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This week on Everything You Didn't Know About Herbalism, we are joined by our long-time beloved friends, farm partners, and stewards of the regenerative organic farming movement, Elise and Jeff Higley. Tune in with Tommy, Elise, and Jeff, as they explore what it means to be a Regenerative Organic Certified® farmer and how we must grow alongside the movement of regenerative agriculture for the preservation of our food systems and the future of our planet. Elise and Jeff also share about the upcoming Oshala Herb Camp, which is weekend campout hosted in the breathtaking landscape of Grants Pass, Oregon on July 27 – 29. Filled with classes on medicine making, materia medica, botanical crafting, and hands-on experience for what life on an herb farm is like, Oshala Herb Camp weaves agriculture, herbalism, and sustainability into one to create a weekend of community building with plant-lovers from all walks of life. Be sure to check out the hyperlink above or detailed links included below to learn more about this invaluable opportunity! Learn more about Oshala Farm and the farmers behind it below! ⬇️
Direct-to-consumer marketing models like farmers markets and CSAs have evolved a lot over the years, with plenty of ups and downs along the way.
Chris chats with Courtney Klee, a farmer at Growing Family Farms, who shares her journey into agriculture and highlights the farm's commitment to regenerative practices. They discuss the variety of produce they grow and how CSAs foster a direct relationship between farmers and consumers. Courtney explains how CSAs work, allowing customers to receive fresh, local produce while helping farmers during the off-season. They emphasize the value of knowing where food comes from and the unique flavors that come from freshly harvested crops, encouraging listeners to engage with local agriculture as the spring season unfolds.Mentions:Growing Family Farms (@growingfamilyfarms) - @explorerochester - Rochester Contemporary Art Center (@roco137) - SEAC Tool Shed - Living Roots Winery (@livingrootswine)Mentioned in this episode:Joe Bean RoastersJoe Bean Coffee - Coffee that lifts everyone. https://shop.joebeanroasters.comBehind the GlassPodcast and gallery focusing on underrepresented artists utilize the space to amplify their work. Curated by @Richardbcolon @qua.jay. Check out the podcast or join them in person first Fridays at 240 E Main St, Rochester, NY! https://behind-the-glass-gallery.captivate.fmDialed In: A Coffee PodcastGet Dialed In to the world of coffee with Aaron and Wade! Tastings, coffee news and opinion and more! https://dialedincoffee.captivate.fm
Unlock the secret to healing from betrayal as Eddie Caparucci, a seasoned counselor, guides us through the transformative power of inner child work. Gain insights from Eddie as he unravels the intricate tapestry of trauma, betrayal, and recovery. Eddie's latest book offers a lifeline to those grappling with the pain of infidelity, drawing connections between unresolved childhood wounds and present-day struggles. Together with his wife, Teri, they illuminate a path towards reclaiming one's sense of self and emotional resilience. Join us as we explore the profound impact of childhood experiences on our responses to betrayal. Eddie shares his expertise on identifying core emotional triggers and how these can magnify the hurt of infidelity. By acknowledging the inner child, betrayed partners can begin the journey of healing and learn to separate raw emotions from rational thoughts. With compassion and understanding, this episode shines a light on the complex journey of recovery, empowering listeners to manage emotional distress more effectively. In this episode, you will hear: Eddie Capparucci discusses healing from betrayal using inner child work, linking unresolved childhood trauma to current emotional issues. Exploration of betrayal and trauma intersection, offering insights on separating emotions from thoughts for recovery. Strategies for finding inner strength and resilience after betrayal, focusing on self-empowerment and understanding pain. The importance of community support and therapy for managing distress and rebuilding trust. Discussion on identifying emotional triggers and addressing past wounds for recovery and better relationship decisions. Insights on maintaining healthy relationships by understanding childhood impact on adult emotions and behavior. Follow and Review: We'd love for you to follow us if you haven't yet. Click that purple '+' in the top right corner of your Apple Podcasts app. We'd love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast. Supporting Resources: https://abundantlifecounselingga.com/ NovusMindfulLife.com Episode Credits If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know we sent you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode, farming couple Jesse Way & Megan Brandenburg of Milk Way Farm talk about the pros, cons, and nuances of running CSAs compared to going to farmer's markets. Get time and labor-saving farm tools and microgreen seeds at shop.modern grower.co Listen to other podcasts on the Modern Grower Podcast Network: Farm Small, Farm Smart Farm Small, Farm Smart Daily The Growing Microgreens Podcast Carrot Cashflow Podcast In Search of Soil Check out Diego's book Sell Everything You Grow on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Sell-Everything-You-Grow-Homestead-ebook/dp/B0CJC9NTZF
In this episode, we sit down withChloé Roy, seasoned flower farmer, teacher at the Market Gardener Institute, and author of a new book on flower farming. She shares her journey from vegetable farming to building Floramama, a thriving flower farm, and the lessons learned along the way. Chloé discusses the business side of flower farming and sheds light on the hidden environmental and ethical costs of conventional flowers and why local flower farms are part of a growing movement.Chloé also reflects on scaling back production, prioritizing work-life balance, and her dream of documenting a world tour of flower farms. Whether you're a market gardener or a flower enthusiast, this episode is full of insights to help you grow flowers more profitably and sustainably.PLEASE make sure to subscribe to the podcast, download our episodes, and rate them! Your support means the world to us. Thank you!Join The Flower Farm Online Course and take your flower farm to the next level! Next cohort coming March 2025. Timestamps[06:40] The hidden costs of the conventional flower industry and why local flowers matter[12:12] The rise of the small flower farm movement[18:51] Applying bio-intensive market gardening to flower farming[27:15] Challenges in growing Lisianthus and Ranunculus – Trial, error, and success[32:40] Pricing flowers correctly and educating customers on their value[39:24] Market strategies – Selling at farmers' markets, CSAs, and to florists[45:08] Scaling up to a $380K farm operation – Managing a team and business growth[51:22] Scaling back – Shifting focus to seed and bulb production[56:10] Chloé's dream – A world tour documenting flower farms[1:10:54] Lessons in business planning and work-life balance[1:24:19] Advice for new flower farmers[1:41:07] Rapid fire Q&ASponsorsTessierhttps://info.serres-guytessier.com/en/tessier-mgi10?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Tessier+MGI+podcastUse promocode MGI10 for 10% off and free shipping on your first purchase for the Eastern North American regions (Ontario, the Maritimes, and the states of Vermont, Maine, New York, and New Hampshire). Bootstraphttps://bootstrapfarmer.com/marketgardenerpodcastMarket Gardener Institutewww.themarketgardener.com/introduction Limited time offer of $99 USD on our online course Introduction To Organic Farming.Links/ResourcesMarket Gardener Institute: https://themarketgardener.com/ Masterclass: https://themarketgardener.com/courses/the-market-gardener-masterclass/ Newsletter: https://themarketgardener.com/newsletterBlog: https://themarketgardener.com/blog Books: https://themarketgardener.com/booksGrowers & Co: https://growers.co/Heirloom: https://heirloom.ag/The Old Mill: https://www.espaceoldmill.com/en/Follow UsWebsite: http://themarketgardener.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/marketgardenerinstitute Instagram: http://instagram.com/themarketgardeners Guest Social Media LinksFloramama:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/floramamafermeflorale Website: https://www.floramama.ca/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/floramama JM:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeanmartinfortierFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/jeanmartinfortier
What better time is there to talk about flowers than the middle of winter, especially when we're talking about winter tulips! In this episode, the Valley Girls chat with flower farmer Lauren Tamraz of Alchemy Farmhouse about impermanence, seasonality, beauty, CSAs, getting little treats, the astonishing number of tulip varieties, and flowers as the artist's muse and medium. Check out @alchemyfarmhouseblooms on Instagram for an instant mood boost. Thanks for listening! To help support the Valley Girls, please follow our podcast from our show page, leave a rating and review, and please spread the word and share our podcast with others. We really appreciate your support! To stay up to date and for more content you can find us at valleygirlspodcast.com, at instagram.com/ValleyGirlsPodNY, at YouTube.com/@ValleyGirlsPodcast, and also check out the Newsletter and Pod Squad tab on our website to sign up for our e-mail newsletter and join our Facebook Group so you never miss a thing! All links can also be found in our Instagram bio. Episode music by Robert Burke Warren entitled Painting a Vast Blue Sky can be found at robertburkewarren.bandcamp.com/track/painting-a-vast-blue-sky.
Podcast Description:In this episode, we're joined by Mandi Garcia, a Clinical Nutritionist, Master Health Coach, and Performance Specialist with over 20 years of experience in the allied health industry. Mandi's passion for nutrition began with a deeply personal journey—her dog's lymphoma diagnosis—which ignited her dedication to holistic eating and sparked a profound connection between food, health, and agriculture.Mandi shares her expertise in tying nutrition to sustainable agriculture, diving into the concept of farm-to-table nutrition and its impact on our health. We explore the benefits of locally-sourced and seasonal foods, from their superior nutrient density to the role of soil health in creating more nutrient-rich crops. Learn why freshness matters, how reduced transportation time enhances flavor and quality, and why seasonal eating can optimize your overall well-being.Mandi also provides practical tips for incorporating local foods into your diet, from finding fresh produce at farmers markets and CSAs to crafting simple, nutrient-packed recipes. Whether you're curious about nutrient retention, soil health, or meal prepping with local ingredients, this episode will inspire you to make informed food choices that support your health, local farmers, and the environment.Tune in to discover how embracing farm-to-table practices can transform the way you eat, live, and connect with your community!Learn more at: Wellness | Freedom Health and Well-BeingAdditional resources mentioned: SNAP-ed Connection - Seasonal Produce GuideFoundation for Fresh ProduceFresh From FloridaMandi's "Chicken in a Pot" recipeSupport the showWe hope you enjoyed the episode! Please help us continue to produce more valuable content by subscribing to our Fresh Take Podcast Series! Subscribe here SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITY- Learn more about the many benefits of becoming a Sponsor of Florida Organic Growers! Your contribution will not only help to advance an organic and sustainable future but gain brand awareness through our growing audience. If you are interested, click here
Pete Russell used his experience in the food industry to design Ooooby, a sales platform for farmers to sell directly to the public. Their goal is to put local, ecologically sound growers back at the heart of the food system. Ooooby integrates all the apps one would use to build an online farm store into their software to simplify the process for farmers and offer a seamless experience for the customer.The platform has been available in Australia, New Zealand and the UK and is now becoming available in North America. One of the ways they keep the platform true to its values is by steward ownership- where the people who work for the company and the users all have buy-in. Learn how it works in this week's podcast interview! Connect With Guest:Website: www.ooooby.comInstagram: @oooobyhq Podcast Sponsors:Huge thanks to our podcast sponsors as they make this podcast FREE to everyone with their generous support: There are a lot of farm sales platforms out there, but there's only one that's cooperatively owned by farmers. That's GrownBy — your all-in-one solution to simplify farm sales. From start-up market farms to complex and scaled-up CSAs, GrownBy makes online farm sales easy and affordable; setting up your shop is free, and you only pay when you sell. Join over 900 farms who have already signed up for GrownBy, and you're eligible to join the co-op and become a member-owner after your first sale. Visit grownby.com to get started.Farmhand is the only ready-to-ride assistant made by and for farmers. Through a simple text or email to Farmhand, you can offload admin tasks, automate your CSA, update your website, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and take one of our many time-saving tasks for a test drive to see firsthand how Farmhand can help you earn more, and work less at farmhand.partners/gfm.Bootstrap Farmer offers a complete range of growing supplies including heat mats, ground cover, frost blankets, silage tarps, irrigation, and trellising. They also make all-metal, all-inclusive greenhouse kits, constructed of steel made in the USA and fabricated in Texas. Their heavy-duty, Midwest-made propagation and microgreens trays will last for years and are available in a full spectrum of colors. For all that plus experienced support for everything they sell, check out Bootstrap Farmer at bootstrapfarmer.com. Subscribe To Our Magazine -all new subscriptions include a FREE 28-Day Trial
In this interview Leah Penniman tells us why and how she started Soul Fire Farm, along with what she would do differently for those starting out or starting over. She discusses her most recent book, Black Earth Wisdom, and the recent adaptation of her first book, Farming While Black, into a documentary movie of the same title. She discusses how, in 1910, about 14% of farms in the United States were Black-owned, compared with about 2% today, and how her books are an effort to help Black farmers reconnect with their agricultural heritage and reclaim it from racism, discrimination and dispossession.In the conversation with host April Parms Jones, they explore land access, soil health, seed keeping, and the cultural connections to farming, emphasizing the importance of community and resilience in the face of challenges. Leah's insights provide an understanding of the historical and spiritual ties that Black communities have with the land, and the ongoing efforts to reclaim and nurture these connections through sustainable practices. Connect With Guest:Website: www.soulfirefarm.orgInstagram: @leahpenniman@soulfirefarm Podcast Sponsors:Huge thanks to our podcast sponsors as they make this podcast FREE to everyone with their generous support:BCS two-wheel tractors are designed and built in Italy where small-scale farming has been a way of life for generations. Discover the beauty of BCS on your farm with PTO-driven implements for soil-working, shredding cover crops, spreading compost, mowing under fences, clearing snow, and more – all powered by a single, gear-driven machine that's tailored to the size and scale of your operation. To learn more, view sale pricing, or locate your nearest dealer, visit BCS America. There are a lot of farm sales platforms out there, but there's only one that's cooperatively owned by farmers. That's GrownBy — your all-in-one solution to simplify farm sales. From start-up market farms to complex and scaled-up CSAs, GrownBy makes online farm sales easy and affordable; setting up your shop is free, and you only pay when you sell. Join over 900 farms who have already signed up for GrownBy, and you're eligible to join the co-op and become a member-owner after your first sale. Visit grownby.com to get started. Tilth Soil makes living soils for organic growers. The base for all our mixes is NOP-compliant compost, made from the 4,000 tons of food scraps we divert from landfills each year. And the results speak for themselves. Get excellent germination, strong transplants, and help us turn these resources back into food. Try a free bag, and check our 2025 seed starter pre-sale for the best prices of the season at tilthsoil.com/gfm. Farmhand is the only ready-to-ride assistant made by and for farmers. Through a simple text or email to Farmhand, you can offload admin tasks, automate your CSA, update your website, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and take one of our many time-saving tasks for a test drive to see firsthand how Farmhand can help you earn more, and work less at farmhand.partners/gfm. Bootstrap Farmer offers a complete range of growing supplies including heat mats, ground cover, frost blankets, silage tarps, irrigation, and trellising. They also make all-metal, all-inclusive greenhouse kits, constructed of steel made in the USA and fabricated in Texas. Their heavy-duty, Midwest-made propagation and microgreens trays will last for years and are available in a full spectrum of colors. For all that plus experienced support for everything they sell, check out Bootstrap Farmer at bootstrapfarmer.com. Subscribe To Our Magazine -all new subscriptions include a FREE 28-Day Trial
Despite growing up farming, Jenny Marks didn't think she could make a living at it. So she worked in agriculture supporting other farmers, where she learned more about the business of farming; that led her to start her own Trademarks Flower Farm in New York State. Now, in addition to her own farm, she teaches the business of flower farming to other growers with her business Trademark Farmer. She's doing a free masterclass the first week of January, for more info go to her website trademarkfarmer.com.In this interview with host and fellow flower farmer Rebecca Kutzer-Rice, Jenny discusses the importance of focusing on a few key crops, and the strategies she employs to maximize efficiency and profitability. Jenny also delves into the structure of her flower CSA, the significance of partnerships with local businesses, and her approach to dahlia tuber sales. Jenny also goes into the business aspects of flower farming, including budgeting and marketing strategies, while offering advice on how to succeed in the industry. Connect With Guest:Website: https://www.trademarksflowers.comInstagram: @trademarkfarmerFree article mentioned in interview: Managing gray mold in cut flowers Podcast Sponsors:Huge thanks to our podcast sponsors as they make this podcast FREE to everyone with their generous support:BCS two-wheel tractors are designed and built in Italy where small-scale farming has been a way of life for generations. Discover the beauty of BCS on your farm with PTO-driven implements for soil-working, shredding cover crops, spreading compost, mowing under fences, clearing snow, and more – all powered by a single, gear-driven machine that's tailored to the size and scale of your operation. To learn more, view sale pricing, or locate your nearest dealer, visit BCS America. There are a lot of farm sales platforms out there, but there's only one that's cooperatively owned by farmers. That's GrownBy — your all-in-one solution to simplify farm sales. From start-up market farms to complex and scaled-up CSAs, GrownBy makes online farm sales easy and affordable; setting up your shop is free, and you only pay when you sell. Join over 900 farms who have already signed up for GrownBy, and you're eligible to join the co-op and become a member-owner after your first sale. Visit grownby.com to get started. Tilth Soil makes living soils for organic growers. The base for all our mixes is NOP-compliant compost, made from the 4,000 tons of food scraps we divert from landfills each year. And the results speak for themselves. Get excellent germination, strong transplants, and help us turn these resources back into food. Try a free bag, and check our 2025 seed starter pre-sale for the best prices of the season at tilthsoil.com/gfm. PanAmerican Seed brings to market novel, high-quality vegetables for the fresh market grower and hobby farmer. This year, to help make choices for vegetable programs easier, we've grouped our assortment into four categories where these edible favorites perform their best. Look for our easy-to-identify symbols in our latest brochure! Visit panamseed.com/vegetables to learn more and find a seed supplier today. Farmhand is the only ready-to-ride assistant made by and for farmers. Through a simple text or email to Farmhand, you can offload admin tasks, automate your CSA, update your website, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and take one of our many time-saving tasks for a test drive to see firsthand how Farmhand can help you earn more, and work less at farmhand.partners/gfm. Bootstrap Farmer offers a complete range of growing supplies including heat mats, ground cover, frost blankets, silage tarps, irrigation, and trellising. They also make all-metal, all-inclusive greenhouse kits, constructed of steel made in the USA and fabricated in Texas. Their heavy-duty, Midwest-made propagation and microgreens trays will last for years and are available in a full spectrum of colors. For all that plus experienced support for everything they sell, check out Bootstrap Farmer at bootstrapfarmer.com.Subscribe To Our Magazine -all new subscriptions include a FREE 28-Day Trial
Why land tenure and security are key to the future of food. We've touched on the massive issues of land tenure, access, and security on the podcast before, but never enough. In many regions, land prices have been rising steadily for the past 50–100 years, becoming entirely disconnected from the land's productive value—especially for those wanting to farm using regenerative agroecology. This has made land increasingly inaccessible for the next generation of farmers. Exacerbating the problem is the aging farmer population. In the U.S., the average age of farmers is 62, which means most are nearing retirement. What happens next?With Ian McSweeney and Kristina Villa, co-founders of The Farmers Land Trust , we focus on first-generation pioneering organic and biodynamic farmers who plan to retire soon. Many have spent their lives building successful small businesses, running community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs, hosting events, providing education, and feeding countless people. Then there's the next generation—capable farmers who've trained extensively, spent years working on others' farms, and now dream of having their own land. Yet, they can't afford the inflated market prices.What can be done? One solution lies in shifting to common land ownership. Much like CSAs, the community can own the land, enabling a new generation of farmers to steward it. This often involves retiring farmers selling their land for significantly less—sometimes less than 50% of market value—unlocking opportunities for others to step in and carry the torch. This approach isn't reserved for hippies, socialists, or communists; it's gaining traction across the U.S. and, in some cases, is even supported by federal initiatives.Leaders in the land ownership space, Ian and Kristina explain why there's suddenly so much momentum in what has traditionally been a slow-moving area.---------------------------------------------------Join our Gumroad community, discover the tiers and benefits on www.gumroad.com/investinginregenag. Support our work:Share itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! www.Ko-fi.com/regenerativeagriculture----------------------------------------------------More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/ian-mcsweeney-kristina-villa.Find our video course on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/course.----------------------------------------------------The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to bThoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!https://regenerativo.org/en/laris/ KOEN10 for 10% off https://rfsi-forum.com/2025-rfsi-europe/ Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:https://gen-re.land/Support the showFeedback, ideas, suggestions? - Twitter @KoenvanSeijen - Get in touch www.investinginregenerativeagriculture.comJoin our newsletter on www.eepurl.com/cxU33P! Support the showThanks for listening and sharing!
