Uno teacher also entrepreneur

Friday evening. A time for most full-time workers to sit back and relax. But not for Tina Weaver. As soon as the Madison County resident returned home from work, she slapped on a winter jacket and eagerly headed outside.

As the Madison County High School business teacher carefully stepped over a cattle-grate in her driveway, she spoke of her next big idea.

“These are my shiitake mushrooms,” Weaver said as she peered underneath a pile of logs. “That’s my next business.”

Drilled holes in each of the logs contain mushroom spores and little else – for now.

Unfortunately, the summer’s lack of rain left Weaver without a crucial ingredient to growing mushrooms – moisture.

But that hasn’t discouraged Weaver, who owns Madison County-based business Papa Weaver’s Pork, with her husband Tom Weaver.

Starting out is always difficult. The Weavers are all too familiar with the trials and tribulations of getting an agricultural business off the ground.

The couple began by raising hogs and farming on Tom Weaver’s family’s approximately 1,000-acre property, which his great-grandfather purchased from James Madison, the fourth president of the United States, according to Tina Weaver.

Although the Weavers hadn’t been married long at that point, they had known each other for years.

“We met when we were about 6 or 7 years old. We were at the pool at Graves Mountain Lodge and I asked him to play Barbies,” Tina Weaver recalled laughing.

Like most teenage couples, the Weavers dated on and off throughout high school.

“We’d break up, and then get back together. We always found our way back to each other,” she said.

Following high school, Tina Weaver received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Virginia Tech and then returned to Madison County to marry her fiancé.
Although she grew up regularly visiting her grandparents’ farm in Oak Hill, her relatives were surprised when she first told them of her plans to marry Tom Weaver and live on his family’s Caves Ford Lane farm.

“My grandmother laughed when I told her,” she recalls.

“I’m not a big animal person,” Weaver explained, standing outside on her property overlooking a herd of cattle. Weaver’s tolerance of animals has seemingly improved over the years, as she doesn’t seem to mind the fact that two of her dogs and a cat insist on following her wherever she goes.

When they first started out, the Weavers were selling hogs for $20 a piece, although it was costing them $90 to bring them up to weight.
“You just can’t go on losing that amount of money,” she said.

The couple realized they needed to strengthen their business, so Tina Weaver enrolled at Strayer University in Fredericksburg to pursue a master’s degree in business administration.

When Uno-area resident Tina Weaver first started classes toward her master’s degree in business administration, her two children, Sarah and Matt Weaver, were still quite young.

Before heading out to Strayer University in Fredericksburg for class each night, Weaver cooked up a hearty meal to make sure her family was fed.
Often times, she would pack along extras to share with her classmates. Right off the bat, she impressed her fellow students with her fresh meals that she had prepared from animals her husband had raised himself.

“It was fascinating to them to actually eat your own meat,” she recalled. “They kept asking for the sausage biscuits – they just said, ‘you can’t buy ‘em like this.’”

For the next two years, Weaver – along with her fellow classmates and professors – spent class time creating a plan for what would become the family business – Papa Weaver’s Pork.

“The professors really fell in love with the idea and incorporated it into our classes. I had a business plan when I came out all ready.”

The couple’s goal was to create a “value-added product” – high quality pork products guaranteed to be free of extra additives and chemicals.

However, the first few years of the business were slow, she recalls. Weaver remembers a time during the couple’s first year of business, when she set up shop at an area farmer’s market.

“I remember not having one sale that day and I thought, ‘Boy, what have we got ourselves into!’” she said.

But business slowly grew and the couple continues to sell Papa Weaver’s Pork products at area farmers markets as well as to restaurants in the Washington, D.C. area.

Right after Weaver got her master’s degree in 1998, her professor suggested she become a teacher herself. Weaver’s role at the head of the classroom seemed natural as her parents both worked at the county’s schools when she was growing up and she had always loved school throughout her childhood.
“I loved school. I was a straight-A student,” she said.

Starting out as a business adjunct professor at Germanna Community College, Weaver then went on to teach at Orange County High School, finally joining MCHS in 2004, where she continues to teach.

As a teacher, she admits, she has “tremendously high expectations.”

“I expect them to use every single moment. I’m very passionate about their education,” she said.

Weaver enjoys watching her students’ business ideas blossom. MCHS senior Nick Aylor, went from being one of Weaver’s students in the classroom to a fellow vendor at the Madison Farmers Market in the course of a few years.

In class, Weaver coached Nick about how to start his own corn-growing venture using a piece of land his grandfather had given to him.

“His goal was to pay for his gas to drive to school,” she said. “He did more than that, Nick did very well.”

Besides the joy she found in seeing her student succeed, Weaver appreciated speaking with Nick as a fellow farmer.

“It was nice to be a peer – we were both vendors,” she said recalling Nick’s first day at the market. “It’s different for students, I think they start to see teachers in a different light.”

Weaver tells all of her students interested in starting a business to find their “passion.”

“If you’re passionate about it, you’re going to give it 110 percent,” she said.

Customers can tell when a company’s owners are enthusiastic and excited about their business and they in turn feed on that, according to Weaver.

“It’s contagious,” she said. “You’re most likely to succeed if it’s something you whole-heartedly believe in.”

For information about Papa Weaver’s Pork, visit its Web site at www.papaweaver.com or call (540) 672-1552.