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103: Todd Nichols of Nichols Farm and Orchard on Managing Production and Markets on 300 Acres

1/26/2017

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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 complete the large amount of work that often needs to be done in a short period of time. We talk about the low-density approach to cropping at Nichols Farm, the workflow they use to provide outstanding service to their restaurant and farmers market customers, and the ways their four different farming locations create advantages for disease management and coping with the weather.

Nichols Farm is certified to the Food Alliance Sustainability Standard, but is not certified organic. Todd shares his reasons why, how he farms differently because of it, and some of the other ways that Nichols Farm has taken a green approach to their agricultural production.

Perennial support for the Farmer to Farmer Podcast is generously provided by Vermont Compost Company and BCS America.

Sponsors

Vermont Compost Company: Founded by organic crop growing professionals committed to meeting the need for high-quality composts and compost-based, living soil mixes for certified organic plant production.

Farmers Web: Making it simple for farms, farm cooperatives, and local food artisans to streamline working with wholesale buyers. Lessening the administrative work that comes with each order helps producers create a more successful relationship with their buyers and can help them work with more buyers overall.

Farm Commons: Strong, resilient, sustainable farm businesses are built on a solid legal foundation. With practical resources geared for the direct-to-consumer and organic producer, Farm Commons can help you understand what you need to know, in language that makes it easy to understand. 

Quotes from the Show

If you limit yourself to 2 tractors, you're limited to what you can do on 2 tractors.

We find it much better to have extra and not have to harvest it than to run out and the lost potential in that way. In most cases, most of the cost of growing is in the labor of picking it.

You'll never escape the need for hand labor in this industry, at least on our level and our diversity.

It didn't take much to have too many sunchokes.

A lot of restaurants come and go, and chefs are still in the industry. We've got a lot of clients that were, if you look at it like the chef's the client, they move on and often move up.

It really is important to delegate and try not to worry about everything, because if you just stick your nose in every component of the farm, for one, you'll never get anything done. Two, you'll end up really frustrated that you couldn't do it all.

The thing about this is we grow crops and we take them personal and it's very serious, but at the same time, they're just crops.
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You can never have enough cooler space… When you have 100 different crops on inventory, you really have to have the space to get in and get out and not unload the entire cooler to get something out of the back.

Show Links

Todd’s pretty happy with his Oxbo Green Bean Harvester.

Nichols Farm is certified to the Food Alliance’s Sustainability Standard.

Todd’s favorite tool on the farm is the Ferris Farm Polyplanter, a precision seeder for sowing through plastic.

I’ve been to the Great Lakes Fruit, Vegetable and Farm Market EXPO that Todd discussed, and agree that it’s a great resource for education and information about the tools of the trade for vegetable growers.

Transcript

The transcript for this episode is brought to you by Earth Tools, offering the most complete selection of walk-behind farming equipment and high-quality garden tools in North America; and by Growing for Market, where you can get 20% off your subscription with the code “podcast” at checkout.
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102: Shiloh Avery and Jason Roehrig of Tumbling Shoals Farm on Planning for Success, Smaller Markets, and Using Employees to Make Time to Manage

1/19/2017

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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 northwestern North Carolina, the advantages of marketing in smaller markets, and how their marketing decisions have shaped their production strategies. Jason and Shiloh tell us about the ways they’ve made use of high tunnels and Haygrove polytunnels to increase the reliability of their cropping systems.

We also dig into the lessons Shiloh and Jason have learned about the power of having enough labor to leave them time to manage the farm, and the changes they are making based on some in-depth business planning as they move into their tenth season on the farm.
​

The Farmer to Farmer Podcast is generously supported by Vermont Compost Company and BCS America.

Sponsors

Vermont Compost: Founded by organic crop growing professionals committed to meeting the need for high-quality composts and compost-based, living soil mixes for certified organic plant production.

