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055: Jane Hawley Stevens on Scaling Up with Value-Added Medicinal Herbs

2/25/2016

Farmer to Farmer Podcast | Guest | Jane Hawley Stevens | Four Elements Herbals

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 Elements Herbal brand in the market place.

Four Elements Herbals recently used a Value-Added Producer Grant to support the expansion of their product line, which in turn drove significant growth in the business overall. Jane shares her experiences managing growth and moving into a national market, as well as how she has passed the field production torch to a new generation and the ways that her job has changed as her business has grown.

We also learn the meaning of the word, “garble.”

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

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.

Quotes from the Show

By going organic, this new door opened to me, which was herbal products.

We’ve noticed that over the years, no matter how well you manage your perennial crops through hand weeding, hoeing, mulching, after a while the weeds just take over. So we till them under and replant.

Most tea companies are forced to buy their herbs from the world market. What makes ours so different is that we are in charge of the quality from seed to the finished product.

It’s ruthless out there now [in the herbal products market] unless you find the right partners.

I think co-ops and what I’m doing are just such a natural fit. I think it’s really important for co-ops and independents and farmers to maintain their partnerships to keep that integrity going of what started this industry.

Show Links

Four Season Herbals uses Sustane fertilizer to keep perennial crops healthy through multiple years of production.

Jane told us how she sells herbs to the nearby Wollersheim Winery to make their gin and absinthe.

And I mentioned that I used to sell my dill to an aquavit producer, Gamle Ode of Wisconsin.

Jane serves on the governing council of the American Herbalists Guild.

… and she’s a member of the American Herbal Products Association.

You can find Jane’s teaching schedule at Four Elements Herbal on her website.

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054: Erich Schultz Talks Suburban Farming in the Arizona Desert

2/18/2016

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Farmer to Farmer Podcast | Guest | Erich Schultz | Steadfast Farm

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 farmstand, at farmers markets, and through a CSA.

Farming in suburbia comes with its own challenges, as does farming in the desert Southwest, and Erich fills us on the ways he has made the most of both. We discuss how he’s leveraged his neighborhood for marketing, how he manages irrigation, the evolution of Steadfast Farm’s livestock rotation, and how he has moved away from the intensive mechanization he started with.

We also get into the details of the arrangement Erich has with the developers and owners of the farmland, and how the neighborhood has managed some of the complications of having an urban farm.

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

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Quotes from the Show

[The season in Arizona] is totally backwards.

It can be seventy degrees during the day and then drop into the thirties at night.

We haven’t really taken a break in the last five years [as long as they’ve been in business]… but one of our goals this year is to take a vacation. We can grow twelve months of the year, and that’s what we’ve done, but I’m envious of having a little bit of downtime and being able to plan.

This is what I do and this is my farm, so I can reconcile putting in the hours. But when you have employees too, it gets to kind of wears on them and burns them out.

Since we’ve started to create those restrictions [on the hours we worked], it’s allowed us to look at how we do things and ty to improve upon those.

We don’t get rattlesnake in the field… the biggest thing we have to watch out for is scorpions and black widows.

At one point we had as many as ten folks working on the farm, and I felt like I was just a manager of people at that point and not really where I wanted to be. So we started to pull things down and relook at how we were doing things so that we can do things with less people.

Show Links

Steadfast Farm is The Farm at Agritopia.

Erich mentioned that he’s been working to dial in some of the principle’s from Ben Hartmann’s book, The Lean Farm.

Erich’s favorite tool is his BCS two-wheeled tractor and power harrow.

Erich’s second-favorite tool, the Quick Cut Greens Harvester, is available from Farmer’s Friend.

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053: Patrice Gros on Real No-Till Farming, Profitability, and Not Working Too Hard

2/11/2016

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Farmer to Farmer Podcast | Guest | Patrice Gros | Foundation Farm

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 margin doing all of his farming in just three mornings a week with a small crew. And I do want to emphasize, the no-till farming that Patrice does isn’t just an occasional no-till crop here and there. He doesn’t own a tractor or a tiller, and doesn’t even use a broadfork on his soils.

We dig in to – or rake in to – the details of how he manages his system, from scheduling and weed control to fertility management. Along the way, we explore how Patrice has planned his farming operation around his family’s needs, how he evaluates crop profitability, and his efforts to balance productivity and quality of life with his employees.

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

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.

Farmers Web: Providing small business software for farmers. By allowing you to streamline wholesale ordering and operations, FarmersWeb makes it easier to work with your buyers, reducing costs and increasing your business capacity.

