Episode 146: How to Go From Growing Your Farm to Being a Thriving Farmer with Michael Kilpatrick

INTRODUCTION

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Homestead Education Podcast. Today, I have Michael Kilpatrick from Farm on Central, then Growing Farmers, who is here to just chat with us about how he farms and how that works with… I forgot what I was saying. So I’m going to… Education, life, you know, just the whole… And how his farming works with education and life and everything else.

COFFEE, ENERGY, AND BUSY BRAINS

And, you know, some days we just can’t get our brains to work. So maybe we should farm more coffee. Yeah, you know, it’s really interesting, a complete side topic.

But it’s… I didn’t use to drink coffee until I got married to my wife. And then she kind of like, you know, convinced me. And now, you know, the best part of my day is that hot cup of java that she puts at my desk or the kids put at my desk at this point.

But yes, it’s life changing. Unfortunately, you know, actually coffee makes me so sick that I actually use like the more natural energy drinks with like green tea and stuff like that. And I’m trying to do a sugar detox right now.

So I’ve been drinking coffee with cream in it in the morning with over ice because it doesn’t make me sick if it’s cold. And my daughter made it too big this morning, but I was enjoying it and drank the whole thing. And now I feel like I’m jittering out of my skin.

So so I don’t know if it was my past poor life choices where I drank a lot of Mountain Dew when I was very young. Yeah, I might have done that, too. Caffeine really does not affect me.

Like I could drink an entire cup of full on brew at 8 p.m. and go straight to bed and get all sleep. I absolutely can, too. The inner I don’t do the nasty energy drinks, just the good ones.

Yeah. And I can do coffee. I just have to be careful with it.

Yeah. But yeah, when I do coffee hot and with sugar and stuff in it, I’m so sick. Interesting.

MEET MICHAEL KILPATRICK

OK, so hi, welcome. Yeah, I saw everyone a little bit about yourself. So yeah, who’s this crazy person she’s talking to about coffee? Yeah.

So just maybe. Well, I feel like we kind of know each other because you came on my podcast about a month ago. So we kind of, you know, we’re already like, yes.

But so we I’m Michael Kilpatrick. Me and my wife Savannah have four kids, 10 through seven months now. And we have the farm on Central.

So we have an urban farm located in southwest Ohio, a little tiny city called Carlisle. We are we farm 100 percent inside the city limits on two different parcels. Wow.

We have we are a big of our biggest crops is strawberries. We actually are about to wrap up strawberry season. So I was out this morning shooting video about that.

We do horticulture. So we have a full greenhouse operation. We do transplants for people’s home gardens.

We have a shipping department where we ship over 10,000 orders across the country, mainly plant starts, everything from elderberry cuttings to like strawberry plants to even soil amendments for organic home gardens. And then the education side of the business is we have a company called Growing Farmers. That’s where we teach farmers to do what we do and to share just the story of regenerative farming in the good old US of A. I love it.

FARMING INSIDE CITY LIMITS & GOVERNMENT COMPLIANCE

I mean, I’m really shocked to find out that you farm completely inside the city limits because that’s so hard these days to even be able to make that work. Yes, yes. And when I do it over again, probably not.

The amount of money we spend in government compliance inside the city limits is mind blowing. So, you know, I’m not anti-government. I’m pro a responsible, small government.

And actually, I’m also on our city council because I got so fed up when we moved into town with how they were treating us. And it’s really interesting. An executive session about a month ago, I saw how some city staff were thinking and it blows my mind just how anti-small business that the government is actually blew my mind that they the level of just complete anti-small business they end up being.

It’s small business, and I find it’s small farmers, too. And some of these conversations I’ve had, they’re like, oh, the small farmers are the problem because they’re using more carbon and things like that. And I’m like, you know, the actual act of farming, they might end up using more because they don’t have the equipment and things like that.

But the distribution is a completely different conversation because it’s not being shipped all the way across the world to be processed and shipped back. It’s literally going to like your neighbors. Correct.

Yeah, they don’t understand that aspect of the carbon chain. And then they also don’t understand the aspect of if a million chicken operation gets the bird flu, the government will kill a million chickens. If you distribute that risk between 20 smaller farms, if one place gets now, you still have 19 farms producing chickens, eggs.

And, you know, that’s something that we’ve seen here locally because northern Ohio is one of the top five egg producing states in the U.S. Really? We’re on the front lines of talking to the farmers who are being, you know, completely 100 percent eradicated. And the stories they’re telling us is, you know, the government came in and spent four hours trying to make sure they got a positive diagnosis so that they literally had to test hundreds of chickens until they got a positive diagnosis. And I said, OK, yeah, now we can do it.

And they slaughter them all. And if you don’t follow their guidance and slaughter them all, you don’t get the payout. So you’re kind of locked in.

You’ve got to do what they tell you. I and that this whole payout thing on most things with agriculture drives me crazy. Uh-huh.

AG SUBSIDIES, ETHANOL, AND ‘WHY ARE WE STILL DOING THIS?’

I understand why some of it was put into place, but I don’t understand necessarily why it’s still happening. Correct. Yes, I completely agree with you on that, especially when we’re subsidized in ethanol, which we know is a net energy drain because it takes more calories to grow and produce ethanol than it would be to just use oil.

And we’re just basically routing it through a soil, well, routing it through a farm. Now, there’s so many problems with this. And I’ll admit, I grew up in agriculture, worked in ag, you know, majored in ag and everything.

But I’ve been reading a lot of books lately on the history of ag. Yeah. Yeah, I’m writing my next curriculum on ag history.

And so I’m starting to really try to understand these commodities that I knew existed, but I never truly understood. And the more I understand, the more not confused I am, but confused as to why. And it’s just, yeah, it comes down to and I forget the Supreme.

You probably as a as a homeschool curriculum writer probably do know this one. What was the Supreme Court decision that says that corporations are people and corporate? Well, there’s actually two of them. There’s that one.

And then the other one that says the corporate corporation’s sole responsibility is to create value for the shareholder. So the corporation can’t say, oh, well, we probably shouldn’t. If you look at who was lobbying for ethanol and being forced in the gas, was the seed producers, the chemical producers, the the farm states that have massive farmers, which knew that they were going to get higher, more money for their their corn.

Now, the way that ethanol destroys the environment, obviously, we’re just producing more and more corn. There’s no quality aspect of it. Any corn can live on the flip side.

Any other corn that they aren’t using for the ethanol, they’re making the high fructose corn syrup and trying to convince us that that’s the better option for us and cramming it into our pigs and cows. Correct. Yes.

Yeah. So ethanol is and the problem with ethanol, too, is it destroys engines. I have a sawmill that, you know, the whole reason I got into farming twenty five years ago is because I wanted to earn enough money so I could buy myself a sawmill so I could saw logs.

I saw, you know, just Joel Salatin documentary. He had that part of the sawmill. And I thought that was so cool.

And so I was like, I’m going to buy myself a sawmill. So I anyway, my my route for 10 years was I was farming in upstate New York. And finally, when my wife and I moved back to Ohio, I cashed out.

I had some extra cash. I bought a sawmill. Well, that sawmill has had the carburetor replaced three times because and it has 40 hours on it because it sits there.

And the ethanol just and we even you will use low ethanol gas. But, you know, every so often I’ll forget and I’ll use the high ethanol. And it just choose that carburetor.

