choose a farmers market in their area, and go sometime this summer, and enjoy the community. Meet a farmer, buy some fresh produce, buy some fresh bread, buy a salt or a syrup, if you come see Tracy or me at one of our markets in Greenville or Travelers Rest, South Carolina, or Charlotte, North Carolina, I think it’s just if you have not ever been to a farmer's market, go and support small farmers. It really makes a difference.
(Stella)
Awesome. Well, Carolyn, we really appreciate this conversation, and we have really learned a lot from being with you this weekend, and we really appreciate you hosting us.
(Elias)
Thank you so much for having us again, Carolyn.