Maud Powell, former co-owner of Wolf Gulch Farm in Oregon, shares her farming journey and the impact of climate change on her land. After experiencing drought and a devastating heat dome, Maud and her husband realized they had to leave their farm and find a new property with more water, despite having made decades of investment in the farm. In response, Maud started the Oregon State University Extension Ag Climate Grief and Support Initiative to help farmers cope with the emotional toll of climate change.The initiative offers workshops and resources to address climate grief and stress. Maud emphasizes the importance of community support and resilience in the face of climate challenges. The project aims to create a supportive community for farmers and provide resources to address climate grief. Podcast Sponsors:Huge thanks to our podcast sponsors as they make this podcast FREE to everyone with their generous support: BCS two-wheel tractors are designed and built in Italy where small-scale farming has been a way of life for generations. Discover the beauty of BCS on your farm with PTO-driven implements for soil-working, shredding cover crops, spreading compost, mowing under fences, clearing snow, and more – all powered by a single, gear-driven machine that's tailored to the size and scale of your operation. To learn more, view sale pricing, or locate your nearest dealer, visit BCS America. There are a lot of farm sales platforms out there, but there's only one that's cooperatively owned by farmers. That's GrownBy — your all-in-one solution to simplify farm sales. From start-up market farms to complex and scaled-up CSAs, GrownBy makes online farm sales easy and affordable; setting up your shop is free, and you only pay when you sell. Join over 900 farms who have already signed up for GrownBy, and you're eligible to join the co-op and become a member-owner after your first sale. Visit grownby.com to get started. Tilth Soil makes living soils for organic growers. The base for all our mixes is NOP-compliant compost, made from the 4,000 tons of food scraps we divert from landfills each year. And the results speak for themselves. Get excellent germination, strong transplants, and help us turn these resources back into food. Try a free bag, and check our 2025 seed starter pre-sale for the best prices of the season at tilthsoil.com/gfm. PanAmerican Seed brings to market novel, high-quality vegetables for the fresh market grower and hobby farmer. This year, to help make choices for vegetable programs easier, we've grouped our assortment into four categories where these edible favorites perform their best. Look for our easy-to-identify symbols in our latest brochure! Visit panamseed.com/vegetables to learn more and find a seed supplier today. Farmhand is the only ready-to-ride assistant made by and for farmers. Through a simple text or email to Farmhand, you can offload admin tasks, automate your CSA, update your website, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and take one of our many time-saving tasks for a test drive to see firsthand how Farmhand can help you earn more, and work less at farmhand.partners/gfm. Bootstrap Farmer offers a complete range of growing supplies including heat mats, ground cover, frost blankets, silage tarps, irrigation, and trellising. They also make all-metal, all-inclusive greenhouse kits, constructed of steel made in the USA and fabricated in Texas. Their heavy-duty, Midwest-made propagation and microgreens trays will last for years and are available in a full spectrum of colors. For all that plus experienced support for everything they sell, check out Bootstrap Farmer at bootstrapfarmer.com.Subscribe To Our Magazine -all new subscriptions include a FREE 28-Day Trial
If you store vegetables for any length of time, you're going to want to hear this interview with Sam Knapp of Offbeet Farm. Sam has practiced “storage farming” for years, growing during the summer for off-season sales from stored crops deep into the winter. In this interview, he tells us about how he figured out his own best practices along the way, as there was little available information on modern veg storage techniques that would keep produce in top shape over an extended period of time.The product of all this learning is Sam's brand-new book, Beyond the Root Cellar. It covers every aspect of storage farming, from which crops to grow for storage, to how to grow and harvest them, to what kind of a structure to build for long-term storage and the conditions that will keep vegetables fresh for as long as possible. We cover a lot of it in this interview, though for all the details, you can order Beyond the Root Cellar, which is now shipping from Growing for Market; magazine subscribers always get 20% off all books, including Beyond the Root Cellar. Connect With Guest:Sam's book Beyond the Root Cellar: https://growingformarket.com/store/products/264Website: https://offbeetalaska.comInstagram: @offbeetalaska Podcast Sponsors:Huge thanks to our podcast sponsors as they make this podcast FREE to everyone with their generous support: There are a lot of farm sales platforms out there, but there's only one that's cooperatively owned by farmers. That's GrownBy — your all-in-one solution to simplify farm sales. From start-up market farms to complex and scaled-up CSAs, GrownBy makes online farm sales easy and affordable; setting up your shop is free, and you only pay when you sell. Join over 900 farms who have already signed up for GrownBy, and you're eligible to join the co-op and become a member-owner after your first sale. Visit grownby.com to get started. Tilth Soil makes living soils for organic growers. The base for all our mixes is NOP-compliant compost, made from the 4,000 tons of food scraps we divert from landfills each year. And the results speak for themselves. Get excellent germination, strong transplants, and help us turn these resources back into food. Try a free bag, and check our 2025 seed starter pre-sale for the best prices of the season at tilthsoil.com/gfm. PanAmerican Seed brings to market novel, high-quality vegetables for the fresh market grower and hobby farmer. This year, to help make choices for vegetable programs easier, we've grouped our assortment into four categories where these edible favorites perform their best. Look for our easy-to-identify symbols in our latest brochure! Visit panamseed.com/vegetables to learn more and find a seed supplier today. Farmhand is the only ready-to-ride assistant made by and for farmers. Through a simple text or email to Farmhand, you can offload admin tasks, automate your CSA, update your website, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and take one of our many time-saving tasks for a test drive to see firsthand how Farmhand can help you earn more, and work less at farmhand.partners/gfm. Bootstrap Farmer offers a complete range of growing supplies including heat mats, ground cover, frost blankets, silage tarps, irrigation, and trellising. They also make all-metal, all-inclusive greenhouse kits, constructed of steel made in the USA and fabricated in Texas. Their heavy-duty, Midwest-made propagation and microgreens trays will last for years and are available in a full spectrum of colors. For all that plus experienced support for everything they sell, check out Bootstrap Farmer at bootstrapfarmer.com.
Dan Brisebois has over 20 years of market farming and seed growing experience as a founding member of Tourne-Sol Cooperative farm in Quebec, Canada. In this interview and discussion of his new book, The Seed Farmer, we hear how his interest in seed growing goes all the way back to the beginning of his farming career. Now, he can tell us from experience what it's like to grow many seed crops, since roughly half of the farm income derives from seed sales, with the other half coming from a 500-member CSA.This interview and Dan's book cover the practicalities of how to grow a seed crop, whether for your own use or for sale. Topics covered include choosing a crop, pollination, isolation distances, inbreeders vs outcrossers, harvest and processing for good germination, storage and more! This interview gives an overview of the differences between growing for a crop of fresh vegetables vs. for seed. For the nitty-gritty details, order The Seed Farmer, which is now shipping from Growing for Market; magazine subscribers always get 20% off all books, including The Seed Farmer. Dan is also the author of the book Crop Planning for Vegetable Growers and founder of the Farmer Spreadsheet Academy that offers courses in farm planning, including a seed farmer mentorship. Connect With Guest: Dan's book The Seed Farmer: https://growingformarket.com/store/products/262Website: https://www.fermetournesol.qc.ca/enFarmer spreadsheet academy: http://spreadsheet.farm/bcpInstagram: @danbrisebois.farmInstagram: @fermetournesol Podcast Sponsors:Huge thanks to our podcast sponsors as they make this podcast FREE to everyone with their generous support: There are a lot of farm sales platforms out there, but there's only one that's cooperatively owned by farmers. That's GrownBy — your all-in-one solution to simplify farm sales. From start-up market farms to complex and scaled-up CSAs, GrownBy makes online farm sales easy and affordable; setting up your shop is free, and you only pay when you sell. Join over 900 farms who have already signed up for GrownBy, and you're eligible to join the co-op and become a member-owner after your first sale. Visit grownby.com to get started. Tilth Soil makes living soils for organic growers. The base for all our mixes is NOP-compliant compost, made from the 4,000 tons of food scraps we divert from landfills each year. And the results speak for themselves. Get excellent germination, strong transplants, and help us turn these resources back into food. Try a free bag, and check our 2025 seed starter pre-sale for the best prices of the season at tilthsoil.com/gfm. PanAmerican Seed brings to market novel, high-quality vegetables for the fresh market grower and hobby farmer. This year, to help make choices for vegetable programs easier, we've grouped our assortment into four categories where these edible favorites perform their best. Look for our easy-to-identify symbols in our latest brochure! Visit panamseed.com/vegetables to learn more and find a seed supplier today. Farmhand is the only ready-to-ride assistant made by and for farmers. Through a simple text or email to Farmhand, you can offload admin tasks, automate your CSA, update your website, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and take one of our many time-saving tasks for a test drive to see firsthand how Farmhand can help you earn more, and work less at farmhand.partners/gfm. Bootstrap Farmer offers a complete range of growing supplies including heat mats, ground cover, frost blankets, silage tarps, irrigation, and trellising. They also make all-metal, all-inclusive greenhouse kits, constructed of steel made in the USA and fabricated in Texas. Their heavy-duty, Midwest-made propagation and microgreens trays will last for years and are available in a full spectrum of colors. For all that plus experienced support for everything they sell, check out Bootstrap Farmer at bootstrapfarmer.com. Subscribe To Our Magazine -all new subscriptions include a FREE 28-Day Trial
James speaks to Ed Hamer of Chagfood Community Market Garden in the Dartmoor National Park. CSAs or Community Supported Agriculture is very much the focus in this one. We talk about Ed's split growing site, leaning into the restrictive nature of the CSA model, dealing with and sharing risk, the importance and challenges of communicating with customers/members, the benefits of hard copy newsletters, member recruitment and retention, dealing with crop failures, surviving without cold storage and calculating value in CSA models. We also speak about Ed's recent travels around the US, where as part of a Churchill Fellowship, he visited 25 CSA farms to see how things compare across the pond and see what lessons could be brought back to the UK. Later on, we get into the nitty gritty of growing carrots and discuss how woodland coppicing has allowed Ed to integrate biochar and woodchip into the growing operation. Ed spells everything out with so much passion and with such clarity that I'm sure you'll find this one a joy to listen to, so let's get to it.This podcast is brought to you by the Organic Growers Alliance, the UK's only grower-led organisation providing technical and practical advice and support on organic growing. For more information about the OGA head to www.organicgrowersalliance.co.uk and become a member.More about James Butterworth and Cotswold Market Garden: https://www.cotswoldmarketgarden.co.uk/This project is part-funded by our podcast partner Ooooby, and our show sponsors ReAgTools, Vital Seeds, and the Biodynamic Agricultural College. We also rely on the generosity of listeners to keep this project going - if you like what you hear and want to hear more of it, please consider donating to our Patreon page on a monthly basis. Find out more here: https://www.patreon.com/TheOrganicGrowerPodcast
In this episode, farmer Travis Schulert shares how they deal with fulfilling CSA shares when they have issues with their field crops. Get time and labor-saving farm tools and microgreen seeds at shop.modern grower.co Listen to other podcasts on the Modern Grower Podcast Network: Farm Small, Farm Smart Farm Small, Farm Smart Daily The Growing Microgreens Podcast Carrot Cashflow Podcast In Search of Soil Check out Diego's book Sell Everything You Grow on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Sell-Everything-You-Grow-Homestead-ebook/dp/B0CJC9NTZF
In this episode, Guillaume Seynhaeve (G), SVP of Partnerships and Alliances at 3CLogic. He advises and supports the organization's strategic initiatives, including the oversight of 3CLogic's ServiceNow offerings. With over 20 years of experience in both sales and customer service, he has held leadership in the financial and communication industry, and he's a recognized expert in SAS, CSAS, AI, and CX, a ServiceNow enthusiast of 12 years. He holds his bachelor's degree from Boston College and an MBA from the University of Maryland. Welcome to the show. The Customer Connection Podcast helps you learn the implementation and adoption of the ServiceNow platform. This show is led by a Customer Experience Expert and Director of Customer Creator, and Workflows-Leading Practices, Jerry Campbell, and Portfolio Manager Sohail Ali Key highlights of the episode: 6:58 - Guillaume shares an incident about his personal experience with customer service 14:45 - How ServiceNow helped 3CLogic efficiently resolve complex customer service issues? 20:22 - How AI comes into the equation to improve customer experience, both for the customer and probably at the agent interface? 24:20 - How 3CLogic and ServiceNow are trying to better optimize AI to effortlessly solve customer problems faster?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In this episode, Guillaume Seynhaeve (G), SVP of Partnerships and Alliances at 3CLogic. He advises and supports the organization's strategic initiatives, including the oversight of 3CLogic's ServiceNow offerings. With over 20 years of experience in both sales and customer service, he has held leadership in the financial and communication industry, and he's a recognized expert in SAS, CSAS, AI, and CX, a ServiceNow enthusiast of 12 years. He holds his bachelor's degree from Boston College and an MBA from the University of Maryland. Welcome to the show. The Customer Connection Podcast helps you learn the implementation and adoption of the ServiceNow platform. This show is led by a Customer Experience Expert and Director of Customer Creator, and Workflows-Leading Practices, Jerry Campbell, and Portfolio Manager Sohail Ali Key highlights of the episode: 6:58 - Guillaume shares an incident about his personal experience with customer service 14:45 - How ServiceNow helped 3CLogic efficiently resolve complex customer service issues? 20:22 - How AI comes into the equation to improve customer experience, both for the customer and probably at the agent interface? 24:20 - How 3CLogic and ServiceNow are trying to better optimize AI to effortlessly solve customer problems faster?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Good marketing makes your web presence stand out so customers can find you. Nina Galle, co-author of Ready Farmer One, The Farmer's Guide to Selling and Marketing, and head of marketing at Local Line, discusses how to optimize your farm's online sales and marketing so you can reach a wider customer base and increase sales. Galle shares how online sales can also help boost in-person sales at farmers markets, CSAs and food hubs. She discusses the importance of offers and incentives to attract and retain customers, the role of visual assets in building brand trust, the back-end processes of order management and fulfillment, storytelling and creating a memorable brand, and strategies for social media engagement. Whether you are setting up an online store for the first time or have been taking online sales for years, if you're selling farm products online, this conversation can help you grow your online presence along with your farm. Connect With Guest:Email: info@localline.caWebsite: https://hubs.la/Q02bpWQV0Read her book: https://readyfarmerone.comInstagram: @locallineinc Podcast Sponsors:Huge thanks to our podcast sponsors as they make this podcast FREE to everyone with their generous support: Do you have more tasks on your farm than you have time? Stop interruptions and focus on what matters most. Delegate repetitive duties in your tunnel to Orisha, get rid of diseases for good and get the most out of your tunnels. Sleep better, knowing that they'll call you if anything goes wrong in your greenhouse. For tips and tricks on how to simplify your farm activities, check out their free ebooks at orisha.io/tools and sign up to Orisha's newsletter at orisha.io/newsletter.Farmhand is the only ready-to-ride assistant made by and for farmers. Through a simple text or email to Farmhand, you can offload admin tasks, automate your CSA, update your website, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and take one of our many time-saving tasks for a test drive to see firsthand how Farmhand can help you earn more, and work less at farmhand.partners/gfm.BCS two-wheel tractors are designed and built in Italy where small-scale farming has been a way of life for generations. Discover the beauty of BCS on your farm with PTO-driven implements for soil-working, shredding cover crops, spreading compost, mowing under fences, clearing snow, and more – all powered by a single, gear-driven machine that's tailored to the size and scale of your operation. To learn more, view sale pricing, or locate your nearest dealer, visit BCS America.Bootstrap Farmer offers a complete range of growing supplies including heat mats, ground cover, frost blankets, silage tarps, irrigation, and trellising. They also make all-metal, all-inclusive greenhouse kits, constructed of steel made in the USA and fabricated in Texas. Their heavy-duty, Midwest-made propagation and microgreens trays will last for years and are available in a full spectrum of colors. For all that plus experienced support for everything they sell, check out Bootstrap Farmer at bootstrapfarmer.com. Subscribe To Our Magazine - FREE 28-Day Trial:Our Website: www.GrowingForMarket.com
Two farmers on the SFA team share what they've learned over several years of operating CSAs and selling at farmers' markets. Dan Zimmerli of Cedar Crate Farm (Waldorf) and Lauren Barry of Dancing Gnome Farm (Wabasha) talk about how they've grown their businesses, the tech that helps them day-to-day, and how they design their farm stands at the market to boost sales and build relationships with customers. Dan Zimmerli, SFA Specialty Crop Lead; Cedar Crate Farm Lauren Barry, SFA Finance Director; Dancing Gnome Farm Jonathan Kilpatrick, SFA Farmer Education Director The viewpoints of the speakers expressed within or outside of this episode do not necessarily reflect the goals and mission of SFA. Dirt Rich is produced by the Sustainable Farming Association of Minnesota. If you enjoy Dirt Rich, consider supporting our work by becoming a member of SFA or donating at www.sfa-mn.org.
Megan Hunter is a passionate advocate from Mercy for Animals, who in this episode, shares their remarkable transition from physical therapy and emergency dispatching to championing animal welfare and sustainable agriculture. Megan recounts how early experiences with animal rescue and an interest in preventative medicine fueled their drive to reduce suffering and promote systemic change. Influenced by leading figures, they now serve as the Transformation Midwest Coordinator, working to create a more just and sustainable food system. Throughout our discussion, we spotlight the transformative efforts empowering farmers stuck in the contract farming system. We explore the practical challenges they face and the innovative solutions being offered. Listen to inspiring stories of farmers who have shifted from factory farming to sustainable practices like greenhouse farming and specialty mushroom cultivation. These transitions not only help farmers regain control over their livelihoods but also enable them to make positive contributions to their communities and the environment. This point comes up A LOT when you bring up veganism and Megan does a great job of explaining it all. We also delve into the broader implications of supporting farmers and transforming our food system. Explore how systemic issues prioritize profit over well-being and the role of community connections through farmers' markets and CSAs in fostering a more equitable food landscape. We discuss the critical support provided by the Transformation Project, which offers technical and financial assistance to farmers, encouraging innovation and solidarity. It's seriously such a cool program! Finally, we address the environmental and social injustices of factory farming and highlight the benefits of a predominantly plant-based diet for both human health and sustainability. Tune in to understand the importance of aligning personal practices with broader environmental goals and fostering community-driven change. Guest Bio: Megan Hunter is the Midwest coordinator for Transfarmation. Born and raised in the Midwest, Megan has a background in telecommunications and worked as a 911 emergency dispatcher in rural Indiana for over six years. She lives in Ossian, Indiana, with her family and two cats. As a previous first responder, she values approaching obstacles with compassion and a problem-solving mindset. Megan enjoys connecting people with diverse backgrounds to resources that fit their needs. She is involved with onboarding new Transfarmation farmers, developing resources to support existing ones, and providing R&I grant and administrative support. Thanks for listening to another episode. Follow, review, and share to help Consciously Clueless grow! Connect with me: https://www.consciouslycarly.com/ Join the Consciously Clueless community on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/consciouslycarly Connect on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/consciously.carly/ Connect on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/consciously.carly.blog Music by Matthew Baxley
Pick-your-own is an underused marketing channel for local vegetable and flower farms, one that could be transformative if PYO were implemented on anywhere near the scale of farmers markets or CSAs. Megan Neubauer of Pure Land Farm in McKinney, Texas is here to tell us how, after struggling with farmers markets, she made PYO more profitable and efficient for her farm. She used these experiences to write the book, Pick-Your-Own Farming: Free Yourself from Farmers Markets and Join the Agritourism Revolution. Learn how to deal with “customer blight,” why she charges admission, how they choose good PYO crops, and what veg and flower crops those are. It all adds up to making double or triple what they made at farmers markets in just eight weeks of PYO (though of course it takes more than eight weeks of farm work to make that happen).Megan didn't start her career in farming — she has a BS in Biology from Boston University and worked for several years in biotech and scientific research. But in 2012, Megan and her father started their farm together using regenerative growing methods on three acres of thornless blackberries and two acres of diversified fruits and vegetables, exclusively marketing their products using agritourism. They offer their local customers a uniquely diverse pick-your-own or u-pick experience, which you can hear about on this week's Growing for Market Podcast. Connect With Guest:Read her book: Pick-Your-Own Farming: Free Yourself from Farmers Markets and Join the Agritourism RevolutionEmail: megan@purelandorganic.comWebsite: www.purelandorganic.comFacebook: @purelandfarmInstagram: @purelandfarmTikTok: @purelandfarm Podcast Sponsors:Huge thanks to our podcast sponsors as they make this podcast FREE to everyone with their generous support: Tired of admin work and technology trouble? You need Farmhand on your team. Farmhand is the all-in-one software platform and virtual assistant built by and for independent farmers. Through a simple text or email to Farmhand, you can offload admin tasks, automate your CSA, update your website, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and take the quiz to see how much you can save at farmhand.partners/GFM BCS two-wheel tractors are designed and built in Italy where small-scale farming has been a way of life for generations. Discover the beauty of BCS on your farm with PTO-driven implements for soil-working, shredding cover crops, spreading compost, mowing under fences, clearing snow, and more – all powered by a single, gear-driven machine that's tailored to the size and scale of your operation. To learn more, view sale pricing, or locate your nearest dealer, visit BCS America Bootstrap Farmer offers a complete range of growing supplies including heat mats, ground cover, frost blankets, silage tarps, irrigation, and trellising. They also make all-metal, all-inclusive greenhouse kits, constructed of steel made in the USA and fabricated in Texas. Their heavy-duty, Midwest-made propagation and microgreens trays will last for years and are available in a full spectrum of colors. For all that plus experienced support for everything they sell, check out Bootstrap Farmer at bootstrapfarmer.com. Subscribe To Our Magazine -all new subscriptions include a FREE 28-Day Trial
Imagine turning a small urban garden into a flourishing ½ acre flower farm—all while homeschooling four kids and battling postpartum depression. That's exactly what Galena Berkompas accomplished, and she's here to share her inspiring journey on the Backyard Bouquet podcast. Galena transformed her life through the power of flowers, starting with little knowledge and a modest space in 2020, and has now grown into a successful flower farmer known for her sustainable practices and heartwarming story. Join us as we explore the therapeutic effects of gardening and how flowers brought joy and purpose back into Galena's life.Balancing a bustling family life with a thriving flower farm is no small feat, but Galena has found a way to weave her children into her passion seamlessly. From homeschooling to farm chores, her young ones are learning the value of hard work and the wonders of nature. Galena opens up about the tough decisions she's had to make, like dropping summer CSAs to focus on her family, and shares humorous anecdotes of her kids' farm escapades. You'll also discover her strategies for maintaining profitability while nurturing her children's education and childhood, as well as exciting future plans like selling seeds and expanding her farming operations.But Galena's story doesn't end there. Learn how an unexpected Airbnb listing led her to the perfect 6-acre property and how she's embracing organic and sustainable farming practices. Listen to her serendipitous tale of purchasing her dream farm, negotiating with sellers, and managing unexpected challenges. Galena's social media success, nearing a million followers on Instagram, underscores her genuine connection with her audience and commitment to sharing her journey. Tune in to this episode for an uplifting and informative discussion on flower farming, family, and the serendipitous joys of life.In This Episode You'll Hear About: 00:02:10 - Galena's Inspiration for Flower Farming 00:04:30 - Transition from Hobby to Profitable Flower Farming 00:06:45 - Involving Kids in the Farming Process 00:10:35 - Balancing Business and Passion for Flower Farming 00:12:39 - Managing Profitability and Personal Preferences in Flower Farming 00:13:21 - Transitioning to a Larger Flower Farm Property 00:16:46 - Involving Family in the Farming Operation 00:21:45 - Balancing Work Ethic and Family Time on the Farm 00:27:13 - Finding the Perfect Property for Flower Farming 00:32:07 - Implementing Natural Pest Control Methods on the Farm 00:40:04 - Unexpected Discovery of New Farm Property 00:44:08 - Challenges and Successes in the Farm Property Purchase 00:49:46 - Impact of Social Media Presence on Flower Farming JourneyShownotes: https://thefloweringfarmhouse.com/2024/06/25/ep-27-micro-flower-farm/Learn More About Micro Flower Farm: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/microflowerfarm/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/microflowerfarm YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn62VzXv-XdA9Kq1hVpUolQ Website: https://www.microflowerfarm.com/***Rate, Review, & Follow The Backyard Bouquet***If you enjoyed this episode, will you please consider leaving the podcast a review? I'd love to know what you enjoyed most about the episode.New episodes every Tuesday to help keep your garden blooming!
