Episodios
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Lewis Hughes, land steward and local-food distribution pro
Hear about Lewis Hughesâs journey into farming, from conventional pig and corn farms to international agricultural research to organic farming and cooperative farming. His vast experience in the farming world set him up to be able to work with small-scale farmers in distributing their products to wider markets.
Learn about the What Chefs Want (formerly called Creation Gardens) food distributor and its local-foods procurement arm, Local Food Connection. Lewis explains how a small-scale grower in Northeast Ohio might typically only be able to distribute their food to a farmers market or local food hub and how What Chefs Want can now help them sell throughout the Midwest and beyond. He talks about the grant funding (USDA Local Food Purchase Assistance, USDA Local Food for Schools and others) that has helped rapidly build capacity and infrastructure in the local food system and positively impact farmers and consumers.
Take Lewisâs best advice for how you, as a small-scale farmer, can make the step from selling at a farmers market to selling to a food hub, with the potential to bring your full-time-farming dream into reality.
Finally, Lewis talks about his new 13-acre property in Michigan and his plans to develop a âmicro-farmâ that relies on season extension and a focused crop plan.
Links from this episode:
Local Food Connection website
Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good episode # 67 with Ben Hartman
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Small-scale farmer and entrepreneur Nasuha Lenuh â nicknamed R â talks about the tree crops grown in her region, the southern part of Thailand. Hear about her familyâs tree crops, from rubber to durian fruit, and how R has chosen her own path in developing Rganic Farm, including herbs, salad greens and edible flowers. R shares this journey, being honest about her familyâs and communityâs feelings about her attempt at growing crops that others just arenât attempting in this area.
R talks about her elevated raised beds, which she said go together like Legos so she can move them as the durian tree crops around them grow tall. She also talks about her experience as a woman farmer in Thailand and why this profession is important to her.
Based on her experience of growing temperate-climate crops in a tropical climate, R explains a secret of her success: patience in soil building.
Hear about the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative, hosted by the US State Department, which awarded R a fellowship that brought her to the US to study food systems (and then allowed the Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good host Lisa Munniksma to visit Thailand through a reciprocal fellowship). R explains Kotatuera Basar Kita, the YSEALI project sheâs working on now, to develop farmers and bring an American-style farmers market to her community in Yala, Thailand. R and Lisa also talk about what itâs been like to work together on this project both in the U.S. and in Thailand.
Links from this episode:
Rganic Farm on Facebook
Rganic Farm on Instagram
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Military service members and veterans farming program and aeroponic gardening with Melissa Stewart
Listen to Melissa Stewartâs story about the West Virginia National Guardâs Patriot Guardens program â the only agricultural unit embedded in a National Guard unit â and how it grew from an educational program to what it has become in 7 years: an urban farm in Charleston, a flock of laying hens, farmers markets, an orchard on reclaimed coal-mine land in Central West Virginia, a robust beekeeping program, business and marketing support, a composting project, family programming, and mental-health services. All grant-funded, Patriot Guardens is ever-evolving.
Melissa talks about the ways this program is benefiting their military service people and veterans, with some seeing agriculture as a possible retirement plan, giving them an opportunity to continue to give back to their community after their military service. Hear about a success story of one participant whoâs turned what heâs learned in the program into a thriving plant business. And Melissa gets emotional talking about why Patriot Guardens is important to her and the impact it has on their service members.
Melissa shares her story of her own home garden. As a greenhouse production grower before becoming an Extension agent (and now working with Patriot Guardens), Melissa has a ton of experience using a range of gardening techniques. Listen to the end for Melissaâs advice on getting starting with aeroponics at home.
Links
Patriot Guardens on Facebook
Patriot Guardens website
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Flexibility in farming, connecting with the natural world, and the Organic Association of Kentucky with Jenny Howard Owen
In this episode of Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good, listen to Jennyâs story of her love of farming rooted in childhood. You might identify with her vivid childhood memories of digging potatoes, setting off with the family dogs through the woods and fields, and living a life outdoors. She talks about being in the Peace Corps in Gabon as her first experience with environmental education and the start to her work in sharing the outdoors with others. During her time in Gabon, she learned about gardening in the tropics and started teaching the concepts of ecology through school gardens.
