Lewis Hughes, land steward and local-food distribution pro

Hear about Lewis Hughes’s 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 Lewis’s 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 “micro-farm” 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

Small-scale farmer and entrepreneur Nasuha Lenuh — nicknamed R — talks about the tree crops grown in her region, the southern part of Thailand. Hear about her family’s 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 family’s and community’s feelings about her attempt at growing crops that others just aren’t 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 she’s 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 it’s 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

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 “failure” and more.

Hear about all the ways that Thorne engages with the food system through what she refers to as “choice, trade and destiny.” 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 year—bringing together and promoting grassfed-beef producers—and a number of other promotions and learning communities meant to uplift all “good meat” 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 — 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.’s 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

Homesteader Hillarie Maddox talks about returning to the land, building community and mental health for farmers.

Hear about Hillarie’s upbringing visiting her family members’ 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 — having grown from 5 to 20 — and they are slowly bringing the group into a more formal structure. 

While everyone contributes their own strengths to the collective, some of Hillarie’s 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

Kimberly Haire talks with Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good host Lisa Munniksma about what it’s 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 School’s scholarship fundraising dinner came from these students’ 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 can’t 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 system’s unified arts curriculum. Keep listening to get Kimberly’s advice for capturing middle-school students’ 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

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

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

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

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

Sustainabillies website

Sustainabillies on Instagram

Sustainabillies on Facebook

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

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

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

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

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

Coffee with the Chicken Ladies podcast website

On Instagram

On Facebook

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

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

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

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

Cornell Small Farms Program website

Reduced tillage resources

Futuro en Ag Latinx farmers program

Reconnecting with Purpose

Be Well Farming

Online courses

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

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

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

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

 Learn more about Chyka Okarter’s work:

• Winrock International
• Email Chyka

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

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

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

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

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

• Keisha Johnson on LinkedIn
• On Instagram

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

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

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

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

• Clay Bottom Farm website
• The Lean Micro Farm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Military service members and veterans farming program and aeroponic gardening with Melissa Stewart

Listen to Melissa Stewart’s story about the West Virginia National Guard’s Patriot Guardens program — the only agricultural unit embedded in a National Guard unit — 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 who’s turned what he’s 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 Melissa’s advice on getting starting with aeroponics at home.

Links

Patriot Guardens on Facebook

Patriot Guardens website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chicken keeper, gardener and author Frank Hyman talks about his gardens, chickens, books and more.

Hear about Frank’s books, Hentopia: Create a Hassle-Free Habitat for Happy Chickens and How to Forage for Mushrooms Without Dying: An Absolute Beginner's Guide. Hear about the design of Frank’s chicken pagoda—not just a coop—and some of the time-saving chicken-keeping projects in Frank’s book and his backyard. Learn about the origins of How to Forage for Mushrooms Without Dying and how Frank is advocating for all of us to let loose of our fear of fungus. 

Get to know Frank’s unconventional vegetable garden-ornamental garden-“lawnlet”-chicken area. He shares some garden-design tips, including what Frank calls his No. 1 horticultural technique. Hear about Durham, North Carolina’s, zoning ordinances for lawns and chickens, too.

• Frank Hyman’s website and upcoming classes
• Frank Hyman’s Instagram
• Hentopia: Create a Hassle-Free Habitat for Happy Chickens
• How to Forage for Mushrooms Without Dying: An Absolute Beginner's Guide

Ohio farmer Stephen Mackell talks with podcast host Lisa Munniksma about microgreens, actually sustainable (profitable!) small-scale farming and food access.

Hear about how Stephen found his passion for farming through the magic of starting seeds. Learn about the Mission of Mary Cooperative Farm in Dayton, Ohio, where Stephen started out as a volunteer farm manager and went on to build their community programs for nine years. Stephen explains how the farm came to financially sustain itself with a two-tier CSA being grown on six empty housing lots and eight homemade caterpillar tunnels and greenhouses. He also talks about other food-access programs, including an after-school program that eventually led to food production for the school salad bar and a program to help 100 neighbors start their own gardens.

Get to know Stephen’s 1/2-acre Greentable Gardens in Xenia, Ohio, where he and one part-time employee serve a 90-member microgreens, salad and full-vegetable CSA. Learn how Stephen got his garden beds established from lawn to permanent raised beds, including the installation of drainage tiles. Stephen talks about his farming and business efficiencies—hint: microgreens are a year-round, stable source of income—and his farm’s niche as a USDA Certified Organic home-delivery CSA. Get Stephen’s advice for growing microgreens yourself, too.