What began with a tent purchased from an anonymous $200 donation and Dawnna Berndt's idea to grow a garden to bring in more income, turned into a family-based vegetable farm market business (Berndt Family Produce) that's been serving their community of customers in eastern South Dakota and western Minnesota for 24 years. At the time, she and her husband, David, had five young children and even though she admits she knew zilch about gardening (she told me she was the “inside girl” and her sister was the “outside girl” when they were growing up), she leaned on David's knowledge as a lifelong farmer to start growing and harvesting veggies on less than two acres and selling the produce at their local farm stands and self-serve stands. Since their start in 2000, they've grown to six children, eight grandkids, 30 acres of sweet corn and 25 acres of some of the best vegetables, CSAs and canning and salsa shares around! And Dawnna says that along with all that growth and change, faith and family have always been at the center of what they do and how they treat people. Berndt Family Produce grows everything from broccoli, tomatoes, cabbage, garlic, tomatoes, peppers, onions, pumpkins, gourds, sweet corn, squash, cauliflower, potatoes radish, carrots, watermelon, cucumbers, beans, muskmelon, and more. While you're listening, learn more about Berndt Family Produce at Berndtproduce.com. I also posted photos and the recipe links from Dawnna for their favorite corn salsa, potato soup, copycat KFC coleslaw, roasted garlic parmesan potatoes, and 11 easy potato recipes on randomsweets.com. Dawnna and David Berndt, Berndt Family Produce, White, SD Email: berndtproduce@gmail.com https://www.berndtproduce.com Mobile: 605-690-4522 Facebook: Berndt Family Produce Instagram: @berndtproduce Locations: https://www.berndtproduce.com/visit_us Recipes Dawnna mentions in this episode: 11 Easy Potato Recipes https://www.pinterest.com/pin/3588874692004262/ Roasted Garlic Butter Parmesan Potatoes https://www.pinterest.com/pin/241787073737487016/ KFC Coleslaw Copycat https://www.pinterest.com/pin/153403931048621958/ Best Ever Potato Soup https://www.pinterest.com/pin/274086327313603706/ Easy Corn Salsa https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/187625/easy-corn-salsa/ Staci Mergenthal RandomSweets.com #ourSweetMidwestLife Website randomsweets.com Instagram @potatoesandmittens Instagram @randomsweets Facebook Random Sweets Pinterest @staciperry Email: staci@randomsweets.com #ag #agriculture #garden #gardening #farmer #farmtotable #produce #vegetablegarden #farmstand #rural #ruralSD #midwest #oursweetmidwestlife #podcast #foodpodcast #southdakota --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/potatoesandmittens/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/potatoesandmittens/support
In this episode, grower Travis Schulert shares why they switched their business model from doing a CSA to doing farmer's markets. Make farming easier with the Paperpot Transplanter and Other Farm Efficiency Tools and Equipment at Modern Grower. Follow PaperpotCo on IG https://instagram.com/paperpotco Podcasts by Diego Footer: Microgreens: https://apple.co/2m1QXmW Vegetable Farming: https://apple.co/2lCuv3m Livestock Farming: https://apple.co/2m75EVG Large Scale Farming: https://apple.co/2kxj39i Small Farm Tools at Modern Grower
In the first hour of "Connections with Evan Dawson" on Thursday, May 23. 2023, we talk with farmers about how CSAs can help with food insecurity and the challenges of running a farm in 2024.
How can shifting from profit-driven farming to a nonprofit model enhance food production and community well-being? In this episode of the Thriving Farmer Podcast, Michael welcomes Jim Sander of Wildflower Lane Farm in North Carolina. After a successful career selling to local markets and CSAs, Jim shifted his farm's focus to growing produce exclusively for local food relief groups using regenerative techniques, increasing both food production and personal fulfillment. Tune in to hear how Jim has transformed his passion for farming into a powerful force for community good. Episode Highlights: Jim's Farming Journey: Discover how Jim's farming journey began. [1:40] Challenging Beginnings: Hear about Jim's first year of growing. [4:11] Evolution of Wildflower Lane: Learn how his farm evolved into what it is today. [9:02] Crop Planning Challenges: Discover the difficulties of crop planning at Wildflower Lane. [23:02] Soil Fertility Program: Understand how the soil fertility program works. [24:38] Starting a Nonprofit Model Farm: Get Jim's advice for starting a nonprofit model farm operation. [29:33] Advice for Aspiring Farmers: Hear Jim's advice for those looking to get into farming. [35:24] Favorite Farming Tool: Find out what Jim's favorite farming tool is. [38:15] About the Guest: Jim began farming at Wildflower Lane Farm in 2010 after attending an introductory farming course at the Breeze Farm in Hillsborough. After successfully farming there for a year, Jim converted 3/4 acre of pasture land at his 24 acre farm into a small organic farm. For the first 7 years, Jim grew organically-certified produce and sold it to local markets, including Whole Foods, Weaver Street Market, Eastern Carolina Organics and numerous restaurants and CSA's. At the end of year 7, Jim decided to partner with Table to feed local kids who are food insecure. Jim now volunteers 20 hours each week supervising Table volunteers and couldn't be more fulfilled doing just what he loves, farming and providing fresh produce to locals. Connect with Wildflower Lane Farm: Website: Visit Wildflower Lane Farm Don't miss this episode on how Jim Sander's innovative approach is transforming farming and making a significant impact on local food relief efforts. The Thriving Farmer Podcast Team would like to thank our amazing sponsor, Farmhand! When it comes to buying a truck, you don't look for parts and try to build it yourself. You want something ready to ride. So why settle for parts when it comes to your farm management? In a world filled with parts vendors, Farmhand is the only all-in-one virtual assistant built by and for independent farmers. With one single platform, Farmhand helps ensure that even small, local farms can access the same level of support and technology typically reserved for larger factory farms. The best part? Farmhand's ready-to-ride platform comes with zero startup costs or long-term commitments. Learn more and take the quiz to see how much you can save at farmhand.partners/podcast.
We begin the show by talking with (pinch us!) food writer and reporter Priya Krishna of the New York Times. She shares some of the stories behind her new book, Priya's Kitchen Adventures. It's a cookbook for kids! And, Priya talks about some of her most meaningful reporting for the Times to date: her video series On the Job, where she shines a light on the unseen workers of New York City's food scene. Priya also previews Chefs!, the Connecticut Forum's live, unscripted panel discussion taking place at The Bushnell on Tuesday, May 21 at 7:30 PM. Priya's fellow panelists are Marcus Samuelsson and Gail Simmons, and the event is moderated by Sam Sifton. Go to CT Public's website for a chance to win free tickets to the event or buy your tickets directly from The Connecticut Forum. Also this hour, Azeem (Blessings) Kareem and Sarah Rose Kareem of Samad Gardens Initiative describe how they teach newbie gardeners and farmers how to grow food for themselves and their communities. You'll learn how to connect with Nature by growing vegetables, greens, and herbs in recycled egg cartons, milk jugs or buckets. Plus, you've heard of CSAs. What does it mean to be a “CSA grocery store?” We talk with Jocelyn Cerda (below), founder of Mercado Popular. Jocelyn is on a mission to work with BIPOC growers and makers to connect the Hartford community with fresh, healthy, local food. GUESTS: Priya Krishna: Food writer and contributor to the New York Times. She's the author or co-author of several books, including Cooking at Home (with David Chang) and Indian-ish with her mother, Ritu. Her latest book is Priya's Kitchen Adventures. (@priyakrishna) on Instagram Azeem (Blessings) Kareem and Sarah Rose Kareem: Founders of Samad Gardens Initiative, Bloomfield, Conn. (@samadgardensinitiative) on Facebook and (@samadgardensinitiative) on Instagram Jocelyn Cerda: Owner of Mercado Popular, Hartford, Conn. (@mercadopopct) on Facebook and (@mercadopopct) on Instagram FEATURED RECIPES: Watermelon Agua FrescaDahi Bahalla, Nana-Style LEARN MORE: Read/Listen: Azeem (Blessings) and Sarah Rose Kareem were profiled in Connecticut Public's series: BIPOC farmers in Conn. may be small in number, but they have plenty of stories to tell Watch: Sarah Rose Kareem demo: How to Make Apple Cider Vinegar Extract Watch: Sarah Rose and Azeem (Blessings) Kareem demo: How to Make Fermented Plant Juice Learn: Sign up for a Samad Gardens Initiative gardening class or find teas Learn: Fruition Seeds - Free Container Gardening Course (and many other resources on their website for new and seasoned growers) Learn: Sarah Rose and Azeem (Blessings) recommend Nigel Palmers book The Regenerative Growers Guide to Garden Amendments to new and aspiring growers Plan: Consult a Biodynamic Calendar to learn which tasks to do when and how to sync your growing with lunar and planetary influences. This show was produced by Robyn Doyon-Aitken, Meg Dalton, Tagan Engel, Katrice Claudio, Stephanie Stender, and Meg Fitzgerald. Our Social team includes Sabrina Herrera, Francesca Fontanez, Martha Castillo, Katherine Jimenez and Janae Spinato. Join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and email: seasoned@ctpublic.org. Seasoned is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Listen Notes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode.Support the show: https://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Fresh produce travels an average of about 1,500 miles from farm to your dinner table. It's one of the reasons that many consumers prefer to buy local, believing the food they're buying and eating is truly fresh with the added benefit of supporting a local farmer or community member. Those are two of the principles behind Community Supported Agriculture or CSA businesses, arrangements and plans that can be a win-win for both consumer and farmer. To explain more about CSAs on The Spark Thursday were Mike Nolan, owner Earth Spring Farm in Carlisle and Bethany Hinkle, CSA Manager at Spiral Path Farm CSA in Loysville, Perry County, who explained the concept of a CSA,"We see it as a relationship between the community and the farm that provides mutual support and commitment. Since the members (who join the CSA) met at the beginning of the season to be customers for the season, and then we as the farmers commit to the community to do all of the work of the seeding, the planting, the growing, harvesting and delivering those." Hinkle described how their CSA works,"We have different size options. So depending on how many vegetables you eat and we have different season lengths whether you want to get a box of veggies or our whole 35 weeks of growing, April to mid-December, or if you just want our peak summer season, or just want to try it out for a few weeks. And then we have delivery sites anywhere from Manheim to Shippensburg and everywhere in between, where we will do weekly box deliveries while we're in season that are farmer's choice of what veggies are ripe that week that we want to send out to our members." The customer benefits from the CSA by knowing they have fresh produce that was harvested recently and didn't have to be shipped a long distance. Nolan said there a few benefits for the farmer,"For us the benefit is we get to showcase what we're growing. We get to showcase what other farms are doing too, because we don't grow everything that we put in the CSA. So we will pull in from other farms that we know. They are almost all organic, with the exception of maybe a fruit farm. And then the benefit for us is that we just get a constant stream of revenue all year, because we do run all year with our CSA. You can also put your CSA on hold with ours. And then so we'll see the numbers sort of decrease over the winter time and then pick up during the summertime and fall. And that's just a trend that we deal with. But it's a nice little cash flow that kind of keeps things moving for us." Support WITF: https://www.witf.org/support/give-now/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We know that motivating homeowners to invest in energy efficiency retrofits and home upgrades is hard. Energy efficiency might not sound glamorous, but across the US, retrofits can actually cut our residential energy usage in half. That's why when I met Scope Zero CEO Lizzy Kolar, I was excited to learn about her company's novel way of motivating home upgrades. What Lizzy and her co-founder realized is that our homes are now workplaces. And, with employers having to account for emissions for remote workers, they now have an incentive to help homeowners invest in upgrades. Enter the Carbon Savings Account (CSA). Modeled after FSAs and HSAs, the CSA can scale quickly and help millions of homeowners across the US to begin investing in upgrades they've been putiing off. In this episode, we hear about Lizzy's background, the founding story of Scope Zero, the problems they're trying to solve, the best home upgrade investments, how the home upgrade ecosystem has been evolving, and much more. This is a fast and to-the-point episode. Hope you enjoy it.In today's episode, we cover:[03:02] Lizzy's background, what sparked her interest in climate & founding Scope Zero[05:50] Key needs that Scope Zero is addressing[07:17] The HSA model & how it works[08:24] How the HSA model translates to climate action[09:20] How someone might use the money they put in a Scope Zero account[10:15] What holds homeowners back from making investments[11:40] Evidence that consumers will invest in CSAs[12:23] The benefits of government incentives - Inflation Reduction Act[12:53] What home upgrades should be prioritized[14:43] The benefits of a Scope Zero CSA for employers[16:34] ROI for employers[17:53] CSAs in practice & the response[18:27] How far along is Scope Zero & the growth plan[19:44] Scope Zero's total addressable market & opportunity[20:27] Quantifying impact in terms of emissions reduced & environmental benefits[21:06] Tracking the impact of CSAs using dashboards & data[21:44] Customers' access to a partner vendor network[22:14] How the ecosystem surrounding home upgrades is evolving[23:08] How Scope Zero is financed & raising funding[23:47] Opportunities for aligning interests & motivating changeResources MentionedScope ZeroTomKat Center for Sustainable Energy - StanfordCaltech Rocket FundCollaborative FundConnect with Lizzy KolarConnect with Lizzy on LinkedInConnect with Jason RissmanOn LinkedInOn TwitterKeep up with Invested In ClimateSign up for our NewsletterLinkedIn
In this episode I sit down with Parish Bhumgara from Gardiner Roberts LLP to discuss corporate shareholder agreements (CSA).Discussion points:- Parish's background (2:05)- Corporate shareholder agreements/CSAs: what & when? (2:40)- CSAs: who should consider this? (3:45)- CSA structure (6:20)- CSA share types (8:05)- Key details to be outlined on a CSA (11:03)- Unanimous shareholder agreements (16:33)- Scenarios where CSAs really help (17:33)- Separate corporation to invest in Real Estate (19:52)- Corporations as a way to reduce liability (21:55)- Any disadvantages to CSAs? (23:30)- CSA set up (24:45)- CSA cost (25:05)- Transferring shares (27:18)This episode features Arya EHR - https://www.aryaehr.com/**I endorse only products/services I personally use or would use. Any income generated offsets the costs of running this podcast :)Yatin:Email: beyondmdpodcast@gmail.com LinkedIn: Yatin ChadhaParish:pbhumgara@grllp.com
Just because vegetables aren't growing outside right now doesn't mean that the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farmers are just sitting around. A big thing that CSA growers are doing now during the winter is looking at seed and equipment catalogs. These growers need to order thousands of dollars worth of seeds, not to mention supplies such as potting soil, roll cover, tractor tires, greenhouse plastic, you name it. So the winter means a lot of time in the office. At the end of February, some greenhouses are getting fired up to start the longer growing produce. Then in March and into April, the transplants will be started in the greenhouse. By the middle of April, depending on the weather, farmers will get into their fields and work the soil for the first time. “They're also working to adjust to industry changes post pandemic,” explains Tess Romanski, Communications and Development Manager for the Fairshare CSA Coalition. “Two big changes we've seen are the surge of customizable shares and the use of home delivery services.” Additionally, market shares have witnessed substantial growth. This allows consumers to shop for their produce on-site or at farmers markets and choose what they want versus receiving the traditional CSA box.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In this episode, Local Line Founder and CEO Cole Jones shares how farmers can manage their CSA programs using Local Line. Make farming easier with the Paperpot Transplanter and Other Farm Efficiency Tools and Equipment at Modern Grower. Follow PaperpotCo on IG https://instagram.com/paperpotco Podcasts by Diego Footer: Microgreens: https://apple.co/2m1QXmW Vegetable Farming: https://apple.co/2lCuv3m Livestock Farming: https://apple.co/2m75EVG Large Scale Farming: https://apple.co/2kxj39i Small Farm Tools at Modern Grower
Stories from the past help us understand who we are and who we can be. In today's podcast, we will explore a gripping new book titled "Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement," written by African American Studies Assistant Professor Bobby J. Smith II at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The book tells how food was used as a political weapon against African Americans and describes how black people fought against oppressive regimes by creating their own food systems, Bobby sets the stage for understanding how black youth today in Mississippi and beyond are building food justice movements and grappling with inequalities that attempt to contort their lives. Interview Summary So, Bobby, what inspired you to write "Food Power Politics?" So many different ways to answer the question. I have a family background in agriculture. I did food justice activism while I was in graduate school. I also worked on food policy councils. So, I was inspired to write it because I was already interested in understanding the ways in which food was produced, consumed, and distributed. But what inspired me to write "Food Power Politics" was actually a class I took while I was in graduate school at Cornell University in the Department of Developmental Sociology. I'm taking a course around community development and organizing and we read a book by sociologist Charles Payne entitled "I've Got the Light of Freedom." It's about the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, particularly the area called Greenwood, Mississippi in the Yazoo Mississippi Delta Region of the state of Mississippi, which is the northwest quadrant of the state. And in the book, Payne talks about the organizing tradition of the Civil Rights Movement. And during that class, I'd already been interested in understanding, again, issues of food justice and food security. So, as I was reading that book, I learned about the ways in which food became a weapon used against the Civil Rights Movement and civil rights activists responded by organizing their own food programs. And essentially, I wrote "Food Power Politics" because I wanted to raise awareness about how food can be used in different ways. But I also wanted people to rethink the idea of food. Many times, people think about food as something that's on your plate or something you get at the grocery store. But what inspired me to write "Food Power Politics" was to show a different story about food and how it impacts the lives of African American people. Thank you for that. And I have got to tell you, I'm intrigued by the phrasing of "Food Power Politics." Could you please unpack its meaning and explain how you map it across the landscape of Black life? "Food Power Politics" is the title of my book, but it's also the theoretical framework that I created to begin to understand, or for scholars and other people to interpret, how food can be used as a weapon. The book started as ideas for my dissertation. When I first learned about the ways in which food had been used as a weapon against African American communities, I started looking to the literature to find out how have people talked about food as a weapon. I remember talking to a number of my colleagues about the book itself and they were telling me stories about how the idea of food as a weapon is just what we call wartime tactics. So, food has been weaponized for many, many years, and centuries. So, I went to the literature, and I found out that scholars, typically legal scholars, historians, and political scientists, when they talk about how food when used as a weapon, they use the term food power. I had never heard of food power before or this framework of food power. So I, of course, as a diligent graduate student, delved into the literature and learned more about food power. And it's a concept that is usually understood in the context of international conflict whereby one nation withholds food from another nation in times of conflict as a way to mitigate the impact of the conflict, or that the nation that wills the power against another nation can win the conflict. That's what they call food power. So, I used the concept of food power and transposed it into the context of the Civil Rights Movement. And while I was studying the Civil Rights Movement, food power allowed me to think about how food had been used as a weapon against African communities, but it didn't allow me to pick up on how African American communities fought back. And that was a key part for me because many times when we think about times of oppression or social struggle, we tend to think about how oppressors oppressed people and not have those who are oppressed fight back. So, when I observed what African American communities were doing in Mississippi in response to food being weaponized against them, I theorized ideally emancipatory food power, which allows or creates this way for us to understand how African American communities use food as a way to emancipate themselves from those kinds of conditions and circumstances. So, the conflict between food power and emancipatory food power equals or is a sense is where I theorize as "Food Power Politics" which captures those struggles. I didn't want to show just one side of the struggle by which food is used against African American communities. I wanted to show both sides. And that's what the concept of "Food Power Politics" seeks to do. It gives us language to understand these instances, whether it's during times of enslavement in the African American experience or in times of Jim Crow or civil rights or even today. It gives us language to understand the ways in which food is used in times of social struggle. This is really rich. I'm so intrigued by the idea of taking from geopolitical conflict, this notion of food power and this idea of food power against, but you also talk about food power for, and that was an important move because it shows how people can take possession of their lives and use food, that can be so complicated, for their good. And so, I hope we'll talk a bit more about that. But I really want you to take us back in time. So, what is the food story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and why do you think it's important? So, thinking back when I talked about Charles Payne's piece, "I've Got the Light of Freedom." He talks about how food was used as a weapon against African American communities. So, although Charles Payne's book is not about food, it's not about agriculture. It's a strictly civil rights, Black Freedom Struggle type of book. But in chapter five of the book, he recounts this moment activists now called the Greenwood Food Blockade. And the food story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, or the story that I want to tell, begins with this Greenwood Food Blockade. In short, it is this moment where the White political structure there in the Yazoo Mississippi Delta Region through the city of Greenwood, Mississippi, in Ford County, is where they begin to use food as a form of voter suppression. So, there's this federal surplus commodities food program. Government cheese, or government peanut butter, meats, and things like that. At the time in the Delta Region of Mississippi, that program was a big program for rural African American communities. In 1962, the Florida County Board of Supervisors decides to dismantle that program. And that was the only way that our poor world Black communities were able to even get food. Many of them were sharecroppers or farm workers or day laborers, and many of them didn't have any money to buy foods. So, all the food they got and the ways in which they fed themselves was mostly through this federal surplus commodities program, which is what they call the Surplus Food Program. So, in 1962, the Florida County Board of Supervisors in November of 1962 decide to dismantle the program as a form of voter suppression. So, what ends up happening is that now activists who are in Mississippi begin to make connections between food and the struggles of sharecroppers. And so essentially the food