And,you know, the guy that looks at it is like, Michael, did you use? And I was like, I must have because that’s but it’s so frustrating. Literally sitting over there right now and has for the last six weeks has not been running because of the ethanol in our gas. And, you know, I know so many small engine people that will say the exact same thing is destroys these small engines.

The cost of ethanol and fuel is massive. Mm hmm. I mean, just yeah, fuel in general.

I mean, that’s a whole nother conversation. But, you know, some of the stuff that we see where we’re just like bringing it in from other places constantly and their only option is battery operated everything, which doesn’t work either. And not in the same way.

And a lot of the things like I was looking at California recently, they’re trying to, you know, make it where you have to have battery operated chainsaws and quads. Well, it’s like what half the time when I’m using a chainsaw or a quad, I am nowhere near where I can get a return. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, battery technology has come so far.

Oh, I think there’s a lot of potential. But you’re absolutely correct that I think the market should dictate what is right instead of, you know, government legislation on all this stuff. And you’re right.

I mean, it’s it’s blows my mind, especially California. California has really gone down. It’s just and which is really sad.

I mean, it’s where I grew up and, you know, went to ag school and my dad was a cattle rancher and a hunting guide. And that was our life. And California was amazing for that 20 years ago.

Yeah. Now I can imagine still trying to farm there. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Yeah, it’s sad. And that’s why you see the exodus to all these other states.

And unfortunately, like California is an absolute beautiful state. The weather is gorgeous. The if I had if I could pick anywhere to farm in the US, it would probably be northern California right on the coast.

That’s where I grew up. So it’s beautiful. Like Mendocino County wine country.

Oh, incredible. Yeah, incredible. And they have some beautiful soils out there, too.

But yeah, I just I mean, we in Ohio here, we deal with enough regulation and then just add on California on top of that. I just I would go crazy. But yeah, of course, you know, we got out of there quite a while ago.

Nine years ago now. And we moved to Oregon first and then up to Idaho. And we have no regulation here.

So that’s kind of we just do whatever we want. Yeah. Sometimes not for the but who knows, you know? So that’s interesting.

RURAL VS CITY REGULATION EXPERIENCES

So back in when we were farming in New York, because we farmed up there for 12 years, we were outside of the city limits. So we were in the township and we literally did whatever we wanted there, too. We built a greenhouse.

We didn’t ask. You know, we need to grade something. We brought in a dozer and graded it.

The only regulation we did once a year, the scale guy would come out and weights and measures would come and certify our scales. And and that was literally the only time that was actually in our farmer’s market. He would come to our farmer’s market.

He wouldn’t come to our farm. Our county didn’t even know we existed for that. But yeah, the amount of regulation is is is mind blowingly and crippling to small businesses between all the companies we own.

We have we have five different companies now. We have one full time person. All I do is deal with government regulation.

Yeah, that’s insane. But I believe it. I mean, I was a quality assurance specialist for years.

And so, you know, you know, the the the. And again, I’m not saying that there’s no aspect of that regulation that is warranted. There are some bad actors out there and definitely some people need to be, you know, taught the straight and narrow.

But 80 percent of the regulation is. Either repetitive or it’s also it’s just like we’re inspected by this, the health department and we’re inspected by the ODA on our kitchen to base two people do the exact same thing. Yeah, but all it means for us is that we’ve got two inspectors, two reports, two people to pay and all of that.

But anyway, I know we didn’t come here to talk about this. Unfortunately, just went down the rabbit hole. You know what, though? It’s a legitimate thing.

SMALL FARMERS VS RULES & EXEMPTIONS

Like I had a podcast a couple of weeks ago with a gal. It was the. Farm to consumer legal defense.

Yes. Yes. And we were just chatting about, you know, the fact that small farmers have such a hard time because even with the exemptions, they aren’t out there just to say, hey, if you want to be a small farmer, there are laws, but here’s some exemptions and here’s how to follow them.

No, they don’t have that. Well, and then they are almost unintelligible. Correct.

And then the exemptions are typically priced so low that you can’t even build a really business because, you know, that’s I think the one thing that I really enjoy about any of the businesses. I love building businesses and running businesses and just figuring out that since the systems and processes are like I always say, some people have hobbies, some people have businesses. So, yes, exactly.

Yes. But, you know, in this day and age with inflation, like $100,000 a year business that doesn’t even pay for one part time staff and yourself, because, again, you know, the cost, just the, you know, payroll and all that stuff, it just adds up so quickly. So, yeah, it’s just you need to be in.

To me, you need to be in the three to $500,000 range. But all these exemptions are typically for smaller than that. Like the tester amendment for small farms in the Food Safety Modernization Act, that’s a $500,000 exemption.

That’s really not that much anymore. When you think about it, it’s really not. I mean, yeah, I mean, I was talking to someone the other day.

They were they were asking about if you can make money as an egg farmer. Yeah. And I was like, I mean, yeah, you absolutely can.

But there’s this thing where there’s this place of diminishing returns where at first you’re like selling your eggs under the table to all your friends and neighbors and maybe branching out a little bit. And you’re probably covering your flock, maybe, you know, getting to go to dinner with your family once a month. Yes.

And then there’s a place where you get over that hump of diminishing returns and you are a huge farm where you’re you’re making enough money to cover everything you need to cover. And you have a large corporate factory farm. But there’s that place in the middle where you’re still a small farmer, but you aren’t making so much money that you can cover everything you need to cover and you get eaten alive by the regulations.

Absolutely. That’s that you’ve nailed it. And what I would like to say, too, is that I feel there are these all these sweet spots, too.

SWEET SPOTS, SCALING, AND THE THRIVING FARMER STAGES

So it may not it may be oversimplifying to say you’ve got the home flock under the table and then you get the massive farm. Yeah, but you’re there’s only there’s these little tiny sweet spots, maybe one or two little tiny spots on the way up that entire ladder that you can make it work. And and unfortunately, I think us as farmers seem to spend 99% of the time not in those sweet spots because we’re always trying to scale.

We’re trying to say, oh, well, OK, so maybe we make this investment or make it a little bit easier. And unfortunately, you end up. And again, there is in our farming when we teach farming, we teach people there’s five different stages of farming.

And there is the stage you get into what we call the thriving farmer. That’s the end stage, which is where you actually make it. And but that’s after you’ve mastered the other four stages.

And a lot of that the fourth stage is called the traction stage where you really start to make it. You feel like you’ve got the flywheel for customers and you’ve got staff and all of that, but you’re still investing. And so you end up just sitting on a pile of assets, which, you know, the goal of any thriving farmer would be to be able to pass the farm to the next generation.

But a lot of times you may not get those assets back out. I mean, yeah, you put there’s like a certain amount that you’re putting so much in that you’re like, OK, everything’s running fine, but there’s still no money. Exactly.

Yeah. And farming is historically a very low margin because the government wants cheap food. Exactly.

WHAT IS ‘CHEAP FOOD’ REALLY?

But what really is cheap food at this point? Like, what are you actually paying for? Exactly. So, again, if we go back to ethanol, if you’re buying ethanol, which actually is more expensive, but you’re paying for soil down the Mississippi, you’re paying for lack of natural habitat, you’re paying for native bees and butterflies and frogs and all of that to disappear. You’re paying for floods in the Mississippi every single year.

That did not used to happen the way it does now. So these all these things, they come with a price. And unfortunately, people have a hard time putting two and two together on this.

But it’s it’s real. Like they just want to, like, talk about, oh, the farmer is killing, you know, the soils and the land and the all that stuff when really it’s the system of farming. Correct.

