Tennessee has argued about its own three Grand Divisions since before the Civil War, and a farm in Toone has about as much to do with a farm outside Knoxville as it does with one in Ohio. So we keep them apart.
West Tennessee opened first. It’s the division we can get to — Memphis is a straight shot up Highway 7 and I-55 from the homeplace — and the ring we built around the city crosses into north Mississippi and east Arkansas, because that’s where the farms actually are.
Middle Tennessee is open now too. The Nashville ring stays inside the state line the whole way around, so what changes out there isn’t the state, it’s the county: the milk is south in Williamson and Rutherford, the berries and the pastured meat are north in Robertson. Twenty-four farms between the two rings, every one of them read off its own website or Facebook page before it went in.
A ring is drawn by drive time, not by the state line. The Memphis one crosses into Mississippi and Arkansas; the Nashville one doesn’t cross anything. Either way a farm carries the state it’s actually in, not the state of the city it’s near.
And the standing rule, on every page of this thing: call or check their own page before you drive out.
Flat delta country, cotton and soybeans, and — if you know where to look — strawberries, raw milk by the herd share, and choose-and-cut cypress at Christmas.
One ring so far, drawn an hour out from the city in every direction it makes sense to drive.
Rolling limestone country and the best dairy ground in the state — a cow dairy that bottles its own, a goat creamery, a raw herd share, and berries north of the city where the land flattens out toward Kentucky.
One ring so far, and it’s the dairy end of the state — pick your direction out of town before you pick your Saturday.
Farther out — Clarksville, Columbia, the Highland Rim — comes next, one ring at a time.
Still empty, and honestly further off — the mountains are a different kind of farming and we won’t pretend to know it yet. Knoxville and Chattanooga first, when we get there.
Know the country up there? Tell us who to call.
Every farm on this page is here because somebody read its own words and wrote them down. If that’s your farm and we got something wrong — or if you’re not on here at all — we want to hear from you. No fee, no ads, no catch.