story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement begins with this event called the Greenwood Food Blockade. And in response to the blockade, activists organized what they call the Food for Freedom program. So, that's one of the first times we see these tensions between food power against and food power for. The blockade itself is one where food power is used against these communities. And then the Food for Freedom program is designed to respond to that lack of food that is engineered by the Greenwood Food Blockade. That's my entry point and that's how I even found out about this food story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. And in 2017 when I was a graduate student, I went to Mississippi to learn more about the Greenwood Food Blockade. I wanted to locate activists who knew about it. I went to the places where the Food for Freedom program operated, and I learned so much about the Greenwood Food Blockade. But while I was in Mississippi, I also learned about another part of this story. So, during the Greenwood Food Blockade, while activists are responding to this use of food as a form of voter suppression, there's also this food stamps campaign that is engineered by White grocery store owners in the Delta and across Mississippi. Now, I call it a food stamps campaign because in 1962, our nation did not have a Federal Food Stamp program. It was a pilot program at the time. White grocery store owners in Mississippi wanted food stamps, but not food stamps to feed people; they wanted food stamps to make profit. They also wanted to get rid of the federal surplus commodities food program because they believed that that program would cut into their profit. So, once I learned more about this Federal Food Stamps campaign in Mississippi, I soon learned that another way in which food had been used as a weapon against African American communities was also through the Federal Food Stamp Program. The Greenwood Food Blockade is food as a political weapon. And then this Federal Food Stamp campaign by White grocery store owners is food used as an economic weapon, and how activists and how sharecroppers in those communities responded to that campaign was how they developed food cooperatives. Throughout each chapter of the book, I provide a case study of how food is used as a weapon against African American communities and how they respond. But they respond in different ways because when it's a political situation, they respond by attaching food to civil rights activism and freedom. Whereas the food stamps, they realize whether we have surplus commodities or whether we have food stamps, we can't control when, where, and how we access food. In response, they start developing these food and farm cooperatives in Mississippi, and that's the way we see how food can be used as a weapon against, but also how being those communities counter weaponized. And then I follow that story and situate it through today and show how particularly Black youth in the Delta today continue the food story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, recognizing that things are different today and that a lot of the power structure has morphed to fit today's context. But communities are still struggling to counter weaponize the ways in which food has been used against them. You are already leading into the next line of questioning and that's this idea why your text mostly is about historical events. You do, of course, bring it to today. And I'd like to hear you talk about this. How do you envision your book contributing to the contemporary work of food activists and their communities? Honestly, when writing books or articles, you never know who might have access to it or who might get it. And my hope for at least communities or those who are actually on the ground doing the work around food justice or food sovereignty or any type of food movement, I want them to use the book as a part of their arsenal of stories to develop blueprints to think about the future. The reason why I wanted to end the book with thinking about Black youth, because the Black youth that I studied in the book, they were directly continuing this food story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, which also showed me that there's some unanswered questions left from the past that we still need to address if we're going to create this socially just food futures. I'm hoping that my book can be used by activists to show them that they're not by themselves. In fact, they're part of a legacy, a genealogy if you will, a lineage of people who have always put food at the center of social struggle to think about how can we ensure that everybody is food secure? I couldn't leave the book in the civil rights era. I wanted to think about how people today, so the rural Black youth that I write about in chapter four in the book, they continue this story, but they're thinking about how can we, one, reclaim the past but also make it fit today? The local foodscape of the Delta is different now, back then, the Delta's Foodscape was shaped by mostly commissary stores and a few grocery stores as well as these plantation stores. And they all worked together to create this type of food outlet or food environment for to be poor world Black communities. But today we have a prevalence of corner stores, a prevalence of liquor stores, dollar stores, and those type of stores that carry cheap and highly processed foods or even no foods. And that's the foodscape by which activists are navigating today in the Delta. And I wanted to create a type of book that could help them think about how we can use history as a way to shape our strategies? Because while I tell the food story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, there's a food story of the Alabama Civil Rights Movement, a food story of the North Carolina Civil Rights Movement. And I want to give people permission to begin to excavate those stories and think more about how it relates to the work they're doing today. That's really helpful. I mean, you clearly have an eye toward the public to say, "What can folks who are on the ground doing the work of trying to fight for food justice pull from the past to use as strategy, as motivation, as even hope?" And I really appreciate that. Now I want to shift gears and talk a little bit about policy because I'm at a policy center and I'm interested to understand what we can learn about current conversations about federal, agricultural or food policies, given what you say? I appreciate this question, Norbert. So, next year marks 60 years since Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Federal Food Stamp bill, which created food stamps. We call SNAP today the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. What does it mean to think about food stamps 60 years later? My book provides an untold history, if you will, about the food stamp program. When many people think about federal food policies, they think about these policies as a way to ensure that people get something to eat. People need these programs to get access to groceries, get access to foods from a number of places. But historically, these food policies and ag policies were not necessarily designed to impact the public at large. And I think it's important for us to understand it as we think about how we're going to revise these programs to ensure that they're meeting the needs of the actual recipients. What we do know about food stamps is that in the past, it was designed while Lyndon B. Johnson and others argued in the 1960s that it was a part of this larger war on poverty and that it would help people get out of poverty. But food policies are not necessarily designed to get people out of poverty. It doesn't necessarily give them more actual money for them to take care of other things in their lives. Now, while it gives them some type of supplemental food assistance that then could possibly increase their income, it doesn't give them direct aid. And what I want my book to do is for us to begin to complicate how we think about ag and food policies and recognizing that while on the surface or when we read the legislation, it's designed to do X, Y, and Z, what actually happens and what we do know in the 1960s after the Federal Food Stamp program is passed, and it comes in Mississippi, people become more food insecure in Mississippi. And that's interesting to understand because people think when food stamps come to Mississippi, oh, now everybody can eat. And in fact, civil rights activists were saying, "Actually, no, we can't even eat now because you have these requirements." And that's also what we're seeing today. Activists have been organizing to shift the requirements of what it means to get SNAP or what it means to get food aid. And year after year or every five years under the Farm Bill, it gets harder and harder for people to get something to eat. But somebody's still making money from these policies and I'm hoping that my book provides at least an entry point or a window into complicating those conversations. I mean, if the goal is to feed people through food policy, then I'm hoping that we can learn this history, learn from it and as a way to revise what's going on presently to impact the future. As you know, USDA just released its most recent estimates of food insecurity in the United States and there's been an increase. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah. Yeah, and the fact that we're now in the conversation around the Farm Bill and what's going to happen there. I think there's some important policy conversations that need to take place. And one thing, of course, given the origins of your book and where you're located, in addition to thinking about the policy, there are racial and societal concerns that also crop up. Thank you for exploring these issues and trying to recognize the complexity of the lives that we live. So, I appreciate your project there. Thank you for framing it the way that you did. I'm glad you borrowed the food insecurity increasing because it's important to recognize that nationally, it's gone up. So, what does that mean for those demographics that were already disproportionately impacted by food insecurity? Thank you for bringing up that particular point. I understand that your book is the inaugural publication of the newly launched Black Food Justice series at the University of North Carolina Press. That's wonderful. Congratulations. Thank you. I appreciate that. My last question for you is how do you see your book reshaping our understanding of food justice? I've been thinking a lot about food justice, at least for the past 10 years. And in many conversations about food justice, there's been an explicit focus on thinking about race, but mostly thinking about race in the context of what we called the local food movement. So many of us, even myself, have argued before about how the local food movement is overwhelmingly White and overwhelmingly affluent and that poor people or people of color or Black people can't even get access to the movement. And while that was important, some maybe five years ago thinking about food justice, what my book shows is that the story of food justice or the development of the movement has deep roots in the arc of the Black Freedom Struggle in the United States. And I think that's important because when we begin to think about food justice, we tend to automatically connect it to the Environmental Justice Movement of the 1970s and 1980s. And what my book shows is that in fact, Black folks have been doing food justice since they were enslaved. They just didn't have the language to call it food justice because they were just attempting to survive. They were trying to make new worlds in a strange world they were brought to when they were enslaved because there wasn't any knowledge. So, what my book shows or extends or what it does or what it begins to reshape, if you think about this idea of food justice, is that it shows that there's more to food justice than just an opposition to local foods or just opposition to the absence of Black people at farmer's markets and CSAs. In fact, food justice has a deep history in how Black people reimagine their worlds and how they put food at the center. And I believe that's what my book does. It reshapes our understandings of food justice, and it provides concrete examples of how food justice morphs with the times. How it looked during times of slavery versus Jim Crow versus civil rights versus current that we find ourselves in. In the sense, what I'm attempting to do is I'm showing how it connects food justice connect to civil rights, but also, I'm showing more largely how the food justice movement, in many ways, African Americans provide the blueprint for understanding how we can achieve food justice in our nation and around the world today. Bio Dr. Bobby J. Smith II is an interdisciplinary scholar of the African American agricultural and food experience. Trained as a sociologist, with a background in agricultural economics, Dr. Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with affiliations in the Department of Food Science & Human Nutrition and the Center for Social & Behavioral Science. He is the author of Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina (UNC) Press, 2023), the inaugural book of the newly launched Black Food Justice Series at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Press. Dr. Smith earned a B.S. degree (summa cum laude) in Agriculture, with a focus on Agricultural Economics, from Prairie View A&M University in 2011. He earned a M.S. degree in Agricultural and Applied Economics in 2013 and a Ph.D. in Development Sociology in 2018 from Cornell University. Most recently, Dr. Smith has been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), among others.
In this episode, grower Kim Doughty-McCannon shares a potential additional market stream for flower growers. Make farming easier with the Paperpot Transplanter and Other Small Farm Equipment at https://www.paperpot.co/ Follow PaperpotCo on IG https://instagram.com/paperpotco Podcasts by Diego Footer: Microgreens: https://apple.co/2m1QXmW Vegetable Farming: https://apple.co/2lCuv3m Livestock Farming: https://apple.co/2m75EVG Large Scale Farming: https://apple.co/2kxj39i Small Farm Tools https://www.paperpot.co/
Seth Godin (!) and Brian go through startup ideas. Seth gives his opinion on how he'd start everything from a pasta truck to an updated CSA program. We dive into risk, emotion, tension and doing things that matter. Seth talks about the distinction between entrepreneurs and freelancers and the danger of thinking you're one when you're really the other. We talk about marketplaces and domain expertise and knowing what it is you're actually selling.This is Brian's favorite episode ever.The Song of SignificanceTackleboxPurple CowLinchpinThe DipTed Talk - How to Get Your Ideas to SpreadThe Tribes We LeadSeth on Farnam Street - Failing On Our Way To MasteryThe Coaching Habit - Michael Bungay StanierFarmer JonesEcosia Search EnginePoilane Bakery01:45 How Brian and Seth Met 05:10 Idea #1 - Helping Doctors and Patients get 2nd (and 10th) opinions 10:48 Idea #2 - How to Start a Pasta Truck 13:01 Landlords and Renters 14:45 Bootstrapping the food truck - emotional vs. financial risk 17:13 Can you start a business if you're not a domain expert? 18:42 Idea #3 - The Scalable Coach 22:50 Entrepreneur Pacs 26:15 - Idea #4 - Update to CSAs 31:20 - How to Pitch Something Uncomfortable - who takes the risk 34:15 - Idea #5 - Cost Transparency 40:37 - Confusing Freelancing and Entrepreneurship 45:08 - The Billboard Question - (outstanding, make sure you get here)
At the turn of the 20th century, half of Americans were farmers. Now that number is less than 2%! This week we talk about Community Supported Agriculture or CSAs. It's basically a subscription service for produce (and sometimes flowers) that helps support a small business, allows consumers to shop local, and for people to take back POWER! Support a small farm this growing season! You will be joining a community of people that believe in seasonal eating, fresher veggies, and small scale agriculture that is better for the planet and human beings. Check out Prairie's Edge Garden and follow us on social media to keep up with Emily on the farm. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/mirepoixtastebuds/support
Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Elizabeth talks with Brooke about running a small scale farm, including what goes into feeding over 700 families year-round, the importance of community accessible farm space, how climate change continues to mess things up, and how taking care of the soil really matters. Host Info Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Elizabeth on small scale farming **Brooke ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host Brooke Jackson. And today we're going to be talking with Elizabeth Miller, a farmer, about her work in having an organic farm and some really cool stuff that she does that's worth all of us learning how to do a bit of. But before we get into that, we'd like to give a shout out to another one of the podcasts on the Channel Zero Network. So here's a little jingle from one of our friends. Doo doo doo doo, doo doo. [Singing a simple melody] **Brooke ** 01:29 And we're back. So as I mentioned in the intro, I have with me today, Elizabeth Miller, a wonderful lady who owns a farm. And Elizabeth, I'll hand it off to you to tell us a little bit more about yourself. **Elizabeth ** 01:46 Thanks for having me. I'd love to talk about farming and my community. I've been running Minto Island Growers for about 16 years here in South Salem. My husband Chris and I started the farm way back when. We were passionate about environmental science and community food systems when we met in college, and I grew up working on our family farm and it was the kid who always wanted to come back and work with plants. And when Chris and I formed our partnership we were ready to come back here, in 2008, after working at a farm in California and really building a community based organic farm. And I can delve more into what that means to me. But one of our primary works that we do on our farm is centered around our CSA program, which is an acronym for Community Supported Agriculture that's practiced in lots of different ways all over the world, really. Every farm does a little bit differently but you have a subscription based weekly produce box. And we do a main season and a winter season for that. And I can, again, talk more about that if that's of interest. And we have a farm stand where we also do lots of food: woodfired pizza and berry milkshakes and salads, things that we hope reflect all the beautiful abundance and diversity that you can grow and eat here in Oregon. And it's also just a wonderful community hub for families to come and gather and join and connect with nature and really connect with the earth. That's what I firmly believe food can do for us and feed our souls and bodies in all the really most profound ways. We do organic plant starts and we do mint propagation and we used to do native plant work that were projects that I grew up doing, but we don't do any of that anymore. And that's a short summary. And I'll stop talking so we can get into more detail. **Brooke ** 03:46 No worries, thank you. Now listeners, you're listening to this and you may be wondering why we're having a farmer come on and talk and we've definitely talked a lot about gardening, at home gardening, growing your own garden. We've talked a little bit about community gardens. And what intrigues me about what Elizabeth's doing and what I think is useful to us is that she and her farm operate on a fairly small footprint. They grow an incredible diversity of food. And it's a fairly small staff. And when I think about the future and climate change problems that we're having and the number of food chains, food supply insecurities that we have, I'm concerned a lot about how we grow food to feed a community. And I feel like what Elizabeth does with her farm does feed a large community and there may be parts of that that are replicable for the rest of us. So if we find ourselves in a time in which our supply chains have broken down or we can work together to develop a farm, there's a lot of insights from what she does that would help create those kinds of things and replicate them in other places, because she's not a large scale industrial farmer and is not mono-cropping. And really does, like I was saying, a lot on a small footprint with a small staff. So. Elizabeth, would you tell us a little bit more about some of the specifics of the farm like how much land do you farm? How much food do you produce? How many different crops? What's your staff size? Some of those kinds of things to fill in the details of what I was just saying, **Elizabeth ** 05:46 Sure, happy to. We lease about 29 acres. A lot of that encompasses non-production areas where we grow our plant starts and have our washing station and a commercial kitchen that supports the food cart. So in any given season, we are probably cultivating between 8 to 12 acres of land and that also includes lots of fallow fields that are either not in the rotation that year or hopefully are being cover cropped to add more nutrients and organic matter to the soil and to just practice good rotation. And one of the most amazing things about growing in the Pacific Northwest is the huge amount of diversity that you can grow here in this temperate climate, even with climate change. And that's going to stay true even within a climate change context. And I feel like having a diverse...a business model based on a high level of diversity can provide a lot of resilience within, you know, socio-political changes, climate change, context environmental extremes, you know, that.... Even though diversity is challenging, because it means you have to have a greater skill set per crop. And the complexity, the number of successions, and the complexity with the number of crops makes it difficult to run as lean and efficient and profitable of a business, it still provides a lot of resilience and it's really what our business model is based on. So we grow, you know, about 30 to 40 different crops and within that, over 100 different varieties. You know, just with pepper, eggplant, and tomato alone there's probably 30 to 40 varieties there, which is a little bit insane, but it's also incredibly exciting because there's so much diversity out there. And as a farmer, you know, it's just...it keeps...it's just exciting to delve into the world of diversity within varieties. And we do that both for fun, to expose our customers and our eaters and for ourselves to more options and things you don't get in the store. That's one of the fun things about gardening at home or working on or buying from a small farm is just getting access to more interesting varieties. We do that also because there's a lot of great plant breeding that goes on and can--depending on what the breeders are focusing on--there can be more resilience within a variety. That's especially true with the hybrid brassicas. So, you know, we love the seed saving. We love open pollinated varieties and heirloom varieties. But as farmers who rely on growing food for our economic living, we do buy hybrid seeds--nothing GMO, of course, because we're certified organic and we wouldn't do that anyway. But we do see it with certain crops like the hybrid brassicas--like the heading brassicas, like broccoli, cabbages, etc--having options with hybrids is really important for just vigor and yield and consistency. And even with tomatoes, we love growing the beautiful diversity of all the open pollinated heirloom tomatoes but, you know, now that we've been farming for over 16 years, we're seeing diseases we hadn't seen before, especially with the extreme.... Well, we had already seen late blight in our tomatoes, but I'm sure that it would have been.... Our very, very wet spring we had last year, we saw a bigger increase in fungal and bacterial diseases and we've seen resistance to those things in different varieties. So that's been an interesting thing we've observed in the last couple years. So yeah, our CSA model, it's changed a little bit over the years but essentially we do 22 weeks of a main season. And then we do about 7 weeks of a winter season. And our main season is June through the end of October and winter being November through February. And we could easily do a year round CSA in terms of what we're able to grow. It's those bridge months, we call them, from like February March, April, May are challenging but we have farmer friends who are really successfully do a year round CSAs because you can grow so much diversity here, especially if you utilize covered spaces really strategically, like hoop houses or even lower tech stuff like caterpillar tunnels--which are also important in a climate change context, even more so than then they have been in the past. So we do a combination for our CSA program of pack [unsure of spelling] shares, where we decide what goes in those shares. and we do two different share sizes to make it more...give more options to the community. And those get delivered to drop sites still relatively, you know, the farthest.... We used to go to Portland and then we realized at a point that we could fulfill all of our CSA shares here in the community. And so we decided to just deliver into the Salem area, which is so much better for many, many reasons. So the farthest we go out is Kaiser. But many of our drop sites are really pretty close to the farm. A few are five minutes away. Some are 10 minutes away. And that's because we really do cater to our local Salem community. And we are so proud of the relationships we've been able to build with our community over time, which I can talk more about because it's really its own thing to discuss. And then we do a market-style option, which again, different farms define this and do this in different ways. But for us it means setting up our produce at our farm stand two nights a week from four to seven. And we have a combination of fixed and choice items. And so the fixed items allow us to just have a little more reliable crop plan and make sure that we're still getting that good level of diversity out to our customers. People have to try to eat bok choy at least once a year, not five times a year, but once a year. It justifies us growing it too, which is good, you know. You want that diversity. It's good for our bodies. It's good for the soil. It's good in many, many ways. And then they get their choice items which they get to choose amongst. And like we've found that market-style option to just be incredibly popular, both for our customers and for us as a farm. It gives us so much more flexibility. It allows us to.... It justify us growing more specialty crops too because we can pick those really small amounts of like a specialty crop fully and put it out for market-style choice and we know that it'll all get taken and chosen versus like not being sure that that would all get enjoyed in our packed boxes, because we want to make sure that folks are really enjoying their CSAs. One of the big pieces...the most consistent piece of feedback we've gotten over the years, and many other CSA farms we hear this too, is that folks aren't able to fully utilize everything that's in their share. And they're usually joining a CSA because they value that local produce so much. And so trying to find ways to fit different people's needs within the CSA, you know, do the combo and fix and choice and also not...still grow specialty items but not have to grow huge quantities of it, you know. We've really fine tuned our model quite a bit over the years in the options that we've created. And then the winter season's every other week with a bigger break in the winter. And that's a combination of storage crops, but a lot of crops still coming from the field, which is really one of the things I love to talk about when I do tours is talking about just the amount you can still eat fresh from the fields where your nutrient density is still so high because things are fresh. You know, you lose a lot of your nutrients when things are picked and sit on the store shelves or, you know. They can be...not all frozen things are bad, you know. You can capture nutrients with certain types of processing techniques. But if it's not being processed in a certain way and it's just fresh, sitting on the shelf, you can lose a lot of your nutrient density that way. So the winter CSA is a really fun eating because it's still very, very diverse. And a lot of it's still really fresh. And there's some folks that just do that CSA. They might be really avid home gardeners, but they either don't have the scale or the storage capacity but they still want to eat a seasonal diversity and eat local and fresh. And so they'll come to our farm just for the winter CSA which is really neat. Yeah. **Brooke ** 14:13 And you do garden, or excuse me, "garden..." you do farm year round basically. It's not that you're...you're not working throughout those months when there isn't the CSA, right? Your farmers are still quite busy. **Elizabeth ** 14:29 That's very true. And yeah, you had asked to talk about our staff. So we-- **Brooke ** 14:34 Yeah, hold on, let me back up before you get into the numbers just because I want to review. Okay, so you're operating on eight or nine acres a year generally. And you're growing how many different crops, not including sub varieties? **Elizabeth ** 14:48 I'd say 30 to 40. I haven't encountered the actual list in a few years, but it's definitely between 30 and maybe 45. **Brooke ** 14:58 30 to 45 crops. 