Hear about how Stephen, as a college student, was inspired to start a curbside-collection compost subscription company, which he then sold. It’s still in business today! 

• Greentable Gardens on Instagram
• Greentable Gardens on Facebook
• Greentable Gardens website

Kentucky farmer Jann Knappage talks with Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good podcast host Lisa Munniksma about part-time farming, farmers markets, working behind the scenes in Extension, and food preservation.

Get to know Cooperative Extension’s Nutrition Education Program and the behind-the-scenes work that goes into bringing Extension programming to us as farmers and citizens. Jann explains the University of Kentucky’s Recovery Garden Toolkit, bringing gardening programs into substance-use recovery centers; Growing Your Own publications for homesteaders and home gardeners; the Farmers Market Toolkit for farmers markets wanting to reach customers purchasing food with SNAP; and the Cook Wild Kentucky program, promoting the heritage of hunting, fishing and foraging in the state. (You need to hear why Jann had a meeting in a Lowes parking lot in Eastern Kentucky!)

Learn about how the Red River Gorge Farmers Market was born from Jann and her partner’s own dreams of building community and bolstering local farmers’ income. Now in their third season, the market runs two days a week with as many as 40 vendors and features various community programs. Jann gets honest about what it’s like to start and run a farmers market as a volunteer—the good and the less good.

Jann also talks about her and her partner’s Fox and Hen Farm and the journey they took through a series of rental properties—including one that involved growing in 5-gallon buckets and another that flooded—for 3 1/2 years until they found a place to call their own. And she shares her hack for getting through food preservation while managing a full-time job, young baby, farmers market and regular life.

Listen to the end for Jann to convince you that you need to be eating beet greens—and to get a creative recipe for using them.

• Fox and Hen Farm website
• Fox and Hen Farm on Instagram
• Fox and Hen Farm on Facebook
• Red River Gorge Farmers Market website
• Red River Gorge Farmers Market on Instagram
• Red River Gorge Farmers Market on Facebook
• University of Kentucky Nutrition Education Program on Facebook

Denà Brummer talks farming, gardening and building a life around food in this episode of Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good.

Hear about Denà’s journey from reading the recipes in Seventeen magazine to throwing epic house parties that were all about the food to studying culinary arts and growing her own food. And now she teaches others about these things! Hear about her new On The Grow business, centered around educating folks about health, lifestyles and habits related to food, picking up where home economics and gardening classes left off. 

Learn about the Garden of Hope community garden, which Denà manages for the City of Hope cancer center. She talks about the Garden of Hope community education programs,  kid-powered farmers market, Produce for Patients food distribution and the upcoming Farmacy work-trade program.

Denà tells us about the Multinational Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture nonprofit and its pay-what-you-can networking, international education and fellowship programs. She acts as an Agroecology Fellows Mentor, “breathing life into people’s dreams,” as she explains it. 

Denà shares her personal philosophy behind producing and sharing food, no matter the scale. Hear also about her teaching in the Fundamentals of Food Communication class at the University of Southern California’s Annenburg School of Communication and Journalism.

At the end, Denà shares her favorite food to cook for others. 

• Denà Brummer’s website
• Denà Brummer on Instagram

In a Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good episode that’s just a little bit different than usual, Barbara Lawson talks about gardening’s place in moving through grief.

Hear about how Barbara’s business, Meet Me in the Dirt, eventually grew out of her own grief over her mother’s death and the healing power of her own garden. She talks about healing gardens and shares a really special story about the tropical milkweed that brought home this concept to her.

Learn about the progression of Meet Me in the Dirt, from a group of Facebook followers to a mobile garden Barbara built in a bus to the current iteration of a wellness retreat space full of plants. This plant-filled wellness retreat is in a storefront in a mall, of all places, and serves as a healing space for Barbara’s clients—and it’s not the final iteration of Meet Me in the Dirt.

Listen to the end and get yourself to a quiet space for Barbara to lead you through a meditation-like experience that she might use in her gardening sessions.

Meet Me in the Dirt website

In the second episode of the two-part series with the farmers at Urban Buds City Grown Flowers, Miranda Duschack covers urban cut flower farming, supporting farmers through an 1890 land-grant university and the realities of being a part-time farmer.

