Mike Hoopengardner, of Redbud Farm and Caprini Creamery (Spiceland, Ind.), joins host Nick Carter to discuss goat farms and growing pains for farmers.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (00:04):
Welcome to More Than A Mile, a local food podcast from Market Wagon, focused on connecting you to local food through farmer stories from across America. I'm Nick Carter, your host, a farmer and the CEO and co-founder of Market Wagon. We are your online farmer's market with a mission to enable food producers to thrive in their local and regional markets. Food is so much more than just nutrients and calories. It's actually the fabric that holds us together. And I look forward to crafting a generational quilt of farmers' stories and experiences, the victories and challenges of individuals, families, and teams doing their part to help democratize food in America. Thanks for joining me for this episode of More Than A Mile and thank you for buying local food. It's one critical step in making an investment in food for future generations.
(00:54):
My guest today is Mike Hoopengardner, affectionately known as Hoop, by a lot of people in the local food movement. And I am really excited to have you here with me, Mike, because you were also with me in the very first-ever Market Wagon market day. Delivering, what if I recall was only 12 total customers and you might've brought one piece of goat cheese, but you were there from the beginning. Do you remember that?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (01:20):
Oh yeah. Oh yeah, no, we were glad to be part of it.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (01:24):
We were glad to have you. We were really glad to have you. I want to talk today about you and your journey into becoming a farmer and what the consumers that have supported your farm along the way have meant, but just to get going--So from what I know about you, you and Kristy, you're a professional stained glass solderer and Kristy is a PhD chemist.
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (01:53):
She's an immunologist.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (01:55):
So tell me, Mike, how does a stained glass window solderer and a PhD immunologist become farmers?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (02:04):
You purchase five acres, a couple goats and a couple llamas, and those coupled goats multiply rapidly. And then you're looking for, is there a way we can generate some income from this? And then at the same time, Christy was looking for an exit plan from Eli Lilly. So we were looking at a long-term exit plan and we leveraged every dollar we could find in our portfolio and bought 57 acres of nothing but corn and soybeans and started building a farm.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (02:51):
Wow. And when was that?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (02:53):
15 years ago now?
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (02:56):
15 years ago. So, 2006. That's a big bet. And tell me about, you said you bought corn and soy land and you turn that into a goat farm. So, you, you were farming or you were raising goats anyways, before you bought those 57 acres. Is that right?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (03:18):
Yeah, that's correct.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (03:19):
Where was that at those five acres?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (03:22):
In Fortville.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (03:23):
And today your farm is in Spiceland, Indiana. How far is that from Fortville?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (03:28):
About 20 minutes by car. About, we looked at it this way. Christy was commuting to downtown Indianapolis, and she would get off at the Greenfield exit and we moved that out one exit to the Knightstown exit. So about 12 miles more of driving on the freeway to Indianapolis.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (03:52):
Got it. So tell me about the transformation from corn and soy to a herd of, and you'll have to inform me how many goats now are living on these 57 acres?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (04:06):
We have a little over 200 goats and we're milking currently 72, twice a day. And as far as the transition, I was not a farmer, not even close, but I used a lot of resources that are available to us. The NRCS, Purdue Extension, the Soil and Water Conservation District. A lot of people that actually had expertise in farming assisted us, and that's part of what they do professionally. So we felt like we were in good hands. And boy, I'm proud. So proud of this place because we put in every fence post, over two miles of fence. I planted 50 acres of pasture grasses, which is a funny story because I planted them one day, $10,000 of seed. And knowing that it takes a week to 10 days to germinate at day three, I was out here on my hands and knees crawling around wondering if I wasted $10,000. And I did that every day and kind of wondered if at that point if I really should be farming or not, but no, we built everything. So we were the general contractors, designed and built everything with all of that assistance.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (05:42):
50 acres of pasture grass into what had been commodity grain production for, do you have any idea how long it had been in grain production?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (05:51):
From the time it was cleared from being a woods? So over a hundred years easily.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (05:59):
Wow. What--did it take a while for that--I know it probably took seven to 10 days to get the germination and you could see your seed spiking up. So, you know, you didn't throw $10,000 away to the wind, but then what was the production of the pasture like, to begin with? Did it take a while for you to build the soils up, to get you the kind of production that you need to support the now over 200 goats that are making their living off of the grass?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (06:26):