Quotes from the Show

As we evolved as a family – as we became four people – we lost that original connection to the land and that innocence… our lifestyle became more complex.

The only thing that [touches] my soil is a rake to prepare the beds, and trowels and small transplanting devices.

If you bring all of the different situations that are absent of work, you’ll reduce your labor, you’ll reduce your need for machines and for time spent. And the bottom line of all that is to become immensely profitable.

No till means that I use a lot of organic matter, and I layer that organic matter on a regular basis.
Make this work based on your calculations of yield and money. Don’t make it a sentimental, emotional decision, make it a money decision.

The true no-till structure is made of the most pristine and nature-based aggregate that has this bacterial glue that creates this crumbliness that is not what you get from a tilled soil. It doesn’t matter how much compost you till in, it doesn’t matter how much cover crop you play with, you will never get to the structure of no-till soil.

A really challenging thing for the farmer is to balance the sense of this is a professional place… and this is also a place to enjoy life.

I have a very keen knowledge of my profitability. I do not grow corn, and I do not grow okra, and I do not grow strawberries, because they are simply not profitable enough. I love strawberries, but I will not sacrifice my square footage of soil to a crop that can make only half the money that arugula or basil makes on the same space.

I was so lost in the passion of gardening… that I lost the sense of what it took to make quite a bit of money.

You have to align your farming scale to the lifestyle that you have decided for yourself.

Show Links

Patrice mentioned two books that were very influential in the development of his approach to farming and the business of farming:

The Good Life: Helen and Scott Nearing's Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living, by Scott and Helen Nearing.

The One-Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka

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052: Mark Boen Talks Cover Crops, CSA, and Changes on 320 Acres at Bluebird Gardens

2/4/2016

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Farmer to Farmer Podcast | Guest | Mark Boen | Bluebird Gardens

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 vegetables. We get into the nuts and bolts of the Bluebird Gardens cover crop system, including the challenges, planning techniques, and the tools he’s using to establish and manage the cover crops.

Bluebird gardens is also in the midst of a marketing transition, and we delve into the changes Mark is making to make his food accessible to a wider swath of the population than just the customers who are able to make CSA work for their lifestyle. Plans include marketing Bluebird Gardens produce in local grocery stores and increasing agritourism opportunities.

We also get into some of the harvest mechanization Mark has used to manage so many vegetables with a small staff, as well as irrigation and crop planning.

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Quotes from the Show

For any farmer, whatever size they are, their farming career is an evolution, and whatever size you are is perfect for that moment.

If you’re not selling it all, your farm is lacking.

The CSA appeals to such a narrow band of people, disciplined eaters who really want to be connected to the farm. The problem is that 85% of food is eaten within two hours of purchase – people are flying by the seat of their pants.
People want three things, they want choice, they want convenience, and they want connection to the farm.

They can go to Walmart and fill their fridge with produce, and if that gets wasted they don’t blame Walmart. But if they don’t use all the CSA produce, they do blame me.

Each year, we’ve looked at what’s backwards. If you look at what’s backwards, you can problem solve and find a better way. Sometimes it’s easy to bump along and deal with those backwards things year after year, but [it’s better to] take a look at them and see what’s making them backwards.

The secret to farming is cover crops, and it is organic matter in the soil, and it’s allowing the biology to flourish.

All the problems that are in agriculture , the hypoxia zone the size of the state of Massachusetts in the Gulf of Mexico… happen because we haven’t covered our soils with cover crops that scavenge the nutrients and hang on to them there.

Especially with the CSA, when you’re committed to produce a crop, you’ve got to minimize every risk you can.

That’s the nice thing about vegetable growing: you have such big windows of time spring and fall for planting and growing things. It’s not like one crop takes the whole season on every strip.
Anything that feeds you can also bite you in the butt.

So many of those things you learn the hard way and learn by doing. You have to always have your eyes open to learn from those things, so that it never happens again. The bigger the pain the better.

Every learning you make, you learn it that season. And you can’t apply the learning until the next season. And you realize that in your life that you don’t have that many seasons to do. So you want to avoid any bad thing before it even happens.

You want to read the future, and definitely learn from any mistake.

I plan to die here when my walker tangles in the carrots and I fall down.

[On marketing] It’s not that easy. Over time, you pay your dues enough that you create the following.

[On attending conferences] If you can bring at least one thing back that changes your farm it’s a royal success.

The important thing for each of us is to find our niche and what is your talent that’s going to connect people to your farm.

There’s no need to try to get bigger. That’s just what we evolved into doing.