Hear about how, when Jenny left Kentucky after college, she had no interest in living in her home state again but has since come back to Kentucky and built a farm. Being flexible is the lesson here. Jenny talks about the time she spent as a market farmer when her son was young and how sheâs transitioned their 8 acres to more of a homesteading space for the time being.
Jenny tells us about her work as a farmer educator with the Organic Association of Kentucky, a nonprofit promoting and supporting organic farmers in the state. An annual conference, regular farmer field days, assistance for farmers transitioning to organic certification, and consumer education are all part of OAK programming. Additionally, the organization hosts the Kentucky Farm Share Coalition, which arranges employer-sponsored CSA programs with local farmers.
Finally, Jenny offers advice for getting started on your own land, sharing what she wished she knew when she and her husband were setting up their farm 10 years ago. And we hear about why this work is important to Jenny.
Diggin It Farm on Facebook
Organic Association of Kentucky website
OAK conference
Kentucky Farm Share Coalition
Research on employee-sponsored organic CSA programs
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The hazards of grants, letting vegetable plants go to seed and lessons in water rights with Robert Frew and Juan Carlos Arango
Robert and Juan Carlos practice permaculture and a culture of sharing at Sobremesa Farm, just outside Bloomington, Indiana. In this episode, Robert talks about taking the time to observe the land before jumping into farming and waiting one more year before putting any pressure on selling anything from the land. Juan Carlos points out that neither of them knew much about farming but came into this work through their interest in nature and wildlife and, eventually, the relationships they built at a Bioneers Conference. That permaculture mimics nature made it a natural fit for their land-management philosophy.
Hear about the steps they took to bring municipal water to a property that isnât suited for a well but didnât have a municipal-water meter. (Listeners: Most of us would have walked away from this property. You have to hear about their journey!) Robert also talks about how they collect and keep rainwater on the land, plus two springs that have come to the surface since they purchased the property.
Juan Carlos talks about the concept of âvolunteersâ--particularly plant volunteers as a means to reduce dependence on off-farm seed resources. He also talks about the various animals they keep and the rolls each fills on the farm, plus some of the more untypical tropical crops they grow in greenhouses and the fields. You wonât find soursop, bananas or pittaya growing too many other places in the Midwest!
Hear, too, about their fellowship with Midwest Grains, the milpas theyâre experimenting with, and their interest in finding and learning from other small-scale grain growers in the region.
From CSA to an on-farm market, Sobremesa Farm attempts to connect their customers with how their food is grown. Robert talks about getting grant money to expand production via mini production contracts for a local food pantry in 2023. He gets real about the growing pains for farms as small as theirs when engaging with grants.
Finally, Juan Carlos talks about their approach to educating their customers and school groups, as well as multicultural farming workshops they host on the farm. Hear, too, about the fertility methods theyâve used to supercharge the soil organic matter on their farm.âŻ
If youâre curious about the name Sobremesa Farm, listen to the very end to hear Juan Carlosâs explanation of the Latin American concept of sobremesa.
Note from the host:
One thing we did not get to talk about in this episode was Sobremesa Farmâs feature during the 2023 Farm Aid benefit concert. Be sure to watch the video, linked below.âŻ
Links from this episode
Sobremesa Farm website
Sobremesa Farm Instagram
The ABC of Organic Agriculture, Chromatography and Sustainable Livestock Management workshop with Jairo Restrepo, September 3-6, 2024
Farm Aid video
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Sara Wittenberg on Pollinators and How to Build a Pollinator Garden
Pollinator Week is June 17-23, 2024. Without pollinators, we wouldnât have food, making pollinators an essential link in the food system. You, as a gardener or farmer, have a role to play here. Gardener and biologist Sara Wittenberg talks with podcast host Lisa Munniksma about how and why we should be caring for our pollinators, including how to build a pollinator garden.
