Lee’s One Fortune Farm
Flourishes outside Morganton, North Carolina
By Kiesa Kay
For many years, Chue Lee dreamed of Lee’s One Fortune Farm, and hard work brought that dream into being outside the town of Morganton, North Carolina.
“At first, I planted to feed my family,” Chue Lee says as she dishes up a meal of bok choy, sausage, and delicious rice. “Then, we had enough to share with the community.”
They started Lee’s One Fortune Farm and this year had a place on the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project tour for the first time.
“We call it Lee’s One Fortune because we are the Lee family,” she said. “We all work together for one fortune.”
Eight families work together, helping with farms in the area, said Chue’s husband, Tou.
Tou explained that the Hmong families in the area support each other, laboring together to help every field flourish
“We stair step the times when we will plant, because if everything ripens at the same time, there is no way to harvest it all,” he says. “Once my uncle offered to help harvest, and when I got to the field, there were big piles, and little left to do. I had planned to begin when the dew was dry, but he and the others had arrived at daybreak. We always help each other.”
Lee’s One Fortune Farm has four acres of rice planted in a bog watered by a natural spring, and they hand-shuck individual seed heads to save only the very best of the seeds every year. The best seed, leaning from its heavy health and golden brown from top to bottom, will be harvested, dried, refrigerated, and planted in the next year. They have four kinds of rice in their fields, Tou said, including purple rice, with a taste as delicious as wine.
Their heirloom varieties grow at different rates, with the sticky rice taking 135 days, and the purple rice taking 115 days. They do all the planting and harvesting using traditional methods of the Hmong farmers in Laos, Tou said. He got to this country as a young boy of six or seven years of age, and he learned from his uncles. North Carolina has the fourth largest Hmong population in the USA, with about 10,000 people, and half of them reside in the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton area.
“The whole community helps each other. Among our families, instead of paying for labor, we give labor,” he said. “We share what needs doing, and whoever is available shows up.”
Nowhere in America could the Lees find small-scale rice production equipment, and they were doing all their harvesting by hand. A grant from WNC AgOptions helped pay for a special small combine harvester in 2019. The combine came by mail from China, with directions in Mandarin. Tou studied the machine and the pictures, and figured out how to put it together from scratch. He shared that he walks behind this machine, and it has pulled him up out of the mud — although it sometimes has left his boots behind. Tou works a full-time job in addition to keeping the farm strong.
“Work is part of being in the community of Hmong,” he said. “As soon as you can hold a tool, you are expected to work.”
The Lee One Fortune Farm, more than 90 acres, features 765 specially patented fruit trees, with 400 more arriving this year. They have a two year waiting time when they order these distinctive trees, which include Japanese plum trees that bear fruits blood red inside. They have seven varieties of asian pear trees, eight types of plum trees, seven varieties of peach trees, two types of persimmon trees, and four different varieties of nectarine trees. They pay a royalty for each patented tree, and agree never to graft or take cuttings from them.
The farm also includes a vast vegetable garden of Asian vegetables and more. The red-packed clay gets nourished with chicken litter, heavy in calcium, and gypsum for nutrients. One 50 pound bag of gypsum covers 5600 square feet, and Tou buys in bulk. He prefers it to lime, which takes longer.
“Gypsum does wonders,” Tou says. “It is like candy for the greens, making the calcium readily available. We use no synthetics here. Plants need nitrogen, calcium, and potassium, and there is a symbiotic relationship between the bacteria and the fungi.”
Tou and Chue met in California, and came back to North Carolina to build their lives. A third of rural residents in NC are nonwhite, and the state has twice as many rural residents (39%) as the national average (21%). Tou and Chue have had six children and frequently shared bounty with their neighbors. They had known how to do traditional farming for many years, but it wasn’t until Tou was in his late 30s that they decided to make a full commitment to the farm. He says it always has been his wife’s dream.
Tou gestures up the dirt road, where his wife is cooking a mile away. “That lady up there, in the hot sun like this, will set up an umbrella in the green fields and get down on her hands and knees and pull weeds from 9 am to 4 pm.”
The market for this food has developed recently, Tou said. Lee’s One Fortune Farm supplies rice directly to Asana and Table restaurants in Asheville. The Lees also have provided Asian eggplant, peaches, Asian pears, cucumbers, corn, tomatoes, and green beans to the Foothills Food Hub Community Supported Agriculture pilot and Food Distribution programs. Every week, they also take their produce to five different farmer’s markets in the area.
“We never do pre-orders,” he says frankly. “For one, we don’t know how much we will have, and restaurants would order so much. We want to have enough for the community.”
They have a healthy farm, although they have occasional muskrats, a bear, and what they affectionately call a “Ninja Cow.” They’ve never seen the cow, only hoofprints, and the cow munches on cabbage, broccoli, greens, and bok choy when no one’s around. Lee’s One Fortune Farm is thriving, and they have an even bigger goal.
Tou smiled broadly as he gestured toward the hills. “We want to go to the treeline with the rice, and put walkways and benches so people can relax when they visit.”
