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.

It finally dawned on me, that I want to be the person doing the farming, not the person supporting the farmers.

That’s the beauty of (this area) – is that it’s not Portland, it’s not Montpelier. It’s its own crusty blend.

[Zoe’s sister Abby] was a little bit ahead of the curve [with her salad greens in the 1990s], but there were just enough receptive chefs and a couple of health food stores and, combined with all of that, an absolutely beautiful product.

Where we live, we’re the last stop on the Sysco truck, so to get this totally fresh product that lasts for a couple of weeks and was beautiful to behold, I think it was an easy sell.

I like the challenge of something new.

[Our independent but cooperative business structure has] worked really beautifully. It’s meant that as a family we could farm together, side-by-side, but there’s none of the tension around being told what to do by someone else, or working more or less than someone else. Everyone can just be their own independent operator. And we can still have a nice time together on family dinner night.

You can’t really argue with QuickBooks. It turns it into this objective thing instead of this subjective emotional battleground.

Farming with two kids in tow, I had the hardest season ever this year… I had moments where I said words I’ve never said out loud. It’s really humbling to come up against that.

To realize that the last four years of having my first child, I’ve been a farmer and, oh, yeah, I have a kid. She’s in the backpack, comes with me everywhere. But now that there’s two, and you’ve got a four year old and an infant, I’ve had to realize that I’m a mother and I’m a farmer too. It had to flip a little bit in order for me not to lose my mind.

I’ve made a conscious choice that I like this scale, I like being in the field and being hands on, and I also like the management responsibilities.

Sometimes I think, what would it be like to farm with my partner? But someone once told me, “Don’t get your money where you get your honey.”

Our little town has become a hotbed for local food.

When you live in a small town, word travels fast. And it really matters to treat people well and to have integrity in business.

Take a deep breath, life is long. There’s another year, and another one after that. It’ll never be static, and what a blessing, because it keeps it really fun and inspiring, and every single year is a new adventure.

Zoe worked at Sauvie Island Organics in Portland before returning to the family farm.

Zoe’s sister, Abby, learned about greens production from Pete Johnson of Pete’s Greens, who has also been featured on the Farmer to Farmer Podcast.

Zoe learned about draft horses from Doc Hammill, who offers instructional workshops on driving and working horses in harness.

Zoe shared her housing experience from the Terra Madre conference in Turin, Italy.

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.

Farmigo: The Farmer to Farmer Podcast is brought to you by Farmigo CSA Management Software, providing the tools you need to manage your CSA business. Farmigo CSA Management Software has a customizable management system to meet your farm’s specific needs.

Everything in farming’s about timing.

The game of farming to me is that something screwy is constantly happening. It’s about keeping your cool and your creativity, and being able to laugh and go, “Well, we learned one there.”

I still think vegetable farming is trickier, because there’s so many different crops with vegetables. At least with grain you’ve got three categories: your corn, your small grains, and your beans.

As we get established, it would be fun to trade five pounds of my improved Reid’s Yellow Dent with another farmer from Iowa or Kentucky so that we can keep trading our genetics. And it will end up making our corn all the better by having those inputs.

[The genetics work] keeps it interesting. It keep my mind working and keeps me engaged in farming in a way that I really enjoy because there’s always something new to mull over while you’re two-row cultivating five acres of corn.

When it comes down to it I just like a challenge…

It’s making your body… it stems from the soil. Everything we have.

In a world where there is so much strife and chaos… there’s something about nature that’s very simple, strong, stabilizing force. And I think that that can come through food as well.

It’s fun to harvest it year after year and see your efforts pay off.

The truth is, if I wasn’t using all this old equipment, I’m not sure [my dad] would be such a fan. He loves old equipment, and my operation wouldn’t exist if he didn’t have that passion.

Because it’s a year-round sale with a grocer or restaurant, it’s a different relationship. Once you step away from those seasonal crops, and get into a crop that is available year-round for them, you need to make sure you have enough of it to supply it for a year.

