ColdWater Creek Farms
Variety of produce, whole wheat flour, grits, and cornmeal.
Vendor Story
Brad Hinckley
A college career aptitude test once pigeonholed ColdWater Creek Farms’ Brad Hinckley as well-suited to be a farmer or… a building inspector?
“What the [heck] is that about?” he recalls thinking.
Market customers have been glad he chose wisely since ColdWater Creek joined a young Davidson Farmers Market in 2011.
Brad grew up in Ohio, around farming but not necessarily of it.
“I played golf, that’s what I did!” he says. Still, he spent some summers at his dad’s family’s South Dakota farm of, and his mom sometimes sent him to her family’s farm in Tennessee. It was his Tennessee grandfather who planted the seed that “if a man does what he loves, he will never work a day in his life.”
In college, Brad learned the basics of organic gardening while working in a flower greenhouse: “For just about every bad bug, there’s a good bug that eats it.”
Then, North Carolina’s economic transition away from tobacco farming in the 1990s led him into vegetables. His first crop was broccoli, starting sets from seed in Styrofoam flats leftover from the golden age of the golden leaf. Broccoli is still his favorite vegetable.
ColdWater Creek Farms carries on the organic approach (“Don’t panic, it’s organic!” is the farm’s motto). They also carry on other traditional methods.
“I drive a 1951 tractor to turn a 1913 mill,” Brad notes of his wheat and corn milling operation.
Brad and his wife Donna, who runs a family farm stall at the South End Market, and son Corbin, a Davidson Farmers Market regular, grow seasonal varieties of crops on their farm between Mount Pleasant and Albemarle, with a special fondness for heirloom varieties.
“I knew if I raised vegetables, I would never go hungry,” he says.
It’s hard work, but his grandfather was right.
“You never have two days that are the same. And every year is different, too,” he says. “I get to be my own boss. Yes, I’m out in the greenhouse watering on a Sunday night, but it’s better than 100 degrees in the afternoon…. Even though I’m a hard worker and put in crazy hours, when you do what you love, it’s a different story. And I’ve got lights on the tractor.”
