Episode 54: Rachael Harrop talks agriculture in Isle of Man, the Manx Wildlife Trust, rare British sheep and more.

Appalachian farmer Sara Martin asks us to put on our science hats and talks about farming at high elevation, running a truly diverse small farm, redistributing unsold produce and more.

Hear about how Sara and her husband, Dustin Cornelison, became “accidental farmers,” as their homesteading endeavor just kept growing. Sara talks about how their Two Trees Farm and Sustainabillies business support their family and their community. With 3/4 acre in production, they’ve learned to grow vertically and construct multi-use structures to make the most of their small farm. Sara explains how her background in ecology, rather than agriculture, has shaped her farming experience. Learn about the ecological growing efforts they use to make this challenging property into a productive piece of land.

Sara says when people ask them what they do, their first reaction is, “Putting out fires.” From growing plant starts and diverse vegetable production to using the plentiful shady areas on the farm for growing mushrooms and teaching classes, plus 70+ pastured laying hens, growing 70% of their own food and keeping a blacksmith shop, there’s no shortage of work to be done at Two Trees Farm. Learn about their wasabi-growing experiment and the mobile greenhouse that Dustin built on the back of their pickup truck. Let Sara take you back to science class as she reminds us about how to use the scientific method to make informed decisions on the farm.

Also get to know the community work that Sara does, including with the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project and the local Cooperative Extension advisory board. Sara and Dustin manage Haywood’s Historic Farmers Market and have worked with their team to secure grants to pay farmers for their unsold produce and redistribute it to hunger-relief organizations. “There’s no such thing as a bad day at our farmers market anymore for our vendors,” Sara says.

Sustainabillies website

Sustainabillies on Instagram

Sustainabillies on Facebook

The Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good podcast meets the Coffee with the Chicken Ladies podcast with this episode’s guests, Holly Callahan-Kasmala and Chrisie DiCarlo.

Learn about how these best friends of 40+ years started the Coffee with the Chicken Ladies podcast and why it’s important to them to share their experience with and educate others about poultry. 

Listen to the impressive list of heritage chicken breeds Holly and Chrisie keep on their farms and why. Also, they try to answer the question, “Why chickens?” We talk about what to do with all these eggs—with more than 60 chickens between them—and the difference between backyard eggs and industrial eggs. Learn about the greens and herbs that Holly and Chrisie grow for their chickens, including a collards variety with an appropriate name for feeding to poultry.

Hear about Holly’s and Chrisie’s own farms, including why they took a 17-hour road trip in the pursuit of heritage breeds. Holly explains how she chose the location for the poultry runs, sheep fields and gardens on her farm. She tells us about her fiber arts and why it’s important for her to grow cotton and keep wool sheep now. Chrisie explains that her experience with emergency veterinary care began with a toy doctor’s kit that she used to “take care of” all the neighborhood dogs as a kid and continued on into her career. She tells us about her 3 acres and what it was like to get started with just four chickens as a means of teaching her daughters about the responsibility and care of animals.

Listen to the end for Holly’s and Chrisie’s favorite egg-based dishes!

Coffee with the Chicken Ladies podcast website

On Instagram

On Facebook

Cornell Small Farms Program director Anu Rangarajan talks about supporting farmers as whole people, making farming communities more welcoming spaces, life as a strawberry farmer and a game-changing reduced-tillage technique.

Hear about how the Cornell University Small Farms Program free classes and resources can support your farming—whether your farm in New York or elsewhere—and how they differ from and work in conjunction with Cooperative Extension resources. Anu emphasizes the importance of building networks and utilizing local knowledge in building farms that are socially sustainable as well as sustainable in every other sense of the word. Learn about the Reconnecting with Purpose, Be Well Farming Project and other programs meant to support farmers as whole people and farms as whole systems. (If the concept of “listening like a cow” intrigues you, this is an episode for you.) 

This episode is recorded just a week after the first Northeast Latino/a/x Agricultural Community Conference, and Anu asks the question, How is it that we welcome and create a sense of safety for people who are not from traditional white farmer audiences? As a woman of color working in production agriculture for a couple of decades, this is a question that’s been on her mind. Anu explains how the Cornell Small Farms Program is working on answers to the question from supporting farmworkers to cultivating pathways to farming. 