To get farmer because farmers are given such a low margin, they’re pushed into wholesale markets and they’re pushed to sell a commodity which they can barely afford. And again, you know that they are manipulating the prices on the market. Because it’s interesting, like when you want to start understanding the wholesale market with corn and all that, it can be manipulated very easily, as long as you’re one of the five big ones that control the housing and the global market.

Yeah. And then they say, OK, like in order to farm as much as I need you to farm, you need a million dollar combine. Oh, yeah.

But yeah, you’re just going to have to make payments on that. And so any margin that they did have is pretty much gone. And they have to wait till their commodity payments come in to even afford seed for the next year.

Absolutely. And it’s it’s a vicious cycle that these farmers are stuck in. And so that’s why both of them are working off farm jobs.

The wife or the wife is working in town. Well, actually, mostly around here. There’s maybe that I know of a half dozen farmers that actually are full time on the farm.

And those are the guys that are doing several thousand acres. If you’re farming 300 acres here, you’re not making that. You’re you’re doing that on the nights and weekends.

And you’re both working a full time job. The wife is working for the school or someplace like that. So she gets the insurance.

The husband probably doesn’t have insurance. He’s a machinist. I’m thinking of that exact farm family right now as we speak.

FARM FAMILY STRESS, HEALTH, AND REALITIES

I think, you know, it’s one of those things where I can like almost replicate that in my head of so many farm families that I know. And I was actually talking to someone this morning about, you know, the health of farmers and how, you know, like the suicide suicide rates are extremely high in farmers and their wives are working off farm for insurance. And, you know, that’s why they make the joke that like if a farmer gets hurt, he’s never going to the doctor because he can’t afford it.

And if he’s not there, no one else is doing the work. Correct. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So that’s the problem.

DIVERSIFIED MODEL: HOW THEY FARM DIFFERENTLY

Do we have a solution? Yeah. So so, yeah, we farm a bit differently now. Again, I’m not going to say it’s all peaches and cream and butterflies and roses because it isn’t.

We’re still in. We’re five years into this farm. We now have 22 employees that work for us across five different divisions of the farm and operation.

But I would say, you know, we just literally are applied for a USDA equipment loan. And the interesting thing was she says, oh, I can fast track you because your asset, the debt ratio is so good. And she said that’s it’s not something you see five years into an operation.

So now, granted, yes, we do carry some debt on this farm. But our ratio is great. Well, and even like just kind of a side note on that is, yes, you’re a farmer, but you are also podcasting and doing courses and things like that, which is like for us, our farm does well, but we would not survive year round if I didn’t have my other.

Correct. Yeah. So the number one rule is we’re diversified.

So we’re diversified. Yes. In crops, we grow a wide range of crops.

We do not sell wholesale. Well, we sell very, very little wholesale. It’s like a couple of customers that really want our product and then we grin and bear it.

But we sell direct to consumer. That’s rule number two for us. The rule number three is that is that we run the numbers and everything.

So every crop has to pay. I mean, there’s not one crop that we’re solely growing out the good graces of our heart. I can’t do that.

So those are the kind of the big thing. And I think number four is that we’re all about diversity and regeneration. So, again, we’re not a certified organic farm, but we farm organic to organic principles.

And we argue with the USDA about what that means. But no CAFOs, no hydroponics over here, we’re all soil based. And we do a lot.

I think rule number five is that we use a lot of protected culture. So we have multiple greenhouses and hoop houses, and that allows us to farm year round so people can buy lettuce out of our store, typically 52 weeks out of the year and nine months out of the year that’s grown outside or in a simple hoop house. About two to three months out of the year, we do have a little bit of heat into that so that we can get that customer year round.

But it’s very important for us that we keep the customer year round. And so that’s why our store is open 52 weeks out of the year. And then we do have a couple one of the couple of things that have kind of, I think, exploded our growth, because, again, we’ve grown very fast as an operation is that we do have a couple of what we call what’s the word we use? Anyway, they’re kind of like if you were to use the marketing term, it would be a top of funnel or a marketing funnel for that.

STRAWBERRIES AS A MARKETING FUNNEL

So like for us, strawberries is one of those things that people love strawberries. They love organic strawberries because strawberries are a dirty dozen and they don’t want to, you know, eat those that are covered with sprays. And, you know, absolutely.

I went to a strawberry conference last year and I literally left saying I will never eat a non-organic strawberry ever again because the amount of sprays they use and just the toxicity of that. But that to me is one of the fast the ways that we’ve grown our brand is people over 3000 people a year come into our farm every spring to pick berries. And then that allows us to keep growing.

So every strawberry season is kind of a big jump in our overall average week sales and just the amount of product we’re moving. People sign up for our CSA when they come out. They learn about us.

I never knew you guys were here. I’m 20 minutes away. So they’re basically a massive input of new customers to our business.

And we definitely recommend all farms have a couple of those. Another one, which is kind of crazy. We never know.

Basically, you’re saying like you bring customers in with your strawberries and then they learn about everything else and they stay and then we indoctrinate them. Love it. But we actually do have a what we call it.

And I and the marketing team kind of doesn’t like this, but I really do. I like to call it what it is. It’s an indoctrination campaign that talk to people about the toxins in their food.

We talk to them about food dyes. We talk to them about a to a to milk. You know, that’s all.

I was actually thinking of that because we have customers that have bought pork from us for years. And when the cows came back in to milk this year, I said, hey, do you guys want to try milk? And he goes, oh, no, I’m allergic. And I said, then let’s have a talk.

And now he like goes around and tells everybody about how amazing milk is because it changed his life because he hasn’t been able to drink milk in 35 years. Yes, yes, yes. So basically, we had a creamery out that they sell it.

We sell our cheese, their cheese in the store, and she quantified it as this milk is easy on the tummy. And I was like, that’s a beautiful way of simplifying it. Yes.

Oh, yes, yes. But yeah, so we have the strawberries is the big wing for us, obviously, our year round salad. People love that, too.

PEACHES AND OTHER TOP-OF-FUNNEL PRODUCTS

And but the other one that’s kind of been unique for us is peaches. So, again, we don’t grow peaches. But what we’ve done is we have the rule that we want people to know who their farmer is.

So we source single source out of Georgia, Lane Orchards. And we bring in last year, we brought in twenty two pallets of peaches for our community. Oh, my gosh.

That’s almost enough for me to like put on my yogurt for the year. Yes, almost. That’s like my favorite.

Like, I can’t wait for when peaches are the best because that is. Yeah, absolutely. And out here we have something called the peach truck.

And again, I have nothing against a couple that have spent ten years building a forty five million dollar a year company. But the peaches are ridiculously overpriced. They charge at least double.

So our boxes are like thirty two dollars a box. Their boxes, I think, start at fifty five dollars a box. But you can pay as high as one hundred dollars a box when you figure out how much any peaches are actually there.

You’re getting that are still good. They’re semi good. I brought some home where I’m like, what did I pay for? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the problem with us is, well, problem with them is because they’re so large, they have the source from like a half dozen orchards. Now, you all know that some peaches are good and some peaches aren’t. And because they’re trying to buy so many peaches, they just can’t get all good peaches.

So the quality of their peaches aren’t great. So people have, you know, obviously figured that out. And so now we sell again.

Another one of our marketing funnels is pulling new customers in with peaches. And when they come into the store, they then can see all the other things we have. But again, back to building businesses, marketing.