Learn about the Pollinator Partnership nonprofit and the work theyâre doing to protect pollinators and prevent habitat loss, from educating gardeners and farmers to working on policies and supplying research grants. Sara may surprise you as she reveals who all of our pollinators areânot only honey bees, for sure!
More than 85% of U.S. households have outdoor living space, and Sara points out that even container gardens planted with pollinator habitat can make a difference! Hear about various pollinator initiatives happening in Arkansas and beyond that you can become involved in: the Project Wingspan effort to make native ecotype seeds more available to land stewards, NRCS programs to connect biologists with landowners for free advice and potential funding assistance, and all that the Pollinator Partnership offers. Sara explains the Bee Friendly Gardening program that she manages, which includes helping people learn how to build a pollinator garden. You can join the program to help them reach their goal of 1,000 Bee Friendly Gardeners by the end of 2024!
Sara lets us in on a new programâthe first time sheâs mentioned it to the publicâthe Bee Friendly Gardening badge system. Harkening back to your scout days, you can earn up to six badges to show your pollinator prowess.
For listeners growing on a commercial level, Bee Friendly Farming is an actual certification program that allows Bee Friendly Farmers to use the logo on their packaging.
Keep listening to learn about Saraâs own native-plant garden in her suburban Arkansas backyard. Milkweed, asters, black-eyed Susans, phlox and more turn her small outdoor space into a palette of colors throughout the seasons.
Keep listening for Saraâs best advice for how to build a pollinator garden on your own land, backyard or balcony. (Hint: The Pollinator Partnershipâs garden recipe cards can help get you started.)
Links from this episode:
Bee Friendly Gardening website
Pollinator Partnership website
Native plants in your region
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Pattie Baker talks about WWOOFing â traveling to work on farms â gardening and finding hope.
Hear about how 9/11 spurred Pattie on to start gardening, from zero interest to a need to plant a seed in the name of hope. She tells her story about how she went from growing food for her family to now traveling to learn about farming and to share her knowledge with others.
In 2008, the city Pattie lived in became the newest city in the US: Dunwoody, Georgia. From here, Pattie started following this burgeoning cityâs development and was quickly named the Sustainability Commission Chairperson to help pursue Atlantaâs Green Community Certification, which included developing a community garden. (Itâs now the largest volunteer-run community garden in Georgia!)
Pattie tells us about growing nearly $2,500 worth of vegetables per year from her suburban property. She talks about having witnessed the loss of the majority of her pollinators over the past 10 years and what sheâs doing to educate others about this. With her daughters now out of the household, Pattie decided it was time to travel, and at 56 years old was scheduled to go to Uganda with the Peace Corps. COVID changed those plans â you have to hear about the drama of this situation â and left Pattie with a new travel plan.
If youâve never planned to leave your garden behind for two years, Pattie talks about this process and then reversing the process when she realized she wasnât going to Uganda after all.
Listen to Pattieâs tales of traveling around the U.S. for five months in 2023, working on farms and riding bus, bike and train. She explains the WWOOF concept â sometimes called Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms or Working Worldwide on Organic Farms â and how this educational exchange operates. Pattie talks about her $20 per day budget, traveling 10,000 car-free in the U.S.. Her book, Round America with a Duck, outlines all of this in a colorful and engaging way.
If WWOOFing has ever interested you, Pattie offers her advice for valuing your time and expertise while outlining your goals to get the best experience. She talks, too, about preparing yourself for a WWOOFing experience, whether youâre 60 years old (like her) or a college-age explorer.
Links from this episode:
Round America with a Duck website
Round America with a Duck on Instagram
All of Pattie Bakerâs books
WWOOF USA
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How to find your dream farm, with Bonnie Warndahl!
If you are searching for your dream farm, this podcast episode with Bonnie Warndahl has you covered. Bonnie searched for years to find the property that is now her Winnowburrow Farm and Florals, in Colfax, Wisconsin. Listen to Bonnieâs story about how she came to be interested in gardening and stewarding land. (Thanks, Barbara Kingsolver!) Follow her journey through various programs to learn about farm business, renting farmland as a beginning farmer, losing a farmland deal, and finally finding and purchasing her dream farm.