Get to know how Anu went from being a kid in Detroit to a premed student to a greenhouse employee to a vegetable specialist at a land-grant university. She talks about her organic U-pick strawberry farm—her experience “on the other side” of the research-production relationship. Learn about Anu’s research in small-scale vegetable production, minimum- and no-till system, and soil health. Keep listening for great info about using tarps in the garden to increase nutrient levels, reduce weed populations and more.

Cornell Small Farms Program website

Reduced tillage resources

Futuro en Ag Latinx farmers program

Reconnecting with Purpose

Be Well Farming

Online courses

Chyka Okarter talks about farming an Extension work in Nigeria, putting the lean farming concept into practice, and finding creative financing from within the food system.

Hear about what agriculture looks like in Nigeria—a pursuit with huge potential that Chyka feels is not being met in this country that’s slightly larger than Texas. He talks about growing up in a farming family and wanting to go into agriculture to help farmers work more efficiently.

Learn about the Feed the Future Program, USAID, and Winrock International’s work in bridging the gap between Extension and small-scale farmers where there is one Extension agent to 10,000 farmers. Chyka’s work is to train the trainers working with micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) cohorts to implement the lean principles in farm business approach. They wanted to try using the lean approach rather than the traditional Good Agronomic Practices approach, which can lead to information overload. Hear two examples—in aquaculture and in crop production—of how the six steps of the lean approach have led to big wins for farmers and the whole food chain. (Spoiler alert: One discovery changed the catfish mortality rate from 50%+ to 0% with this approach, and another is leading farmers to more precise organic fertilizer use.)

Finally, listen in on how farmers in Nigeria—a country in economic crisis—are working within the food system for an innovative financing model involving input credits.

 Learn more about Chyka Okarter’s work:

• Winrock International
• Email Chyka

Texas farmer Keisha Johnson talks career transitions, skill sharing, poultry keeping and more.

Hear about Keisha’s career transition from administration and logistics to farming, and her advice for how anyone can take pre-farming-career skills into farm life—”turning your lifestyle into your livelihood.” Keisha talks about growing vegetables in Texas’s hot, arid climate through summer and more mild winter weather, plus her volunteer-potato-growing experiment. (Listen in for her prediction for this winter’s weather!) 

Learn about Keisha’s White Broad Breasted turkey breeding—a rare thing for this breed to be able to naturally reproduce. She talks, too, about the realities of keeping poultry, including predator pressure. 

Hear also about the Texas Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association and their conference happening at the end of January 2024. Keisha talks about getting involved as a first-year board member and the new skill-sharing and job board they’re working on getting off the ground. 

At the very end, Keisha shares her favorite farm meal, sharing a beloved family recipe.

• Keisha Johnson on LinkedIn
• On Instagram

Indiana farmer and The Lean Micro Farm author Ben Hartman talks about the logistics of downsizing. 

Hear about the CSA Ben started while still in high school and how this set him up for a career in farming. Ben shares the statistics that, by the end of this century, we will lose half of the farms that we have now, and the farms that are left will be twice as large. Statistics like this make him believe even more strongly that farmers need to increase their money-making potential.

“We were really bad farmers,” Ben says about his and his wife, Rachel Hershberger’s, Clay Bottom Farm. Listen to his story of farming 5 acres on a growth trajectory, then changing course to start downsizing instead—and now farming just 1/3 acre and making the same amount of money. You’ll hear Ben’s step-by-step entry into the principles of the lean manufacturing system, including examining and getting rid of the seven forms of waste, designing a farm business that achieves specific goals, using the 80/20 principle to identify both customers and products, and more. Also learn a couple of lean concepts for managing workforce and the 5 S organizing system. (This will change how you use and store your farming tools!)

Also get to know the work Ben has done with Winrock International’s USAID farmer-first lean-farming project in Nigeria and his teaching and training work for farmers everywhere.

• Clay Bottom Farm website
• The Lean Micro Farm

Taiwanese-American farmer Li Schmidt talks about growing Asian-heritage crops, growing crops for seeds, small-scale farming in Taiwan and preserving cultural foodways.

Hear about how Li started her Cultural Roots Nursery, in Northern California, in 2020, as a result of the pandemic rather than in spite of it. Most of Li’s customers are Asian American and have encouraged her to grow a broad range of plants from the diaspora community, leading to Li pursuing some creative seed sourcing in addition to looking to a handful of US-based seed companies. Learn how Li has figured out how to grow these mostly subtropical plants in the hot, dry climate of California’s Central Valley.

