Dan Guenthner of Common Harvest Farm, along with his wife Margaret Pennings, has been a CSA farmer since before CSA was even really a thing – 1990, to be exact. With twelve acres of vegetables and a 200-member CSA in Osceola, Wisconsin, just outside of Minnesota’s Twin Cities, Dan and Margaret take a thoughtful approach to how they engage with their CSA membership, the farming community, and their farm’s land and production systems. Dan reflects on the CSA movement, and how it has grown and chan...
Apr 27, 2017•1 hr 29 min
Susan and Harley Soltes of Bow Hill Blueberries raise five acres of high-bush blueberries on the northern edge of the Skagit River Valley in western Washington. Susan and Harley bought the oldest blueberry farm in Skagit County in 2011, transitioned the farm to organic, and launched a new line of value-added products along with their fresh and frozen berries. Harley shares the details of organic blueberry production, from weed control and management of mummy berry and spotted wing drosophila thr...
Apr 20, 2017•1 hr 18 min
Janaki Fisher-Merritt owns Food Farm with his wife, Annie Dugan, and operates it with his parents, John and Jane Fisher-Merritt, and long-time employee Dave Hanlon. Located in Wrenshall, Minnesota, 25 miles southwest of Duluth, Food Farm raises about thirteen acres of vegetables, and sells them over an extended season by storing crops in their high-tech root cellar. In 2010, they were selected as the Organic Farmers of the Year by the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service. Food Farm ...
Apr 13, 2017•1 hr 32 min
Josh Slotnick has farmed at Clark Fork Organics on the outskirts of Missoula, Montana, with his wife, Kim Murchison, since 1992. With about eight acres in vegetables and eleven acres of total crop ground, Clark Fork Organics is a pillar in the Missoula local foods community, and is well-known for their salad greens. They sell at two farmers market, through a local health food store, and to restaurants in the community. In 1996, Josh and a few others founded Garden City Harvest, a non-profit in M...
Apr 06, 2017•1 hr 23 min
Landis and Steven Spickerman own and operate Hermit Creek Farm 15 miles south of Lake Superior in far northern Wisconsin – a challenging place to farm, with lots of woods and a lot of water. With about ten acres in vegetables and another six in cover crop, Landis and Steven sell their produce through a combination of wholesale and a 200-member CSA. We discuss their long, slow, roundabout journey through homesteading and small-scale production to having Landis full-time on the farm. Landis and St...
Mar 30, 2017•1 hr 27 min
Rashid Nuri is the founder and CEO of Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture in Atlanta, Georgia. With four farm sites in Metro Atlanta, Truly Living Well is a leader in demonstrating urban agriculture as a sustainable solution for helping people to eat better and live better. Rashid shares his journey through the conventional agricultural system, including time spent working for Cargill and as a Clinton appointee to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to becoming an organic urba...
Mar 23, 2017•1 hr 19 min
Jean-Paul Courtens is most famous for being the founder and owner of Roxbury Farm in New York’s Hudson Valley. He operated Roxbury Farm with his farming partner, Jody Bolluyt, from 1990 through about 2015, when he started work with the Hudson Valley Farm Hub to create and then to run a professional farmer training program, where he is now the Associate Director for Farm Training. Roxbury Farm is a 245-acre integrated farming operation, with a hundred acres dedicated to vegetable production for a...
Mar 16, 2017•1 hr 24 min
Andrew Mefferd farms at One Drop Farm in Cornville, Maine, with his wife, Ann, where they sell produce and transplants at farmers market, to a multiple farm CSA, and to local restaurants and food stores. Andrew is also the editor and publisher of Growing for Market, having taken over that business from Lynn Byczynski last year – the magazine’s 25th year in publication. Andrew is also the author of The Greenhouse and Hoophouse Grower’s Handbook , a fantastic new guide to growing things in protect...
Mar 09, 2017•1 hr 34 min
Michael Phillips raises about three acres of fruit trees at Lost Nation Orchard in extreme northern New Hampshire. And while that’s pretty cool, and while Michael is well known for his books on organic orcharding, today we dig into the subject of his new book, Mycorrhizal Planet . Michael started his orchard on imperfect apple ground, something that forced him – or gave him the opportunity – to figure out what he needed to do to make his apple trees tick. And that led him to the fungal relations...
Mar 02, 2017•1 hr 22 min
Hans and Katie Bishop raise fifteen acres of certified organic vegetables at PrairiErth Farm in central Illinois, marketing about $250,000 worth of produce through a farmers market, CSA, and wholesale outlets. With about fifty percent of their sales going through one farmers market in a mid-sized city, Katie and Hans had a lot to say about how they make that work, from the details of their display and market stand setup, their digital checkout system and the value its data brings to their farmin...