TEACHING KIDS BUSINESS & CURRICULUM IDEAS

And I really would love, I think if I were to write a curriculum, because I know you’re in the curriculum business. Yeah. Curriculum I would love to write would be how to teach your kids business and just how to teach them how to never want in their life.

Because if you know the principles of business, any kid will never want for anything because anyone can go out and start their own business and do quite well for themselves. I’m actually writing a economics and business course right now. That’s oh, cool.

Coming out this month. And it’s a little bit more how to like run the numbers and stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. It’s been one of my favorites so far because I love teaching business and I love agriculture. So I just like to put it together to teach it on that small scale level versus what they’re getting in like a high school ag program.

Yes. Well, because a high school ag program is typically going to say, well, this is the cow and this is how you handle a cow. And these are the two channels that you can take with a cow.

You can go milk or you can go beef and, you know, you put the you put the hormone pill on the neck. And that’s I’m teaching it from an aspect of a commercial farm that wasn’t making it. And so their kids, it’s got like a story going through it, like a case.

Oh, that’s awesome. And so like the kids are coming in and they want to make it a regenerative farm and they look at what’s still working, what’s not working, running the numbers, that type of thing. So beautiful.

Nice. But yeah, so. So, yeah, we use those.

So then in every single sequence, so like our strawberry sequence, they book a ticket. So basically we charge them to come to our fields. We charge $4.25, which a lot of people get upset at.

Well, actually, this year, I think we may have one or two complaints. But so this year I just looked at the numbers. We’ll do $5,000 in tickets.

Wow. And it’s a per car price. We charge $4.25 a car to come in.

TICKETING, CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE, AND ORGANIC POSITIONING

And but one day the nice thing about that is we also then get their email. So now I have their email and now I can remarket to that email. So we have the strawberry sequences, three or four emails deep.

And one is all about, you know, why we’re regenerative and how that affects their community. And then we talk about one is all about the awesome store we have and all the things they can buy. So, you know, we we basically use these as marketing funnels.

And now I have like 600 or 700 new emails that are now in a further sequence that’s talking to them about, you know, the food dyes and all these other things. And a lot of these parents are like, I never knew that. Or we’ve been looking for you for our whole life.

And that’s awesome, because now I know I’ve created a customer for life and I’m going to help them live a lot healthier. Yeah. So, I mean, I love that model of all the different funnels of coming in and having a plan of how you are teaching them.

So your you pick, is it just $4.50 or didn’t they didn’t they also pay for their strawberries? Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

So, yeah, that’s just to get into the field. And we tell them that, look, we spend a lot of time, effort and money to make the field look really great. And that’s the one thing that people when we started our strawberries, we kind of like looked at all the comments and we read the comments and the comments started seeing some themes.

And the themes were the fields were clean. The fields were not muddy. I didn’t get pricked from thistles.

I it wasn’t it was flat. It I could schedule. It wasn’t overwhelmed.

There was always berries for me to pick. So that’s why we kind of do this ticketing system is we can only we control the number of people into the field. So that means the last person at the end of the day, Saturday was a little bit sparse, but the last person last day still was able to fill their bucket of berries.

And yeah, so we have a guy out there. He’s pulling the thistles out. You know, it’s it’s a it’s a beautiful manicured field.

And it’s very easy to pick berries. Begin of the season, people were walking out with 20 pounds in 10 minutes because it was literally that easy to pick. Oh, my God.

So we work on that experience and we tell people that’s why we charge that. And so that’s where that money goes, is to making sure the field is a great experience. So, yeah, that’s that’s that.

But then we charge this year we charge five ninety five a pound. And in all honesty, that’s on the high end of our area. There’s other people in our area that are charging three dollars a pound.

Other people charging four dollars a pound. One other place I think maybe is in like the four fifty dollar range. But we are we set the price in our area.

But we are the only farm that is any resemblance of organic. Now, again, I can’t say we’re organic because we don’t follow we don’t get certified, but everything we use in our field would be able to be used on an OMRI certified farm. Oh, OK.

So, yeah, I mean, we just we are organic without the label. And we feel quite strongly about that because we just feel the the organic system, the organic program has been completely gutted of what the original intent was. Right.

And it’s just a marketing label at this point. Yeah. At this point, it’s a marketing label.

And they are basically, again, it’s one of those things that they’re a gatekeeper to make sure that small farms really can’t make it. Yep. And that’s what we do here is we just we call ourselves low input farmers.

OK, because then like I use non GMO feed, but I will, you know, give antibiotics to a pig that needs it. Yeah, but I’m not, you know, stripping our land. The animals are rotationally grazed.

You know, it’s like so I call it low input. And it’s worked really well for us in that understanding that we’re just not pumping them full of a bunch of stuff. Yeah, yeah.

ANTIBIOTICS, ORGANIC RULES, AND TRANSPARENCY

Yeah. And, you know, it’s interesting because I think if you go back to the antibiotic thing and that’s one of the biggest things that so many organic farmers are frustrated about. And I absolutely understand where they’re coming from, because obviously if a cow has an antibiotic, there’s a specific amount of withdrawal.

They have to pull the cow from the herd anyway. Already it’s already been there because we already they’ve already established that. But in organic system, the cow is completely out of the organic program for the rest of their life.

Even after, you know, we’ve proven, you know, what the time frame it takes for that that product to run through their system. But no, it’s the rest of their life. So that’s the frustrating part.

Yeah. And that’s I will. Yeah, I’m not going to go out there and take a hurting animal and just rub garlic in it and hope for the best.

Yes. Sometimes you got to do a little more than that. Keep it alive.

Yeah. Yeah. And so I have no problem with giving them antibiotics.

Now, I mean, I don’t know if we talked about it on my podcast or your podcast or not, but if I have an animal that. We sell two different, we sell whole and half hogs and we sell retail. So if somebody gets antibiotic shot, they come out of my retail.

You know, they just get marked. So I know that. Yes, that’s one.

And then I’ll sell those whole or half because then I’m having a conversation with the customer where with my retail cuts, I’m not having a conversation with everybody that comes up like this might be a package of sausage that got antibiotics. Like we’re just not doing that. So.

Yeah. Yeah. You can say, hey, guys, this one that you’re getting or you would get was treated one time or two times with X. Just so you know.

Yeah, you can. Yes. Transparency.

And I think that’s really what again, I don’t care if you go to McDonald’s every single day, but all I care about is McDonald’s is transparent on exactly what you’re eating or not eating when you go there. And I think that’s what you’re eating something. It’s just not food.

Yes, exactly. And again, I don’t like the fact that I’m going to have to pay for your health care when you’re now you have health issues. But I would just take for transparent.

I would just I would just that’s all I would. I really, you know, would take if I had to. Or I mean, I mean, I’ve seen where the argument of not taking.

SNAP, FOOD DESERTS, AND WHAT REALLY NEEDS FUNDING

Soda and sugary drinks off of the farm bill for SNAP benefits is that some people live in food deserts and that’s all they can get to drink. Well, no, that’s not true. Typically, yes, daughter.

Yeah. No. And again, they’re so that you bring a really good point.

And let’s we can go down that rabbit hole a little bit because there are food deserts. But the reason there are food deserts is the food policy in a you’ve made it so hard for an independent grocery to exist because the regulations you. Yeah, you your city planning has built everything for roads, not walkability.

