Emily Oakley owns and operates Three Springs Farm in Oaks, Oklahoma, with her husband, Mike Appel. Since 2003, they’ve sold their organic vegetables through a CSA and at a farmers market. They’ve chosen to keep their farm small, not just in acres but also in overall production, substituting tractors and equipment for labor on their three acres of vegetable production where they gross about $80,000 per year, with a net of well over half of that. We talk about their choice to limit their acres, th...
Mar 03, 2016•1 hr 21 min
Jane Hawley Stevens raises certified organic medicinal herbs on her farm in North Freedom, Wisconsin, and turns them into creams, lip balms, and salves that are sold nationwide. With about five acres in production, Four Elements Herbals produces a wide variety of annual and perennial medicinals in the Baraboo Bluffs of Wisconsin. We dig into medicinal herb production and post-harvest handling, meeting FDA regulations for processing and for selling herbal products, and how Jane has grown the Four...
Feb 25, 2016•1 hr 13 min
Erich Schultz owns and operates Steadfast Farm, a certified organic farm in the heart of a suburban community on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona. With 3 acres of vegetables, over six acres of orchard, and a passel of livestock, Steadfast Farm is the neighborhood amenity in the Agritopia development – an alternative to the golf courses and swimming pools that often anchor suburban developments. Steadfast Farm sells produce through restaurants in the neighborhood and around Phoenix, through a fa...
Feb 18, 2016•1 hr 19 min
Patrice Gros farms on just a half an acre of beds in northern Arkansas without ever tilling the soil. And while it sounds like gardening, he’s definitely farming, grossing $80,000 a year from the crops he grows. Founded in 2006, Foundation Farm builds on ten years of experimentation with various methods for growing organic vegetables, and markets produce through farmers markets, retail stores, and a small CSA. It’s worth noting that Patrice keeps a pretty sharp pencil, and rakes in a 70% profit ...
Feb 11, 2016•1 hr 21 min
At Bluebird Gardens in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, Mark Boen farms 320 acres with his wife, Diane, and a crew of ten employees. Starting with six acres in 1978 selling produce at a farmstand, they grew Bluebird Gardens to over 2,000 CSA members and 80 drop sites in far northwestern Minnesota and the Fargo/Moorhead metro Mark is an enthusiastic farmer, and his zeal for the craft shows when he shares how he has transitioned the farm to include a year-on, year-off rotation of cover crops and vegetable...
Feb 04, 2016•1 hr 25 min
John Biernbaum is a professor in the Department of Horticulture at Michigan State University. He has spent most of his career working with farmers to develop practical solutions to the challenges faced by small-scale organic farmers, with research into high tunnels, compost production, organic transplants, intensive vegetable production, and organic soil management. We dig into the economics and practicalities of worm compost, including methods for low-input, low-energy worm composting through t...
Jan 28, 2016•1 hr 33 min
Dan Brisebois was a founding member of Tourne-Sol Cooperative Farm, begun in 2004. Located just outside of Montreal, Quebec, Tourne-Sol is an employee-owned cooperative with five members, engaged in about seven acres of vegetable and vegetable seed production. Dan provides an eye-opening discussion of his experience as part of a cooperative farming venture, including their use of Holistic Management to guide decision-making with regards to both profitability and quality of life. We dig into some...
Jan 21, 2016•1 hr 18 min
Mark Shepard’s New Forest Farm, in Viola, Wisconsin, isn’t your average farm. After twenty-one years of an intentional conversion from 106 acres of corn, beans, and overgrazed pasture to a chestnut, hazelnut, and apple mimic of the oak savannah, New Forest Farm presents an alternative to just about every way of thinking about agriculture that you’ll find out there. Mark, the author of Restoration Agriculture , is not just a nuts and fruits guy: he used the cash flow from his low-input vegetable ...
Jan 14, 2016•1 hr 31 min
Boggy Creek Farm got it its start in 1991 selling produce at a farm stand in Austin, Texas – and to the original Whole Foods Market, which also there in Austin. Now with two farms – one in Gause, a little over an hour outside of Austin, and one just 2.5 miles from the state capital in the heart of Austin – my guest, Carol Ann Sayle, and her husband and farming partner, Larry Butler, sell their fresh produce and value added products – including smoke-dried tomatoes that have had my mouth watering...
Jan 07, 2016•1 hr 33 min
Don Zasada and Bridget Spann own and operate Caretaker Farm in western Massachusetts, where they raise vegetables for 275 CSA families. Caretaker Farm got its start in 1969 when Sam and Elizabeth Smith purchased the land. They started the CSA in 1991, and Don and Bridget came to the farm in 2004, eventually transferring ownership through a land trust and lease arrangement. We dig into Caretaker Farm’s relationship to its members, and how Don and Bridget arrange things so that members do more tha...