Everything we planted back in April is for sale in 2016 and even into 2017, so you’re trying to plan almost two years in advance when you’re working with these food-grade commodities.

It’s hard with the local foods movement… you have an expectation that if somebody says something, that their word is good until they tell you otherwise. But that’s not always the case. People are in this for the money and to capitalize on the movement, and it’s good to be aware of that. That’s where a contract comes into play.

In college sometime, I just stopped stop caring what other people thought. I just decided that I would approach everything in life with openness and with a smile. And that changed everything for me.

Andy and I both mentioned working with the Angelic Organics Learning Center, which does education and outreach work for farmers and consumers. 

The article in Illinois Farmer Today about Hazzard Free Farm.

And although it wasn't mentioned on the show, below is a really wonderful documentary short by Chicago-area film director Pablo Korona that tells the story of Andy and Hazzard Free 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.

We decided to pull out of Portland entirely, which was terrifying. It felt like we spent more time driving around delivering produce than we did growing the produce.

So we decided, let’s make it a more farmer-centric CSA farm, where we’re at the center of our community.

The vast majority [of our members] live within ten miles of the farm.

We shoot for somewhere around 25 lbs per share on average over the course of the season, which is a lot of vegetables for some people, and it’s almost nothing for others.

It used to be a beautiful CSA share, we’d pack [a homemade cedar boxes] full of veggies… at some point of time we decided to move away from that and sell the crates to our CSA members, and switch over to more of a farmers market-style pickup.

The real power of that switch [from pre-packed shares to a market-style pickup] was that it empowered CSA members to make choices.

If anybody wants to make some money and do some real good in people’s lives, get a container of drip tape and figure out how to start selling it at an appropriate price in northern Uganda.

As soon as Jess showed up on the farm, it really started to change from a garden to a farm. I was still bunching kale with twine…

With any money that we had left over from the loan, we invested in infrastructure as fast as we could. And then, of course, we built the infrastructure ourselves. Not that we were skilled builders but we were willing to learn and we didn’t have enough money to do it otherwise.

After working so hard [the first year that we owned the farm and installed the infrastructure], that was the catalyst to ask, what do we actually need to make this farm sustainable. Our fall CSA was the first time that we asked the CSA for what we needed, so we upped the price on our CSA. And when people asked [us to] explain that, we were both, “That’s what it’s worth. We won’t be willing to grow it for anything less.”

This has been the first year that Jess and I have got energy [at the end of the growing season].
Our CSA community is so vibrant right now, and it’s taken years to get there. It’s taken a lot of thinning of CSA members to find the cream of the crop, and now we want to hold onto them.

Instead of [our customers] saying, what can the CSA offer me, now we’re getting questions about what can we do for you guys?

You don’t come to our farm to get a good deal on food. You come to our farm to get what you pay for.

The thing that gives [us] energy is not just seeing the fruits of our labor, it’s seeing the fruits of our labor being eaten [via social media]. To have a way to witness that just couldn’t be more fulfilling.

Communication is at the heart of it. And eating well is at the heart of it. So we make sure we have our three meals of the day so that have capacity to work these long hours, and also so that we have the capacity to communicate with us.

When you work with the same person day in and day out, it’s just really important to be a good person for the other person and for yourself.

If we weren’t eating really well, if we weren’t taking care of ourselves, if we lost our way of communicating, this just wouldn’t be sustainable. The partnership, the relationship, is at the heart of everything we do.

When we work together, it’s not as stressful as it could be if I had to be responsible for coming up with all of these creative solutions and problem solving.

We work on communication every single day, and we work on making sure that we’ve got that trust element, and that relationship element, and that our needs are being met and that we’re eating well. That is the basis of how we function and survive working as much as we do on this farm.

Brian talked about his work with Aprovecho, a non-profit south of Eugene, Oregon, dedicated to investigating sustainable human settlement in North America.  