So the city will not do walkability, which means that people can’t get around, which means that they now are living in the food desert because they can’t leave their their tiny little neighborhood. And all they’re going to get food from is the little bodega down the corner. And all the bodega can produce.

And there’s no education in the school system on how to eat well. So people don’t know how to use vegetables. They tell them you should eat all your vegetables.

Yeah. And you go home. What do you do with a vegetable? Do you sit there and eat a raw squash? No, exactly.

Yeah. So I just literally before I walked into the podcast, my wife is getting ready for dinner because it’s getting that close closer to that time. I had lunch on the West Coast.

Anyway, she was cooking. There was summer squash and zucchini in there. There was new potatoes.

There was mini broccoli. There was garlic scapes for items. Well, the potatoes probably people would know what to do with, but definitely not garlic scapes and mini broccoli and many times not squash.

But that was delicious. And I can’t wait to go and have it for dinner. And I’m holding you back from that.

No, you’re not. No, I like my podcast, too. So we’re good to go for at least a longer while.

But anyway, I think that brings up to the point that yes, people don’t know what to do. There’s so many things that are that isn’t the issue is not the sugary drinks needs to be in the in the in the snap or needs to be in the USDA funding. People need we need to put in USDA funding, walkability, food education.

How about, you know, funding community gardens? There’s so many things that they could hold like home economics out of high school level. Absolutely. Yes.

They say, oh, well, they’ll learn that at home. I mean, a lot of some places still have it as an elective, but they’ll learn it at home. Well, after three generations of nobody being taught that in schools, there’s no one there to teach it.

Well, and we have to look at our families, our families, and especially in these low income neighborhoods. If you look at the number of intact families, there’s more un-intact families or broken homes than there are intact families. And we are not taught to be multi-generational households at either.

So, I mean, to me, the ideal household would be grandma and grandpa live right next to the whole family or, you know, multiple people live in the same street. But we decided I forget what year that was to break that all up by by purposely saying, well, let’s try to see if we can move people around the country. So, again, we I don’t know that.

That was like right after World War Two, wasn’t it? If you go back to the whole aspect of training for factories, that was right after World War Two. I mean, you you know that way better than I do because you’re in the education business. Well, curriculum, you know, I’m in the ag business.

I just decided to make it an education. Yes. But yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah.

So it’s it’s an issue. And I absolutely 100 percent agree that we do not need more corn syrup in people’s diets because that is causing the chronic obesity epidemic. And they call Alzheimer’s type three diabetes.

And that is a problem. You know, we are we are we are such a sick nation, just headed head over heels as sick as possible. And the last 30, 40 years has not worked.

So why should we continue doing the same thing? We shouldn’t. And, you know, I get that it can’t be changed overnight. But there’s places where we can lighten those margins, where there’s room for like if more people are growing food and buying from smaller farmers.

LOCAL FOOD SYSTEMS & WASTE

Because, by the way, if you want good food, you actually have to buy it from those farmers where they can stay in business. Correct. For those that are considering selling food, you can’t have a local food system without the food.

So you need to get out there and do it. Yeah. And that’s going to create a mark like a buffer there.

And then on the other end, if we could find something to do with the massive amounts of waste that’s happening, that creates like a buffer on the other end where commercial ag would then have a place to go, OK, let’s start using the farrowing system. And I always say farrow like pigs, but the farrowing system and things like that or, you know, back off a little bit. You don’t have to do as intensive farming or you can fertilize with manure and take the two years that it takes to really affect your soil.

And but right now it’s like it’s just push, push, push. And then they say things like we have to support the corn business with commodities. And and the people who are not involved with agriculture go, oh, well, corn, that’s a vegetable.

And that’s how we get our corn to barbecue with. And even our corn for some of our cereals, which I still I have a whole nother thing about cereals. But,you know, people hear that.

They don’t know that these commodities for corn, most of it is never going into human consumption. And if it does, it’s through the route of cattle. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Now, I mean, again, there’s so many topics here we can unpack. But I think that was the whole point, you know, and I think with this is just the fact that somebody hears someone else talk about it and go, wait a second. Why don’t I know this? Correct.

Yeah. Go to the research. Yeah.

I mean, we couldn’t go down all these rabbit holes, but do the research yourself. Again, it’s very available on the Internet now about breakfast cereals did not used to be a thing. You used to actually have a real rounded breakfast of eggs, bacon, and you do not need to be eating the sugary breakfast cereals with and they actually sit with you.

Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah, like I can feed my my large family a couple of meals with just like a dozen eggs, a pack of sausage, a loaf of bread that we bake at home and a half a gallon of raw milk. Yes.

REAL HOMESTEAD BREAKFASTS & SOURDOUGH LIFE

Well, my wife has started making homemade English muffin, sourdough English muffins. Yes, those are so good. My gosh, that is a life changing right there.

And it’s like this morning it was a link of sausage sliced in half, an egg, an English muffin. And I’ve pretty much that took me that I was good to go. And then, of course, the coffee.

We actually right now are drinking what’s called it’s crushed coffee. They don’t grind it. It’s crushed.

It’s a different type of of mill. And we get wheat from them, too. It’s called crushed wheat.

They can’t call it flour. They call it crushed wheat. Anyway, it’s it’s been very out to send you some.

It’s really good stuff. But I kind of let’s let’s kind of go to the next step here, because what I want to kind of pull this conversation around to is kids on the farm in the business and how important that is. And I think there’s a there’s two main things I want to bring up here.

KIDS ON THE FARM: BALANCE AND BUY-IN

The one is a kind of a little bit of a word of warning, because I think I’ve seen too often where the kids are pushed into the farm or pushed into the business too much. And that can be equally as bad as ignoring the kids and never bringing them into the business. And that’s kind of a dance there in the middle.

I think there’s also not a conversation behind a lot of it. Oh, absolutely. And that’s I’ve seen that with we, you know, with us having six kids, we have some that didn’t learn the behind conversation and hate the farm.

And then there’s the ones who really, truly understand what we’re doing and love the farm. So, yes. Well, and then there’s the conversation in the business.

Like, Daddy, we’re rich because they see a pile of money on the counter. Yeah, our kids are so excited. The first time we bought a truckload of hay, we had like five grand in our hands and they were so excited to see five grand.

And I’m like, and it’s gone. Yes, exactly. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, yeah. So like some weeks right now, it’s strawberry season.

So, you know, it’s, you know, there are literally a stack of bills like that that goes for the weekly deposit to the bank. And they’re like, oh, my gosh. I was like, guys, do you realize that strawberry season? It’s a five-week season that supports six months of payroll.

And so that all money has to go in the bank and stay there so that we can continue to pay. We name the employees off these people because they have families and we name their wives and their kids and their families. And it makes sure that they can, you know, survive.

So, you know, we can’t go spend that on a new Nerf gun. That’s what the eight-year-old wanted. But I mean, with the flip side of that, it’s just made Sunday mornings.

We go yard sailing sometimes on Sunday mornings. And we got a free scooter the other day. And, you know, so we talked about that was a conversation about,you know, sometimes we just need to hold off and the right one will come along.

God will give you the right one or, you know, we’ll just, if you wait long enough, sometimes you get the right deal. So, you know, being with kids in a business, there’s so many opportunities for just education and training and, you know, turning about budgeting and learning about cashflow and learning about, you know, should I lease a truck versus purchase a truck versus pay cash for a truck? That is all an operation, a conversation too. But we do a lot of, we do quarterly sit-downs with our kids.