It did. And one of the advantages, Kristy and I decided to let those pastures grow two to three years before the animals ever saw them. So we did that early on that's one of the first things we did was planted that pasture grass so that we could get them established. As we're building the fence, as building the farms, building the barns, building the dairy, building the house--we worked really hard to get those established and we didn't fertilize that much. We basically added some compost and things, but we didn't go out and buy tons and tons of conventional fertilizer. We kind of let mother nature take its course. And in the process, we planted a number of warm-season grasses, which are deep-rooted grasses, knowing that we needed to break up the clay a little bit. And we were very methodical using--wouldn't, does this surprise you, using science to make it work.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (07:39):
And I know science plays a ton into your business especially in the dairy side of it. But how much of this did you learn from Purdue Extension and from your Soil and Water Conservation District and the NRCS programs. Was that your source of, at least primary data, to know how the science of soil works?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (08:01):
Yes. And then this was the fun day. I took my daughter to a Purdue forage day where they were talking about all of these new methods of foraging and growing and composting and all of this stuff. And I happened to sit next to an 80-year-old farmer from Southern Indiana. And he kept nudging me and he's like, "Hey, young man, we've been doing this for 200 years." So I started relying on the wisdom of old farmers because they've been doing it for so long. And people always tell me what's old is new. And it's like, it just keeps cycling round and round.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (08:48):
Yeah. We have similar stories even just in terms of nitrogen and its impact on the land. And, and my dad said, "Yeah, grandpa always told me if the pasture was getting a little anemic, he'd run chickens over it." Now he didn't know why he probably didn't even know what nitrogen was, but he knew what it did.
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (09:05):
Yeah. And our thing was this guy sat next to me. He's like, "Son, grow Clover, just grow Clover."
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (09:15):
Yep. Most people think of clover as a weed when they're looking at their lawn, they're out there, putting out weed and feed, trying to get rid of the broadleaves and clovers. One of the best things you can have mixed into your pasture.
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (09:26):
So you will see me out there every January with clover, frost seeding spots that are already marked and ready to go.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (09:36):
So today your pasture maintenance includes taking a look at what's producing where in the pasture, and then you mark spots and say, "Well, this one, this spot still needs a little bit more clover. This spot needs more of this or that?"
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (09:49):
Oh yeah. Have to.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (09:51):
I think a lot of people think that maintaining a pasture must be easy. It's just grass. We do it in our front yards all the time. But pasture is, as much of the crop is what you grow as the milk is. Wouldn't you say?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (10:07):
It's a huge key to the taste of our milk, which contributes to the taste of our cheese, which if we have a great forage like this year, it lowers the input because we don't have to feed near as much grain. It's Robert Zupancic who's our NRCS grazing specialist. He comes out every now and then. And he always pats me on the back and he says, "You're becoming a pretty good forage farmer." And I always take that as a huge compliment but being a forage farmer.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (10:47):
Yeah. We talked in our last episode about farmers, like you, Mike, you, you serve sort of an intercessory role. You are the steward between consumers and the land. You are the one mediating the relationship between the consumer of food and the soil that actually ultimately produces that, that food. It sounds like you're doing a pretty good job of it. Thanks for that. I want to talk about goats. So you chose goats. It sounds like a hobby evolved into a herd, huh?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (11:18):
Oh yeah. A big herd. No, when we chose goats, once again, going back to the science, we chose Nigerian Dwarf, which are small goats. They don't produce near as much milk as the larger breeds, but they produce the highest, milk fat. Cheese needs cream. You need fat in cheese. So that was the mainstay of that. And then we brought in Oberhaslis, which are a medium-size breed, also producing a higher milk fat with larger utters, larger capacity. And then we started crossbreeding the two of them. So we were trying to get the high milk fat and get more capacity, which that's essentially the way we built the milk side of the business, is one summer we delivered 233 kids in about a 60 day period of time. Go big or go home.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (12:26):
That's right. Now, the thing about dairy goats, it sounds like you were committed to dairy from the beginning, but unless I'm mistaken, there's not a commodity market for goat milk. So if you weren't able to sell it directly to consumers or in stores or building your own channels, is there anywhere that you could call up and say, "Hey, I've got a couple of hundred extra gallons of milk," and take a commodity price for it?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (12:53):
No.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (12:55):
So, and you laugh. So there's, there's no safety net. It's just go big or go home.