Dec 31, 2015•1 hr 31 min
When today’s guest Leslie Cooperband, and her husband, Wes Jarrell, started Prairie Fruits Farm and Creamery in 2005, they didn’t expect the goat dairy and creamery to become the primary driver of the farm. Located just outside of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, Prairie Fruits Farm and Creamery has over seventy milking does providing the basis for their goat cheese and gelato business, which they run in addition to a vigorous on- farm dinner enterprise. We discuss the history of the farm and its var...
Dec 24, 2015•1 hr 15 min
Elizabeth Henderson was a founder of Peacework Organic CSA, one of the oldest CSAs in the United States, where she farmed for over thirty years. She is also the author of the definitive work on CSA farming, Sharing the Harvest . And she has been involved in any number of other initiatives in the food movement, from shaping the National Organic Foods Production Act, to her work with the Agricultural Justice Project. In this movement, especially in the Northeastern United States, it can be hard to...
Dec 17, 2015•1 hr 31 min
Sophia Kruszewski leads the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition’s work on food safety, and has put a ton of time and effort into the FDA’s new rules under the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). The final version of the produce rule was just rolled out by the FDA, so we take the time to dig into who and what is covered under the rule, how the exemptions work, and the highlights of the major provisions of the rules – including some of the important victories we achieved in the proposal a...
Dec 10, 2015•1 hr 25 min
Dru and Adam Montri raise vegetables in 6 large high tunnels and on 3 acres outdoors at Ten Hens Farm in Bath, Michigan, just outside of Lansing. They also both work off farm in jobs related to farming – Dru as the Executive Director of the Michigan Farmers Market Association, and Adam as the Hoophouse Outreach Specialist at Michigan State University’s Center for Regional Farm Systems. In this wide-ranging discussion, Dru, Adam, and I talk about how they balance their off-farm jobs with a farmin...
Dec 03, 2015•1 hr 32 min
Valley Flora’s Zoe Bradbury grew up on the family homestead in southern Oregon, just a few miles from the Pacific Ocean. She left at sixteen and came back many years later to a farm where her mother and sister had started growing and selling vegetables. Many years later, Valley Flora feeds over 100 CSA members and provides produce to dozens of restaurants and stores in the 50-mile radius around their farming collective, as well as a farmstand and u-pick operation on the farm. We discuss how she,...
Nov 26, 2015•1 hr 16 min
Andrea Hazzard grows and mills 30 acres of ancient and heirloom grains, from black beans and red corn to emmer, spelt, einkorn, and oats. Returning to her family farm, she originally began growing vegetables, but gravitated back to grains – with a twist on what her family and her neighbors are doing. We get into the nitty gritty of growing and handling specialty grains, and the differences between planning and marketing a shelf-stable product and planning and marketing vegetables. Along the way,...
Nov 19, 2015•1 hr 24 min
Jess and Brian Powers own and operate Working Hands Farm, with 4 acres of vegetables and a bunch of livestock just outside of Portland Oregon. In this episode, we talk about how the farm got started in 2009, the ways they’ve worked to evolve their CSA into something more sustainable for themselves and the farm, and the relationship they’ve developed and nurtured between themselves as the farm has grown. There’s a lot of great information in here about land access, working together as a couple, a...
Nov 12, 2015•1 hr 37 min
Paul Dietmann is the Emerging Markets Specialist with Badgerland Financial, a member-owned rural lending cooperative and Farm Credit System institution serving southern Wisconsin. Paul has worked with farmers and farm financial issues for over twenty-five years, first as an extension agent, then as director of the Wisconsin Farm Center and Deputy Secretary of Agriculture for Wisconsin, and most recently in his role as a lender. He has woked with hundreds of farmers, helping them assess their far...
Nov 05, 2015•1 hr 15 min
Ben Flanner raises over two acres of vegetables on two rooftop farms in New York. His Brooklyn Grange provides over 50,000 pounds of produce every year to restaurants, stores, farmers markets, and a 70-member CSA. We talk about the nuts and bolts of establishing a rooftop farming operation, the unique challenges of farming above the eleventh story, tools, distribution strategies, and how Brooklyn Grange has incorporated events hosting and outreach into its operation. The Farmer to Farmer Podcast...
Oct 29, 2015•59 min
Steve Tomlinson manages Great Road Farm just four miles from downtown Princeton, New Jersey. Making its home on 112 acres, Great Road Farm has over seven acres in vegetable production in close partnership with Agricola restaurant in Princeton. A graduate of Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, Steve worked for artists Christo and Jeane Claude to build an expansive installation titled “The Gates” in Central Park, and managed a warehouse before starting over working on farms after the 2008 financial crash....
