Flower Power at Alvis Farms

It’s summer in Richmond, and for those who’ve spent the summer in the city before, you already know it’s time to gear up and get ready for festival season. Whether it be the Strawberry Street Festival in the Fan, the Carytown Watermelon Festival, or the Iron Blossom Music Festival at the Training Center on Leigh Street, there’s something going on almost every weekend here in RVA. And while some of the more questionable “festivals” like the Forever Summer Fest at Veil Brewing or The Juicy Brews Summer Invitational at Triple Crossing might just be a cheap advertising gimmick to get people to spend the day guzzling beer and listening to live music (which, hey, there’s nothing wrong with that!), my intent is to highlight those festivals that speak to the larger purpose of not only connecting people to local farms, businesses, artists and musicians, but building community around shared interests and experiences—like, for example, the 6^th Annual Sunflower Festival at Alvis Farms.

A short drive from Short Pump in Manakin-Sabot, Virginia, Alvis Farms is a family-owned and operated farm founded in 1965 and one of the few working dairy farms to survive the rise of alternative food choices, depressed milk prices, and increasing input costs. With over 800 Holstein cows milked daily and 6,000 acres of corn, wheat, soybeans, alfalfa, and rye fields, Alvis Farms remains a landmark of the Goochland County farming community to this day. But in addition to milking cows and producing a variety of agricultural crops, Alvis Farms has achieved widespread renown for its 50 acres of sunflower fields—which, to put it into perspective, is approximately the size of 40 football fields—and it is here that my wife and I find ourselves on a sultry Saturday morning the last weekend of June.

Situated along a stretch of Three Chopt Road, a tree-lined, two-lane county highway just off Highway 250,  the Sunflower Festival at Alvis Farms was a pastoral scene of haystacks, food trucks, vendors’ tents, family-friendly games and activities, and—yup, you guessed it!—sprawling sunflower fields as far as the eye can see. To beat the heat, we arrived early, and after parking the car in a sparsely-populated gravel lot (mind you, it was around 10:30 or so, which, for those not in the know, is prime brunch time), set about exploring the modest line of tents selling everything from cowboy hats, garden knickknacks, and hand-painted stepping stones sporting bees and sunflowers, to an assortment of leather goods, artisanal cutting boards made from reclaimed wood, and even knives hewn from old railroad spikes. And if that doesn’t just scream Richmond, than I don’t know what does!

With a focus on education and community outreach, the festival also hosted an array of tented stations featuring infographics, trivia, and hands-on learning modules; games like bowling, ring toss and rubber-ducky races fueled by the power of an old well pump; a kiddie pool and even a few farm animals lounging in the shade of tent. So, after making our one and only purchase—a collection of greeting cards that, when planted, would spring forth a variety of wild flowers including lavender and chamomile—we steered towards the informational section, where we tested our knowledge of the dairy industry, got lost in the big, beautiful, brown eyes of a mama cow and her two adorable calves, and even tried our hands at milking a plywood cutout of a cow with rubber udders, which I’m proud to say were particularly responsive to my pull-and-squeeze technique and, as a result, kickstarted a heated debate between my wife and me about whether or not I’d been a dairymaid in another life. Guess where I stood on the argument—no, really, guess?

Anyway, having learned more than enough farm trivia for one day, we treated ourselves to a shaved ice from the Kona Ice truck, then a quick jaunt through the misting station, and feeling refreshed (and having done just about everything except what we’d actually come to do), we decided it was probably time to stop posing for pictures in front of the sunflower fields and actually step into one. We weren’t alone, however, and meandering through the maze of buzzing bees and blooming sunflowers, we passed groups of women holding sunflower bouquets, young couples taking the obligatory selfies for social media (of which we took, and posted, our fair share), and frazzled parents wrestling strollers over rough, rock-strewn ground in hot pursuit of flailing toddlers. Perhaps if the flowers had been a little higher, the maze might’ve proved more challenging, but within a half-hour of leisurely walking and after a number of carefully-planned “candid” photo ops featuring my wife and me strolling leisurely through knee-high stands of sunflowers, arms wide and face lifted to the sky, we reached the end of the maze and started back to our car, with nothing more than our baggie of greeting cards and a number of thank-you’s to the staff who, at this point, were huddled in front of an industrial-sized fan but still more than happy to help us trim the sunflowers we didn’t have.

Now some of you may be asking yourselves how we managed to spend almost two hours at a sunflower festival and leave flowerless, and the answer is: we have a chronically-asthmatic cat, and can’t have flowers, candles, potpourri, or any types of scented objects in the house without inciting an asthma attack. And yes, I’m being serious—I mean, what kind of twisted individual would joke about that, anyway?

Nevertheless, regardless of how many flowers we did or didn’t pick, it was a wonderful day, and for those of you wondering why I’m telling you about a festival that has already passed, thanks to the months of rainless weather and intense heat the sunflowers aren’t supposed to reach peak bloom until later this month. Accordingly, Alvis Farms is hosting a few more sunflower festivals throughout the end of July and the first two weekends of August, and while I don’t know to what extent there will be food trucks and local craftsmen present, you can be reasonably assured that there will be rambling fields of sunflowers and a number of friendly people willing to loan you a pair of shears or engage you in a friendly conversation about the pros and cons of managing a working dairy farm in this day and age.

Unfortunately, unless you want to know how many dairy cows exist in the United States (~ 9 million) or how much milk the average American drinks (~ 16 gallons per year), there’s not much more I can tell you about Alvis Farms or any of its upcoming events, but if you’re interested in more information, I’d recommend visiting their website at https://www.alvisfarmsva.com/, join their mailing list, and/or reach out to them with any questions you might have.

With that said, I’ll leave you with one final word of wisdom I’ve gleaned from my time in Richmond thus far: just because you don’t have a boat or a pool in your backyard (or, for that matter, a backyard), that doesn’t mean you can’t have your fair share of fun during these sweltering summer months. So, stop feeling sorry for your landlocked self and go find a festival that speaks to you—whether that be smoking cigars and sipping wine at the Smoke and Vine Festival, vibing out to the at the Summer R&B Wine and Food Festival, or snapping your fingers at the Richmond Jazz Festival—because here in RVA, there are an endless number of opportunities to build your own unique community!

Written by Carl Smith