Warndahl talks about the Renewing the Countryside nonprofit that she works with as a farmland access specialist. From food hubs to farm-to-childcare and connecting farmers with farmland, the organization is building a regional network to prop up farmers of all kinds. The Farmland Access Hub helps assess farmersâ readiness for land access, guides farmers in their loan applications, and provides resources to help farmers with their land search and purchase.
Dive into the facts about why farmland access is so hard as well as why itâs so vital. âItâs important for people to understand how dire of a situation we are in, unbeknownst to so many people,â Warndahl says. She continues, talking about an impending food crisis facing the US, given the confluence of the advancing age of farmers, farmland real estate prices and fewer new farmers coming in to replace those who are retiring. Hear about federal and state policy solutions that may help ease some of the issues complicating the current farmland-access crisis.
Get Warndahl's best advice for your farmland search, from her lived experience as a beginning farmer trying to purchase land as well as her professional experience as a farmland access specialist. Start by preparing yourself, knowing how and why youâre farming, and exploring all manner of outlets to search for land. Best of all, find out how you can get connected to farmland access assistance!
Finally, hear about Warndahlâs Winnowburrow Farm and Florals. While Bonnie is currently focusing on her farmland access specialist work, she has big plans for this farm and retreat space.
Renewing the Countryside
Farmland Access Hub
Women, Food and Agriculture Network
Episode 23 with WFAN executive director Jules Salinas
Community Farm Alliance
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In this podcast episode, Arkansas rancher Lauren Manning talks about responsible grazing, lessons learned from starting a grazing operation from scratch and financing to support a regenerative food system.
Learn how CrossFit â the popular fitness and lifestyle program â helped shape the focus of Laurenâs legal career, from civil litigation in California to agricultural law in Arkansas. An internship at an agri-food-tech venture capital investing firm further turned her career on its head, drawing her attention toward farming and ranching. After interning with Ozark Grassfed Beef, Lauren realized how rewarding it is to work with the land and animals. Hear about how Lauren uses all that sheâs learned with hands-on farming experience to benefit her legal and financial work.
Laurenâs career is an illustration of her philosophy to follow your curiosity. She talks about how just showing up and continuing to show up has led to so many opportunities for her and how you can do it, too.
Lauren talks about her work as associate director of Food System 6, a nonprofit that is working to change how financing firms choose to finance agricultural operations. She explains how they go about encouraging underwriters to see agricultural output from a more holistic mindset and gives examples of what this uphill battle looks like in practice. She even talks about the new book, Food Inc., 2, in which she coauthors a chapter on this subject.
Get excited about a project that Food System 6 is working on to create an EQIP (Environmental Quality Incentives Program) bridge loan. This would allow farmers to apply for NRCS EQIP funds without needing the capital to finance their project upfront, which is a major barrier to small-scale farmers utilizing this federal cost-share program.
Switching gears from ag-industry details to on-farm details, Lauren talks about using the USDA Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program to finance her first farm: goats on the side of a rough hillside. Through telling her story, she gives her best advice for anyone to get started with grazing animals and purchasing a farm property in general. (Also see her advice in this article online.) Spoiler alert: Patience, mentorship and experience are central to future success â also buying used equipment.
Listen to the end to hear about Laurenâs current 35-acre property as she talks about pasture development, pasture-management for horses and the uncommon practice of rotational grazing for horses.
Episode links:
Lauren Manning on LinkedIn
Lauren on Instagram
Food System 6 on LinkedIn
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Urban farmer and seed advocate Florentina Rodriguez talks seeds, seeds and, you guessed it, seeds.
Hear about how Florentina started her Flora Seeds, all thanks to seeing the need for a community seed library in her village of Yellow Springs, Ohio. Her interest in seed education and in helping people save, share and grow seeds grew from there. As more people started becoming more aware of the vulnerabilities of our global food system, they also started paying attention to where their food comes from, which invariably leads back to seeds, seed keeping and seed sovereignty. Florentina explores the multiple pathways that bring people into having an interest in seeds, ranging from food security to political resistance and cultural interests.