Feb 23, 2017•1 hr 24 min
Josh Volk is, most recently, the author of Compact Farms , a new, illustrated guide for anyone dreaming of starting, expanding, or perfecting a profitable farm enterprise on five acres or less. Compact Farms includes in-depth interviews with fifteen small farms about the systems and tools that make them tick. With over twenty years of experience working on and managing small farms around the country, Josh currently works part time at Cully Neighborhood Farm in Portland, Oregon, as well as provid...
Feb 16, 2017•1 hr 29 min
Mimo Davis and Miranda Duschack farm at Urban Buds City Grown Flowers, an acre of flowers in a working class neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri. Urban Buds is located on property that was an operating flower farm in the city for three generations, but had fallen into poor condition when Mimo and Miranda purchased it in 2012. We talk about how Miranda and Mimo rehabilitated the property, and made the journey from startup to turning a profit while they financed the farm with income paychecks from...
Feb 09, 2017•1 hr 16 min
Mike Brownback farms at Spiral Path Farm in South-Central Pennsylvania with his wife, Terra, and sons Will and Lucas. Spiral Path farms over seventy acres on more than 300 acres of land that they own. Serving two farmers markets, and 2,000-member CSA, and a substantial wholesale business with Wegmans grocery store, they farm all of their acres organically, and have been certified organic since 1994. Mike shares the recent history of Spiral Path Farm and the return of his sons to the operation. W...
Feb 02, 2017•1 hr 29 min
Todd Nichols is the head grower at Nichols Farm and Orchard in Marengo, Illinois, about 65 miles northwest of Chicago. Founded in 1977 by Todd’s parents, Nichols Farm currently produces about 260 acres of vegetables and forty acres of apples. Nichols Farm markets to some 200 restaurants, fifteen farmers markets each week, and a 450-member CSA. Todd digs into what a farm this size looks like, and the sorts of investments they’ve made in equipment and infrastructure to ensure that they can complet...
Jan 26, 2017•1 hr 22 min
Shiloh Avery and Jason Roehrig own and operate Tumbling Shoals Farm in northwestern North Carolina. With three acres tilled and almost half an acre under plastic, they gross about $145,000 selling certified organic vegetables through a CSA, three farmers market, a cooperative CSA, and a few restaurants. Shiloh and Jason were very intentional about where they chose to start Tumbling Shoals Farm, and the smaller cities that they chose to market in. They share the factors behind locating in northwe...
Jan 19, 2017•1 hr 32 min
Curtis Millsap farms raises two acres of vegetables, with 22,000 square feet under plastic, at Millsap Farms, just outside of Springfield, Missouri. He and his wife, Sarah, make a living from the farm with the help of their ten kids, a full-time farm manager, and another employee. Curtis shares how his farm grew over the years – and then how it shrunk on its path to profitability and a more family- and faith-focused life, shedding most of its livestock and farmers markets in favor of production ...
Jan 12, 2017•1 hr 32 min
For episode 100, several listeners requested that I either do an interview with myself, or get somebody to interview me. So I invited my good friend Liz Graznak to do the job – Liz was also the first guest on the podcast, so it seemed to me to have some nice symmetry. Liz reached out to many of the previous guests on the show to get their input on what to ask me, and we dig into what I’ve learned from interviewing over a hundred farmers since the show’s beginnings during a drive to a field day i...
Jan 05, 2017•1 hr 21 min
Chris McGuire and his wife, Juli, own and operate Two Onion Farm in Belmont, Wisconsin. With four acres of vegetables and ¾ of an acre of apples – all certified organic – Two Onion Farm is packing 300 CSA shares each week for delivery in Madison, Wisconsin, Dubuque, Iowa, and Galena, Illinois. Chris digs into the details of weed control without tractors on Two Onion Farm, with an emphasis on prevention and reducing the bank of weed seeds in the soil. We also explore details of the farm’s use of ...
Dec 29, 2016•1 hr 22 min
Mike Nolan raises about five acres of vegetables at Mountain Roots Produce in Mancos, Colorado. With a focus on storage crops, Mike has patched together a market in his rural marketplace that includes restaurants, grocery stores, schools, and CSA members in the Four Corners area of Colorado. Farming in Mancos for the last seven years, Mike has recently brought Mountain Roots into profitability, and no longer has to work off the farm to make ends meet. We dig into the details of Mike’s operation,...
Dec 22, 2016•1 hr 18 min
Eva Rehak and Rebekah Frazer Chiasson are members of Coin Bio – that’s Organic Corner in English – a small marketing co-op at the Dieppe Farmers Market in Dieppe, New Brunswick. With a total of four farms, the Organic Corner co-op allows these farmers to show up at market with the greatest diversity of produce in southeastern New Brunswick. Eva and Rebekah share the details of how they make the co-op work, including how they decide who sells what and how they structure the finances to keep the c...