Yeah. They help make the executive decisions that we’re making for the farm. Like who’s getting pulled for the winner? And, you know, are we good with butchering ham or do, you know, or do you guys think that we ought to butcher this sow or sell this sow? Do we, how are we doing on dog food? And, you know, like those types of things.

Yeah. So that’s a good question. So then do you kind of share like the reasoning behind that? And you help them kind of come to the decision of like, okay, the last two litters, she’s only had five piglets.

Yeah. I’ll actually bring the numbers out and we run the numbers together and look at what we think our best choice is on that. How much we spend on dog food, how much dog food we make.

Yeah. And all those types of things. And they help make all those decisions, but then they have the buy-in come spring when we go, if we sell her now, that’s 300 bucks.

Yeah. And use to purchase whatever, but we need a new fence built for that in the spring. And then they’re excited all winter to start that new project.

Yes. Because they see the potential. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. Right now we are planning to go to Maine for about 10 days this summer in August.

FAMILY GOALS AND KID-LED MICROBUSINESSES

First official vacation since we started the farm in 2020. And so the kids have a main jar. They started a main jar.

And so I was sitting brainstorming with them the other night. I was like, okay, so what are you guys going to do so we can put more money into the main jar? Well, Simon wants to do simple syrup. So we go out to the farm, we pick some lavender and some mint and we boil it down and we make simple syrup.

So he did that, but he was sitting behind the table and someone came up and says, well, what do I do with it? So now I’m like, okay, buddy, now we have to learn marketing. Now we have to figure out what’s your product marketing strategy. So we went in and we worked on that.

My daughter’s working on these little, she loves to sew. And so she made these little bags. And so, yeah, we’re talking about those different aspects of things.

And we haven’t quite gotten to cost a good soul because when he realizes what his bottles cost, a little bit different story. Yeah, that’ll definitely do it. I like when money gets tight or something like, well, I mean, we have like money’s a little tight and the kids start doing well, let’s all get in the kitchen and make our breakfasts for the week or for the month or whatever and freeze them so that we’re not feeling like we need to pick up food on the way to co-op or something.

Okay, great guys. Thank you. That’s an awesome one.

Well, the other day, we needed a few bags, like chicken feed and something else. And it was going to be like 40 bucks. Plus my husband needed gas to get to town.

And I had just paid for all of our stuff to go for a trip and deposits weren’t coming in until the next day. And we’re like, what do we do? And the kids were like, we have an idea. And they like, all of them scattered and came back with all of their change and dollar bills and everything ended up coming up with like $107 to be able to handle what we needed.

And they were so proud of themselves afterwards, you know? Yeah, well, it’s buy in. And I think it’s that, I think it’s that literal just aspect of including them. Because I think in the, if you look at the, I don’t know if you’re going to do the quintessential, I don’t even want to call it quintessential, because I don’t want to give it that level of awesomeness.

FAMILY CULTURE VS DEVICE CULTURE

The average American family, I guess is what I’m going to say, is you’ve got dad goes to work. And actually, after a couple years, mom typically goes to work and both of them can’t stand their kids. And that is so sad.

But I think they can’t stand it because they don’t know what to do with them because they’re never trained how to actually be in community with family. And they don’t have relationships with their kids because their kids have relationships with the school district. Or their phone.

Yeah. In all honesty, and so we go out to dinner as a family. And you know, we leave phones in the car, or sometimes all the phone on if I if like staff is still working.

Yeah. But you look at the family across the table, and every single one of them is on a device. And it blows my mind that that’s of, and just it’s saddening, just kind of where we’ve how far we’ve come.

It really is we, we work on that one. And sometimes like if, like you’re saying, I work 24 seven. So yeah, I always have my phone.

But sometimes even if the kids are being squirrely, I’ll pull up like a crossword puzzle. And we’re all playing the crossword puzzle. We have food to come or something in our little podunk diner where we’re sitting.

Yeah, because we’re the only ones with a giant family that came in at night, you know? Yeah. And I tried to teach them that like, you know, tool, electronics are a wonderful tool. And sometimes that tool is for entertainment.

I like it. I like when everybody goes to bed at night to take a half an hour and do my little crossword puzzle and stuff. But it is not the only form of entertainment.

It’s just one of them. Correct. Yes.

TECH, DOPAMINE, AND THE PHONE AS A ‘CIGARETTE’

And I think too, and when you start understanding the dopamine hits and how that all works, and the those, and again, there’s books out on that. So if you’re interested in that, you can go research that. You really then start to understand like, so it’s interesting, like today, I forget what I was doing.

And I got a little frustrated by something. And so instead of stopping and just saying, OK, well, we’re going to plow through this and we’re going to really figure this out. The thing was to pick up my phone, which was on my desk and just go ignore it.

And because I just I was like frustrated and I felt like I needed it. It was like it’s basically that phone in that instant was my cigarette. Yeah.

So identifying that, I think, is super key. And then figuring out, OK, what are ways to move past that? But yeah, I think that’s that’s important. And just a super it’s just it’s a sign of the times we live in and something that we just need to, I don’t know, do our best to kind of fight.

AI EVERYWHERE: OVERWHELM VS TOOL

I interviewed this was a while ago. The owner of Saddleback Leather. Ever heard of Saddleback Leather? I don’t think so.

Saddleback Leather makes some of the highest quality, most beautiful, full leather products. And they used to be in Texas. I think they now have their factory in Mexico.

But they might recognize their stuff when I see it. You would absolutely recognize their stuff. And they charge, you know, a thousand dollars for a bag, because I think they’re they’re guarantee is something like so tough your grandkids can’t break it or something to that effect.

And he talked about how he literally lew in a vacation because he had a smartphone. He was on a smartphone the whole time of the vacation. So he went to literally a dumb phone.

And now, granted, he is in a place in his business where he has people working for him with a lot of those, you know, instant things that needs to keep going. But he said that has changed his life, you know, being able to go to that. So that is definitely something to think about as we, you know, navigate this incredible world of online business and people.

And when I’ve seen a lot, what that reminded me of is the move to AI. Oh, gosh, it is like it’s driving me crazy because I was talking with somebody the other day about something with, you know, small business and farm grants. And I was like, I have tried to really stay away from that.

But I have some ideas with some educational, like rural America, you know, yes, rural education grants that I would like to look into because I feel like I’m doing a better good with it. Yeah. And I was like, but I wonder if I could get away with writing a grant or if I need to find a grant writer, like I’m a pretty good writer, but I don’t know, I’ve never done that.

And they’re like, oh, just use AI. And I was like, yeah, what? They said, I don’t know how ethical it is, like against the other people who are applying for the grant, but you’ll get it. And I was like, what? Well, there’s no there’s nothing against.

Again, I don’t look at the specific grant rules, but typically there’s nothing against it. And I would say that everyone’s using at this point. I mean, I would say feel ethical to me.

Well, OK, so look at it this way. If you wanted to make sure that every every every word in your grant was was spelled correctly, would you use a dictionary? No, I would use a spellcheck. Yeah.

OK, but you would use spellcheck. Yeah. So basically, AI is like 20x spellcheck.

I just I feel like it’s kind of that, like everything is going to that. Like it’s not like I saw a there’s a direct to consumer meat operation that I really, really look up to. Yeah.

And I’m like they put out like learn how I, you know, grew my consumer, you know, direct to consumer business exponentially this last year. And we’re getting ready to expand with our pork. So I was like, yeah, oh, I want to get whatever it is that they’re offering.