Learn how the Yellow Springs Community Seed Library works and how people can âcheck outâ and donate seeds. Florentina explains how she checks in with seed library users to be sure they are getting along with their seeds and to improve the system for everyone. She tells us, too, about some of her favorite seeds that have been contributed to the seed library. (Have you ever heard of elephant dill?)
With sights set on having an even larger impact than what a seed library offers, Florentina is also working with seed commonsâcommunal resources of seed collections, seed keepers and seed protectors on a regional level. She talks about farmers, gardeners and community people who are building these networks to exchange seeds, share skills and continue specific seedsâ stories. Florentina also discusses how university and government interests are impacting the spirit behind seed commons and why itâs important to have both regionally based community seed commons and university/government programs but not necessarily the two combined. She also makes the case for when and why you might want to work with folks in your region to start your own seed commons.
Listen to the end to hear about Edenâs Harvest urban farm in Dayton, Ohio, which is a certified native wildlife habitat and center for growing food and educating neighbors and local students about food and farming.
Flora Seeds on Instagram
Email Florentina
The Utopian Seed Project
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From Oregon, Michele Thorne talks with show host Lisa Munniksma about support and resources for livestock farmers and meat consumers from The Good Meat Project, the challenges of farming on rented land, the finding value in âfailureâ and more.
Hear about all the ways that Thorne engages with the food system through what she refers to as âchoice, trade and destiny.â She talks all about The Good Meat Project, a nonprofit building pathways toward responsible meat production and consumption for consumers, producers, processors, and food professionals. Learn about how they bridge gaps and break down barriers between all of these stakeholders in the food system and how you as a farmer can plug into the free resources and education the organization offers. Also hear about the Real Burger of Earth Day promotion happening in April each yearâbringing together and promoting grassfed-beef producersâand a number of other promotions and learning communities meant to uplift all âgood meatâ farmers.
Thorne talks about her background in gardening and then keeping livestock, beginning with inheriting ducks and chickens and progressing through just about every type of poultry there is, plus pigs. We cover the ecosystem services animals provide to the land and to the farmer and the value in that over and above the eggs, meat and milk they provide. Thorne talks, too, about how her farming mindset changed after evacuating her property from wildfires with 200 animals in tow. Conversation turns, of course, to land access and the challenges associated with that, as so many farming conversations do.
Thorne gets vulnerable about failure and how we can learn from it â a lesson that endures in farming and elsewhere. She talks about how her experience in farming and her decision to back away from making a living farming helps her in her work with The Good Meat Project now.
Listen to the end to hear about Food Slain, the podcast that Thorne hosted for a few years focusing on food chain issues, from the adulteration of honey to the U.S.âs food-labeling laws. Hear about her thoughts on starting in our backyards to understand and ultimately change the food system for people, animals, the environment and the economy.
Real Burger of Earth Day website
The Good Meat Project website
The Good Meat Project on Instagram
Donate to The Good Meat Project
Food Slain podcast
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Homesteader Hillarie Maddox talks about returning to the land, building community and mental health for farmers.
Hear about Hillarieâs upbringing visiting her family membersâ original homesteads in South Dakota and how her life came full circle, back to the land herself on Whidbey Island, in Washington. She talks about how she and her husband are balancing their differing interests in landscaping versus gardening on their property, ultimately arriving at a food forest approach.
Learn about Heavy Nettle Collective, a diverse group of farmers, creatives and healers who are growing food, producing local events and building community together. This group has formed organically and changes in response to the needs of the people coming together â having grown from 5 to 20 â and they are slowly bringing the group into a more formal structure.
While everyone contributes their own strengths to the collective, some of Hillarieâs gifts are facilitating community and wellness. Since launching her wellness experiences through an REI business incubator program, Hillarie has been offering nature immersion, movement and breathwork to reconnect people to themselves and the world around them.
Hillarie offers a thoughtful definition of the concept of community and illustrates how that looks in her own life. Get her best advice for how to actually build the community that so many people talk about wanting.
Hillarie Maddox on Instagram
Hillarie Maddox on Substack
Black Girl Country Living podcast
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Kimberly Haire talks with Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good host Lisa Munniksma about what itâs like to teach middle schoolers in Kentucky about growing food while she expands her own farming knowledge.