Farm Commons: Strong, resilient, sustainable farm businesses are built on a solid legal foundation. With practical resources geared for the direct-to-consumer and organic producer, Farm Commons can help you understand what you need to know, in language that makes it easy to understand.
​

Small Farm Central: Providers of Member Assembler CSA management software. Member Assembler has the flexibility to serve the needs of the myriad of farmers’ business models as well as serving non-traditional local food subscriptions like meat, fish, dairy, and fruit CSAs and CSFs.

Quotes from the Show

[Shiloh] We really like to eat, so food tends to be where we can really thrive in a marketing situation, because we can talk about how we prepare it, and where... Flowers are interesting, and really challenging, and pretty, we just don't have that same passion.

[Jason] When we left the Peace Corps, we had $5,000 and a Pontiac Grand Prix with 125,000 miles on it, where the transmission went at 128,000 miles, so it didn't last very long as an asset. But, the ability to shop for your market was the primary thing that we made a decision about.

[Shiloh] It's good for the ego to be a big fish in a small pond.

[Jason] People eat with their eyes as much as they eat with their mouths, and the experience that they have in purchasing the food has a lot to do with the experience that they have when they're eating it.

[Jason] I read in an agronomic textbook somewhere that 100% weed control is an aesthetic choice, not an economic choice, and we had based our farming strategy on that idea, but, as it turns out, that might be true in a corn field, but it's not true in a small-scale vegetable operation.

[Jason] Making the right decisions at the right time… takes time to do for the management.

[Shiloh] We like to say we started out as firefighters or triage nurses, and we're evolving into farm managers.

[Jason] You can easily come to believe that how you're doing something is as well as it can be done until you see someone doing it better.

[Shiloh] We can either move to California, or we can make the plants believe they're in California.
​

[Shiloh] Every year we increase our spacing on things and grow fewer plants and, consequently, get higher yields.

Show Links

We talked extensively about Tumbling Shoals’s multi-bayHaygrove Polytunnels.  

Shiloh worked for Alex Hitt, and mentioned his name several times. He was featured in Episode 023 of the Farmer to Farmer Podcast.

Shiloh referenced Jim Crawford’s experience of tripling bean yields just through irrigation, described in Episode 024.

Transcripts

The transcript for this episode is brought to you by Growing for Market. Get 20% off your subscription with the code podcast at checkout. And by EarthTools, offering the most complete selection of walk-behind farming equipment and high-quality garden tools in North America.
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101: Curtis Millsap of Millsap Farms on Family, Faith, Time Management, and Pizza

1/12/2017

4 Comments

 
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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 that they can stay on top of, and the addition of a major value-added enterprise with their pizza club.

We dig into the pizza club, why they’ve structured it as a membership program, and how that works on a farm that’s wired for community. Curtis shares how they have leveraged seconds and family labor – including Sarah’s skills as a pizza magician – to grow the enterprise and make it work.

Curtis also lets us in on how they’ve created a farm that allowed them to take five full weeks of vacation last year. We talk about the routines and management systems they’ve built to support Curtis’ quality of life goals, including the fundamentals of Curtis’ paper-based system to stay on top of tasks and projects. He also shares the good and the bad about the Chinese-style solar greenhouse they built.
​

Perennial support for the Farmer to Farmer Podcast is generously provided by Vermont Compost Company and BCS America.

Sponsors

Vermont Compost: Founded by organic crop growing professionals committed to meeting the need for high-quality composts and compost-based, living soil mixes for certified organic plant production.

BCS America: BCS two-wheel tractors are versatile, maneuverable in tight spaces, light-weight for less compaction, and easy to maintain and repair on farm. Gear-driven and built to last for decades of dependable service on your farm or market garden.

Farmers Web: FarmersWeb makes it simple for farms, farm cooperatives, and local food artisans to streamline working with wholesale buyers. Lessening the administrative work that comes with each order helps producers create a more successful relationship with their buyers and can help them work with more buyers overall.

Quotes from the Show

That’s a good theme for us: a lot from a little.

We started more from a vision of community more than really wanting to be agricultural producers. We wanted to farm, but the motivation behind that was community.