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (13:02):
Kristy and I have been married, it'll be 39 years in May, and we've always bet on ourselves. And we, we just, we knew this was a sound bet. At that point, when we had the board of health out here to look at our plans for the dairy, they all had smiles on their face. Cause nobody had built a goat dairy and cheese processing plant for goats in Indiana, since Judy Schad in the seventies.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (13:36):
So you had to build a product that people were going to consume in their kitchens because there wasn't a, there was nowhere further down the supply chain for you to send the milk where somebody else was going to do something with it. So right there on your farm, in your barn, you take the raw goat's milk straight from the goat and it leaves your farm packaged as ready-to-eat cheese. Is that right?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (14:04):
Yes. When Kristy and I looked at farming, we felt like the only way we were going to operate a small farm and make a living was to produce the value-added product here on the farm. I have, I love commodity guys. We depend on commodity guys for a lot of the things on our farm--boy, that to us that was too risky, especially on 57 acres. There's no way you can make that work. So we wanted a value-added product. One of the reasons we chose the goat cheese, Kristy's science background, and cheese just line up perfectly. And the other thing is the business side. And we never ever leave thinking about the business is, for every gallon of milk that we get, we get a pound and a half of goat cheese that we retail at the farmer's market for $24 to $30 a pound--I'm sorry, a gallon. So if you have $24 to $30 for every gallon, suddenly it becomes, "Okay, we can make this work." And then it's all up to scale. You know, you just got to scale up to where you're paying your bills.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (15:28):
Yeah. There's a lot of investment and risk in that. I mean, you had to build a milking parlor and then the cheese room and I'm sure quite a bit of other infrastructure. What was your biggest challenge getting started?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (15:43):
Knowledge, lack of knowledge, after we'd been milking goats and making cheese for about 10 and a half years now, we are so much better now at everything because we've built that base of knowledge and understanding and made a lot of errors. But that was the thing--let's Google "build a goat farm," and there's nothing. That's gonna give you information that we needed to make this happen. There's no, right now there's one reference guide, but even, like cheesemaking, Kristy uses a textbook from the 1970s, so it's just, it's not there.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (16:35):
Yeah. You're not going to find it on Google, but I do think Mike, you're being a little modest. You said that you're much better today than you were then. But, and this isn't just my words. I think some large institutions have deemed you one of the best, right? You've won awards, you've got national acclaim or even international acclaim. I'm going to give you a chance here--I want you to brag a little bit. Tell me a little bit about what the world says about your cheese.
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (16:59):
Well, we were voted, or we went to a cheese competition at the American Cheese Society National Convention, and our goat milk feta was named the best goat milk feta in the United States. And that was in 2019, and they haven't had anything since then. So we haven't entered any competitions at this point, other than that. But I think the thing that we look at is who buys our cheese and we're in some of the best restaurants in the Indianapolis area. St. Elmo's, Harry and Izzy's, the Patachou Group, the Cunningham Group. We have so many of the top chefs in Indianapolis that will stop by the farmers market or come out to the farm or visit with Kristy on the phone about how our cheeses are doing and what they like about our cheeses. So to us, you know, as much as winning awards is cool, and to Kristy, it's not cool at all. She could care less if we win awards, but it's important that the chefs that have that unique taste really love our cheese and they do so that's award enough for us.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (18:28):
That's really cool. Well, congratulations on both the external award and also all the tiny awards you get every single week when chefs call you up in order again, and again and again, for the last 11 years. You've built an amazing product and an amazing farm. I want to touch a little bit just about what your weeks look like today. What does a typical week for Mike Hoopengardner look like as a farmer, now 11 years into this?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (18:58):
You really want to know? Every morning my alarm goes off on my phone, hopefully, it's sitting near me, at 3:31 in the morning. And I value that one minute, so that's why it's 3:31--that's a valuable minute of sleep for me. And I'm in the barn by between 4 and 4:30 in the morning, doing chores, watering, getting the milking parlor prepped, and ready to go. And then it's run 72 goats up to the milking parlor, milk them, and get them back out to the pasture where they can enjoy some of this beautiful weather we're having today. And then I'm filtering the milk, putting it into the bulk tank to refrigerate it, and then cleaning up. So I have to clean, do dishes, seven days a week, twice a day. And I'm usually done by about 9 o'clock in the morning. So 4 to 4:30 to 9 o'clock chores and milking in the morning. From 9 to about 1:30 in the afternoon is my time to work on the farm.
