[NAFEX] A Chapel Hill Venture Capitalist is Betting the Farm on Muscadine Grapes, Katahdin Sheep, and 100, 000 Red Wiggler Worms

A Chapel Hill Venture Capitalist is Betting the Farm on Muscadine Grapes,
Katahdin Sheep, and 100,000 Red Wiggler Worms - INDY Week
https://indyweek.com/news/orange/a-chapel-hill-venture-capitalist-is-betting-the-farm-on-muscadine-grapes-katahdin-sheep-and-100000-red-wiggler-worms/
A Chapel Hill Venture Capitalist is Betting the Farm on Muscadine Grapes,
Katahdin Sheep, and 100,000 Red Wiggler Worms
Greg Bohlen is counting on a new strain of muscadine grape, paired with
regenerative farming techniques, to yield profits and usher in a public
health revolution.
by Ted Vaden
11/15/2023

For nearly 60 years, visitors to Orange County's Dairyland Road admired the
hilltop dairy farm that gave the road its name. Maple View Farm was an
iconic feature of the landscape, its adjoining ice cream store a must-see,
must-taste attraction. Dairyland's rolling hills and long vistas make it a
popular bicycling route in midland North Carolina.

But today the view has changed. As visitors settle into rocking chairs with
their butter pecan, they see not the familiar Holstein cattle grazing the
meadows but instead a grid of grape vineyards stretching toward the
horizon. The Maple View silo standing sentinel over the fields now bears
the name Union Grove Farm, heralding a new and innovative era in the
dairyscape.

In 2021, a venture capital entrepreneur bought Maple View, with a vision of
planting its fields with tens of thousands of grapevines. Greg Bohlen is
planting 1,000 acres in muscadines, a native Southern grape that advocates
acclaim as a nutrient-dense "superfood" with health benefits ranging from
better nutrition to cancer treatment. With the help of a local grape
breeder, Bohlen has developed a new strain of muscadine that is seedless,
thin-skinned, and sweeter.

"We are going to change the world," says Bohlen, who has literally bet the
farm—tens of millions of dollars from his VC earnings—on turning Union
Grove Farm into a major food producer and demonstration laboratory for new
agricultural technology.

Bohlen is a nationally recognized starter and seller of businesses, whose
successes include the meat-substitute company Beyond Meat and Hero Bread, a
low-carb bakery.

"I am convinced that if I have a legacy, it will be tied to the farm and
not to my venture capital work," he says. "My companies have changed a lot
of things in the landscape of the world, but this is literally the first
company I've had that can do exceedingly well by doing good."

Bohlen is planting muscadines using advanced agricultural technology called
regenerative farming. It is a process that eschews fertilizers and
pesticides in favor of nutrient-enriched soil to revive fields exhausted by
decades of erosion and chemical poisoning. His tools are not tillers and
chemicals but sheep and red wiggler worms, tens of thousands of them.

This year, Union Grove planted 20 acres of vines and will add 50 more next
year, toward the goal of 1,000 over 10 years. Bohlen aims to make the Union
Grove grape a moneymaker for his portfolio, but his vision is a public
health revolution.

"If they are successful, I will say they will be the biggest vineyard in
the Southeast," says Mart Bumgarner, North Carolina Agriculture Extension
Agent for Orange County. "It's phenomenal that they're bringing this to
Orange County."

Bumgarner and other farming experts say Union Grove still has a lot to
prove to reach that potential. It needs to show both that its new muscadine
strain can attract a broader consumer market than traditional muscadines
and that regenerative farming—an expensive investment even for a venture
capitalist—is worth the cost. It faces some resistance from traditional
farmers and the vested interests of the farm world—lenders, property
owners, and farm supply companies.

There also are questions, faced by any farmer, about environmental threats,
insect infestation, and the food safety of a new product. "We do not know
what diseases could get them, we do not know about the management system of
those grapes at this point in time. And we won't for a very long time,
because there is a limited supply of those grapes," says Mark Hoffman, an
NC State University agriculture professor who specializes in grapes and
other small fruits.

Bohlen and his team have heard the skepticism, but they are plowing ahead
with a combination of science and field work. They have planted 8,000 vines
so far, with a plan to add 30,000 more each year up to 400,000 plants by
2030.

Bohlen's new strain of muscadine was developed by Hillsborough grape
breeder Jeff Bloodworth, a former NCSU grape expert. Test-planting 1,800
varieties, Bloodworth developed a seedless, thin-skinned hybrid to supplant
the pulpy, hard-husked muscadine traditionally grown in North Carolina. The
new grape, by many accounts, is delicious.

"Oh my god, have you tasted it?" asks Bumgarner, the extension agent. "It's
a cross between a muscadine and a table grape, and the taste is
phenomenal."

Bloodworth's first generation of fruit, called Razzmatazz, is sold now in
Weaver Street Market, Food Lion, and other retailers. He and Bohlen
developed a relationship after Bohlen began acquiring land near
Hillsborough. Bloodworth has patents on the new strain, and Bohlen controls
the marketing rights.

The muscadine is considered a nutritional food because it is high in
polyphenols, which impart health-improving antioxidants. "These are the
reasons your mother told you to eat your fruits and vegetables, to get
these dietary polyphenols," says Wake Forest University medical school
researcher Patricia Gallagher, who is leading a $20 million study of the
health benefits of muscadines. Early results show reductions in tumor
growth in prostate and breast cancer.

