Podcast

Romondo Woods of the Urban Youth Agriculture Farm in Detroit, Michigan, tells us about how he is producing food for the city, while at the same time giving children hands-on experiences at the farm. Romondo started the farm a decade ago and has been scaling up ever since in order to make it a growing source of produce for the city. In addition to letting kids know where their food comes from, they are helping make Detroit a leading example of how cities can implement natural farming practices that make the city a healthier place for people to live.

In this conversation, host Rebecca Kutzer-Rice speaks with Matt Dell, co-owner of Treadlight Farm, about their journey into organic flower farming, the transition from retail to wholesale, and the unique challenges and strategies involved in scaling their business. Treadlight Farm focuses on uncommon flower varieties, and Matt discusses how they built relationships with wholesalers, and the techniques they use to manage production effectively.

Corinna Bench learned digital marketing by doing the marketing for her family’s farm, Shared Legacy Farms. They grow certified organic vegetables for a 400-member CSA in Ohio, and Corinna offers classes and coaching for farm marketing through MyDigitalFarmer. Whether your goal is to get more people to your market stand or sell out your CSA by the New Year, don’t underestimate the importance of marketing to grow your business! In this interview, we talk about what she has learned from running her own farm’s marketing campaigns.

Rogue Farm Corps grew out of the age-old network of farmer-led apprenticeships, to help make the apprenticeship system compliant with modern labor laws and fulfil its educational component, while continuing to give people real-world farming experience on the way to starting their own farms. In the process they’ve added many opportunities in addition to traditional apprenticeships, forming a robust training program to the benefit of beginners and current farmers alike.

Pete Russell used his experience in the food industry to design Ooooby, a sales platform for farmers to sell directly to the public. Their goal is to put local, ecologically sound growers back at the heart of the food system. Ooooby integrates all the apps one would use to build an online farm store into their software to simplify the process for farmers and offer a seamless experience for the customer.

In this interview Leah Penniman tells us why and how she started Soul Fire Farm, along with what she would do differently for those starting out or starting over. She discusses her most recent book, Black Earth Wisdom, and the recent adaptation of her first book, Farming While Black, into a documentary movie of the same title. She discusses how, in 1910, about 14% of farms in the United States were Black-owned, compared with about 2% today, and how her books are an effort to help Black farmers reconnect with their agricultural heritage and reclaim it from racism, discrimination and dispossession.

Despite growing up farming, Jenny Marks didn’t think she could make a living at it. So she worked in agriculture supporting other farmers, where she learned more about the business of farming; that led her to start her own Trademarks Flower Farm in New York State. Now, in addition to her own farm, she teaches the business of flower farming to other growers with her business Trademark Farmer. She’s doing a free masterclass the first week of January, for more info go to her website trademarkfarmer.com.

Maud Powell, former co-owner of Wolf Gulch Farm in Oregon, shares her farming journey and the impact of climate change on her land. After experiencing drought and a devastating heat dome, Maud and her husband realized they had to leave their farm and find a new property with more water, despite having made decades of investment in the farm. In response, Maud started the Oregon State University Extension Ag Climate Grief and Support Initiative to help farmers cope with the emotional toll of climate change.

If you store vegetables for any length of time, you’re going to want to hear this interview with Sam Knapp of Offbeet Farm. Sam has practiced “storage farming” for years, growing during the summer for off-season sales from stored crops deep into the winter. In this interview, he tells us about how he figured out his own best practices along the way, as there was little available information on modern veg storage techniques that would keep produce in top shape over an extended period of time.

Dan Brisebois has over 20 years of market farming and seed growing experience as a founding member of Tourne-Sol Cooperative farm in Quebec, Canada. In this interview and discussion of his new book, The Seed Farmer, we hear how his interest in seed growing goes all the way back to the beginning of his farming career. Now, he can tell us from experience what it’s like to grow many seed crops, since roughly half of the farm income derives from seed sales, with the other half coming from a 500-member CSA.

You may know Lindsey Lusher Shute from co-founding the National Young Farmers Coalition, but what we talk about on the pod this week is her work with GrownBy: the only cooperatively farmer-owned farm marketplace app. During her decade as the Executive Director of the NYFC, one of the needs that was identified was a flexible way for farmers to sell a wide variety of products online. That need is what led to her founding the Farm Generations Cooperative that runs GrownBy.

Tilth Soil was born out of a desire to keep some of the millions of pounds of food waste that is discarded every year out of landfills, with their mission to “feed people, not landfills.” Hear about how their sister company, Rust Belt Riders, started out hauling food waste in bicycle trailers, and has subsequently scaled up to trucks in order to handle just some of the scraps generated in Cleveland, Ohio- in 2023 they composted over 10 million pounds and that’s not even all the food waste generated by Cleveland!

Driftless Seed Company is part of an encouraging trend we are seeing with regional seed companies producing seed in and with adaptations to their specific region. On this week’s podcast, we have Cody Egan and Dylan Bruce of Driftless Seed Company, telling host April Parms Jones how they went from farming and working for a seed company to founding one. Dylan had to leave part way through the interview due to technical difficulties, so we get the rest of the story from Cody.

Farming and parenting can each be demanding jobs by all by themselves, so it can be a real challenge to do both at the same time! Katie Kulla talked to over 25 farmers about their experiences and how they strike a balance between the two, and it’s all in her new book, Farm Raised Kids: Parenting Strategies for Balancing Family Life with Running a Small Farm or Homestead! The book will be available at the end of October, and you can pre-order it from Growing for Market Magazine’s online store now (subscribers always get 20% off all books).

We’re so excited to be welcoming Rebecca Kutzer-Rice to the podcast team as one of our co-hosts, we wanted to make sure and record an episode to properly introduce everyone to her! Growing for Market Magazine readers will recognize Rebecca from her articles in the mag, including many about flower growing written from her experience running Moonshot Farm, a specialty cut flower farm in East Windsor, NJ. She grows flowers year-round including in a geothermal greenhouse, for retail markets in and around NYC.