And it was how to leverage AI as like an assistant. And I’m like, I get it. But I feel like there’s still that point of.

Authenticity. Yes, authenticity. And it’s I have definitely myself gone in and been like, oh, my gosh, my brain is broken and I need to have a blog tomorrow.

And I’ve gone in and been like, give me an outline for a blog about and like, you know, write a paragraph about what I’m thinking. And it gives me a good outline. And then I can go in and expand on each of those.

Correct. Yeah. But I’ve never felt comfortable just saying, write my blog.

Yeah. So, I mean, there’s different levels that you’re going to be comfortable with. And again, that’s, I think, the biggest aspect how we use it is.

So I will come up with an outline. Sometimes I’ll do the outline and then I’ll say, just make sure that this is written that people can understand well. And so they’ll make some changes for me.

So that’s one of the ways. Other I think, as you said, right there is just use it to build the outline and then you can fill it in. And it really depends on what we’re trying to write.

If I’m just trying to get out information, like recently, we started a new business. We bought a very, very large soil steamer. And we’ll get into that in a second.

But part of the reason for buying it larger is because we realized that there’s very, there’s no one in the US doing this for farmers. And so basically, we’re building a company that will be able to offer this as a service to small farms. And there’s so many advantages for small farms, particularly no-till vegetable farms.

Greenhouse operations will use it sometimes to larger flower operations, but there’s some massive advantages for them. And I knew I needed a marketing plan. And I knew a lot of the things I wanted to do.

So I literally did a brain dump into AI. And it literally then took all that brain dump, organized it for me and gave me like step by step of what I needed to focus on the next three months. That’s awesome.

That to me is awesome. It’s still you taking the information and executing it. It’s still me giving that the meat of it there.

AI AS FARM TOOL: DISEASE, ORGANIC OPTIONS, RESEARCH

Now, another way we use it is if I need, so like our strawberries, there’s in the 2024 massive disease at the strawberry industry. I think we talked about it on my podcast, maybe a little bit. And so it’s caused all sorts of problems, which basically means for us that we have to be very, very aggressive with our organic fungicide.

Now, again, in the past, we really haven’t done a lot of organic fungicides because we just don’t need to, because, you know, plants are pretty healthy. We keep healthy plants, healthy soil is healthy plants, healthy plants, healthy people. So that’s kind of always been our mantra.

But this year, because of this disease, we’ve had to go down a whole nother level. Well, the beautiful thing of AI is I can say, hey, this is my disease. Give me a full list of the organic options out there.

Look at the research that’s out there and tell me which ones are working the better. Tell me how I might be able to stagger these different ones. Remind me of any re-entry periods and stuff, because some organic pesticides do have a re-entry period.

You have to be careful because they might be an irritant or something. They’re still organic, but they still might be an irritant, like let’s say sulfur. Used organically, but it can mess up your lungs if you breathe it in.

Oh, yeah. Everything in my house was yellow when I was a kid. I lived next to vineyards.

Yes. Oh, yeah. And everything was yellow.

Oh, yes. Yes. And that destroys your lungs.

Anyway, but it kicked out for me a exact- Might explain that pneumonia I had last week. Yes, it absolutely would. But anyway, go back to this AI.

It kicked out an exact thing of the different fungicides. It reminded me of the ones I already had. It told me the rates to spray them for our specific situation.

Also, if I wanted to verify that they’re organic, it pulled up the OMRI label for me. So the level that it can just help farmers and just business people is great. But it will never replace the personal touch.

It will never replace the human empathy. AI can’t have empathy to the level that humans can just because it’s a machine, not a human. And so, yeah, it’s one of those things where it’s a tool and just don’t let it control you.

And it’s also, at this point now, I can see AI everywhere. I’m like, oh, yeah, that was written with AI. And actually, a frustration that I’ve had with it is a couple of times I’m sitting there racking my brain like, I need to come up with a good social media ad or something.

And I’m like, help me write a converting ad on my curriculum. And I do it in the same chat that I’ve been… So it knows all about my curriculum. And it’ll come back with what I feel is very generic information.

And I’m like, so how are people using this to leverage their marketing plans if I’m plugging in the exact details of what I want? It’s almost like ignoring… Yeah. Well, so I think one of the things… AI is evolving. It’s only a couple of years.

WHICH AI TO USE (CHATGPT, GROK) AND COST REALITY

Yes. So what you will get is you will get… I think what they call is AI overload or AI actually tired. It just gets tired.

And that model, you kind of need to refresh the new model. What actually AI are you actually playing with right now? I’ve used a little chat GPT, but I didn’t want to pay for it. And so I have Gemini through Google because it’s part of my… Yeah, I will say that’s the worst one.

Okay. Yes. So the top two, in my opinion… Now, I’m sure other people will come on and say they’re wrong.

The top two, in my opinion, chat GPT is very good. Okay. And Grok, which is the X version, is very good as well.

Both of those, to me, some of them have bigger… Some of them have strength. Some of them have a little bit, but both of them are just top-notch. You can barely… You barely know at this point that they’re AI.

Wow. And I had Grok the other day coding me an entire website. Holy moly.

Literally. I can pull up a webpage and it coded the entire thing for me. It wrote the content and coded it.

Huh. I’ll have to play with it a little bit more because it’s one of those things where, as a small business owner, I have all these ideas, but I don’t have the manpower or the finances to pay for the higher level. Yes.

Power to get to the point where I would ever be able to afford that manpower. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, Grok is one of those things that it had a bunch of… I tried the free version for long enough that I knew just what it could do for me. And so then we just invested in it.

It’s more expensive. ChatGPT, I think, is like $20 a month. Grok is like $30 a month.

But at this point, I just use the free version of ChatGPT because, yeah, I don’t want to pay for both of them. But what I will say is a lot of people are complaining it’s going to take their job. I’m like, hey, you’re going to have to get over it.

I’m sorry. It’s going to come for your job. And if you’re stuck and you’re upset about that, you’re going to turn into a Kodak moment, which is a company out of business.

Oh, okay. Gotcha. I think for me, I feel like I’m unindated with it right now.

Oh, yeah. Like I said, the email from the direct-to-consumer pork person, like, I want to know how you’re selling… Sorry, she sells beef. I want to know how you’re selling beef and how you’re marketing that to customers.

And she’s like, AI. Okay. So then I open another email.

I use Asana for planning all my stuff with all the people in the house and business and stuff. And they’re like, all these new updates that we have. And I open the document.

It’s like a 42-page document of all of the updates they have. And it was all AI. And I was just like… And it’s been like this a lot lately.

And I was like, like I said, I feel like it’s a wonderful tool. And if you’re using it responsibly and ethically, that’s awesome. But I feel like it’s coming so much from everywhere.

Well, what I’m hearing is the overwhelm. Yeah. Yeah.

And I totally agree with you. I think the biggest thing is that I have a couple of specific AI tools I use. And then I ignore everything else.

Because you’re right. It will completely overwhelm you. And then, of course, everyone right now in the online business world is pushing you.

Oh, you use AI to write a course. You can do it in half the time. And I’m like, no.

Because the point of somebody wanting to come buy a course from you is that they want your experience. Exactly. Yeah.

And yeah, I think that’s where it kind of like… And then I also look at a lot of this stuff with, say, Asana. And it’s, we can put all these rules in place that if you enter this, all this other stuff happens. And then I go, that’s great.