Bohlen is not yet claiming cancer-reduction properties, but he is pinning
his hopes on his grape's health benefits.

"It's important for a society that continues to be overweight and a society
that tends toward pharmaceuticals instead of looking for their food to heal
them," he says. "That's our goal, to feed people in a way that makes them
healthier, not less healthy."

Mary Ann Lila, professor of food and nutrition at NCSU, says the muscadine
goes beyond being just a nutritious food. As part of a regular diet, she
says, the grapes can protect against chronic diseases like cancer,
cardiovascular disease, diabetes, arthritis, and even cognitive decline.

"The thing that's so interesting about muscadines, unlike table grapes, is
they are not heavily bred, but they are so close to nature," says Lila, who
directs NCSU's Plants for Human Health Institute. "They're natural and
they're naturally evolved to the Southeastern environment. They're tough,
they're very resilient to the insults the environment can impose, and
because of that they are a repository for health-protective compounds."

The uniqueness of the grape is one of Bohlen's competitive strategies. The
other is the regenerative farming process used to grow it. Regenerative
farming aims to rehabilitate fields exhausted by erosion and traditional
farming practices by building new nutrient-rich soil. The process avoids
chemicals and tilling, instead keeping fields planted in cover crops and
infusing them with a compost cocktail generated in Union Grove's
vermiculture lab.

The facility collects tons of debris and food scraps to feed into bins of
more than 100,000 red wiggler worms, which digest the scraps and poop out a
nutrient-rich compost. A compost tea then is sprayed onto fields of cover
crop, building up new layers of high-nutrient soil. Instead of using
tractors and mowers, the farm maintains the land using 250 Katahdin sheep
that simultaneously graze cover crops and fertilize the fields, priming
them for later grape planting.

Bohlen says regenerative farming not only rebuilds the soil but also
recaptures carbon from the atmosphere. "For every 1 percent of soil organic
matter we build, we're taking 8.5 tons of carbon out of the air," he says.
"Imagine how the soil that has been for generations depleted by tobacco
would respond if it instead built up an inch of topsoil a year, what that
would do to our productive agricultural land in North Carolina."

Regenerative practices date back to Indigenous populations, but the concept
has taken off in recent decades as a movement to reverse climate change and
address world hunger. It was spotlighted at the World Economic Forum in
2022 and adopted as policy by the Biden administration, which is investing
funding to incentivize farmers to adopt sustainable practices.

Bohlen and his team are trying to spread the regenerative gospel to
traditional farmers and to that end have set up the Center for Regenerative
Agriculture at Union Grove to showcase the practices. But they have run
into indifference, if not skepticism.

"The main challenge we face is going to be the farmer—the small and medium
size, the ones that are going out of business," says Martin Crompton,
Bohlen's vineyard director. "Ninety percent of them are not making money
from farming anymore. What regenerative farming will offer them, if they
will open their minds to it, is an opportunity to not just make money from
farming but enjoy farming again and encourage their sons and daughters to
come in behind them.

"If they don't, what we are going to see in North Carolina is out of the 8
million acres currently that we've got for farms, a million will be lost in
the next 10 years to development."

Crompton and Bohlen have tried to set up a meeting with state agriculture
commissioner Steve Troxler, but so far that has not panned out. Troxler,
through a spokesperson, twice declined interviews for this story.

Hoffman, the NCSU grape specialist, says Union Grove's new grape looks
promising, but regenerative farming could be a tough sell to traditional
farmers. "If there is no economic incentive, I don't see a fresh-market
grower changing their practices," he says. "They have to show you can make
a profit with that approach."

Bohlen says he is absolutely in the grape business to make a profit. "It
takes about $100,000 an acre to get grape production," he says. "We
generate about $40,000 a year in gross revenue, once we're up and running.
That's a 25 percent IRR [internal rate of return]. I'm pretty happy making
a 25 percent IRR."

Still, Bohlen admits to concerns. "There are a lot of things that worry
me," he says. "Can my team do this? … I worry about the money. What happens
if I can't keep loading the machine? I worry about the unknowns: Zero
degrees for three days. What would a year of insects do?"

Other possible issues: Hoffman says grape supply could be an obstacle to
mass marketing, since Bloodworth currently is the only producer of the new
muscadine strain. Bloodworth says he can easily ramp up production.

Lila, the NCSU researcher, says a highly bred variant like Bloodworth's may
not confer as much health benefit as a natural muscadine. But she says
regenerative practices would help.

Bohlen says the greater concern is what happens to the global environment
if food production practices don't change. "The challenge for me, as I see
it, is we're running out of time. First of all, we're going to be carbon
bound; [global] temperature is going to increase. Second, our soils are
losing efficacy and ability every single year, making it more difficult to
make the transition."

He adds, "I think my team is going to be able to pull it off. Look at those
vines. Look at how green they are. Look how much bigger the vines get. I'm
willing to embarrass myself by talking about it at this point."

*Ted Vaden was a reporter and editor with the Raleigh* News & Observer* for
32 years. Now retired in Chapel Hill, he is president of the NC Press
Foundation, which supports open government and citizens' access to public
records.*
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