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (20:15):
So today I was building a loft in one of the barns. So I was out there framing up a loft, running errands, picking up feed, whatever needs to be done. And then at 1:30, that whole cycle starts over again where we do chores, get the milking parlor ready, we milk. And then I'm in the parlor until roughly 5 - 5:30 every day. And that's just my side of the farm. That's just the farm side. Kristy will spend a little bit of time with me in the morning and the afternoon helping with milking, doing some filtering. And then she spends the rest of her day making cheese. So she's pasteurizing milk, she's separating curds and whey. She's draining, she's packaging. She hand mixes all the cheeses and we do this seven days a week. So there's no, there's no day off. Cause they've gotta be milked twice a day, every day.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (21:26):
Did you know that when you got into this, did anybody sit you down, did one of those old 80-year-old farmers sit you down and say, "Son, let me tell you what milking, what a dairy farmer life is like," as opposed to either even meat or other kinds of animal livestock?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (21:43):
Yeah. But you know, I was closer to your age then. So I was like, "Piece of cake. I can do that." Now that I'm 62, it's like, "Ah, you know, wait a minute. This is a lot of work." So yeah, we did. But and to be honest with you, we, we believed in ourselves and believed that we could be this big. I don't think we really planned for it properly. I don't think that we were, I don't think we're still ready to the scale that we're at now and the scale that we could potentially be.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (22:25):
Well even us young bucks have a little bit of wisdom, Mike. When I was thinking about starting my farm, having grown up on a dairy, knowing exactly what you just described, it was the furthest thing from my mind. So I got to tell you, you're a harder working guy than I am, and you're more willing to take it because dairy was off the, off the table for me. But it is amazing what you've built. And it's interesting. You say you are, you still think that there's a lot of blue sky ahead?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (22:55):
We could triple in size if we choose to. We easily could triple in size.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (23:02):
The demand is there. And you now have the master of your own destiny. How much do you want to work? How big do you want to make it? And it sounds like you and Kristy are enjoying life right now.
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (23:16):
We are, we're tired. We're, we're gonna take this winter and kinda evaluate things and come up with a short term, long term, medium-term plans. And you know, some of the struggles I know small businesses are having everywhere is the lack of employees. And we've hit that wall. Trying to hire people for the farm is a struggle. And either we've got to figure out a way to overcome that struggle or we can't grow because we physically, at this point, cannot do any more than we're doing right now.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (23:56):
So if anybody's listening, and everything that might describe to you is idyllic and you want to be a part of it, Mike, how can they get in touch with you to figure out if, if one of our listeners could become a farmhand, even one or two days a week,
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (24:11):
CapriniCreamery.com. Caprini is "baby goat" in Italian. CapriniCreamery.com.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (24:22):
There you go. Well, hopefully, we can find you some farmhands because it is great work and it is incredibly rewarding. And something that very few people have the opportunity to experience anymore. So hopefully we can do that. What advice do you have for young farmers or first-time farmers who may be thinking about turning their own little five-acre and couple of goat hobby into a dairy, or anything similar?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (24:51):
Don't forget. There's a bottom line. As weird as that sounds everybody wants to turn their hobby into a business. Well, part of the definition of running a business is making money. So I think a lot of people fall into that romantic vision of turning their hobby into making money. And you gotta be cold when it comes to making money. You've got to, you gotta make hard decisions. So that's always what I tell young people. It's like, you know, it's great that you want to be whatever it is, grass-fed, organic, this, that, the other thing. But at the end of the day, does it pay your bills? And if it doesn't pay your bills, you're going to be frustrated, angry, and you're going to quit. So remember the bottom line.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (25:53):
And wanting to quit, that plays into the definition of sustainability. There's a lot of people that toss out the word sustainability. We had a conversation years ago with Purdue about, "Well, what is the definition of a sustainable farm?" And I said, "That you could keep doing it." That's the definition of sustainability. So if you're not making any money at it, the next generation is not going to pick it up and it's not going to continue. Well, Mike, I know that our listeners can support you on MarketWagon.com, but you're also, you're out there. You mentioned a lot of restaurants. You mentioned farmers markets. How can people connect with you and where can we find your amazing award-winning cheese?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (26:35):
We are very fortunate that we have Ideal Food Group as our distributor. So you can find us in Moody's Butcher Shops, Joe's Butcher Shop, Traders Point Creamery--which, Traders Point I'm going to go sideways a little, but Traders Point was the very first place that took our cheese in retail. And the way it happened was, was kind of neat. We were not yet ready to open. We've had the board of health out, they've seen and approved our equipment. Traders Point Creamery's temperature probe, that they have to have to make cheese, failed one day as the board of health inspector was there, which is your worst nightmare. And the board of health inspector said, "Hey, Caprini is not using theirs for about three weeks. Why don't you call them and see if you can send somebody out and unwire it and bring it over here and hook it up?"