8 or 9 acres. You're sort of actively actually farming and yielding stuff from May/June through winter. **Elizabeth ** 15:10 Well, with our covered spaces, honestly, it's almost February now. February or March through.... We had a really big success last year in growing a much greater amount of food fresh from the soil but in the covered spaces with the addition of the caterpillar tunnels. We were harvesting quite a bit starting in early March. **Brooke ** 15:32 You didn't say numbers on the CSA, but I just happen to know that it's about 250 families that sign up that get that weekly produce box through the summer. Plus, you still have a farmstand that people come and buy fresh at. Plus, you have wholesale. Do you know how much food you produce? Like I don't.... You know, I know sometimes I hear about tons of this or that, but.... **Elizabeth ** 15:54 You know, I don't know the statistics and I really should. We keep them all in our harvest spreadsheets for our own record keeping and for Oregon Tilth for the organic certification. And I should know some of those stats because it'd be really.... What I really should know is per acre and by crop, you know, per bed-foot yield. But it's changing. I mean.... I have two really talented.... Shoutout to my two head farmers, my harvest manager, Arabella, and my field manager, Justin, are in their fifth and sixth year of farming on our particular farm, which is important to say because you have to really learn how to farm a particular farm. You can be a talented grower, but knowing a particular farm's soil, experiencing multiple seasons of variations, both in disease, pests, cropping patterns, weather patterns, learning that level, you know, you have to know a lot about many different crops. It's a huge breadth of knowledge that you need. And so you only really get that depth by farming many seasons. So they're just at the peak of their game in their trajectory this year. And so many crops statistics that they have reported have been double or more. I mean, just.... And it was a quote, unquote, "normal year," you know, with no big climate extremes. No, you know, heat dome. No raining for the first three months of spring so that, you know, the soil tilth was so much better than last year, for instance, where we had one of the coldest, wettest springs on record. And we saw the effects on crop health, and especially disease, but just crop health generally because of the tilth of the soil. The roots...the plants just were never as healthy, especially the one-time plantings that you would have to establish in the beginning of the year when we were so pressed to get things in the ground. So this year has just been so incredibly positive and more bountiful than normally even so. It's really turning my head of what's possible growing wise, you know, because there's so much variation within a crop year-to-year. And you know that with a large level of diversity, you're never going to grow each crop perfectly. There's always going to be something that's going to have a challenge or be better than expected or have some unusual circumstance. That's the challenge but also the wonderful curiosity of farming is you're always learning something new because soil systems and ecological systems are so complex. So I should...I'll get some of those steps under my belt for the next time I have a conversation like this. **Brooke ** 18:39 Well and that diversity, you know, another example of why that diversity is so important is that you're going to have some kind of crop failure or problem going on, right? Okay, so the CSA feeds something like 750 families. So if you had to take a guesstimate with, you know, Saturday markets and farmstand and wholesale, what do you think.... Like how many additional families worth of produce do you suppose that you put out? **Elizabeth ** 19:12 Oh, gosh, I mean, I'd say there's, you know, probably 700 to.... I don't know if we should say 1000 family units that come through the farm. You know, some people come to just have a milkshake with their kids and play on the playground, which is wonderful. My single biggest driving factor in starting the farm was that I wanted to continue a deep, and deeply important to me, and long family tradition of working within natural resources in Oregon. But most importantly, I wanted to keep the soil productive and in agricultural production so that it could be farmed for a few generations because we will need that soil and once.... If you can't afford to keep land in agricultural production and it's developed, you can never really go back from that. And two, was to give people the same opportunity to connect with the land that I had, you know? My family happens to own it. But of course the white people took all the land from the Native Americans and have abused it in many different ways over the years. And thankfully, the family tradition I was raised in, generationally it shifted, of course, because we've learned so much more about how to treat the land well. But there was always a history, like when my family was in timber. And that's where my family got its start was, you know, getting to take advantage, in some sense, of Earth's, you know, capital that it had grown for hundreds of years. And that's given me, in some way, the opportunity to have. But there was always an ethic of conservation and stewardship within my family's relationship to the land or to the natural resource that they were able to have the privilege to get to interact with. And I believe firmly that I'm so passionate about the Earth because I had the opportunity to connect with it. And so many people just don't have the exposure. They don't have the opportunity to either be out in nature or to have a garden. And of course, many people, you know, encounter that and experience it and find inspiration on their own. But it's hard...it can be hard to find that connection and that care for the earth and that perspective if you don't have the opportunity to interact with nature and with the soil. And food is such a fundamental way that we can all do that. And it connects us all. We all have to eat. So I just felt that our farm at Minto needed to be a community farm. People needed access to it. They needed to be able to connect to it and we needed to be able to connect to each other through that mechanism of growing and eating food. So that's always been a driving principle of our farm and our business. **Brooke ** 22:08 Yeah, and I'll say, you know, as an indigenous woman, how proud of you I am and how grateful I am for your ongoing.... You know, and you don't shy away from the awareness of the privilege that you have and where it came from and then the commitment that you have and have had towards land preservation and restoration and the way you take care of this piece of land. Yes, it is a business. But I think you would do things that would help the land and hurt the business because of your priority structure. Not that you would generally have to make that choice. But like if that's...if it came down to a decision between the two, I know that you're always going to take care of the land and make sure that it's healthy and strong and sustainable for generations. And that's really important culturally to me. So I'm, I'm grateful for that and to be a part of it. **Elizabeth ** 23:05 And thank you for that comment. I have so much learning to do. But I am so thankful for my family and especially my father for giving me that opportunity. He's my greatest hero and we share the same passion for plants and for soil and really the idea of stewardship that we just happen to be lucky to be able to have this relationship and that it's, you know, really.... I really wanted to examine what the idea of ownership is.... It's never made sense to me that we have the ability to own land, you know, and so there's so much more soul searching and seeking of...questioning of what that means. But I definitely see it as there's a huge responsibility when you do have the opportunity to try to do the best you can. And I'm thankful that my dad's been able to learn from me too. He still thinks we're crazy with all the amount of work that we put in. But he also understands. He sees how responsive the community has been to it. Because I believed...I knew that the community would come for this because it's just so fundamental. It's so fundamental to our wellness to be connected to the earth and to each other and to do it through food. It's like you can't really argue with it. And I am not.... This is not a discovery I'm making. This discovery has been fundamental to how we've interacted as a species since we've been evolving, you know? So um, yeah, so back.... I didn't really get to talk about the team that that makes it all happen because I-- **Brooke ** 24:53 Yeah, you must have a massive staff to produce this much food and be working this long and year round and so much land that you're doing. It must take an army to get that out, right? **Elizabeth ** 25:06 Yes, I simultaneously feel that it's huge and tiny and huge. And you know, my conception of it, my concept of it, expands and contracts depending on how I'm looking at things. But I just want to say that the people who choose to work on organic...small organic farms--or any farm really--are just some of the best people around there. They're in it because they're passionate about plants and soil and feeding their community. They're not in it because they're trying to make a bunch of money and they're sacrificing. Agriculture is often a lower paid profession. And there are very few farms, unless they're in a nonprofit structure or have figured some things out that I'm really trying to figure out, but there's usually not a benefit package to support, you know, these worker populations. And so it's just, it's a labor of love, the people that choose to do this work, and I am so humbled and proud to work with them every day. So we have a team of year-round managers. That's about four or five. And then we have a seasonal staff that expands quite a bit and quite a bit more so even this year to about between 20 and 30. But that encompasses all the farmstand staff and food cart and our perennial crew. And I haven't yet spoken about the fact that we grow blueberries and strawberries and we also have a neat tea project. Camellia sinensis is the tea plant and all the types of teas, black, green, oolong, ect... come from that one plant. And my dad has a real innovative approach to plants and agriculture, always has, so he, with a partner, in the late 80s planted tea, and so I've gotten to try to move that project forward. And so we have managers that kind of head each part of that farm. We have a CSA manager. We have a CSA logistics person. We have a field manager. We have a perennial manager. We have a farmstead manager, a food cart manager. And often those folks will take on many other roles too on the farm or have done other.... So, it's a small but mighty team. And since we do farm year round, that core managerial staff is often working in the winter still, which is wonderful but also challenging because they work so hard during the main season that then to continue to work when it gets so much colder and wetter and muddier and everything is hard and you can't necessarily warm up and recharge your body during the day, it's.... I'm at a crossroads with our business where I'm really trying to build longer term sustainability. And we've been doing this for 16 years, so that's quite a long time and some big lessons learned and there's still a lot of resilience needed in our business model to keep going. And our managers are really the heart of the farm. I can't physically do all the work as a mother of two younger kids. My husband, Chris, now works as a mint breeder and he still is able to work from the farm but for a totally different company. And he really supports my ability to keep farming because the economics are really challenging with small farms. So I'm just trying to think very creatively with the newer perspectives I have of how people can do this work year round, long term, and what they really want to do during the winter. I think it's an incredible niche for other folks that are interested in this as a business model. There are some beet firms that only do winter farming because so many fewer farms there do it and you can do so much. But I'm thinking of different options and different models for our farm, but that's probably a level of detail we don't need to go into today but it's.... Yeah, I'm really looking at our business model from all angles to try to build in long term resilience, just in terms of the model. Yeah. **Brooke ** 29:24 Well, I might love to have you back sometime and talk about some specific things like winter farming or maybe.... I would love to do a whole thing on potatoes and I don't know if you want to come back for that but.... **Elizabeth ** 29:35 Well, I might stop throwing them so I don't know if you want me to. Not fully. Not fully. But if there's one crop I know we lose money on its potatoes. **Brooke ** 29:47 Wow. Okay, that's really interesting because potatoes are-- **Elizabeth ** 29:49 I'm not sure. My numbers will tell me this year but.... Yeah, we could do a deep dive on potatoes, even later in the episode if we have time, but.... People love potatoes, though. So that's a thing. There's like.... You want to grow what people love and you know they'll use. And they're nutritious. And they store. And they're so versatile in the kitchen. But.... **Brooke ** 30:12 Nutrient dense. **Elizabeth ** 30:16 Yep. But we've had such a difficult time growing them consistently well. Last year, we doubled our yield from the previous year, and grew them better than we ever had. And then this year, it's kind of back down to, "Ehh?" normal yields. We're like, well, did we learn anything? What were the factors, you know. Sometimes there's trajectories in crops and trends and you're like, okay, I'm steadily getting better at this. I'm learning things that I'm applying to a consistently better outcome. Potatoes are not one of those crops. There just seems to still be so much uncertainty and variation in the end yields. And to me, you know, I like to think about what is really unique about a locally grown vegetable. And often there is something really special, whether it be a variety or the fact that it doesn't store well or it's super delicious, or it's more perishable, or, you know, many, many things. Potatoes, in my mind, unless it's a really interesting variety and it's a new potato, to me, potatoes are almost.... There's not that many distinguishing features that make a fresh, locally grown potato that different in comparison to everything else we grow. To me, it's more of a commodity type thing. Same with onions, but I love growing alliums and I will never stop growing them. But I could deep dive into those specific crops if we wanted to. **Brooke ** 31:43 Yeah, I think I'll save that for probably another one. But that is really interesting to know. And some of our audience members are going to have some strong feelings about not growing potatoes. And I understand that. And we've done episodes around.... Well, I don't know if we did it. I know Margaret, who's one of our other hosts who originally started the podcast, has certainly done a deeper dive on potatoes on one of her other podcasts. Anyway, sorry. If you said it, I guess I missed it, you talked about your management team but then like the harvest staff you have kind of at the height of your season, how many folks do you have? **Elizabeth ** 32:25 Yeah, I'd say six to eight. I mean, you know, on a...Tuesday is our biggest harvest day, and there's probably, you know, six to eight people out there. Some of the managers come in to do half days, but you know, on a Wednesday, that's the second biggest day of our CSA, we'll have four or five in the morning and then three in the afternoon. So it really...it really varies. **Brooke ** 32:50 So less than one person per acre? Not that that's how.... That's not a great measure. But, you know, if you're growing eight or nine acres, you have-- **Elizabeth ** 32:59 It's difficult to talk about the stats because you're growing...you have to do.... There's so many steps that go into the full execution of a crop. You know, onions, for instance, your crop planning in November. You're starting the seeds very, very early, actually. We used to do it in February. Now it's March. Because they're relatively slow growing and you have to grow quite a bit. You know, one onion plant is an onion versus a potato plant grows multiple potatoes. Same with a kale plant. You know, so lots and lots of seedlings, many, many flats. And then they are in the greenhouse for a long time. Then they get transplanted out and they grow all season long. They don't get harvested for storage until.... Of course we're taking spring or fresh onions out of the field starting in maybe July, but the bulk of the allium harvest isn't until August/September. And then they're stored all winter. So the labor that's spread across that whole.... You know, it's almost.... I mean, we have onions year round so sometimes an onion will be a seedling or in storage for almost an entire year. So it's difficult to fully, accurately allocate your labor across an acre or crop just because-- **Brooke ** 34:15 Sure. Yeah, **Elizabeth ** 34:16 You know, but yeah, in peak season from June through September, I would say that there's six to eight people on average that are full time growing those crops. Growing, harvesting, delivering, etc...processing, delivery, ect... **Brooke ** 34:36 And that's what it takes to grow enough food to feed more than 250 families a weekly box of produce, six to eight folks. **Elizabeth ** 34:43 It probably could be quite a bit more. I believe, you know, with better farming techniques and, you know, I don't know if we want to go into no-till philosophy and practices on this episode, but from the learning we've been doing about some of these no-till farms that have been in operation for quite a long time. Singing Frog is one in California that's pointed to a lot because they've been farming for so long. The yields that they're getting per acre, it's almost like double or triple or even quadruple sometimes what even the best, you know, organic producers are saying they're getting. So I believe on our footprint we could be growing a much higher density of food per bed foot or per acre than we even are now, but it's very labor intensive. It's a very.... Which I think is good and challenging economically. But it's good that there is the opportunity for people to grow food for a living as their job. It's extremely enriching and gratifying on many levels. I think the economics are the hardest part. And I believe farmers should be making as much as doctors are making. I mean, maybe, yeah. Ehh, maybe not a specialist surgeon, you know, but you know what I mean? It's a very undervalued profession, especially for the crew position versus a managerial position. It's incredibly important and incredibly difficult. And food prices in our country, and across the world, it's just the way that we perceive food value is challenging. And affordability is incredibly challenging too. But there's just many things that should change in our food system to value, you know, to value food better. Not necessarily that it should cost more money for people, but the way that that work and that product is valued, there's a lot of improvement that could be made in that and you know, we could talk all about government subsidies and policy and all that another time. But I believe there's a lot.... I believe the federal government should be subsidizing small to medium diversified organic farms, not just large scale commodity farms growing GMO soy for a stupid faux green biofuel, you know? I mean, there's just so much wrong with our agricultural policy. But, again, another episode in the making maybe? **Brooke ** 35:06 Yeah, there's so much to get into there. And that's interesting. So you've had 16 years of learning and growing and it's a nonstop process, it sounds like. Partly with just because some crops are fickle and because of climate change. So, I want to rewind for a second all the way back to 16 years ago when you and Chris first started and compare, you know, what your staff size looked like, how much of the land you were farming, what kind of yield you were getting in those first few years as you were learning and developing. **Elizabeth ** 38:04 Again, I don't have those statistics. They're all anecdotal at this point. The big context for when Chris and I started the farm was that we were both more steeped in native plant and restoration work. Chris did, you know, he did Environmental Science at Colorado College and I was on that track as well but switched to more social sciences and music and.... But, you know, that's what I grew up primarily working with on our farm. We had a native plants nursery, and my dad did forestry research. And you can still see some of the cottonwoods, the native and the hybrid cottonwoods on the farm, which are an interesting thing that isn't active really anymore. But you know, those woody perennials and their kind of environmental uses, you know, from both just standard restoration to bio energy and phytoremediation, like toxic metals and wastewater clean up. And Chris and I were really interested in green roofs and urban use of plants, you know, and that.... So when we started the farm, we were passionate about food systems and we started a small CSA. We started with five people, five shares. And LifeSource was actually our first sale of Romaine. I still have the receipt framed. We sold them some romaine. And we're not currently selling to them right now. But we have sold them quite a bit in the past. And Marion Polk Food Share is currently our large wholesale account. But yeah, we started with five members, one who is still an active member of our CSA, which