Quail Cove Farms, a local organic farm and business located in Machipongo, Virginia, has been named as a finalist for the Tayloe Murphy Resilience Award for its success and resilience over 18 years. Starting from the owners' living room, Quail Cove Farms now delivers hundreds of organic food items to customers in four states. The award would provide a scholarship for an executive education course to help the farm's continued growth.

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- Wednesday, August 18, 2010
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Local success, statewide acclaim
Jardines' Quail Cove Farms is finalist for state honor lauding business resilience
MACHIPONGO -- Since 1992, the local and family-owned Quail Cove Farms Inc. has strongly held its
commitment to providing natural and organic food products to customers, despite having faced financial
setbacks and a slow developing market along the way.
This commitment has led to a thriving business that now manages the delivery and sale of hundreds of
organic and natural food items ---- foods produced with limited or no amounts of artificial ingredients and
chemicals -- to customers in more than 60 cities and towns throughout Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and
North Carolina.
Owners Bill and Elaine Jardine also offer these items to customers who visit their local retail store.
"We've been able to hold our own and stay paced with organic growth in the country," said Bill Jardine,
who manages Quail Cove's acres of organic farmland located near the store.
As a result of the success, the business has been named as a finalist in this year's Tayloe Murphy
Resilience Award, sponsored by the Tayloe Murphy Center at the University of Virginia's Darden School of
Business.
Merchants throughout the region competed for this award, which is "designed to spotlight successful
businesses located in the state's most economically challenged communities."
The award competition, which was introduced this year, was spearheaded by Gregory Fairchild, executive
director of the Tayloe Murphy Center.
Fairchild created the competition as a way to learn and hear the stories of "the best and growing
businesses in our backyard."
"At this time in our country, so much of the story about the economy and business is negative ... even in
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2. Digital Collections: Daily Times Text http://10.7.216.32/archives/archive/search/_1282662693/?search...
all the years of economic hardship there have always been businesses that continue to grow. Sometimes
those stories get lost, so I hoped this award would bring out these stories," said Fairchild.
After they were nominated for the award earlier this year, the Jardines answered questions relating to their
business' contribution to the community, financial growth, geography and more.
Bill Jardine thought the application process for the award was beneficial to Quail Cove Farms, saying, "I
thought it was good to start thinking and talking more about the business."
On Sept. 1, Quail Cove Farms will join the other 11 finalists at a celebration dinner to hear if they are one
of the five recipients of the Resilience Award ---- a full scholarship to a course at Darden's Executive
Education Program.
"(If we take the course) maybe we could learn a better way to do business," said Jardine.
Humble roots
The Jardines' business began almost 20 years ago from the living room of their Birdnest home.
"Bill would drive up to Northern Virginia in his little Toyota pickup once a month and meet a man from
Frankford Farms in Pennsylvania. He would buy dry products like grain and flour and then bring them back
to Birdnest and we would divide them into little plastic bags using a scale. People would then come to our
house and we would sell the items," said Elaine Jardine.
In 1985, seven years before Jardine started selling to and buying from organic food co-ops, he decided to
convert his conventional farm in Birdsnest to an organic farm.
"I saw the chemicals (conventional farmers) were adding, so I decided to go the other way around and do
what I believed was the right thing to do," said Jardine.
He then started working with the Eastern Shore Agricultural Research and Extension Center in Painter,
which tested new biological pesticide products on the beetles who inhabited his acres of sweet potato
farms.
"We were the first people on the Shore to use the biological products and we had good results," said
Jardine.
Although Jardine saw the pesticide results on his 300 acres, he wasn't seeing the profits from his organic
products.
"In '89 we had a huge, huge beating that hurt us pretty bad," Jardine said. "We ended up downsizing to
115 acres."
According to Jardine, the organic market on the Shore at the time wasn't very big, so he started to
collaborate with networks of organic farmers outside of the region, selling their products locally and in
surrounding areas as a way to support his wife and five children.
The next few years, he traveled to Northern Virginia, Norfolk and Virginia Beach, where he met groups of
organic food co-ops that all wanted to buy new products.
"Customers would ask, 'If you got this, can you get this?' so we started getting more and more products,"
said Elaine Jardine.
Over time, the business slowly grew larger from word of mouth between organic customers all throughout
eastern and northern Virginia.
Business moves
In 1998, the Jardines relocated to Machipongo and moved their business operation to a vacant vegetable
grader near their new home, where they began storing bulk quantities of dry food products, such as flour,
oats and grains.
Two years later, the Jardines transformed the building's empty warehouse into a retail store, filled with the
same organic products that are shipped to Quail Cove's customers.
Today, Quail Cove has three trucks that make an average of 500 monthly deliveries to cities as far north as
Frederick, Md., and as far south as Elizabeth City, N.C. According to Jardine, his business buys directly
from 60 organic vendors ---- 10 farmers in surrounding areas and 50 farmers from outside this region.
One of those vendors is Bunker Hill Cheese Company Inc., which produces hormone-free cheese products
in Ohio's northeast Amish community.
"A lot of people come (to the store) just to buy cheese," said Jardine, who considers his small retail store
to be more "customer-friendly" than larger food stores.
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3. Digital Collections: Daily Times Text http://10.7.216.32/archives/archive/search/_1282662693/?search...
"We have a little closer connection to where stuff is coming from and it's not likely that (other stores) will
go through what we go through to get products for customers," he said.
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