Hear about how Kimberly uses the foundations of agriculture, local and global food systems, and hands-on work to get sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students excited about coming to class. In one of the most tangible examples of demonstrating the impact of agriculture, the lettuce and radishes on the menu for Bullitt Central High Schoolâs scholarship fundraising dinner came from these studentsâ work. This new program is in its startup stages, with a greenhouse and a new egg incubator, and Kimberly is looking for grants and funding for a larger greenhouse and other infrastructure to continue to grow and improve the program. Listen to how Kimberly has tapped into community resources, like the county 4-H program and local farms and agritourism locations, to still provide experiences and opportunities for the students that their small budget canât provide.
Kimberly talks about her personal interest and experience in producing food, why this work is important to her, and what it was like to transition from her career as an English teacher into agriculture as part of the school systemâs unified arts curriculum. Keep listening to get Kimberlyâs advice for capturing middle-school studentsâ interest in food and farming, using their limited attention spans to your advantage.
At the end of the episode, Kimberly describes an incredible meal straight from her garden, and Lisa talks about her favorite farm meal, as well.
Bullitt Lick Middle School Facebook page
Kimberly Haire on Instagram
Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good podcast episode with Michelle Howell
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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 âaccidental farmers,â 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, theyâve 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, âPutting out fires.â 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, thereâs 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 Haywoodâs 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. âThereâs no such thing as a bad day at our farmers market anymore for our vendors,â Sara says.
Sustainabillies website
Sustainabillies on Instagram
Sustainabillies on Facebook
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The Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good podcast meets the Coffee with the Chicken Ladies podcast with this episodeâs 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 itâs 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, âWhy chickens?â We talk about what to do with all these eggsâwith more than 60 chickens between themâand 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 Hollyâs and Chrisieâs 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 itâs important for her to grow cotton and keep wool sheep now. Chrisie explains that her experience with emergency veterinary care began with a toy doctorâs kit that she used to âtake care ofâ 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 Hollyâs and Chrisieâs favorite egg-based dishes!
Coffee with the Chicken Ladies podcast website
On Instagram
On Facebook
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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 farmingâwhether your farm in New York or elsewhereâand 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 âlistening like a cowâ 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 thatâs 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 farmâher experience âon the other sideâ of the research-production relationship. Learn about Anuâs 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
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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 Nigeriaâa pursuit with huge potential that Chyka feels is not being met in this country thatâs 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 Internationalâs work in bridging the gap between Extension and small-scale farmers where there is one Extension agent to 10,000 farmers. Chykaâs 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 examplesâin aquaculture and in crop productionâof 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 Nigeriaâa country in economic crisisâare working within the food system for an innovative financing model involving input credits.
Learn more about Chyka Okarterâs work:
Winrock International Email Chyka -
Texas farmer Keisha Johnson talks career transitions, skill sharing, poultry keeping and more.
Hear about Keishaâs career transition from administration and logistics to farming, and her advice for how anyone can take pre-farming-career skills into farm lifeââturning your lifestyle into your livelihood.â Keisha talks about growing vegetables in Texasâs hot, arid climate through summer and more mild winter weather, plus her volunteer-potato-growing experiment. (Listen in for her prediction for this winterâs weather!)
Learn about Keishaâs White Broad Breasted turkey breedingâa 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 theyâre 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.
âWe were really bad farmers,â Ben says about his and his wife, Rachel Hershbergerâs, Clay Bottom Farm. Listen to his story of farming 5 acres on a growth trajectory, then changing course to start downsizing insteadâand now farming just 1/3 acre and making the same amount of money. Youâll hear Benâs 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 Internationalâs 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 Liâs 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 Californiaâs Central Valley.
Check out a short list of Cultural Roots Nurseryâs crops:
Bitter melon Long beans Taiwanese basil Shiso Bo Ju Hua chrysanthemum tea plant Taro Ginger Goji berries Tong Ho chrysanthemum greensLi 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 Californiaâs 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 Liâs 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
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