I love. And we actually had a largely Latino crew. Pedro and Maria were husband and wife. Pedro used to work with my dad doing the hybrid poplar harvest. And Maria and her sisters and her nieces were our core crew for quite a long time. And they are amazing people who I miss on the farm. And that's another whole topic, of just agricultural labor and how that's changed so much. But it's interesting to think back to that because that's a very different population of people. And they are such skilled agricultural workers. And I miss so many aspects of that on the farm. And currently most of our worker population are young students. It's a lot of Willamette students, other students, people who are transitioning to other professions, people who are going into horticulture, you know, who are plant and science based people all mostly in their early 20s or 30s. It's.... How to do this work into your 40s, 50s, and 60s, and 70s is a whole nother thing that I'm thinking about quite a bit now as I'm entering my early 40s. But yeah, very different demographics of people who were working on the farm. And Chris and I were doing so many native, woody plant-based projects at that time. We were in mint propagation, and that was both really positive because we were really passionate about that work and it's really interesting work, and Chris had been working at a living roof ecological restoration company down in California before he moved up to Oregon. And it also spreads really, really thin across the farm and across many projects. And it didn't...we didn't have the.... Now, in hindsight, I realize it. Doing too many things just doesn't allow you to really focus in and hone your skills and get your discipline, especially with the economics, in your key project areas. And so we grew our CSA model and the direct-to-farm model really quickly. I think we said, "Yes," to everything. Like "Yes, we'll do the Wednesday farmers market. We'll do the Salem public market, we'll do the Salem Saturday market. We'll do the Tuesday OHSU farmers market and then oh, while we're up at the Tuesday OHSU market, they want to do wholesale for their institutional bid at OHSU, and they need a new CSA farm for all of their drop sites. And I thought, well, what an opportunity. They're one of the largest employers in Oregon there. They have an in-house nutritionist who is incredible, who's still there and still passionate about food systems, and what an amazing opportunity. And it was. I mean, I don't know.... It felt to me at the time it was, but really, it just, I think, spread us too far and wide and thin. And so that's one of the biggest hindsight reflections I have at this point of just.... And I encourage anyone who's interested in this type of farming model is t to make this model successful, to actually not burnout with an injury, to burnout psychologically, like my husband, Chris did, and physically doing this work, to not get into debt, you know, to have a good business plan, and to be disciplined about your numbers, you just have to plan well, and you have to be diligent about your expansion. And I think we just...we had so much enthusiasm and so much demand for our products, so we just grew really fast without really understanding the economics of that growth. And so there was a mid period where our first really.... Tim, who's now a farmer in...he was a Willamette student and now a farmer in New Orleans. And a very wonderful farmer himself, now. He and his partner, Madeline, also a really talented farmer, they're both from Willamette. But Tim was our first kind of longer term staffer who became a manager. And he really.... He and Lindsey, another wonderful Willamette student, they were so gung ho about scaling up our CSA, and also doubling our market sales at the Saturday market, you know. They had these personal professional goals that they brought to the business. And we had never before had the capacity for that kind of growth because we hadn't had folks that were like, you know, quote, unquote, "like" Chris and I, that kind of had that same bird's eye view perspective and were really interested in the business side of things and the strategy and we're kind of doing the business planning with us and really had the capacity to take on that growth. And so they wanted to expand the CSA by like 40 shares one year and they were in their fourth year of farming. They had the capability. They're both incredibly bright and incredibly hardworking. And they were also young. They had that 20 year old energy. It's really something and it's unique, you know? And so those were some of those mid years of growth, really came from those strategic managerial staffers that really when I look at the peak, the growth spurts that we've had over the business as the business has expanded and also gotten better and more efficient and gained the knowledge and depth, it's because of these...it always has coincided with the peak of these managerial staff that have come into their third and fourth and fifth seasons. And they go in cycles. And they eventually have to cycle through because they want their own farms or they can't physically, they don't physically want to do the work anymore, or, you know, there's a combination of reasons, but it's always a cyclical thing. And that's a pattern that is now known to me, but it also is still a vulnerable pattern. So those are the patterns I've had, yeah, the kind of patterns I've been able to recognize at this point. Yeah. **Brooke ** 45:49 So if people are doing this model, either for business or, you know, in the context of trying to develop a small farm like this for community support and perhaps a climate collapse situation, knowing that sort of rotation that people will go through and helping make sure that, you know, whoever's.... Even if you're collectively running the farm and everyone sort of equal partners, knowing that there is sort of that learning and burnout cycle to be aware of and, you know, having the members of your community that are doing this together supporting each other and taking some turns with it over time, like that sounds really important. **Elizabeth ** 46:29 And trying to build structurally into the business ways to prevent that burnout. So even this next season that I'm looking towards, where those two key managers are moving on, and we've known that and we've been planning for and they're going to help us transition at the beginning of the next season, thankfully, but we're looking towards, you know, training a new set of managers. The expectation for that new set of managers is going to be completely different. I want every manager to be able to go on vacation during the peak production season for at least like a week or a long weekend, a Friday, Monday, or four or five days. They need that. They need that physical and psychological break. They need that recharge. Everybody needs it, everyone deserves to go on vacation and to not work, especially farmers. And there was never that.... Our previous managerial staff, they're just, that isn't a common expectation on most farms. You're just sort of expected to to work your ass off, excuse me, and you will anyway. So, it's up to the owners, or to the collective leaders, to find ways to build that structure of balance into the structure from the beginning, but this is the advice I would give. Because the work is hard no matter what. It's some of the most challenging work you're going to do no matter what, especially in a climate change context. The extremes are here. They're not predictable. You might have experienced one extreme, but you don't know what the next extreme is going to be like or what it's going to do in your ecological system. So you can't even really plan for it. That's the challenge of farming in a climate change context is these extremes. I'm sure there'll be some similar ones. Perhaps we'll be able to apply lessons learned. But that's been the biggest challenge of experiencing these climate extremes over the last five or six years is that it's been a new extreme each time. And so the learning curve is immense and it's stressful and it's costly and there's so much uncertainty. So that's a challenge. **Brooke ** 48:35 So really quickly then as our last thing on this, before we wrap, you've mentioned some of the climate issues that we've had, and I know I've mentioned these on other episodes of the podcast too, that, you know, for instance, last year, we had a really long, cold wet spring that went well into the first part of the growing season and it really screwed a lot of things up in a lot of different ways. And then two years ago we had some really extreme heat in that summer or a couple times over temperatures that have, you know, record breaking heat temperatures here. And so now we're looking ahead at the world and we know that there will continue to be climate issues and to some degree, you can kind of predict for your own area what's most likely to happen and what's somewhat likely to happen and what's not very likely to happen in terms of your individual climate extremes. Is that something that you actively work into your plans or is it something you deal with as it comes up? You know, how much are you looking ahead and planning for that and practicing for that on your own farm? **Elizabeth ** 49:43 Yeah, I think that we're planning for it to the extent that we can, you know. Like you've said, there is some predictability and now that we have experienced, you know, the heat dome.... The wildfires were so, just almost a completely totally different scenario, because you could hardly be outside safely, you know, but you we had to keep...some crops had to continue to be harvested or else it would make them unharvestable for a period after. You know, farms like ours, you have to continually harvest many crops. And then flooding has been really.... Wet and cold is always something we dealt with, but the extremes of last year were just far and above. And then flooding has been also greater and at times that we had never experienced before. Like we had some really intense flooding in April. I think that was like six years ago now. And so, yeah, ways that we're adapting and planning for that, you know, where we have floods...we have fields that are more flood…that are more.... All of our farm fields are in the floodway, actually. It's a pretty extreme flood plain designation from the Army Corps. But some of our fields are lower and they farm, you know, almost every winter. And so to the extent we can, we plan our rotations so that our winter crops are now, like I mentioned before, we had some crops, some of our first crops of the season in April, flood. So to the extent we can, we try to be cognizant of where that flooding might happen and try to put more vulnerable plantings in higher fields. But that's difficult for us to always do, but we try our best at it. Season extension, you know, through covered spaces is something that farmers have been doing all over the world forever, because it just gives you more flexibility, extends your growing season, and you can control your environment better. Sometimes you have less...you're less prone to pests. Those diseases can be much greater risk. So,you know, we had never had a huge amount of covered spaces. They're expensive to put in. And they're more difficult growing environments. I always like to say that they kind of expose all your weaknesses. And so since we've been spread so thin across so many projects and so much diversity and probably more scale than we should have expanded to too early, we have not always been the greatest hoop house or covered space growers. But our team's really improved in that area in the last few years. And so we've really benefited from partnerships with the NRCS. They administer the organic equip program and they give dollars towards conventional and organic farmers, the organic equip program specifically for organic farmers for many projects like cover cropping, restoration projects, hedgerows, and, most impactful for us, hoop house infrastructure. So all of our hoop houses and our caterpillar tunnels, including two more that we bought that haven't been put up, were all partially funded by the NRCS, which is really, really great use of our tax dollars. We can all at least maybe feel good about that for the use of our tax dollars. Yeah. And so that's.... Those spaces have been really instrumental in our bridge season growing, would you like to call it, especially the early season. Like, we all know Oregon springs can be cold and wet in a normal year and relatively unpredictable, and so because we are building our farm model on a CSA that starts in June, which actually really isn't that early, and people are really ready to eat seasonally from the farm in June. They're coming to us in April and May like, "When does the CSA start?" Like they think it should just all be available. And yeah, certain crops are. But to have the level of diversity and scale in June to feed that many people does take quite a bit of planning and land space. And so having just those extra covered spaces so that we can just fine tune our planting schedule and our planting mix in those early months, has been really key. And then methodologies that were even kind of pre a climate change context but just for better spring farming, like there was a practice that we were following, many farmers are doing, with preparing beds in the fall, tarping with silage tarps, and then that allows you to just pull back those silage tarps in the spring when you have a couple days of dry out. And then you can direct seed and transplant right into those beds, as opposed to having to wait for a one or two week dry window and leaving soil uncovered without a cover crop, which you don't really want to do anyway. So that completely changed our spring growing. And then adding in extra covered spaces this year was what allowed us to have such a wonderful early diversity. And then pushing, being pushed more towards no-till and regenerative practices that are, we feel, can just provide even more resilience in a climate change context, and in any in any context, you know, when you're building up the quality of your soil with the microbiology and organic matter. And from what we've researched and seen, the potential for healthier, happier crops that are produced with less fossil-fuel-based equipment and don't release carbon because of tillage, and just myriad other benefits that we've been seen and been hearing about, we were motivated to start our own no-till experimental plot. And so we had our first crops on that this year and they did well. And the soil--we didn't know how our heavier clay content soil would respond to no-till practices and from what we've read and understood, really the benefits of no-till don't take in massively so until years three to five. It takes a while to do your weed control and for your microbiology to get in there and add all that soil health. It just takes a while for the soils to adjust. Yeah, it's like how to.... How I say this to kids on tours is like, “How do forests feed themselves? How do those big old growth trees get so big? Humans aren't coming in and fertilizing those trees. It's just decomposition and micro organisms and all those amazing nutrient relationships between the micro organisms.” It's like they're just all working in this beautiful, and even more so we know now, because of these really cool scientists that are doing forestry research showing how these forest communities are this huge interconnected network with the root systems and the fungi and bacteria. It's just so much more complex and interconnected than scientists ever even thought. And so it's the same principle applied to annual or perennial farms. So we're only in...this will be year two. But we were already interested in those practices and some folks on our staff, Garabella, had studied that in college at Willamette and was already really passionate about it. We'd been doing some experiments with it, but this was our first year really biting the bullet and saying, okay, this is our no-till plot. And we're really, really enthused by the results and how well the soils responded. It's hard to break that addiction to tillage. I love tillage. I love tractors and PTO shafts and rototillers. But it's also really disruptive. SO it's breaking those habits. Yeah. **Brooke ** 57:11 And I know you can talk about this literally, for the rest of the week, but we should probably wrap it up here for now. It's been really great having you on and I do hope that we can have you again to talk about some more specifics of this and other things so we can continue to learn how to develop some of this in our communities and encourage the farms that are doing it. **Elizabeth ** 57:35 Thank you so much for having me and exposing and educating our community. **Brooke ** 57:40 Absolutely. And, you know, also to the world over because we have listeners internationally as well. And we love you all very much. Elizabeth, is there anything that you want to plug or promote here before we say goodbye? **Elizabeth ** 57:57 Just in relation to our conversation earlier, just really taking many, many steps back and looking at the communities of people that had a relationship to this land for generations before us. And there's an awesome nonprofit here in Salem run by Rose High Bear, and it's called Elderberry Wisdom Farm and they're an indigenous based nonprofit. And I'm not going to get their mission statement right. But they're educating about indigenous plant communities and knowledge bases and practices of those communities in relation to land. And I'm looking forward to learning more from Rose about their work. And obviously, they're working specifically with the elderberry plant but also indigenous youth. And so if you're in the Salem community, check out their work and support them. **Brooke ** 58:47 Wonderful. Okay, thanks so much for that, Elizabeth. We also want to say thanks to all of our listeners who check out our podcasts. If it's something that you are enjoying, please like it, share it, let others know about it. That's how we reach more voices and help more folks. If you want to comment at me about any of this you can find me on Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke. Brook with an E. Especially if you have any follow up questions for Elizabeth because she's pretty easy to get ahold of and likes talking about her farm and so I will probably try to drag her back around. So if you want specific questions answered, I'd be so happy to share those with her. This podcast is brought to you by Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness publishing collective that produces podcasts, zines, books, posters, comics, and many other forms of educational leftist media. You can check us out at Tangledwilderness.org You can find all of our latest publications there. And if you really love our work and want to help us continue, especially with the podcast production, you can support us on Patreon. We do a monthly zine mailing to our Patreon supporters. That's a really wonderful mix of stories, politics, and poems. It's a different thing that comes out every month. And we especially want to give thanks to some of our patrons who support us at the $20 month level. And those wonderful folks include patolli, Eric, Perceval, Buck, Julia, Catgut, Marm, Carson, Lord Harken, Trixter, Princess Miranda, BenBen, Anonymous, Funder, Janice & O'dell, Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, theo, Hunter, Paige, SJ, Dana, David, Nicole, Chelsea, Jenipher, Kirk, Staro, Chris, Micaiah, and as always, Hoss the Dog. Thank you so much.
In this episode, Woody chats with Matt Henry, a friend and former colleague with extensive experience in architect, developer, and technical strategist capacities for both Microsoft Azure and AWS ecosystems. He's not only a dedicated leader but also a catalyst for professional growth. Matt began his career as a software engineer and solutions architect, and now serves as a Senior Leader, Solutions Architecture (Greenfield West) at AWS. Throughout the conversation, Woody and Matt explore the crucial role of cloud solution architects (CSAs), mentorship, the willingness to learn, and the difference between good managers and great ones.They also touch on the challenges of finding and hiring talented individuals in the ever-evolving cloud industry. Matt believes that the key lies in individuals' ability to answer the question: "What do I want to do?" This introspection, combined with a passion for continuous learning, can help cultivate the right talent pool.Matt's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewstephenhenry/ About Altitude and Host Woody: https://aviatrix.com/altitude/ Timestamped Overview:[00:00] Introduction of Matt Henry, a seasoned professional in the cloud computing industry.[02:15] The significance of Cloud Solution Architects (CSAs) and their pivotal role in the industry.[03:41] Addressing the challenges of talent pool growth and the importance of self-reflection in career choices.[06:06] The importance of mentors, coaches, and sponsors to support career growth.[07:56] Matt's opinion on return to office, virtual work environments, and mentorship effectiveness during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.[10:12] Woody's impactful experience with mentorship early on in his career.[11:12] The evolving skill sets required in the industry, emphasizing adaptability and learning capability.[13:50] Addressing the why, the what, and the how to achieve success as a company.[15:30] Navigating industry churn, culture, and loyalty factors among Cloud Solution Architects.[16:30] The impact of culture on the success of the CSA role and the organization.[20:52] Differentiating good managers from great ones in the context of leadership.[23:44] Closing thoughts and well-wishes for Matt Henry in his new role.
(Note, this one was taped when it was still cold, and now it's hot!) As author Allison C. Meier states, “There are no seasons, only microseasons now.” What are microseasons? They're a different way of viewing time as local, marked not by arbitrary flips of the calendar or the coming and going of major weather patterns, but by more ephemeral and sometimes obscure environmental shifts that only last a few weeks.With Erin Chapman, Allison writes a newsletter called NYC Microseasons that investigates these ephemeral seasons with a mix of wit, humor, and scientific rigor. Wythe and Melissa talk to Erin and Allison about their project overall, many specific plants that live in NYC, shadows/smoke/smog and their effects on plants, cooking possum meat, the seasonality of CSAs, and—of course—algae. We explore all sorts of changing weather patterns and discuss what they mean not only for growing food and foraging in cities, but how we culturally understand and value different parts of the year. We also talk briefly about Allison's new book, Grave, which fans of urban planning and green design (among others) will definitely enjoy. Check out the episode, and pick up Grave!Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support Fields by becoming a member!Fields is Powered by Simplecast.
Jim talks with Aydan Connor about improving American food systems and reducing waste. They discuss Aydan's experience in the craft brewing industry, extremification of beer styles, wastefulness in beer production, how Aydan became interested in food systems, the obsession with consumer choice, how the current system prices in waste, food waste ratios in different countries, where in the chain food waste occurs, the requirement of processed food, unintentional communities, maximizing communal freedom of choice, CSAs as a non-solution, creating tighter networks, decentralized processing systems, America's low food expenditure, needed infrastructure & coordination, a network of networks, the scale advantage, the squeeze on wages, diversifying work tasks, tips for reducing domestic food waste, making a plan before you buy food, on-site food safety testing, bulk freezers with nitrogen flushing, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP131 - Jason Mauck on #FarmWeird Aydan Connor has worked as a professional craft beer brewer in the Midwest for eight years, and has participated in the buildout of multiple brewery startups. At the beginning of his career, he was brewing batches as small as 10 gallons. Over the years, he worked directly with packaging equipment of various types, even leading as an operator of a mobile canning line to package onsite for other breweries. Currently, he works as a beer brewer at a regional craft brewery, brewing batches as large as 8,000 gallons. Employing direct knowledge of food processing, he has a vision for intelligent food systems which synthesize basic equipment and facilities technologies in combination with block chain inventory management towards decreasing food waste and increasing quality on any parameter. He believes these systems could act as a generative ground for building communities more awake and aware of the environments in which we can thrive.
In this episode, host David Crowley from Cooking Chat talks with Amanda Scarlati from Scarlatti Family Kitchen about tips and recipes for Tuscan kale, carrots and dill. Amanda also tells us about her focus on Italian inspired cooking, which combines Italian classics and recipes that apply creative twists to Italian food and cooking techniques. This episode covers: Ways to use Tuscan kale and how Tuscan kale is different than other types of kale. Ideas for using fresh dills. Different ways to use carrots. How Amanda got interested in cooking at a young age. Amanda's approach to Italian inspired cooking. Sourcing fresh, local ingredients from farmer's markets, CSAs and your garden. Letting what is seasonal inspire your cooking.
