This is not a store. This is a mission.
Gentle Harvest is the show piece for Ayrshire Farm, the Upperville-based brand dedicated to raising, slaughtering and processing heritage breed livestock. It’s certified organic, certified humane, certified pretty much everything, including certified predator-friendly, which means it’s even kind to the foxes who try to eat the egg-laying hens.
Taking over the space of a former bank—the vault door now opens to Virginia (and national and international) wines—Gentle Harvest is a food emporium of organic and local goods for Marshall. There’s a butcher case of products from Ayrshire Farm featuring rose veal (male offspring who stay with their moms longer and graze on grass), sausages (pork, beef and new: chicken with apple), rib-eye (look up to see pieces dry-aging for 21 days) and turkey (orders are accepted until the Sunday before Thanksgiving). Also find frozen meats and refrigerated ready-to-cook meal kits, serving two for $20.
The store also stocks cheeses; mostly organic produce from national and local farms (farmers routinely drop by with crates of zucchini in the summer); flowers; and assorted dry goods like beans, pastas and gluten-free snacks, most of which are organic, and others are locally made, like Texas Trey’s chips and salsa (Boyce), or small-batch with a cult following, like Crane Crest Real French Dressing (Massachusetts).
That’s only part of it. There’s a bar with stools and a draft line featuring beers, wine, cider, nitro coffee and kombucha. A few steps away, plucked from Ayrshire’s former retail shop, Home Farm Store in Middleburg, and a Chicago soda shop circa 1930s prior to that, there’s a luncheonette with casual fare: BLT (with house-cured bacon), ancient grain waffles, beef-and-pork house-ground hot dogs and an organic flat-top burger for $5. The menu is unusually inexpensive, but when all of the meat comes from the company’s farm, there’s no middleman to raise prices. With that in mind, Gentle Harvest plans to open burger shops (plus sausages, bone broth, wraps and salads) with a smaller retail footprint, in cities from Winchester to Herndon to Alexandria.
There are more ready-made options with the hot case: rotisserie chicken ($18 for a whole bird), a trout and potato dinner ($9) and sides like mac and cheese and broccoli.
The broccoli is organic, of course. But you won’t find tags, even though most items in the store are organic. “We can sticker everything,” says Sully Callahan, director of business development, “but that’s not very green.”
