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094: Heather Lekx of Ignatius Farm on Employees, Interns, and Farming with Jesuits

11/24/2016

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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 program and the farm developed in a vacuum left by previous programming and how the farm became a focal point of the Ignatius Centre’s identity. We discuss how her role has changed through the years from the initiation of the CSA program to its current ten acres of production alongside of 250 acres of additional farm production as part of the Ignatius Jesuit Centre’s larger mission.

We also dig deep into Ignatius Farm’s process for hiring great employees and interns, from advertising and interviewing through the onboarding process and beyond. Heather helped to start the CRAFT program for Southwest Ontario, and she shares the ways that her farm provides a mission-driven internship program that also provides for the needs of the farm.
​

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

We believe very strongly that our internship program needs to not just offer work experience but the theory behind it. When interns come for training, if they have  questions, there should be time to answer those questions.

[The Catholic community in Guelph] is a big community, and it’s important for us as farmers to be part of that, to be able to speak to it in ways that engage as many people as possible with the land and with the food.


You can only run one year on adrenaline, and after that you have to change your systems.


The biggest skill I’ve built is  hiring – knowing how to select people that I want to work with, and knowing when… a decision needs to be adjusted.


An internship is just like a new worker. And a new worker, or a young worker, is the person who is most likely to get injured on the job, and is most likely  not to know their rights, and is most likely to not ask all the questions that they need to know to be sure that this is the right job for them.

Show Links

Ignatius Farm provides an extensive information about its internship program and additional resources online.
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Heather was involved in the founding of the CRAFT program in Southwest Ontario.
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093: John Middleton of Fazenda Boa Terra on Rapid Growth, Weed Control, and the Challenges of Becoming a Boss

11/17/2016

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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, where an architectural apprenticeship program was already in place when he and Lidia started the vegetable farm – an arrangement that has been rewarding but has also come with some challenges. We discuss Fazenda Boa Terra’s strategy for investing in equipment and infrastructure, how they’ve grown their operation rapidly and what the future is expected to bring, and how they are dealing with the very full marketplace for local vegetables in southern Wisconsin.

We also dig into John’s weed control tools and techniques for both wide rows and solid-seeded beds, their year-on, year-off cover crop rotation, and the challenges of becoming a boss after many years of working on farms.

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

Never assuming that things are obvious, and… over communicating. You really do have to explain everything in detail.

You don’t want to be a jerk, but [employees and apprentices] have to realize that this is our livelihood. We can’t afford to screw around.

We’re looking at one of our best pepper years… but for some reason, that angle of picking peppers, we both just go, “Not if we have to pick those peppers, we’re not doing these.”


When I get into cover crops, sometimes my brain starts running wild.


​I don’t understand why we think a welder needs four years of apprenticeship to weld a pipe together but we think a farmer’s ready to hit the field after a season.

Show Links

We talked about John’s Lilliston rolling cultivators, a tool he uses for three-point cultivation on the back of his tractor.

Fazenda Boa Terra uses a Sutton Seeder, which allows them to seed solid beds as well as rowed crops.

​Fazenda Boa Terra uses Member Assembler to manage their CSA program, as well as to manage smaller wholesale orders.
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092: John Hendrickson of Stone Circle Farm on Choosing to Farm Part-Time

11/10/2016

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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 remain a part-time farmer. John shares the way he’s organized his production and marketing to provide a financially and emotionally rewarding supplement to his day job.

We dig into John’s narrow crop focus and why that works for him and for his farming business, how he rotates his crops with cover crops for soil building and weed control, the tools he uses to manage sales to his and his wife’s co-workers, and his discovery of the paper pot transplanter system while in Japan and the subsequent founding of his company, Small Farm Works.


​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.

FarmersWeb, making it simple for farms, farm cooperatives, and local food artisans to streamline working with wholesale buyers such as restaurants, schools, corporate kitchens, retails stores, and more. 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

I didn’t like how anxious and stressed I was all the time… so I ended up decided that I’m not ever going to push this farm to a scale to supplant the income that I want and need to support the household.

It was going really well. If I had been a little bit more bold and had been enjoying it a little bit more, I probably would have really pushed it.

I really didn’t want to be an employee manager, not something I enjoyed doing. I just recognized that about myself.

If you’re going to grow a business and have employees, you have to be really organized and be a really good manager.

I think I was happiest as a farmer when I was a farm employee.

I think having a smaller set of crops opens up incredible opportunities to perhaps be a better farmer.

Show Links

Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems (CIAS) does collaborative research and education on sustainability issues.

John lead the Grower to Grower project, a study of economics on market farms.

John organizes and teaches the Wisconsin School for Beginning Market Growers with three other instructors – coming up in January in Madison, Wisconsin.


At Stone Circle farm, John relies heavily on the Williams Toolbar System  from Market Farm Implement for weed control, and also uses is to harvest his garlic.


John uses theHatfield Transplanter to set out his pepper transplants.


Plans for John’s favorite tool, a harvest cart designed by Dan Guenthner at Common Harvest Farm, is available at marketfarmtoolbox.com.


John and his neighbor bought a barrel-style root washer from Roeter’s in Michigan


John’s equipment company, where he sells the Japanese Paper Pot Transplanter, is Small Farm Works.
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091: Brooke Salvaggio and Daniel Heryer of Urbavore on Creating an Urban Farm and Farmstead

11/3/2016

1 Comment

 
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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 manage fertility. Because their production system also relies on the incorporation of a 200-hen laying flock, we also dig into the challenges of managing egg production alongside of the vegetables. And a goose comes into the story, too.

Brooke and Daniel share how they developed their off-the-grid infrastructure, including an engineered filtration system to draw potable water from a pond on their farm. We also discuss the impacts of bringing a second child into the family and onto the farm, and the challenges of building a farm from the ground up with a minimal debt load.

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

We live in a pretty exciting neighborhood. There’s shooting from time to time, there’s a meth house down the street. And you’ve got the organic farm…

We’ve paid for all of [our infrastructure] with the food that we grew in these fields.

A lot of the farmers around here only know how to grow in a tunnel. They’ve gotten spoiled by that controlled environment. We’re the opposite. We love growing in the field. We want to use as little plastic as possible.

At first when I started this quest to plant a bunch of beneficials, [I thought,] this is a bunch of BS. They look pretty but I’m not controlling my pest pressure this way. Ten years later I feel like it totally pays off out here.

We’re extremely focused with our time and with the time of our laborers out here.
​

[Our chickens] are our best farm workers. We could not do the no-till system without them.    

Show Links

Brooke mentioned trying to manage their orchard using Michael Phillips’ techniques. Michael is the author of two great books, The Holistic Orchard: Tree Fruits and Berries the Biological Way and The Apple Grower: A Guide for the Organic Orchardist.

Urbavore uses Electronet poultry netting from Premier to keep their chickens in and ground-based predators out. I’ve worked for years, and I think they’re great.
​

Daniels favorite tool is a Rogue hoe, made from recycled agricultural disc blades.
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