Jess and Brian use a 15,000 BTU air conditioner and a CoolBot in a 12-foot by 20-foot cooler.

Brian and Jess talked about their experience with Farm Credit Services as a lender when they purchased their farm. In the northwest United States, Northwest Farm Credit Services has an AgVision program designed to help young and beginning producers access credit and succeed at farming. I just learned about this program when I was at a train-the-trainer program in Montana, and it sounds like a great program. If you’re in Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington and Alaska, I would definitely have a look at this program.

Brian’s favorite tool is a custom-built flame weeder.  The linked photos provide a good overview of the construction and what makes it special.

Tom Robbins’ novel, Jitterbug Perfume, has some great recognitions of beets, and is worth reading if you’re a lover of beets. And to really understand the Pacific Northwest, you need to understand blackberries, and there’s no better resource than his Still Life with Woodpecker.

Jess and Brian shared an excerpt from Wendell Berry’s poem, The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer.  You’ll find the text and reading of the poem by Wendell Berry at the link above.

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.

If you think going through an investment analysis before you make the investment takes the fun out of farming, you ought to try going through bankruptcy.

You work with a few people who are in such serious trouble and you see the kind of suffering that they go through, and it’s hard not to want to do everything you can to keep people from getting into that situation in the first place.

There is a real hunger for the business planning, and [new farmers] want to know, they want to do a good job.

If I had to do pick one thing, and say that this is the single most important thing that you’ll do with starting a farm, it would be to do a month-by-month cash flow projection.

Land can be a good investment, but you’re setting yourself up with a lot of overhead expense before you have your sales established.

You should set your quality of life goal first, because it’s easy to set your business goal and then your quality of life goes out the window as you try to meet your business goal.

Lots of beginning farmers try to get going as quickly as they can, and they overlook the fact that they should have some working capital built up before they get started. If they don’t, and something goes wrong, they’re sunk.

Take a look at opportunities to partner with somebody, whether it’s an experienced farmer or a social-impact investor.

Personally, I think this is one of the best times there’s ever been to start a farm. Even though land values are high and money isn’t necessarily easy to come by, the infrastructure we’ve got around people getting started [is very different than when I got out of school].

In the short term, cash flow is much more critical [than profitability], because if your cash flow is negative, you can’t survive for very many months. Profitability… comes into play when you’re ready to retire or pass it on to the next generation. If the farm hasn’t been profitable, the next generation isn’t going to be able to buy the assets at market value.

Debt is like a chainsaw. It can help you accomplish something really quickly and do some really good work for you, but if you don’t know how to manage it, you can cut your leg off.

I saw too many people who figured that, if I keep my head down and I keep farming and I farm that much harder, every day that I’m on this farm is another day that somebody hasn’t taken me off it  At some point, you’re going to come to the end, and every day, your options become less and less. That’s why it’s so critical to get to people early on and get them back on the right track.

The more stress you’re under, the fewer things you can focus on. Some people, when they are under serious financial stress, they literally can’t do anything to help themselves with that situation once they’re into it.

It takes a lot of courage to ask for help.

Sometimes when you get so close to it, you can’t see what the fix is… sometimes it helps to  have somebody come in from the outside who isn’t so close to the business.

Paul recommended FarmAid as a first point of contact for farmers who are looking for resources for help.

Paul and I were co-authors, with Craig Chase, of Fearless Farm Finances, a book about financial management for farmers.

Paul is the Emerging Markets Specialist with Badgerland Financial.

I mentioned the MOSES board – that’s the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service, and the MOSES Organic Farming Conference.

Paul discussed the USDA Farm Service Agency Beginning Farmer Loan program, where the farmer can get started with a 5% down payment.

Paul recommended FarmAid as a first point of contact for farmers who are looking for resources for help. Their Farmer Resource Network connects farmers to a directory of trusted resource organizations. They also have an 800 number and email if you need immediate assistance.