But then who in the business actually knows how the business runs to make sure all these things happen? Yeah. And that’s, I think, what is hard for me. So, wow, we have covered a lot of stuff.

COMMERCIAL HOMESTEAD VS URBAN FARM

But I think it’s really great to just kind of see what… I mean, I don’t know if you consider yourself a small farmer or a mid-grade farmer. But I kind of see you as like a mid-grade kind of, much more commercial than, say, somebody just selling it. So at this point, based on how the USDA classifies us, we are no longer a small farm, which is mind-blowing because we only farm… Between the two properties we have, we only manage 15 acres.

Wow. And yeah, one acre is one seven acres. Our home farm is eight acres.

And that’s all we manage. But we are no longer considered small farms because of our revenue. Oh, that makes sense.

And I call ourselves a commercial homestead because our homestead feeds us completely, but we are making a living off of one of the products from our homestead. Yes. And that, to me, is mind-blowing and amazing of what you guys have built because you guys are literally in the middle of nowhere.

Yeah. And we are the absolute opposite. And this is something we teach, is that if you are in the middle of nowhere like you are, you need a high-value specific product that you can either ship or transport easily.

I cannot do things that have short shelf lives. And even my raw milk, we struggle with it. But the fact that I can turn around and feed that back to my pigs and have faster-growing pigs and things like that is… Yeah.

And so we flip that. Now, we do have some shelf-stable products. Like our fire ciders and stuff are very shelf-stable, last six, eight months, no problem.

But strawberries, lettuce, both of them have a very… Strawberries is 36 hours, is your shelf life. And so that’s why… I have zero market for that. Yeah.

That’s why we are a you-pick farm that over 3,000 people come and pick them. And we tell them, use them today or tomorrow. You know, I do a small you-pick raspberry on our property.

It’s only we have, I think it’s 150 feet of strawberry canes that… It’s just too much for me and the kids to handle and process. So I just say, like, if you come up and pick, we get half of what you pick and they don’t have to pay me for it. So we do that same thing with strawberries.

It’s two for us, one for you. Yeah. Usually it’s our friends more, but I still kind of… Yeah.

We had one family this year pick 180 pounds of strawberries in two hours. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. We put pictures on our… If you go to our Facebook page, Farm on Central, just type in Farm on Central in Facebook, you can scroll back and see literally… I mean, it’s like a sea of strawberries. I love it.

Yeah. You can’t do that with raspberries. But… No, they’re too valuable, too small.

HOMESTEAD KITCHEN AS PROCESSING PLANT

But yeah, it’s definitely… It’s been a huge help because rather than them going bad on the vine, at least somebody is using them. And for me, half the time I’m freezing what they pick because it’s one of my really busy seasons for other stuff. So… Yeah.

I get, you know, maybe a cup fresh. Yes, exactly. Yeah.

But I think that right there is, to me, the truth of a homesteader is that you are figuring out how to make it work. And that whole thing of they get one, you get one. Look, you both win.

And that’s what I think homesteading is all about, is just figuring out how to figure out how to win on the farm or on your land. That’s absolutely what it is. We are always hustling something in our kitchen.

Another one that people, like, they can’t wrap their mind around sometimes. You cannot have that beautiful farmhouse kitchen on a homestead. Your kitchen is a mini processing plant all year long.

So, you know, about this time of year, I pull out all the canning stuff and it sits there because every night I am processing something small batch. Yeah. Where then come fall, it’s like switching gears and it’s all… We put all the canning, like, end of fall, we put the canning stuff away and we’re pulling out the meat grinder and the slicer.

Because that’s the hunting season or when we’re, you know, culling in the fall and things like that. Yeah. And it’s a constant process.

You know, like, I’m making tons of chicken broth and picking all the bones out one at a time while my daughter’s making bread and my son’s, like, filtering milk. You know, it’s an all-time thing. And I think that’s the other thing, is a lot of people feel like they do all the things when they start homesteading.

But really, just start with one. And as you said, one small batch a night. And by the end of the summer, you are like, oh, my gosh, I don’t know where all this food came from.

Yeah. I always, like, I say pick… When you’re trying to, like, start the full-blown homestead, do three at a time. One in the kitchen, one in the garden, one with the animals.

Yeah. And do those until they’re mastered. And then they just feel like life, not work.

Like, it’s just part of your routine. Like, starting your coffee in the morning. Yes, exactly.

So a lot of times all… Like, we go out and pick huckleberries all day long and we come home. I make dinner and I steam the huckleberries at the same time on the stove. And after dinner, I go and work and my husband goes in and cans it all real quick.

HUCKLEBERRIES AND REGIONAL FOOD

Okay. Yes. I’ve never picked huckleberry.

Remind me a little bit about how that works. So they’re kind of like blueberries. Okay.

But they are a little more sour, a little more purple, and they’re wild. And most of the bushes are only about a foot tall. Oh.

And you have… Isn’t there a book, Huckleberries with Sal? I don’t know. But they’re kind of, like, known to only grow in, like, certain parts of the Pacific Northwest. Okay.

There are some in the South, too, but this is kind of their area. And I mean, sometimes we will hike five miles in a day picking huckleberries. Okay.

And the kids eat most of them before we get back to the truck. Yes. Yes.

Yes, that’s a problem. So, all right. Like I was saying, we’re kind of getting to the end of it.

“KEEP GROWING” QUESTION

My favorite question for all my guests is, what does keep growing mean to you? I think always striving to be better because this… And you can sometimes get complacent. And again, we kind of went through the whole thing of, like, the technology and stuff and letting that let us be complacent. But I think continuing to see things as tools and then always looking at, you know, what can I do better? One of the things one of my coaches says to me is, like, Michael, if you change one thing every day in 365 days, you have changed 365 things in your life.

And that can be life-changing. Yes. So just, you know, just make one simple change.

And again, if it’s homesteading, just read about one new crop. Try one new thing. You know, if you’re trying to get chickens on your farm, you know, maybe one day you find the fencing.

You get the fencing one day on Facebook Marketplace for a half price. The next day you get, you know, some nesting boxes. So, you know, it’s amazing what you can accomplish in a year if you just make one thing every single day.

And it actually becomes part of your just how you function. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, don’t be afraid to change.

Embrace change, actually, because that’s the only way you’re really going to grow. Yeah. Yeah, I actually just this week I needed more laying birds and I’ve been dying for some heritage bourbon turkeys.

Yeah, but just hadn’t really like made that leap yet. And I had someone call me who rents our bull every year. And they were like, hey, can we rent him again in June? And I was like, yeah, not a problem.

And they, you know, we were talking about how much that would cost. And I said, hey, I know you guys have chicks. I saw the flyer down at the grocery store.

Would you trade me? And so they’re trading me the bull for like almost all the meat birds we need for the year. And our first set of awesome turkeys. I’m stealing the kids trampoline that died over the winter and turning it into a chicken or a turkey tractor.

Nice. Nice deal. Yes.

Trying something new. Yeah. All right.

WHERE TO FIND MICHAEL

Well, do you want to tell everyone where they can find you? Yeah. So farm on central dot com if you want to check out our farm and then growing farmers and education. So just type in growing farmers.

We’re on most platforms. Facebook and Instagram is the most common ones. But just get on our email list and we’ll send you all the awesome stuff.

Well, perfect. Thank you so much. And I really appreciate having you on today.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.