Dec 15, 2016•1 hr 19 min
Diane Szukovathy raises about 4.5 acres of cut flowers at Jello Mold Farm in Mount Vernon, Washington. Now in their eleventh year of selling flowers, Diane and Dennis Westphall have become cornerstones of the local flower movement in the Pacific Northwest. Diane cofounded the Seattle Wholesale Growers Market when she realized the need to expand her farm’s reach without putting more hours into marketing and distribution. We discuss the establishment of the cooperative and its journey to self-suff...
Dec 08, 2016•1 hr 27 min
Michael Ableman splits his time between his family’s Foxglove Farm on British Columbia’s Salt Spring Island and SOLEfood, an urban farm on the downtown east side of Vancouver, British Columbia. Michael has been farming full-time since 1976, starting as an orchardist and evolving into a wide range of vegetables, fruits, grains, dry beans, and livestock. An early pioneer in the urban agriculture movement, Michael has long focused on the creation of good jobs and production quantities of food. We d...
Dec 01, 2016•1 hr 24 min
Heather Lekx has managed Ignatius Farm since 2001, when she arrived to start a new CSA program at the Ignatius Jesuit Centre in Guelph, Ontario. She currently oversees the vegetable farm, an extensive community garden, and land management for a multitude of independent enterprises at the Centre’s farm, which has served as the well of sustenance for the Jesuit community in the region since 1913. Heather provides insights into the dynamics of farming with an institution, including how the CSA prog...
Nov 24, 2016•1 hr 32 min
John Middleton farms with his wife Lidia Dungue at Fazenda Boa Terra in Spring Green, Wisconsin. After years of working on other farms, and starting on an incubator program in Minnesota, John and Lidia started a vegetable farm on the farmland at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin estate. Three years into their tenure at Taliesin, they’re growing a little under ten acres of vegetables and grossing about ten thousand dollars per acre. John shares some of the details of getting started at Taliesin, wher...
Nov 17, 2016•1 hr 17 min
John Hendrickson raises two acres of vegetables and cover crops at Stone Circle Farm in Reeseville, Wisconsin. He also works for the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Integrated Agricultural Studies, where he has lead any number of interesting projects and where he organizes the Wisconsin School for Beginning Market Growers. This is not a story about how John makes hundreds of thousands of dollars on two acres. It is a about how John set out to grow a farm, and how and why he decided to remai...
Nov 10, 2016•1 hr 31 min
Brooke Salvaggio and Daniel Heryer own Urbavore, one of the nation’s largest urban farmsteads. With thirteen acres in the urban core of Kansas City, Missouri, Urbavore produces vegetables, berries, tree fruits, and laying hens on an energy-independent piece of land with a meth house just down the street. We dig into their mulch-based no-till production system (which doesn’t require much digging!), including the nuts and bolts of how they handle different crops, source appropriate materials, and ...
Nov 03, 2016•1 hr 15 min
Lucila de Alejandro owns and operates Suzie’s Farm with her husband, Robin Taylor. Located three miles from the Pacific Ocean and three miles from the Mexican border, Suzie’s Farm got its start in 2004, and has provided fresh, organic produce to the San Diego area through a CSA, farmers markets, and sales to restaurants and grocers. As a 70-acre urban farm, Suzie’s Farm provides a rare blend of tractor-scale farming just minutes from the urban core, and Lucila and Robin leveraged their geography...
Oct 27, 2016•1 hr 39 min
David Hambleton manages Sisters Hill Farm in Standfordville, New York. David says he has five acres in production, but it’s worth noting that with what seems like typical attention to the details, that’s five acres of ground actually growing vegetables – he figures he’s got another four acres in field roads and other grass areas around the farm. All of Sisters Hill’s produce is sold through a market-style CSA. Sister Hills’ CSA program has maintained an 80% retention rate by selling the farm exp...
Oct 20, 2016•1 hr 24 min
Lily Schneider and Matt Mccue raise fifteen acres of vegetables at Shooting Star CSA in Fairfield, California, just 35 miles from Berkeley on the edge of the Central Valley. Along with four employees, they provide vegetables for a 250-member CSA plus three farmers markets. Matt and Lily have a couple of unique twists on their CSA operation, making the unusual choice in their area to not operate year-round, as well as to focus on guiding members towards purchasing a full-season, rather than month...
Oct 13, 2016•1 hr 27 min
Simon Huntley is the founder and developer at Small Farm Central, a technology company focused on farming business success with a website builder designed for small farms, a CSA member management and sales solution, and more. Simon is also the author of the new book, Cultivating Customers . Small Farm Central grew out of Simon’s work with an expanding CSA program in western Colorado. Simon got into online marketing before e-commerce was cool, and definitely before its use was widespread in the f...
Oct 06, 2016•1 hr 18 min