Oct 22, 2015•1 hr 5 min
J.M. Fortier is the author of the award-winning book, The Market Gardener. At his farm in Quebec, J.M. and his wife raise 1 ½ acres of produce in permanent raised beds, grossing over $100,000 per acre. His biologically intensive farming practices have inspired readers around the world to imagine human-scale food systems, with a focus on intelligent farm design, appropriate technologies, and harnessing the power of soil biolog. We talk about how J.M. and his wife came to their farm in Quebec, how...
Oct 15, 2015•1 hr 30 min
Karl Hammer is the founder and president of Vermont Compost Company. Vermont Compost collects food waste and manure in central Vermont, and adds it to grass, tree bark, and chickens on the farm to create a compost that serves as the basis for potting soils that have created raving fans all over the United States. Karl is a font of knowledge about all things soil, plant, and long-eared equine, and we tap into just a corner of that here with the history of Vermont Compost Company from Karl’s start...
Oct 08, 2015•1 hr 35 min
Clay Bottom Farm’s Ben Hartman is the author of The Lean Farm , a book on minimizing waste and increasing efficiency on the vegetable farm. He has farmed full time for the past ten years with his wife, Rachel, in Goshen, Indiana, where they’re both making a living on less than an acre of production, selling 90 percent of their produce within ten miles of the farm. Of course, we talk about applying the lean methodology on the modern market farm, including the basics of creating value, establishin...
Oct 01, 2015•1 hr 32 min
Eatwell Farm, in California’s Sacramento Valley just over an hour from San Francisco, is 105 acres of deep, flat, fertile ground. There, Nigel Walker conducts a symphony of employees, cover crops, lavender chickens, vegetables, fruits, and herbs, to provide for a CSA of 550 shares a week as well as the Ferry Plaza farmer’s market. Nigel describes his systems for training and delegating to employees to create pride in their work and profits for the business, and we dig deep on the cover crop and ...
Sep 24, 2015•1 hr 22 min
Rebecca Thistlethwaite, author of The New Livestock Farmer, currently lives and raises livestock near Hood River, Oregon. She and her husband ran TLC Ranch near Watsonville, California, where they raised ten thousand broiler chickens, five thousand laying hens, and 300 hogs each year on twenty acres of irrigated pasture for many years. We discuss ways farmers who are focused on livestock and farmers who have livestock as a secondary enterprise can make the most of their critter-based efforts. Al...
Sep 17, 2015•1 hr 17 min
Collin Thompson manages Michigan State University’s North Farm near the village of Chatham in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The North Farm hosts a two-year residential incubator program in the extremely short season of the Northwoods, with their last frost in the first week of June, and the first frost right about now, in the second week of September. We talk about the ins and outs of running a market farm as part of the University, practical successes for overwintering crops in high and low tunne...
Sep 10, 2015•1 hr 27 min
For more than twenty years, Mushroom Mountain’s Tradd Cotter has been working to think like a mushroom as he worked to build a business based on his mycological adventures. Since 1996, South Carolina’s Mushroom Mountain has produced edible mushrooms and served as a laboratory for Tradd’s explorations into the use of mushrooms for everything from mycoremediation to personalized antibiotics. Tradd and Chris explore Tradd’s low-tech and no-tech strategies for growing mushrooms, including the fundam...
Sep 03, 2015•1 hr 26 min
Anton Burkett started Early Morning Farm in 1999 with three acres, three friends, and a rototiller. Since that time, this farm in the Finger Lake region of upstate New York has grown to 100 acres and 1,500 CSA shares. Anton and Chris talk about how he has managed this rapid growth year over year. Anton has a thoughtful approach to issues of scale, and we talk about how he’s leveraged his CSA to solve the land-access problem, his approach to personnel management and hiring, and how he’s strategic...
Aug 27, 2015•1 hr 16 min
Adam and Mel Millsap own Urban Roots Farm, a four season micro farm set in the West Central neighborhood of Springfield, Missouri. We talk about their family and neighborhood involvement as they grow about a third of an acre of intensive produce, including three mobile high tunnels. Adam and Mel share their experiences managing the extremely wet weather in southern Missouri this summer, and how they care for the natural landscape in their urban environment. The Farmer to Farmer Podcast is genero...
Aug 20, 2015•1 hr 33 min
University of Vermont Extension Professor Vern Grubinger does not fit the conventional extension agent mode. For twenty-five years, Vern has worked to develop a co-learning community among the professional vegetable- and berry-growers of Vermont. In this episode, we talk about the challenges facing Vermont vegetable farmers, from soil fertility basics and phytophthora to human resources, food safety certification, and costs of production – and about how a healthy food system, from marketing to e...
Aug 13, 2015•1 hr 20 min
