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.

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So the question was basically, what could we gross on a square foot…. There’s some data out there but that stuff really can be nuanced based on one’s environment.

I don’t know of any productive rooftop farms that are any higher than the one we put up above the eleventh floor.

I joke sometimes that the wind is our groundhogs, deer, rabbits, all the mammals that we don’t have exposure to.

A large part of what we are doing is preaching and teaching and creating a hub of people to learn about farming.

Being in the city we do have an opportunity to rescue quite a bit of organics from the waste stream. There’s way more organics than we could ever figure out to handle.

We try to do [wholesale] sales about two days ahead of time, but it always ends up being the day of and the day before sometimes.

I think there’s a value for us to make the deliveries, but there’s also a value for folks to specialize.
People like this idea. Especially with environmental concerns and the environmental benefits of green roofs, people are excited about this.

It needs to be sort of a gentle education, like exposure and “what’s it like to pull a carrot of the ground,” to start to re-bridge that connection between urban society and our agricultural system.

We’re not out there saying that we’re going to massively change the food system so that all of our food is grown in the cities. That’s hyperbole that’s just not accurate in the world right now. But we’re proud to be running a business that works and we’re exposing the community to it.

Brooklyn Grange uses a 16-inch Mantis tiller and a Tillie electric tiller. The Tillie is Ben’s favorite tool on the farm.

Brooklyn Grange spawned a non-profit, City Growers, to provide outreach and education to New York’s youth.

The most valuable tool at Brooklyn Grange is the Johnny’s Four-Row Seeder, which provides precision seed placement. We also discussed the role of the seedbed roller to make the Four-Row Seeder really work well.

For Christmas, Ben would like a HarvestStar walk-behind baby leaf harvester from Sutton Ag.

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.

I have a lot of farmer friends around here, and we’re all kind of doing the same thing… we have potlucks together, and if Agricola needs something, I try to call my friends.

It’s very difficult to sell to restaurants unless you have a real relationship.

If a chef comes out to the field and sees all of the produce that I’m talking about, he’s like, okay, we’re going to make this work.

The better the communication, the better the relationship is.

There’s a lot of education involved to understand how the chefs work and how they order and what they’re expecting.

Just the reality of local produce that’s not coming from California, you need to find the right chef who can work with that and use it as a strength for the restaurant.

On things that he’s learned in his chef’s cooler: It’s mostly how people pack things and how they store them, as well… how they use a carrot, are they peeling it, are they dicing it…

Back then, I tried to use the word beyond organic, and that pissed off a lot of people off. I didn’t really realize what I was doing… if you want this movement to move forward, and you move this way, then you should just go ahead and do it.

I made the decision that I’m going to get certified organic and I’m going to support NOFA-New Jersey and the movement here.

I look at farming as a whole systems design. It just really fell into place.

Agricola, the restaurant Great Road Farm works with, just published a self-titled cookbook that includes contributions from Steve.

Steve talked about using the app Slack for communication with the chefs at Agricola.

Steve mentioned that Great Road is selling to Fresh Nation. https://freshnation.com/

Steve’s favorite tool on the farm is his multi-tool, the Leatherman Skeletool.

Steve’s favorite resources are Growing for Market, Acres USA, and the Farmer to Farmer Podcast.

​We didn’t talk about it in the show, but here’s a video that gives a nice overview of the farm:

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.

Local organics is just a small portion of what people are eating out there, so we need to multiply the farms, and we need to grow this system.

When you’re young sometimes you forget certain important things, [like] a teepee in Quebec is not the same as a teepee in Santa Fe.

It was such a small parcel of land that when we were doing the farm design, just the edge row for the tractor to turn was taking up too much space.

The farms that I had worked on were such a mess, that I was looking for efficiencies early on.

[On a tree planting crew] there’s always one guy or one girl that in the same context is planting double the number of trees that you are… when it was time to farm, I was looking for ways to make myself be efficient in what I’m doing, and design was a natural evolution to that.

On our farm, harvesting is half of the work that we do. Half of the time, we’re down in a squatting position. The fact that we can reach to the middle of our [thirty-inch] beds without hyperextending our backs makes a difference in my overall posture and overall stamina throughout the year.

We figured out that eighteen [inch walkways] is more comfortable and we’re not breaking broccoli heads with our butts. The whole idea with intensifying the production is to have great soil structure so that the root systems can really shoot down and not compete with each other for nutrients and water.

From the get-go, we wanted to derive both of our salaries from our farming operation and we wanted to have a quality of life. Every year we sit down and we would revisit that and we would try to make the farm work in that sense.

We’ve had goats, and we’ve had chickens, and we’ve planted an orchard, and when you’re caring for ten fruit trees it’s the same work as if you’re caring for fifty, except that you’re adding another level of thing to manage. And we’ve thought that the forty vegetables were managing was enough.

One year, we decided to [limit our working hours]. That really changed our farming big time. Just the same as when we had the land constraint really define our operation, when we put a time constraint, it really forced us to deepen our commitment to planning and not wasting time on this or that. The year that we did that, we accomplished more doing less work.

I like planning, and I like when a plan works.

A goal without a plan is just a wish. (attributed to J.M.’s dad)

Broadforking is always good. You can’t overdo it, as long as you’re not inverting the layers.
I think that all of us as organic growers should be paying more attention to the ecosystem of the soil.