June 28, 2023 by Corinna I'm often asked by farmers who are strapped for time: "Help! If I only have a few hours a week to devote to marketing, what should I be doing?" Last week, I talked about the top repetitive weekly tasks that drive results in my farm business. So be sure to check that one out too here. In today's podcast, I share the monthly and annual marketing tasks that repeat every year, to keep the flywheel spinning. Creating a system for your marketing strategy is the key. When you know the tasks that drive results in your business, and you create a container/system to make sure they happen over and over again -- that's when you see the needle start to move in your business. I hope you find this list helpful. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, the leading e-commerce platform for the local food system. Try Local Line for your farm today! Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2023. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Episode 216 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast -- I share the repetitive weekly marketing tasks that move the needle in my business. Definitely listen to that one! My List of Great Market Research Survey Questions -- I send a survey out to my clients every year at the end of the season. Want some ideas for great questions to use? Grab this list here. My CSA Renewal Promotion Campaign Course -- learn how to build a promotional campaign to get more of your CSA members to renew their membership when you want. I teach the "launch" style promo, for CSAs. Step by step. Join my free email list! I have a great "email onboarding sequence" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Accelerator Group Coaching with Corinna -- get on the wait list for this 15-member group Mastermind and Farm Marketing School experience. Sign up for my CSA Academy -- and get access to my CSA member resource library to use for your own CSA (as long as you're a paying member). Use coupon code TRIAL to get your first month for $1. Find my Facebook group for farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer
On this episode of Dishing with Stephanies Dish”, I chat with guest Tracey Medeiros to discuss her cookbook, "The Vermont Farm To Table Cookbook." Tracey talks about the inspiration behind the book and her passion for community-driven cookbooks. She emphasizes the importance of building a relationship with recipe contributors and provides tips for utilizing excess produce. The conversation then turns to the impact of supporting local farmers and the farm-to-table movement, with Tracey sharing two recipes from her cookbook. The episode closes with discussing the importance of educating the next generation and supporting local farmers to strengthen the community.Vermont is known for its maple syrup, goat cheese, and farm-to-table spirit. The recipes and stories of ‘The Vermont Farm Table Cookbook” bring a little piece of that Vermont spirit into your home kitchen. After 10 years, author Tracey Medeiros has revised and fully updated this cookbook to highlight the dedication of Vermont's farmers. Readers can indulge in the comforting seasonal recipes and farm-fresh flavors this beautiful state offers while experimenting with their garden produce, CSA, or Farmer's market finds, regardless of geography.Stephanie's Dish Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Here is the Burrata Salad Tracey talked about from the ‘The Vermont Farm Table Cookbook” IngredientsBasil PestoMakes 1 3/4 cups 2 tightly packed cups of fresh basil leaves3 tablespoons raw pine nuts1/2 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (about 2 ounces)3 medium garlic cloves, coarsely chopped 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil Salad 8 ounces baby spinach, preferably local2 medium strawberries, hulled, and sliced2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil1 teaspoon lemon zest2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice1/4 teaspoon kosher salt, or to taste 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or to taste 2 (2-ounce) balls fresh burrata cheese, cut in half, preferably Maplebrook Farm1/2 cup shelled pistachios, salted and roasted 1 to 2 tablespoons aged balsamic vinegar, or to taste Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste Instructions* To make the basil pesto: Place the basil and pine nuts into the bowl of a food processor and pulse several times.* Add the Parmigiano-Reggiano, garlic, salt, and pepper, then pulse several times more. While the processor is running, slowly add the olive oil in a steady stream until well blended and fairly smooth, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. * To make the salad: In a large bowl, toss together the spinach and strawberries. In a small bowl, whisk together the olive oil, lemon zest and juice, salt, and pepper until well combined. Adjust seasonings with salt and pepper to taste.* Drizzle over the salad, tossing until well coated.* To assemble: Smear the basil pesto onto a platter. Place the salad in the center of a platter. Place the burrata on top.* Scatter the pistachios on and around the salad. Drizzle the balsamic vinegar on top and around the salad. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve at once.Here is a transcript of our interview.Stephanie [00:00:15]:Hello, everybody, and welcome to Dishing with Stephanie's Dish, the podcast where we talk to fellow cookbook authors, food lovers, and anyone interested in the food space in the same obsessive way that I am. And Tracy Madeiros is actually, like, right in line with all my obsessions. She is the author of The Vermont Farm Table Cookbook. And Tracy, you are having your 10th anniversary with this amazing book. How exciting, ten years later, to get, like, a rerelease.Tracey Medeiros [00:00:46]:I was so happy when I received the call asking if I would be interested in revising the first edition, and I said yes.Stephanie [00:00:58]:When you think about your original writing of the cookbook, tell me about that process and why you decided to write it.Tracey Medeiros [00:01:05]:Sure. Well, I was writing a column for the Essex Reporter in Colchester Sun, and I just felt the dedication and the energy from these folks wanting to be in that column. And I thought, why not? Why don't I write another Vermont cookbook? So I asked my editor at the newspaper her thoughts on me turning my column into a book. And years prior, the publishing house, that Countryman Press, had approached me, and they asked me if I ever write another cookbook again, please let them know. So I called the gentleman up who had approached me about writing a book for them, and I said, hey, I'm thinking about turning my column into a book. What are your thoughts? And he said, I love the idea. And I sent him some sample recipes and some profile examples, and he gave me a contract. And that's how the first edition came about.Stephanie [00:02:18]:How many recipes were in the original cookbook?Tracey Medeiros [00:02:21]:The original cookbook had 150 recipes.Stephanie [00:02:25]:Okay. And I had a cookbook that had 170. So about the same amount. How long did it take you to put it all together?Tracey Medeiros [00:02:33]:It takes me, I just work nonstop. The second I get a contract, I just run Stephanie, and it's just all consuming, and it's my life. And I would say about a year. I have that same yeah. So you're like me. You just okay, I get the contract. Because it's a little daunting when you get that contract. It's exciting, but it's daunting because you have that pressure to produce and because you have so many people involved, and people have lives, and they're busy, and farmers are extremely busy. You just have to work nonstop. So I would say about a year.Stephanie [00:03:21]:Your cookbook. The Vermont farm to table cookbook reminds me in some respects. So two things. One, I think Vermont and Minnesota are familiar climate wise. There is a rural aspect to Vermont, but also then you kind of have this liberal city in Burlington. So I feel like my daughter went to college there. So I feel like I have some a bit of a touchstone with Vermont. But when I relooked at all of your recipes in this latest 10th edition, I really got that vibe that I got ten years ago or twelve years ago when I kind of fell in love with cooking as an adult in this farm to table movement. Like buying these really cool ingredients at farmers markets and then seeing what I could turn into them.Tracey Medeiros [00:04:16]:Vermont has always been ahead of the curve food wise. And I just find that the people in this realm are just so inspiring. And like you said, and I hope when readers open this book, they will just feel the love and the dedication. These contributors are just so dedicated, so passionate, and it's just such hard work and they're just so inspiring. And they really do this for community wellness, because being a farmer, it's not a lucrative business.Stephanie [00:04:55]:Right, like writing cookbooks.Tracey Medeiros [00:04:57]:Yeah, exactly. You have to have a love and a passion for it. And these folks really do. And I'm just so fortunate that they trust me with their profiles and their recipes. And I always make sure to send the materials back and I tell them, anything you want me to add or omit or edit, please do. Because my books are really a community cookbook and I want them to also, when I feel their love, I want them to feel my love back to them, my thank you for doing what they do. And like, you obviously you love doing cookbooks and you love food. You have to just love these folks because they help you and inspire you to do what you do and do it well. And I always want them to feel my appreciation, and I'm just so grateful for them over the last all these years doing what I've done.Stephanie [00:06:09]:I think the reason your cookbook really appeals to me too, is because I think I'm a good cook. But I am a home cook and I am always attracted to newspaper columns about recipes because I feel like you have an aesthetic and a point of view that is like you're imagining me standing in my regular kitchen like I don't have all the special supplies. And I felt like when I was reading the cookbook too, that it was super approachable and like food that everyday people can cook. And I know that sounds silly, but a lot of cookbooks, they're more aspirational and beautiful. Yours is like, I can do the things. I can make the Vermont Cheddar soup, I can make these salad dressings.Tracey Medeiros [00:06:56]:Well. That's what's so important to me when I do any of my cookbooks. Exactly what you have stated, Stephanie, that I want someone who doesn't cook that often but wants to cook at home once in a while. So, for instance, I have this wonderful Lebanese salad in there. And I think also when you're trying to educate and the importance of the whole farm to table movement and the reason why you should support your local farmer and the importance you want to have that net as wide as possible, you want to educate and entertain as many people as possible so that movement continues to grow and flourish. And that's why too, when I create these books, they're a recipe book, they're also with the profiles, they're interesting reads. So maybe someone might not try a certain recipe, but they're still learning about that farm and also a travel guide too to entice people to come to this state, but say you can't come to this state, you're still learning about our state.Stephanie [00:08:22]:Yeah, I did feel that because I felt like those farm stories, when you read about a goat cheese farmer, for instance, I might not have access to that person specific goat cheese, but it brings me back to a local goat cheese provider in Minnesota that I know has the same aesthetic or works, that same belief system. And it reminds me like, oh, I need to revisit so and so's farm.Tracey Medeiros [00:08:50]:Exactly. And that is my goal. Too you're walking through the farmers market and you tell yourself, oh, I saw this wonderful recipe utilizing goat cheese. I can't get the Vermont in my town, but I'm going to support my local farmer at this farmers market. And that's the goal, just to keep these farmers on the land and also to inspire the next generation, just to keep this growing and strengthening this, because it really is so important, the local farmer and what they do is just so connected to, again, to community wellness, to our health. And it's just really important to let them know that we appreciate them, we know what they do, we know that their work is hard work and it's just inspiring. It is really inspiring. Too if you think about it, every year, you don't know what you're going to yield.Stephanie [00:09:52]:Yeah.Tracey Medeiros [00:09:52]:And it's just hope and resilience at the end of your growing season what you will yield, and you hope that you will yield a lot, but they still every year are just so dedicated to the so dedicated to the community and year after year not knowing what they're going to yield. And it's pretty amazing how resilient they are.Stephanie [00:10:18]:I think this book speaks to gardeners, too, because I'm also a gardener, so I'm just coming up on starting to thin the beets and thin the Swiss yard and the radishes are finally poking their heads out of the ground. And I'm really feeling inspired with this book to carry it as a companion from my gardening season.Tracey Medeiros [00:10:43]:I love that. That is my goal. Too absolutely. And those who are members say of CSAs, where they exactly, yeah, an overabundance, say of potatoes or leaks that they can go through my cookbooks and say, you know what, this is a great way to use all these potatoes, or this is a great way to use all these tomatoes. So that's my other goal. Too or your garden. Sometimes you yield a lot of zucchini or whatever you're growing in your garden and you can't always give your neighbors extra ingredients that you grow, and that's my goal too. And I know you do a lot of canning. You're a big yes, and that's another wonderful way to utilize extra ingredients.Stephanie [00:11:40]:Yeah, sometimes your neighbors see you coming with that extra bushel of zucchini, and they're not so happy to see you anymore.Tracey Medeiros [00:11:48]:They're like zucchini again. I love zucchini. Zucchini is great, and you can certainly do a lot with that. But it is funny because they're like, oh, no, let me guess. They're excited in the beginning, but after.Stephanie [00:12:00]:The fifth visit, yes, I totally concur. Now, what would you say what I also think is interesting about cookbooks is, like, I can tell you the three most popular cookbook, the recipes in my book, just because I get asked about them all the time. What would you say are your top?Tracey Medeiros [00:12:19]:Well, for instance, in the cookbook, there is oh, my goodness, this Maple Brook Farms Burrata Salad. And it uses local spinach and strawberries, which are in season or soon to be in season where you live, basil pesto and pistachios and aged basalmic vinegar. And what I love about the burrata, especially the one from Maple Brook Farms, they use this old world technique, the stretching of the curd, and they put it into the mozzarella and the filling with some cream, and it's just like this luscious texture. And then you have the texture from the pistachios, which is the crunch, and then you have the sweetness of the strawberries and the spinach. I mean, that is by far one of my favorites because it's very easy to make. And visually, it's beautiful, I have to say, because I'm so fortunate, and I live in such a foodie state, when I get these recipes, I'm just so excited. I feel like it's Christmas, because I'm like, oh, how are they utilizing this? Or, I cannot wait to test this. It's just a joy because they take food very seriously, and it educates me as well, and it's just exciting. And then there's this wonderful Stephanie, let me tell you, walnut tart that you can find towards the end of the book when I tell you I could eat the whole tart, it is so good. It's sinful, but it's just like it's so amazing. And you have the walnuts and then the silkiness of the texture. I mean, it's just wonderful. I just love that dessert, and so many people love it, and it's just divine.Stephanie [00:14:24]:Okay, one more question before I let you go. In the broader context of cookbooks, and just, like, your experience as a recipe developer and a writer, are there one or two cookbooks that have inspired you, just, like, in your career, of, like, they're always on your shelf. You never take them and put them away?Tracey Medeiros [00:14:44]:Well, I love anything that Martha Stewart does. I think she is a genius. I really love I'm inspired by her. I think what she does is amazing. And what I find interesting about her, she's just constantly evolving.Stephanie [00:15:07]:A swimsuit model now, so let's just go there.Tracey Medeiros [00:15:10]:Oh, I know. Fabulous.Stephanie [00:15:12]:Beautiful.Tracey Medeiros [00:15:13]:I love the orange. I love the COVID Fabulous. Of course, julia, I mean, anything that Julia had done, she actually was my inspiration as a young child watching her. And so anything from her, I'm inspired by. So I would have to say definitely those two women. Julia just watching her and just being so animated and really when I say not caring, but just wasn't restricted by the camera. She was who she was in front of the camera. Whether she dropped something or didn't have something, she was her, and it was great. And again, with Matthew just an innovator and constantly cutting edge and creative and having the longevity of that career, it's just so inspiring.Stephanie [00:16:15]:Well, I've enjoyed connecting with you. Tracy madeiros the Cookbook is the Vermont Farm Table Cookbook, and it is in its 10th anniversary. You have over 3004.5 and a half or greater reviews, which is pretty awesome, too.Tracey Medeiros [00:16:33]:Wow.Stephanie [00:16:34]:Yeah. I mean, for Amazon, I just think that's amazing so people can find your book there. Also, I'll put a link to it so that people can directly find you on your website. Are you on social media, too, Tracy?Tracey Medeiros [00:16:49]:Yes. Facebook the Vermont Farm table cookbook. Facebook. And then I have my website, which is tracymaderis.com all right.Stephanie [00:17:00]:And I'll go ahead and put links to that in the show notes. Thank you for spending time with me today. It's been really fun.Tracey Medeiros [00:17:07]:Thank you so much. And I hope you have a wonderful day.Stephanie [00:17:10]:Thanks, Tracy. Bye bye.Tracey Medeiros [00:17:11]:Thank you. Bye bye. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stephaniehansen.substack.com/subscribe
On this episode of Dishing with Stephanies Dish”, I chat with guest Tracey Medeiros to discuss her cookbook, "The Vermont Farm To Table Cookbook." Tracey talks about the inspiration behind the book and her passion for community-driven cookbooks. She emphasizes the importance of building a relationship with recipe contributors and provides tips for utilizing excess produce. The conversation then turns to the impact of supporting local farmers and the farm-to-table movement, with Tracey sharing two recipes from her cookbook. The episode closes with discussing the importance of educating the next generation and supporting local farmers to strengthen the community.Vermont is known for its maple syrup, goat cheese, and farm-to-table spirit. The recipes and stories of ‘The Vermont Farm Table Cookbook” bring a little piece of that Vermont spirit into your home kitchen. After 10 years, author Tracey Medeiros has revised and fully updated this cookbook to highlight the dedication of Vermont's farmers. Readers can indulge in the comforting seasonal recipes and farm-fresh flavors this beautiful state offers while experimenting with their garden produce, CSA, or Farmer's market finds, regardless of geography.Stephanie's Dish Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Here is the Burrata Salad Tracey talked about from the ‘The Vermont Farm Table Cookbook” IngredientsBasil PestoMakes 1 3/4 cups 2 tightly packed cups of fresh basil leaves3 tablespoons raw pine nuts1/2 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (about 2 ounces)3 medium garlic cloves, coarsely chopped 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil Salad 8 ounces baby spinach, preferably local2 medium strawberries, hulled, and sliced2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil1 teaspoon lemon zest2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice1/4 teaspoon kosher salt, or to taste 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or to taste 2 (2-ounce) balls fresh burrata cheese, cut in half, preferably Maplebrook Farm1/2 cup shelled pistachios, salted and roasted 1 to 2 tablespoons aged balsamic vinegar, or to taste Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste Instructions* To make the basil pesto: Place the basil and pine nuts into the bowl of a food processor and pulse several times.* Add the Parmigiano-Reggiano, garlic, salt, and pepper, then pulse several times more. While the processor is running, slowly add the olive oil in a steady stream until well blended and fairly smooth, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. * To make the salad: In a large bowl, toss together the spinach and strawberries. In a small bowl, whisk together the olive oil, lemon zest and juice, salt, and pepper until well combined. Adjust seasonings with salt and pepper to taste.* Drizzle over the salad, tossing until well coated.* To assemble: Smear the basil pesto onto a platter. Place the salad in the center of a platter. Place the burrata on top.* Scatter the pistachios on and around the salad. Drizzle the balsamic vinegar on top and around the salad. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve at once.Here is a transcript of our interview.Stephanie [00:00:15]:Hello, everybody, and welcome to Dishing with Stephanie's Dish, the podcast where we talk to fellow cookbook authors, food lovers, and anyone interested in the food space in the same obsessive way that I am. And Tracy Madeiros is actually, like, right in line with all my obsessions. She is the author of The Vermont Farm Table Cookbook. And Tracy, you are having your 10th anniversary with this amazing book. How exciting, ten years later, to get, like, a rerelease.Tracey Medeiros [00:00:46]:I was so happy when I received the call asking if I would be interested in revising the first edition, and I said yes.Stephanie [00:00:58]:When you think about your original writing of the cookbook, tell me about that process and why you decided to write it.Tracey Medeiros [00:01:05]:Sure. Well, I was writing a column for the Essex Reporter in Colchester Sun, and I just felt the dedication and the energy from these folks wanting to be in that column. And I thought, why not? Why don't I write another Vermont cookbook? So I asked my editor at the newspaper her thoughts on me turning my column into a book. And years prior, the publishing house, that Countryman Press, had approached me, and they asked me if I ever write another cookbook again, please let them know. So I called the gentleman up who had approached me about writing a book for them, and I said, hey, I'm thinking about turning my column into a book. What are your thoughts? And he said, I love the idea. And I sent him some sample recipes and some profile examples, and he gave me a contract. And that's how the first edition came about.Stephanie [00:02:18]:How many recipes were in the original cookbook?Tracey Medeiros [00:02:21]:The original cookbook had 150 recipes.Stephanie [00:02:25]:Okay. And I had a cookbook that had 170. So about the same amount. How long did it take you to put it all together?Tracey Medeiros [00:02:33]:It takes me, I just work nonstop. The second I get a contract, I just run Stephanie, and it's just all consuming, and it's my life. And I would say about a year. I have that same yeah. So you're like me. You just okay, I get the contract. Because it's a little daunting when you get that contract. It's exciting, but it's daunting because you have that pressure to produce and because you have so many people involved, and people have lives, and they're busy, and farmers are extremely busy. You just have to work nonstop. So I would say about a year.Stephanie [00:03:21]:Your cookbook. The Vermont farm to table cookbook reminds me in some respects. So two things. One, I think Vermont and Minnesota are familiar climate wise. There is a rural aspect to Vermont, but also then you kind of have this liberal city in Burlington. So I feel like my daughter went to college there. So I feel like I have some a bit of a touchstone with Vermont. But when I relooked at all of your recipes in this latest 10th edition, I really got that vibe that I got ten years ago or twelve years ago when I kind of fell in love with cooking as an adult in this farm to table movement. Like buying these really cool ingredients at farmers markets and then seeing what I could turn into them.Tracey Medeiros [00:04:16]:Vermont has always been ahead of the curve food wise. And I just find that the people in this realm are just so inspiring. And like you said, and I hope when readers open this book, they will just feel the love and the dedication. These contributors are just so dedicated, so passionate, and it's just such hard work and they're just so inspiring. And they really do this for community wellness, because being a farmer, it's not a lucrative business.Stephanie [00:04:55]:Right, like writing cookbooks.Tracey Medeiros [00:04:57]:Yeah, exactly. You have to have a love and a passion for it. And these folks really do. And I'm just so fortunate that they trust me with their profiles and their recipes. And I always make sure to send the materials back and I tell them, anything you want me to add or omit or edit, please do. Because my books are really a community cookbook and I want them to also, when I feel their love, I want them to feel my love back to them, my thank you for doing what they do. And like, you obviously you love doing cookbooks and you love food. You have to just love these folks because they help you and inspire you to do what you do and do it well. And I always want them to feel my appreciation, and I'm just so grateful for them over the last all these years doing what I've done.Stephanie [00:06:09]:I think the reason your cookbook really appeals to me too, is because I think I'm a good cook. But I am a home cook and I am always attracted to newspaper columns about recipes because I feel like you have an aesthetic and a point of view that is like you're imagining me standing in my regular kitchen like I don't have all the special supplies. And I felt like when I was reading the cookbook too, that it was super approachable and like food that everyday people can cook. And I know that sounds silly, but a lot of cookbooks, they're more aspirational and beautiful. Yours is like, I can do the things. I can make the Vermont Cheddar soup, I can make these salad dressings.Tracey Medeiros [00:06:56]:Well. That's what's so important to me when I do any of my cookbooks. Exactly what you have stated, Stephanie, that I want someone who doesn't cook that often but wants to cook at home once in a while. So, for instance, I have this wonderful Lebanese salad in there. And I think also when you're trying to educate and the importance of the whole farm to table movement and the reason why you should support your local farmer and the importance you want to have that net as wide as possible, you want to educate and entertain as many people as possible so that movement continues to grow and flourish. And that's why too, when I create these books, they're a recipe