Mattie’s Story
Written By Mac Croom
Sequatchie, TN
Ingredients of a perfect farm meal:
Fresh-picked tomatoes,
Garlic, with that special taste only farm garlic can have,
Straw hats hung on the door,
One old farm dog,
Many helping hands, only a little dirty,
A couple curious cats,
A family, as big and loud as possible, and whatever other ingredients they bring to the table.
Mattie Sienknecht is a farmer at Sequatchie Cove Farm in Sequatchie, TN. Along with Kelsey Keener, a board member of the Southeast TN Young Farmers and owner of the farm, Mattie manages the farm and its many moving pieces, not the least of which is the perfect farm meals. Sequatchie Cove Farm produces food for numerous restaurants and food hubs across Tennessee and North Georgia, including the Main Street Farmers’ Market in Chattanooga, TN. The four-generation family farm also provides employment opportunities for aspiring farmers, such as a recently-started seasonal internship program, and is dedicated to creating lasting change in the regenerative agriculture field.
Mattie joined Sequatchie Cove Farm in 2020 as a garden volunteer and became Assistant Farm Manager in 2023. Before joining the farm full-time, Mattie attended college at Lewis and Clark College and came back to Chattanooga, TN, her hometown, to volunteer at the farm in the summers. After graduating college in 2020, Mattie worked at a CSA Farm in Portland, OR for a year before returning to Tennessee and starting work for the Sequatchie Cove Creamery, a partner business with the farm. After 8 months with the creamery, Mattie transitioned into a job at the farm, and she has been an essential member of the Sequatchie Cove family ever since.
. . .
“Food, and cooking, and sharing meals… That is a really special thing about farming. Farmers are always so willing to share food, and sit down and, even though they’re tired, have these elaborate potluck feasts together. That's always kept me going.”
Farming and food, one of humankind’s most essential marriages. From the dirt to the table, from the farmer to the community, humans have built the relationship between food and the grower for thousands of years. We rely on this relationship every day, and for good reason: humans need healthy food to survive, and we will need it for as long as we exist as a species. Humans need food, and so we need farms. But to have farms, we need more: we need growers, we need land to grow on, we need the knowledge of how to grow, we need seeds, water, and healthy soil, we need living wages for farmers, we need new generations of children ready to grow— the list goes on and on. The more you look, the more that list grows into a maze, a massive web of relationships that join together to form our food system. Farming lives at the center of that system. And, ta-da, so does Mattie!
Before this interview with Mattie, I got to enjoy a family meal with her and the Keeners at the farm, all of us sweaty after finishing the morning chores. Mattie and Kelsey cooked, and they produced a Sequatchie Cove lunch classic: a Spanish frittata, or tortilla, made with fresh eggs and potatoes, and a side of just-picked tomatoes with basil. We sat around the table and ate ravenously, the quiet sounds of chewing and fork-scraping broken only occasionally by chatter about the farm and our various lives. In those moments, I felt honored by how casually I was welcomed into that meal, and into the family by extension; there was never an inkling of the question if there was enough food for another, or if the added cooking would be a hassle, but only an extra plate sitting on the table.
When we finally washed off our plates and Mattie and I walked outside to the porch to do our interview, one of the first things she said reflected the same gratitude for kindness like that, a farmer’s kindness.
“I never would have guessed that I would be so lucky to be invited into their family in this way,” she said, nearly four years gone since she first began at the farm. “It’s just so unique to farming as a job. Working on a family farm, you get to build such strong relationships with people. If it were a different kind of job, I don’t think we would have the same closeness. Working so hard through all the seasons just brings people together, I think.”
Only a farm can provide relationships like Mattie’s and the Keeners’, and only at a farm meal can the love from those relationships be so perfectly expressed. As a young farmer, relationships like that are what both emotionally and physically keep Mattie going, too. Through the many challenges farming has thrown at Mattie and Sequatchie Cove Farm, from droughts to a lease termination to the record-breaking ice storm in 2023, during which Mattie and the family were stranded for a week at the farm, Mattie had the Keeners to turn to at every step. Mattie expressed throughout our interview just how lucky she felt to have found such a strong support system in the Keeners, especially since so many young farmers lack such support.
“Being at this farm and having this intergenerational family, and seeing that they've persevered through so many generations and so many hard times… that's really encouraging,” she said. “Just having that support system as a young and still a very beginning farmer is so important.”
And for young farmers, support is truly essential. For Mattie, that support ranges from everyday help with farming’s many curveballs to long-term needs like affordable land and farm startup funds. “I don't think I could ever imagine starting a farm alone,” she continued. “It's so hard to imagine even looking for land, and the cost… And as a young farmer, you're not making enough money anyway. It’s just impossible to do alone.”
The relationships that make up Mattie’s web of support inform her hopes for the future of farming as well, one not limited to one family but to an entire region of new farmers.
“My dream for the future of farming here in this region is to bring more young people here who want to stay and farm,” she said. “Moving out of the South happens for so many young people. But there are a lot of people who feel really passionately about staying here, and I want to spread that.”
With more young farmers, the family grows— so does the lunch table, and the great web of interconnections which make up our region's relationship with farming and food, too. We need it to grow, because if it doesn’t, farmers like Mattie and the Keeners will experience the impacts first. As Mattie voiced in our interview, “the future of all farming has to be cooperative”; for farming to be sustainable and healthy into the future, we need to trust each other, weaving our roots into the land and providing for one another when we need it. Mattie and the Keeners embody that trust, and represent a wonderful truth, too: as long as there are places like Sequatchie Cove Farm to grow food, and people like Mattie to share it, we’re going to be okay.
For more information about Sequatchie Cove Farm, visit their website at https://www.sequatchiecovefarm.com/ or follow them on instagram at https://www.instagram.com/sequatchiecovefarm/.