On a mission to change the world, Jamie DeMent ’01 starts with fifty-five acres of NC farm country

by Eric Johnson & Kelly Almond

In 2004, after meeting entrepreneur and investor Richard Holcomb at the downtown Raleigh restaurant Zely & Ritz, Jamie DeMent ’01 made a rather drastic life decision.

She stepped off a Capitol Hill career track to help run Holcomb’s newly purchased farm on the outskirts of Hillsborough.

“We moved from 6,000 square feet inside the Beltline in Raleigh to this,” DeMent says, standing on the porch of the couple’s 1880 farmhouse. “It’s a very different life.”

Different, yes. But arguably just as frenetic as the lives each of them left behind.

The fifty-five-acre Coon Rock Farm is not your average agricultural venture. DeMent and Holcomb have become darlings of the burgeoning local food movement, providing meat and produce to a number of high-end restaurants, dispatching a cornucopia of seasonal goodies to five different farmers’ markets each Saturday, and delivering boxes of fresh produce to hundreds of individual customers each week.

Read full article at moreheadcain.org