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (27:42):
And they did. And Kristy was very leery of--never used before, you know--I haven't even used it yet and I'm loaning it out. And, but it went to Traders Point and they used it. And then Jane and Fritz, when they first saw that what we had done and helped them out. They're like, "When you guys make cheese, come see us." So we had cheese, we took it over there and they're like, "We would love to have you in our store. This is wonderful cheese." And do you know that gave us such a name in the marketplace that we could throw out to everybody. So who else carries your cheese? Traders Point Creamery. "Oh my gosh, really? They make award-winning cheese there," and it gave us such credibility in the market. So I always give them just a huge shout-out because they took care of us, but Traders Point, Good Earth, you can find us at Amelia's Bread in both of their locations. You can find our cheeses a lot of places. You can go to CapriniCreamery.com and we have a somewhat updated list of locations. And you can find us [in] specialty shops. We haven't reached out and got into the big stores.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (29:02):
Well, Mike, I'm glad that you mentioned the value that having an established name in the marketplace, throwing their support behind you, and what that can have to get the momentum going because you were able to do the exact same thing for us. Bring this full circle for Market Wagon, getting, going, Hey, we have an idea for an online farmers market. And we want to get this going. And there were a lot of food producers on the sidelines and Mike Hoopengardner was in. And I know that meant a lot to us getting going. And here we are today almost six years from that point. And sounds like, sounds like we owe you a debt of gratitude as well. So I'm really glad to have you here on the show today as our first guest and talking about your farm. Is there anything else that I haven't asked you that you'd like to be able to talk about?
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (29:55):
Just a couple things. The one thing is you, we talked about gratitude. We, we have so much gratitude for Market Wagon because a year and a half ago, 70 to 80% of our business was restaurant business. And the government decided we weren't going to open restaurants for a while, and restaurants shut down and we literally, you have to milk goats, you have to make cheese, there's no stopping. And we were making for about three weeks, we were making cheese, not knowing where it was gonna end up. Just kind of keeping some faith and knowing we could figure stuff out. And then suddenly this place called Market Wagon went from 200 to 300 orders a week to, "Hey, we're, we're so far at capacity, we're going to go to a second day. We're going to do Tuesdays and Thursdays." And I kept seeing these sponsored Facebook posts with my ugly mug on there, milk and goats.
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (31:12):
And I'm like, you know--and it made a huge difference. And I use that example when I would do deliveries and I would talk to people, people that had stores, people that had, for instance, Charlie down at Amelia's, they turned their bakery and restaurant into a bodega grocery store, all online, and Market Wagon, Green Bean, these online marketplaces set an example that it's very cool. It's become the standard now. And if you have a store, you have an online presence where you're selling things and people can pick them up. So I wanted to tell you guys, thank you. And I know we've done that privately a number of times. We just appreciate the effort. And I do remember this, Ryan made a Facebook post right about the start of the pandemic. And he was kinda, I don't know if he was throwing shade at the government or what, you know, what he was doing.
Mike Hoopengardner (Redbud Farm/Caprini Creamery) (32:26):
And I just responded, "Ryan, you just got to figure out how to get my cheese into people's houses," and you guys did. So we really appreciate that. So that's the first thing. And I'm sorry, now I'm on the soapbox. So here we go. Farmers needed this outlet of Market Wagon. A farmers market is--for some people they're going to make somewhat of a living, but I think most people have realized, in our business, in the farming side, I'm not going to have a home run, one place I'm going to sell all of my cheese to. It's gotta be a balanced, diversified distribution group and Market Wagon has become one of those huge cogs in our big wheel that makes ends meet at the end of the day. And I know that's true for a lot of farmers. They have an avenue now where they can sell stuff over winter, where their winter market may shut down. I see them on Thursdays they're there packing bags. So both of those things. Thank you. We appreciate it.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (33:50):
Well, thank you. It only works because it works for both of us and I'm glad that it works for you, and I'm really glad to have your amazing products on Market Wagon. So thanks for being with us from the beginning.
Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (34:10):
Thanks for listening to this episode of More Than A Mile. Be sure to sign up for Market Wagon at MarketWagon.com or after downloading the Market Wagon app for iOS or Android. Follow us at @MarketWagon on Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook for stories, recipes, special announcements, news, and just digital handshakes from our friendly farming community. If you enjoy More Than A Mile, please rate the podcast and leave a review on iTunes, Castbox, Podchaser or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Thank you for continuing to support local food.