Check out a short list of Cultural Roots Nursery’s crops:

• Bitter melon
• Long beans
• Taiwanese basil
• Shiso
• Bo Ju Hua chrysanthemum tea plant
• Taro
• Ginger
• Goji berries
• Tong Ho chrysanthemum greens

Li talks about traveling in Taiwan, visiting with farmers and chefs, and learning about the food system and farming there. Hear about the accessible small-scale crop processing and infrastructure there and how this interplays with the food culture there. Li gets into the importance of cultural foodways to her work and way of living.

Learn also about the California Farmer Justice Collaborative, which started out as a group formed to pass California’s Farmer Equity Act in 2017 and now focuses on farmer support and legislation. And Li tells us about the Cal Ag Roots storytelling project that she works on with the California Institute for Rural Studies, unearthing the historical roots of agriculture in California.

Listen to the end to hear Li’s favorite meal using the Asian-heritage foods that she grows.

• Cultural Roots Nursery website
• Cultural Roots Nursery on Instagram
• California Farmer Justice Collaborative 
• Email Li
  

Toronto orchardist Susan Poizner talks fruit-tree care, community orcharding and more with Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good podcast host Lisa Munniksma.

Hear about the evolution of the Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard in Toronto, now in its 15th year. Susan admits to knowing less than she should have about fruit-tree care when she undertook the development of a community orchard and shares her journey through an orcharding self-education. Hear, too, about the volunteers coming together to tend the park’s orchard, pollinator garden and other spaces, and how this community orchard has birthed others.

Susan shares her advice for getting started with a fruit tree so you can be set up for success from the start. (Hint: Some cultivars are disease resistant!) 

Also get to know Susan’s books, Growing Urban Orchards and Grow Fruit Trees Fast, her online orcharding courses, and the monthly Urban Forestry Radio Show and Podcast. 

• Susan’s website, OrchardPeople.com
• The Urban Forestry Radio Show and Podcast
• Growing Urban Orchards and Grow Fruit Trees Fast books

Reeba Daniel talks farm to school, land access, leadership in food systems and more on this episode of Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good.

Reeba talks about their business, Keep Growing Seeds, that allows them to create and manage school gardens, work with “learners” to grow and eat good food, and also examine culture and connection through food. They talk about the benefits and challenges of gardening and garden education in the Pacific Northwest climate of Portland, Oregon, and how they adjust their plans based on the weather. Reeba shares their dream for school gardens and garden education everywhere and why this could be important to all of us.

Hear about Reeba’s own garden, growing and marketing culturally relevant crops from responsibly sourced seeds, and learning about the business side of farming from the Come Thru Market. They talk about the search for farmland, Black land loss and opportunities to create community partnerships for growing space. Learn about some of the value-added products Reeba creates—like vegan honey!—their R&AIRE botanical skincare line, Oregon’s cottage-food laws, and why value-added products are a smart business idea.

Get to know the nonprofit Farmers Market Fund, which matches SNAP purchases at Oregon Farmers Markets. Reeba talks about their experience as a first-time board member—and podcast host Lisa Munniksma gives Reeba (and you!) a pep talk about why “we”—meaning everyday farmers and community members—are fully qualified to serve and actually must serve in leadership roles.

• Keep Growing Seeds website
• shiny Flanary interview with Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good

Amy Glattly talks about gleaning, fermenting, sheep shearing and more in this episode of Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good.

Hear about the Lawrence, Kansas, food and farming scene. Amy talks about how they and fellow farmworkers started a totally volunteer-run gleaning program that donated 3,000 pounds of produce during its first season and involved multiple farmers, restaurants and food-access organizations.

Learn about the incubator farm where Amy grows corn, medicinal herbs and garlic, plus their plans for developing their space there. Get to know Amy’s kitchen workings at Wild Alive Ferments, too, sourcing almost all of their produce locally. 

Learn about Amy’s entree into sheep shearing, from hosting a fundraiser to get them started to an honest assessment about gaining and losing clients. Take notes as Amy goes over what you need to know before your shearer comes to your farm. Finally, hear about Amy’s own podcast, Prairie Ramblings, exploring her favorite things that the prairies of Kansas have to offer, from native plant growers to kombucha. 

• Amy Glattly on Instagram
• Prairie Ramblings podcast on Instagram
• Prairie Ramblings podcast on Spotify