You can have all of these good feelings, and how do we actually make this work financially? We have found ways to interface with that community that generate enough income that it works out.

I don’t think anybody gets to start something up without having a real intense period.


We had about forty goats, which is forty-too-many goats no matter what else you’re doing with your life.


Larger than two acres, smaller than ten acres, it’s hard to mechanize fully enough to really take advantage of economies of scale.


So, I’m out there tilling, and it’s dark, and it’s like the finger of god came out of the sky and pointed at me and said, “Hey, stupid, what are you doing on the tractor? There are five little girls in the house who want a bedtime story, and you’re out here on the stupid tractor. Are they really going to care in ten years if you grew carrots in the fall of two-thousand-whatever?”


Farming is ninety percent figuring out when to do things.


​When you get connected to the land and the soil, you can’t be out there very long before you start thinking much bigger thoughts than the thoughts you were thinking when you started.

Show Links

We talked about David Allen’s Getting Things Done as a system for getting things done and expressing your values in the world.

Curtis had nice things to say about the Great Plains Growers Conference  – and I agree!

Curtis shared a lot of details about Chinese-style solar greenhouses. His was inspired by Sanjun Gu, who is featured in this article. 

Transcript

The transcript for this episode is brought to you by Earth Tools, offering the most complete selection of walk-behind farming equipment and high-quality garden tools in North America; and by Growing for Market, where you can get 20% off your subscription with the code “podcast” at checkout.
DOWNLOAD EPISODE
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100: Chris Blanchard on Lessons Learned from the Farmer to Farmer Podcast, Consulting, and His Own Farm

1/5/2017

5 Comments

 
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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 in Minnesota.

We explore how I came to farming in Iowa from an urban childhood in the Pacific Northwest, and Liz gives me a chance to share how my farm grew, the challenges we faced, and what led me to leave the farm behind to pursue my current work as a farm educator.
​

Perennial support for the Farmer to Farmer Podcast is generously provided by Vermont Compost Company and BCS America.

Sponsors

Vermont Compost: Founded by organic crop growing professionals committed to meeting the need for high-quality composts and compost-based, living soil mixes for certified organic plant production.

BCS America: BCS two-wheel tractors are versatile, maneuverable in tight spaces, light-weight for less compaction, and easy to maintain and repair on farm. Gear-driven and built to last for decades of dependable service on your farm or market garden.

Farm Commons: Strong, resilient, sustainable farm businesses are built on a solid legal foundation. With practical resources geared for the direct-to-consumer and organic producer, Farm Commons can help you understand what you need to know, in language that makes it easy to understand.

Quotes from the Show

[from Paul Wellstone:] We all do better when we all do better.

If you’re going to play the small market farmer game, somehow your food has to resonate at a deeper level for people. It has to be a tool for connection in some way.

Managing your weeds is something that, when you do that, everything else gets easier. And not just a little bit easier.

I think that three years is that point when relationships get hard. You can coast a certain distance on adrenaline, but you’re going to run into a position where… the shine comes off the penny.


There’s room at any scale to fail dramatically.


The garden answered all of these questions for me about life and death and about the cycle of things. Things live, things die. It’s just part of what happens.
​

As a business decision, putting an emphasis on your relationships is really important.

​Show Links

Chris spent years as the presentations coordinator and then as the co-director of theMOSES Organic Farming Conference. 
​

Chris coauthored the Fearless Farm Finances book.  

We mentioned Patreon as a way to directly support the show.

And one of Chris’ favorite things to mention: the weird and wonderful Deep Springs College  had a tremendous influence on his life’s trajectory.

Transcript

The transcript for this episode is brought to you by Growing for Market. Get 20% off your subscription with the code podcast at checkout. And by EarthTools, offering the most complete selection of walk-behind farming equipment and high-quality garden tools in North America.Earthtools.com.
DOWNLOAD EPISODE
DOWNLOAD TRANSCRIPT

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