A typical Saturday morning at the Carrboro Farmers Market near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, offers a feast for your eyes and your taste buds, and everyone in town seems to be shopping there. As many as 100 local growers offer everything from fresh corn, strawberries and leafy greens to homemade jellies and breads, pasture-raised meats, handmade baskets and locally grown wool.

At the stall occupied by Peregrine Farm, owned by Alex Hitt '80 and his wife Betsy, you'll usually find a fine selection of greens, heirloom tomatoes, peppers, fresh-cut flowers and - in the fall - three kinds of turkeys for Thanksgiving dinner. The Hitts have been fixtures and organizing forces at the Carrboro Farmers Market for more than 20 years, and their steady success in farming and selling locally has made them a model for others in North Carolina and beyond.

"Between February and October I grow 80-90 varieties of fruits and vegetables," and Betsy grows about 160 kinds of flowers," Hitt says. "The turkeys come as poults in May and July and grow through October. Three-quarters of our business is at the farmers market, and the rest is through local retailers and restaurants." Given this amazing selection of crops, you might expect Peregrine Farm to be a large operation, but it is actually quite comprehensible. In a rural area a few miles west of Chapel Hill, the Hitts now cultivate only three-and-a-half acres of open plots and plots under "hoop houses" made of tube-metal arches and plastic sheathing. The turkeys have shelters for nighttime but otherwise they live outdoors, eating insects and grazing over harvested crops and cover crops like clover and Sudan grass. The Hitts' long devotion to the quality of the soil and their conscientious renewal of its nutrients have helped bring the farm's earnings to well over $20,000 per acre. "We started with a business plan in 1980 and worked eight years before we turned a profit," recalls Hitt, "but since then our earnings have grown steadily and the market has kept growing too."

It is typical of Hitt that he can tell you exact details about both the growing and the selling of his crops. The nitrogen content of the soil around his blueberry bushes is as important to him as the news that a local "white-tablecloth" restaurant may need a supply of salad greens. "I had good training in soil science and horticulture at Utah State, particularly from Alvin Southard," he says. "But I also learned a lot about the business aspects of farming. As I spent time in the orchards and berry patches around Logan and Brigham City, I realized that it was possible to make a living from small-scale, low-capital farming ventures, and that really helped me put things together." Now he occasionally teaches classes to aspiring small-scale farmers, and he and Betsy travel each year to learn other approaches to farming. They visited Holland recently to see the country's highly technological flower farms and went on to the Piedmont region of Italy to visit family-run farms with both livestock and vegetables. more