book, they're also with the profiles, they're interesting reads. So maybe someone might not try a certain recipe, but they're still learning about that farm and also a travel guide too to entice people to come to this state, but say you can't come to this state, you're still learning about our state.Stephanie [00:08:22]:Yeah, I did feel that because I felt like those farm stories, when you read about a goat cheese farmer, for instance, I might not have access to that person specific goat cheese, but it brings me back to a local goat cheese provider in Minnesota that I know has the same aesthetic or works, that same belief system. And it reminds me like, oh, I need to revisit so and so's farm.Tracey Medeiros [00:08:50]:Exactly. And that is my goal. Too you're walking through the farmers market and you tell yourself, oh, I saw this wonderful recipe utilizing goat cheese. I can't get the Vermont in my town, but I'm going to support my local farmer at this farmers market. And that's the goal, just to keep these farmers on the land and also to inspire the next generation, just to keep this growing and strengthening this, because it really is so important, the local farmer and what they do is just so connected to, again, to community wellness, to our health. And it's just really important to let them know that we appreciate them, we know what they do, we know that their work is hard work and it's just inspiring. It is really inspiring. Too if you think about it, every year, you don't know what you're going to yield.Stephanie [00:09:52]:Yeah.Tracey Medeiros [00:09:52]:And it's just hope and resilience at the end of your growing season what you will yield, and you hope that you will yield a lot, but they still every year are just so dedicated to the so dedicated to the community and year after year not knowing what they're going to yield. And it's pretty amazing how resilient they are.Stephanie [00:10:18]:I think this book speaks to gardeners, too, because I'm also a gardener, so I'm just coming up on starting to thin the beets and thin the Swiss yard and the radishes are finally poking their heads out of the ground. And I'm really feeling inspired with this book to carry it as a companion from my gardening season.Tracey Medeiros [00:10:43]:I love that. That is my goal. Too absolutely. And those who are members say of CSAs, where they exactly, yeah, an overabundance, say of potatoes or leaks that they can go through my cookbooks and say, you know what, this is a great way to use all these potatoes, or this is a great way to use all these tomatoes. So that's my other goal. Too or your garden. Sometimes you yield a lot of zucchini or whatever you're growing in your garden and you can't always give your neighbors extra ingredients that you grow, and that's my goal too. And I know you do a lot of canning. You're a big yes, and that's another wonderful way to utilize extra ingredients.Stephanie [00:11:40]:Yeah, sometimes your neighbors see you coming with that extra bushel of zucchini, and they're not so happy to see you anymore.Tracey Medeiros [00:11:48]:They're like zucchini again. I love zucchini. Zucchini is great, and you can certainly do a lot with that. But it is funny because they're like, oh, no, let me guess. They're excited in the beginning, but after.Stephanie [00:12:00]:The fifth visit, yes, I totally concur. Now, what would you say what I also think is interesting about cookbooks is, like, I can tell you the three most popular cookbook, the recipes in my book, just because I get asked about them all the time. What would you say are your top?Tracey Medeiros [00:12:19]:Well, for instance, in the cookbook, there is oh, my goodness, this Maple Brook Farms Burrata Salad. And it uses local spinach and strawberries, which are in season or soon to be in season where you live, basil pesto and pistachios and aged basalmic vinegar. And what I love about the burrata, especially the one from Maple Brook Farms, they use this old world technique, the stretching of the curd, and they put it into the mozzarella and the filling with some cream, and it's just like this luscious texture. And then you have the texture from the pistachios, which is the crunch, and then you have the sweetness of the strawberries and the spinach. I mean, that is by far one of my favorites because it's very easy to make. And visually, it's beautiful, I have to say, because I'm so fortunate, and I live in such a foodie state, when I get these recipes, I'm just so excited. I feel like it's Christmas, because I'm like, oh, how are they utilizing this? Or, I cannot wait to test this. It's just a joy because they take food very seriously, and it educates me as well, and it's just exciting. And then there's this wonderful Stephanie, let me tell you, walnut tart that you can find towards the end of the book when I tell you I could eat the whole tart, it is so good. It's sinful, but it's just like it's so amazing. And you have the walnuts and then the silkiness of the texture. I mean, it's just wonderful. I just love that dessert, and so many people love it, and it's just divine.Stephanie [00:14:24]:Okay, one more question before I let you go. In the broader context of cookbooks, and just, like, your experience as a recipe developer and a writer, are there one or two cookbooks that have inspired you, just, like, in your career, of, like, they're always on your shelf. You never take them and put them away?Tracey Medeiros [00:14:44]:Well, I love anything that Martha Stewart does. I think she is a genius. I really love I'm inspired by her. I think what she does is amazing. And what I find interesting about her, she's just constantly evolving.Stephanie [00:15:07]:A swimsuit model now, so let's just go there.Tracey Medeiros [00:15:10]:Oh, I know. Fabulous.Stephanie [00:15:12]:Beautiful.Tracey Medeiros [00:15:13]:I love the orange. I love the COVID Fabulous. Of course, julia, I mean, anything that Julia had done, she actually was my inspiration as a young child watching her. And so anything from her, I'm inspired by. So I would have to say definitely those two women. Julia just watching her and just being so animated and really when I say not caring, but just wasn't restricted by the camera. She was who she was in front of the camera. Whether she dropped something or didn't have something, she was her, and it was great. And again, with Matthew just an innovator and constantly cutting edge and creative and having the longevity of that career, it's just so inspiring.Stephanie [00:16:15]:Well, I've enjoyed connecting with you. Tracy madeiros the Cookbook is the Vermont Farm Table Cookbook, and it is in its 10th anniversary. You have over 3004.5 and a half or greater reviews, which is pretty awesome, too.Tracey Medeiros [00:16:33]:Wow.Stephanie [00:16:34]:Yeah. I mean, for Amazon, I just think that's amazing so people can find your book there. Also, I'll put a link to it so that people can directly find you on your website. Are you on social media, too, Tracy?Tracey Medeiros [00:16:49]:Yes. Facebook the Vermont Farm table cookbook. Facebook. And then I have my website, which is tracymaderis.com all right.Stephanie [00:17:00]:And I'll go ahead and put links to that in the show notes. Thank you for spending time with me today. It's been really fun.Tracey Medeiros [00:17:07]:Thank you so much. And I hope you have a wonderful day.Stephanie [00:17:10]:Thanks, Tracy. Bye bye.Tracey Medeiros [00:17:11]:Thank you. Bye bye. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stephaniehansen.substack.com/subscribe
This week's guest is Jeffrey Funk, a blacksmith from Bigfork, Montana, who's been crafting public sculpture and architectural metalwork for over 30 years. Jeffrey is the director of the New Agrarian School, an organization that teaches blacksmithing and other traditional rural crafts. In this episode, Jeffrey talks about how being interested in everything led to his blacksmithing career and provides some history of the profession. He also brings up how he deals with certain contradictions in his work — like the fact that the backbones of blacksmithing are destructive to the Earth. Justin asks how blacksmithing fits into the context of other themes of local economy, like CSAs or farmers' markets, and how Jeffrey brings diversity into the New Agrarian School. Learn more about the New Agrarian School here: https://www.newagrarianschool.org/ Transcript here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lNyP7ROE_ZL_xLAtlxtFz7-UcAuZjPlVzW4lv5FP2Ck/edit
Today, Seth Godin (!!) virtually dropped by to talk through a bunch of startup ideas. He gives his opinion on how he'd start everything from a pasta truck to an updated CSA program. We dive into risk, emotion, tension and doing things that matter. Seth talks about the distinction between entrepreneurs and freelancers and the danger of thinking you're one when you're really the other. We talk about marketplaces and domain expertise and knowing what it is you're actually selling.This is my favorite episode we've ever recorded, and I'm excited for you to listen to it.The Song of SignificanceTackleboxPurple CowLinchpinThe DipTed Talk - How to Get Your Ideas to SpreadThe Tribes We LeadSeth on Farnam Street - Failing On Our Way To MasteryThe Coaching Habit - Michael Bungay StanierFarmer JonesEcosia Search EnginePoilane Bakery 01:45 How Brian and Seth Met 05:10 Idea #1 - Helping Doctors and Patients get 2nd (and 10th) opinions 10:48 Idea #2 - How to Start a Pasta Truck 13:01 Landlords and Renters 14:45 Bootstrapping the food truck - emotional vs. financial risk 17:13 Can you start a business if you're not a domain expert? 18:42 Idea #3 - The Scalable Coach 22:50 Entrepreneur Pacs 26:15 - Idea #4 - Update to CSAs 31:20 - How to Pitch Something Uncomfortable - who takes the risk 34:15 - Idea #5 - Cost Transparency 40:37 - Confusing Freelancing and Entrepreneurship 45:08 - The Billboard Question - (outstanding, make sure you get here)
On this episode of Spirit of Leadership with Megan Chaskey, we dive into the interconnectedness through the worlds of soil and spirit and the magic that can be found in these connections between people, plants and place. Our guest, Scott Chaskey, farmer/poet, speaker and author, discusses his latest book, Soil and Spirit, based on his travels and encounters inspired by his exploration of the unseen below ground and in the spirit of perception and ways of perceiving. We also hear about the origins of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement and how it gained traction in China. The author shares how poetry and mentors have influenced his life and leadership roles. Scott Chaskey is a lifelong writer who has built the spirit of community and tilled the soil at Quail Hill Farm for 30 years for the Peconic Land Trust. With a desire to have more time for writing, he decided to “graduate” from the farm and focus on his passion. This led to the creation of Soil and Spirit, a series of interconnected essays, inspired by an epigraph from John Hay that appeared in his previous book, Seedtime: "To what useful end could I use my eyes without acknowledging that they are only one of the earth's inexhaustible ways of seeing?" Join us for this episode woven with hope, magical connections and the importance of caring for the community. UPCOMING READINGS BY SCOTT CHASKEY FROM HIS BOOK SOIL & SPRIT: Scrawl Books, Reston, VA, Wednesday May 24, 7pm Flying Cloud Bookstore, Easton, MD., Friday May 26, 5pm TRANSCRIPT Megan Chaskey [00:00:55]: Welcome to this episode of Spirit of Leadership, and I am so happy to be speaking with you, Scott, and celebrating the publication of your new book, Soil and Spirit, and I look forward to your sharing with our audience some of the things that led up to your writing this book and in the process of writing this book the aspects that relate to leadership and your leadership in the CSA movement and the influences of those who've inspired you in the writing of this book. Scott Chaskey [00:01:48]: Thank you. I'm excited about talking about it. Megan Chaskey [00:01:52]: So tell us a little bit more about the conception of the book and how it evolved as you were writing it. Scott Chaskey [00:02:03]: Yeah, so I've always been writing. It's a lifelong affair for me, but I wanted to have more time to write. And so the timing just seemed to be right to graduate (your words) from Quail Hill Farm, where I pursued community through soil, tilling the soil, and through building community through the members of the farm for 30 years for the Peconic Land Trust. But I wanted to have more time to write. So that led to this book. Actually, the seeds of it came from the book that I wrote before, which was called Seed time. And there was a particular epigraph that I used in the end of that book and feel that that was the beginning of this book. So Seed time ended with this epigraph from the wonderful writer John Hay. "To what useful end could I use my eyes without acknowledging that they are only one of the earth's inexhaustible ways of seeing?" And so that was really the end of Seed time, but the beginning of Soil and Spirit. And I guess I like S's because the titles all have S's. But I conceived of the book quite differently because it's really a series of interconnected essays and I planned on traveling quite a bit. Various chapters were going to be built on my travels, but along came COVID and so there was no more traveling. So the book turns out to be quite different than the way I'd planned it and the proposal that I submitted originally to Milkweed, the publisher. But maybe it's a better book because of that. Megan Chaskey [00:03:56]: In what ways would you say that? Scott Chaskey [00:03:59]: I was interviewed not long ago. Someone said it was a journey inward and it had to be because I wasn't traveling outward. But at the same time, instead of actual traveling, I went back to travels that I had taken many, many years ago. And it was fascinating to realize that, because I never thought I would write about some of these subjects that turn up in this book in a way that is not separate at all from the original conception of the book, but is totally interwoven. So that actually I've now given a few readings from the books, and I feel it's so interconnected. So I sort of joked when I gave a reading and said that, "well, I really have to read you the whole book." But of course that would take 3 or 4 hours. That's not going to happen. Megan Chaskey [00:04:54]: Well, it is going to happen because we're going to make an audio version. Everyone will enjoy hearing the full book. Beautiful voice. Scott Chaskey [00:05:07]: Okay. It will happen. Megan Chaskey [00:05:09]: Yes, it will happen. So what's interesting is that I had that sense in reading one of your chapters that it was very important to actually go back and read it again right away because of how everything is interconnected. And you'll say a phrase or quote a phrase from somewhere and then take us on a whole series of connections that bring us back to that phrase, that brings more depth of meaning to it by having made that little internal journey in that one chapter. So the same thing is going on in the book. And do you feel that there are certain stories that carry that thread through the book? Scott Chaskey [00:06:09]: Yeah, I'm actually really glad that you mentioned just the word "story", because at the beginning of writing this book, I wrote notes to myself over and over again that what I was doing was telling stories. And I suppose a writer does that in one way or another, but more directly, it can be heard more directly by the reader. And so therefore, I really focused on a narrative within each chapter and the chapter that you're talking about, which has to do with a trip across Ireland, which I actually took 50 years ago, but which has been with me for 50 years. And it has to do with riding an old bicycle across Ireland and discovering a branch of white heather among all the purple heather, placing that on my bicycle. And that's a symbol of good fortune and luck in Irish lore. And it was that for me because it led me to a village called Kilkenny, where Seamus Heaney was appearing at an arts festival. And I had no idea that I would be meeting Seamus Heaney, despite the fact that we exchanged letters. And there's a whole story, a longer story to that. But that's part of the interconnection that you're talking about, it's very strong in that particular chapter because it was magical traveling across Ireland. Megan Chaskey [00:07:41]: Yes. And the magical part of that is because it has to do with a plant, it has to do with that white heather. And then you bring that attention to plants, their names, their characteristics to that particular moment. And then also tell us the story about what you found in the attic. Scott Chaskey [00:08:10]: What I found in the attic? Megan Chaskey [00:08:12]: While you were writing that - the letter. Scott Chaskey [00:08:15]: Was it the letter from Seamus Heaney? Megan Chaskey [00:08:18]: Yes. Scott Chaskey [00:08:19]: Yeah. Otherwise, probably that chapter would not exist. So I wrote a letter at the urging of a teacher, Robert Morgan, a wonderful poet, who, when he read my poems, he was a professor at Cornell, and he said, "Have you read Seamus Heaney?" And this was before many people had heard of Seamus Heaney, long before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which I'm so happy that he won. So well deserved. So I wrote him a letter, and believe it or not, that letter still existed. And I had no idea. I mean, having traveled back and forth across the ocean a number of times and lived in England for ten years, and somehow, in a box, in a random box, this letter that Seamus Heaney wrote back to me in let's call it 1976 still existed in his red pen, and he was teaching at Berkeley at the time. And he wrote back, and the origin of the letter really was because we had come upon the same words, we had written the same line. And I wrote to him in amazement as a young poet, and he wrote back, saying how he loved the language of the poem, which I'm still up in a cloud about. Megan Chaskey [00:09:42]: "Both our weights." Scott Chaskey [00:09:44]: Yeah, "in both our weights", yes. Megan Chaskey [00:09:48]: Beautiful line. So that was amazing, too, that you wrote him that letter and then sent it to his address in Ireland. Scott Chaskey [00:10:02]: In Ireland, teaching in California. He sent the letter to me in my dwelling in Massachusetts, but meanwhile, I had enrolled in a program in Ireland, and the letter was forwarded to me in Ireland while he was in California. Yeah, it was an amazing story. Megan Chaskey [00:10:21]: Amazing. Scott Chaskey [00:10:22]: And it continued, and I suppose that's why I had to write about it, because of actually meeting him there, in Kilkenny in this Art s Week. Yeah, it was an amazing, magical happening. Megan Chaskey [00:10:35]: And then you found that letter in the attic while you were writing the book. Scott Chaskey [00:10:39]: Right. Megan Chaskey [00:10:40]: So there's definitely a lot of magic, that story. Scott Chaskey [00:10:45]: Yeah, well, that's the spirit, I guess. So the book is called Soil and Spirit, and there's the spirit part of it. The soil is obviously what I've sifted through my hands and what I've used with shovel and fork and by tractor with tiller and all that for 40 years. So the soil is very obvious. The spirit is unseen, as it should be. Megan Chaskey [00:11:11]: And in relation to the spirit of leadership, how do you feel about this connection with Seamus Heaney as a poet and that connection with the land? Scott Chaskey [00:11:31]: So, actually, the first poem in Seamus Heaney's first book is called Digging. So there you go. There you've got it. He grew up in a farm, and there you've got that connection. But there are so many other connections in the book, because I go back and speak about the great Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting, who was my teacher at the University in Binghamton. And I never guessed that I'd be able to actually fit a chapter about Bunting into a book, but it fit into this book. So on the spirit of leadership, these were the influences on my life, the very foundational influences on my life, these very strong friendships and mentorships that led to, that influenced me being in a role of a leader later. And I didn't intend to write about this specifically, but it's there. It's in the book. Megan Chaskey [00:12:31]: Yeah. Beautiful. And also in each of the stories, because it's about your travels, you also are relating them to people who in those places are leaders, innovative leaders and visionaries, for example, in the chapter about China. Scott Chaskey [00:12:56]: Right. Yeah. Each one is a story in itself. But that trip to China was fantastic. And that all came about eventually because of this wonderful woman, Shi-yan, who actually started the Community Supported Agriculture movement in China, coming to work on a CSA farm in the States and then realizing, she said, "why don't we have this in China?" So she did something about it, she went back, started, and by the time that I reached China for this international gathering of CSA farmers and advocates from all over the globe, from 40 different countries, all practicing Community Supported Agriculture, there were now 500 CSAs in China five years after she brought the idea back from this country. Quite phenomenal, because the idea of CSA, well, there's a seed of it in Japan that started in the early sevent ies, and then there was a seed of this community movement in Switzerland in the early eight ies, and that was brought to the United States and now brought to China. Amazing story. And so I had to write about something to do with that. And so there's the chapter in China. Megan Chaskey [00:14:22]: Right. And so inspiring her story. And she was also very inspired by you. Scott Chaskey [00:14:31]: Well, I hope it was mutual. Megan Chaskey [00:14:34]: Yes. Well, I think it mattered a lot to her that you came and saw her in China and saw what was being created there. Scott Chaskey [00:14:45]: Yeah, we were all there because of community. And nothing could be stronger than the community of all those people speaking all different languages, practicing the same, really the same, thing traveling there. My first thought was what in the world is Community Supported Agriculture like in China of all places? But in fact it's not so different because it has to do with the community of soil, the biology of the soil, and the community of people looking for nutritious food. Megan Chaskey [00:15:25]: Yeah, that's a very beautiful chapter. And give us a sense of what it feels like now that you've completed the book and what it's like for you to have brought these stories into this format. Scott Chaskey [00:15:49]: Well, for me it's really about reaching people. It's not obviously my single story. I actually felt that after all these years of working, digging in the soil locally and working to build community locally, that by writing, I can actually reach many more people. And that's what I hope for this book. Already it seems to have wings, good wings. It's taking off. And that's ultimately what it has to do, not so much with a message, but with a sharing, a basic reality which is often lacking in our modern existence. And reality has to do with tending soil, caring for place, caring for community of people. And everyone who reads about that can share in the importance of it. So, yeah, I just hope it reaches many people. Megan Chaskey [00:16:54]: It already, as you said, is reaching people. And we have some readings coming up, and we will put the schedule in the show notes. So I look forward to hearing from people who get to hear you read in person. And it's a beautiful thing that you're doing, bringing your voice of hope. And I know a lot of people have mentioned that, that it's a seed of hope that is really touching people's hearts as they read your stories, because people need that sense of what's being cultivated and that it's cultivating hope. So thank you for the work you're doing. Scott Chaskey [00:17:46]: Thank you for reading and listening and asking questions. Megan Chaskey [00:17:52]: And we'll be back, we'll do another episode. So thank you.
In this Podcourse, Lisa interviews Dr. Eddie Capparucci and he presents Sex Addiction 101: Symptoms, Causes and Effective Interventions. Learning Objectives: Define sex addiction and how to recognize the symptoms. Identify the risk factors for developing sex addiction. Explain the negative impacts pornography has on individuals, relationships and society. Identify 3 effective treatments for sex addiction. About Dr. Capparucci: Dr. Eddie Capparucci is a licensed professional counselor and certified coach. He also is certified in the treatment of Problematic Sexual Behaviors and is the creator of the Inner Child Model for the treatment of sexual and pornography addiction. Among his many clients, Dr. Capparucci has worked with professional athletes including NFL and MLB players and television personalities. He serves as the clinical director for the National Decency Coalition, an organization working with state governments to help limit the access of pornography to minors. He is the administrator of the websites www.MenAgainstPorn.org and www.SexuallyPureMen.com. He also has written for the blogs Covenant Eyes, KingdomWorks, XXXChurch, and Marriage.com. Over the years, he has spoken to numerous organizations regarding the harmful impact pornography has on individuals, relationships, and society. He is the host of a monthly webcast entitled: Getting to the Other Side. Dr. Capparucci is also the author of Going Deeper: How the Inner Child Impacts Your Sexual Addiction Removing Your Shame Label: Learning to Break Free of Shame and Feel God's Love. About Lisa Mustard: Lisa Mustard, MPH, EdS, LMFT has worked for a college counseling center, addiction recovery center and most recently has been working with a military branch for the past 12 years. In September 2022 she opened up a virtual coaching practice. She is the host of The Therapy Show With Lisa Mustard. She is also the Founder and Owner of Mustard Consulting, LLC. Lisa consults with and coaches other therapists who want to pivot their skill sets to make an impact outside the therapy room. If you desire less time in the therapy chair and more time doing the things you love, book a free call with Lisa. Mustard Consulting, LLC has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 7061. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. Mustard Consulting, LLC is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs. This course has been approved for 1 continuing education contact hour by the SC Professional Counselors, Therapists and Psycho-Educational Specialists Licensing Board. Provider #4597 Completion Requirements: To obtain your certificate of completion, you must listen entirely to the audio, pass the Podcourse completion quiz and complete a satisfaction survey. Refund policy: No refunds are provided for self study courses. Disclosure Statement for Dr. Eddie Capparucci; Financial: Dr. Eddie Capparucci receives a speaking honorarium from Mustard Consulting, LLC. Remember, if you are enjoying this podcourse and would like to receive continuing education credit, head to the site, click on the Buy Now button and you can purchase the quiz and evaluation. Once you have completed the quiz and evaluation, you will receive a certificate of completion.You can also grab your first podcoure for half off - head to my site to get your first one, half off! Thank you for listening! We hope you enjoy and find value in this Podcourse.
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