I’m a strong advocate of substitutions. Once you get your systems going and you’re making a profit and you’re balancing your workload with your life, now’s a good time to make a chance. If you don’t want to use plastic wait until year seven. But if you’re starting with all of these principles, wow…

If when you’re broadforking, it’s a challenge, then you should be broadforking. It allows you to penetrate the soil, bring air into the soil, open up the soil, but without disturbing any of the ecosystem. It’s a really a gentle tool but it really does the work that deep tillage does.

J.M. and Maude-Helene farm at Le Jardins de la Grelinette. I especially enjoyed looking through the photo gallery on the website.

J.M. is the author of The Market Gardener, which describes his production techniques in detail.

J.M. talked about the influence of Cuba’s organoponicos, as pictured and described here.

J.M. has an in-depth article about the two-wheel tractor-mounted power harrow on the FarmStart website.

“[Ben Hartman’s] The Lean Farm was one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.”

We talked about using ramial wood chips in the pathways and their later incorporation into the garden beds. Michael Phillips has a short article about the basics of ramial wood chips.

Besides the broadfork, which his farm is named after, J.M.’s favorite tool is the flame weeder from Flame Weeders. He uses the 5-torch model with a hood.

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.

Audible: Discover the world of audio-books, and absorb yourself in the latest in business management texts, farming essays, or just a dramatic retelling of the Star Wars saga. Get a free audiobook download and a 30-day free trial at audibletrial.com/farmertofarmer.

We’re in a very interesting science time for new stuff that supports things that people have talked about and written about for ten thousand years.

Glomalin is the glue that holds the world together.

I’ve never had a chance to try to compost any diamonds. Plastic bags and chicken shit – it seems like you’d end up with slimy diamonds, but I’d like to give it a try.

I consider myself one of the founding members of Professional Vegetable Growers Anonymous.

When you start talking C:N ratios, at the core of a white pine the C:N ratio might be 500:1. At the apical tip of that same tree it might be 8:1.

A machine cannot make compost. Microbes make compost.

Each step of turning, each movement, everything has biological impact and you want it working for you and for the beneficials, and not against you.

We find ourselves as the thin brown line that connects specialized husbandry to specialized horticulture – like a streak of shit. Captain Compost!

​The mass of what plants remove from soil is very comparable to what they exude into soil.

A great video with Karl talking about Vermont Compost’s Fort Vee potting soil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcktI2q_5mM&feature=youtu.be

Karl recommended several resources for going deeper into soil microbiology:

• Soil Microorganisms and Higher Plants http://amzn.to/1Q887D4   by N.A. Krasil’nikov , or download a free PDF here: http://soilandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/01aglibrary/010112.krasilnikov.pdf
  
  
• The Physics of Agriculture by F.H. King explains how butter is air.
  
  
• Farmers of Forty Centuries by F.H. King
  
  

Vermont Compost’s website has a list of important books that have influenced Karl’s philosophical and practical approach to his life and business.

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.

Audible: Discover the world of audio-books, and absorb yourself in the latest in business management texts, farming essays, or just a dramatic retelling of the Star Wars saga. Get a free audiobook download and a 30-day free trial at audibletrial.com/farmertofarmer.

​We wanted to be in this for the long haul, so we worked pretty hard to set up systems that would work for us when we’re in our fifties as they worked when we were in our late  twenties.

We’re not aiming for doctors wages here, but if we can match teacher’s salaries, that’s good enough. It didn’t happen overnight.

One can burn out pretty easily if you’re adding a winter workload on top of a pretty heavy summer workload. Increasing our winter production is a way of raising our valleys… but what was more of a challenge was decreasing our summer production to even out the peaks.

There are two pieces to lean production. On the one hand is waste elimination… the other have is an intense focus on creating what customers actually want. You’re either adding value or you’re contributing to waste.

The ten types of waste identified in lean are actually ubiquitous – they’re all over the place in all types of business. And any type of business can benefit from getting rid of the waste.

Eliminated waste equals free capacity. If you save an hour of time a week, that’s an hour that you can spend on adding value for your capacity. Usually, adding capacity is kind of expensive; what lean offers is a way to add capacity free.

Most new farmers I’ve met don’t get into [farming] because they love the business end of farming, and they don’t get into it because they love management; however it’s a very important piece.

I got into farming thinking that I could avoid people, but it’s been just the opposite.

The turning point for us was digging in and asking those questions [about what customers actually want].

There’s not a strong indigenous demand for local produce around here, so we feel that we have to make our product very convenient to attract customers.

We’re the caboose, and [our customers] are the engine, pulling the production.

For the most part, I’m at peace with removing from my shoulders the burden of educating the American public about making better food choices. We’re farmers, our focus should be on production.

One of the realities of being a small business is relieving yourself of the burden of having to produce everything for everyone.

Ideally you have more markets than you can meet, and you can be selective and choose to grow the most profitable crops to a small, selective number of markets. And that’s how we’re able to make a living on less than one acre… we have a ruthless focus on growing a small number of the most profitable crops.

You shouldn’t use lean to replace your values.

Ruthlessly eliminate anything that is not absolutely necessary for your production system.

Every step that you take is a cost, in the time that you spent and the energy that you spent to take that step.

​Ben’s book is The Lean Farm: How to Minimize Waste, Increase Efficiency, and Maximize Value and Profits with Less Work.

​Ben and Rachel got the conversion kits to turn chest freezers into refrigerators from Backwoods Solar.

When they went through the lean process of sorting, Ben and Rachel kept just two harvest tools: the curved grape and tomato shears and the stainless steel produce knife, both from Johnny’s Selected Seeds.

Ben’s favorite tool is his tractor-mounted root digger, as pictured here: