BELL BUCKLE, Tenn. – In March 2020 during the heightening uncertainty of the COVID pandemic, Mathieu Legrain and Kelsey Tucker put down roots for a new business in Bell Buckle and called it Belle Fleur Farm.

They aren’t newcomers to Bedford County.

Legrain’s family has farmed on the land they lease for Belle Fleur Farm (French for beautiful flower) since 1978, when they came from France. Mathieu’s grandfather, Michel Legrain, who invented and patented an automated calf feeder in 1962, grew crops and raised cattle on the 170-acre piece. His uncle, Francois, nowadays runs the calf and lamb feeder manufacturing business, Biotic Industries, on the family’s Bell Buckle property. Mathieu’s grandmother, Marie Clotilde Legrain, still lives on the property. Mathieu calls her Bon Mama.

“I’m the third generation farming on this land,” Legrain said. The farming bug skipped a generation in his immediate family. His father became a computer programmer and developed and sold Radio Frequency Identification Scanners.

Kelsey Tucker, Legrain’s life partner and business partner, grew up in Flat Creek. Her grandparents live in Unionville. Her grandparents and mom “always had a big garden,” she said. While she was completing an English degree at MTSU, Tucker started working at Five Senses Restaurant in Murfreesboro. Five Senses is a fine dining restaurant specializing in locally produced “fresh and healthy” foods.

The experience of working at Five Senses, a “farm to table” restaurant, refined Tucker’s understanding of the difference between foods “you care for yourself and get out of the garden yourself and the stuff you get at the grocery store,” she said. Food produced by industrial growers, using chemical fertilizers and pesticides, she said, “doesn’t taste the same. I’ve always been in love with good food, stuff that comes from the earth.”

Legrain’s journey, after graduating from Blackman High School in Murfreesboro, led him to the mountains of the West Coast. He loved backpacking and hiked 2,100 miles of the 2,600 mile Pacific Crest Trail, from Southern California to northern Washington. When he got off the trail he wan’t ready to leave the mountains of the West, so he settled for a few years at the southern end of the Cascade Mountains near Mount Shasta in California.

Legrain loved the mountains but in the rural region of Northern California work was hard to find and his long deferred dream to grow and sell produce on the family farm in Bell Buckle tugged at him.

When Legrain came back East, he was employed for awhile with a grower in Chapel Hill. While working there he met Tucker. “We both love plants and love nature,” she explained. They share a passion for producing healthier, “high quality vegetables.”

When the pandemic arrived both Legrain and Tucker were essentially left jobless. They decided they would build their own future security and prove to themselves and their community that small farming operations, without using herbicides and pesticides and chemical fertilizers, could be successful.

Forging a change in the food landscape

Tucker and Legrain consider their farming practices part of a growing trend. “People are realizing (the value) of being closer to the earth,” she said. “Having small food systems that are sustainable instead of mass dairies and industrial vegetable growing operations that are not good for the earth.”

Spraying crops with pesticides, Legrain said, kills not only the bugs that damage crops but it also kills the beneficial insects that prey on pest bugs. “UT (University of Tennessee) says for every pest bug you have 60 species of predator bugs (that help control the pest species). If you spray pesticides you kill all those bugs.” Instead of spraying pesticides, Tucker and Legrain are using a technology that was in use before the invention of chemical poisons – they spray their crops with sugar water (molasses, white sugar or sorghum) which attracts beneficial insects like lacewings which consume pest bugs like aphids.

“I just want to let people know there’s another way of doing things instead of listening to companies that want to sell you fertilizer,” Legrain said. “They say you need these products but you don’t.”

Time for change?

Tucker thinks agriculture practices will have to change. “I think we’re at a point where we don’t have much of a choice,” she said. “If we keep on with conventional farming practices for another 50 years we’ll have no topsoil left to grow food on for our grandchildren. I think people are starting to wake up and realize that we have to do something different.

“We envision a future with small farms dotting the landscape,” she continued, “taking care of local communities, working together to supply everybody with clean, healthy food that tastes 10-times better than what you can get at the grocery store.”

Tucker is passionate in her belief that the production of food needs to get back on a healthy, sustainable track. “With the industrialization of agriculture everyday people have gotten really removed from where their food comes from,” she said. “I would love to see people come to realize that humans and the earth have evolved together over thousands of years to work together. We take care of each other.”

Tucker said she and Legrain have already made a difference in the health of their families on the half acre they are currently farming. “If 50 more people in our community did the same thing,” she said, “Shelbyville and Bedford County would look entirely different food-wise and health-wise.

“Fried okra and fried chicken, and chicken and dumplings; all that is wonderful and I love it,” she said, but it’s not the healthiest diet. Tucker grew up eating those foods but she said she paid a price. “I was very unhealthy as a kid but over this last year and a half, growing things, picking them and figuring out how to cook them, my health has turned around 180 degrees for the better.”

As Tucker and Legrain guide a visitor around their half acre of cultivated land they point out the wide variety of food they’re growing. High on their list of what’s important is their lettuce crop, both head and mixed greens. They sell much of their lettuce to Five Senses Restaurant in Murfreesboro. They have also had tremendous demand for carrots.

As we tour their high tunnel, Legrain points out the dusty white coating on some of the plants. It’s Kaolin clay, he explained, the same clay people use as a facial skin treatment. Kaolin clay is an effective non-toxic way to repel insects, it irritates them, he said.

As we move further along, Tucker and Legrain point out the various plants: bok choy, mustard greens, watermelon radish, rouge vif détampes ( a French “vivid red” pumpkin especially suited for pies), Carindale pumpkins (an Australian variety), basil and onions, and Aunt Hettie’s red okra (a Tennessee heirloom variety). They are also growing heirloom tomatoes, a variety, black in color, called indigo rose. Consumers are having a hard time accepting not-red tomatoes, Legrain said, despite the luscious flavor.

Where to get Belle Fleur products

Belle Fleur currently markets their produce on Saturday mornings at the Murfreesboro Farmers Market on the courthouse square, 8 a.m.-noon. The Murfreesboro Farmers Market is open Saturdays from June to the end of September. They also sell online at Stones River Market (stonesriver.locallygrown.net). They can be found online at www.facebook.com/bellefleurfarm/ or reached by email at bfleurorganics@gmail.com.