Hear about the history of the land that this farm sits on—it’s been a flower farm since 1870—and how it came into Miranda’s and Mimo Davis’ hands. Miranda gets honest about having to work off-farm to make a farm business work and her dream of farming full-time. Learn about agricultural census and National Agricultural Statistics Service data in an actually interesting way to understand the picture of small-farm profitability in the US.

Hear about Miranda’s role as a Lincoln University Small Farm Extension Specialist and how she’s using her Urban Buds farming experience to benefit the folks she serves through Extension—and how you can best work with your Extension professionals to boost your own farm dreams. Learn also about how Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education’s (SARE) grant programs work—including the Farmer-Rancher Grant and Youth Educator Grant—and the efforts of the Farm Service Agency’s new Urban Ag County Committee Pilot Program.

Listen to the first part of the Urban Buds City Grown Flowers interview, with Mimo Davis, in Episode 56.

• Urban Buds City Grown Flowers website

• Urban Buds City Grown Flowers on Instagram 

• Email Miranda Duschack

St. Louis flower farmer Mimo Davis talks about growing flowers year-round, Black flower farmers, her work as vice president of the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers and more!

Listen to this episode of the Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good podcast to hear about Mimo Davis’ journey from being a social worker for homeless adolescent males in New York City to becoming a flower farmer in rural Missouri in just eight weeks.

Mimo talks about what it’s like as an African American to farm flowers in rural Missouri and the dearth of Black flower farmers in the state. Hear about the transition Mimo made into the current iteration of her farming dream, Urban Buds City Grown Flowers, which she operates with Miranda Duschack, and learn everything about the farm, including the 1-acre property’s history as a flower farm since the 1800s—plus learn how Mimo manages to grow flowers year-round.

Also get to know the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers and how you can tap into the education and resources they offer to farmers.

• Urban Buds City Grown Flowers website
• Urban Buds City Grown Flowers on Instagram 
• Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers website
• ASCFG Conference

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 Jenny’s 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 she’s 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

Farmers Marykate Glenn and Lindsey Melling join Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good to talk cooperative farming, sliding-scale CSAs, handcrafted herbal products and more.

Hear about Marykate’s and Lindsey’s individual backgrounds, how they each became farmers, and how they came together for collaborative farming under the Mustard Seed Farm CSA umbrella. Learn how they farm individual pieces of rented land and share equipment, distribution systems, support and knowledge. Lindsey and Marykate talk about how they found three pieces of land they’re renting for their operation—pay attention if you’re working on your own access to land! 

Have your sliding-scale CSA questions answered with Marykate’s explanation of Mustard Seed Farm’s program—from whether customers intentionally pay a lower price to how the sliding-scale math works out—and what she’s learned with 10 years of working with sliding-scale models. 

Lindsey closes out the conversation telling us about how her Effloresce Herbals business began using a healing salve she started making with chickweed she weeded from her garden beds. Listen to the end to get Lindsey’s recipes for a violet simple syrup and a soothing plantain skin salve.

LINKS:

• Mustard Seed Farm website
• Mustard Seed Farm on Instagram
• Mustard Seed Farm on Facebook
• Effloresce Herbals website
• Efloresce Herbals on Instagram
• Lindsey Melling on Instagram

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

Get to know the Isle of Man, a Crown Dependency island in the Irish Sea, which is the only UNESCO Biosphere Nation in the world (but is more famous for its TT motorcycle road races). Hear about how Rachael started raising rare British Teeswater sheep, which she grazes in a community orchard in Patrick and keeps for their wool. Learn about her breeding program, how to select sheep for their fiber, and the challenges of maintaining a flock on a small island. Rachael also talks about her family’s fiber arts, Willing Heart Wool, their wood processing and natural dying.

Hear about the Manx Wildlife Trust and its partnership with the Isle of Man government to manage the Agri-Environment Scheme, enabling farmers to work better with wildlife. After just two years, 69 percent of farmland on the island is enrolled in the program—which is 49 percent of all land on the island! Forty-three initiatives put forth by the program, plus those suggested by farmers for their own land, offer farmers payments for farm-management projects that benefit conservation on the island. Rachael talks about some of the farm-management projects and some of the wildlife—including fungi!—being protected through the Agri-Environment Scheme.

Listen to the end to hear about Rachael’s hopes for the future of farming in Isle of Man and her favorite all-Manx—meaning from the Isle of Man—meal.

LINKS

• Manx Wildlife Trust website
• Manx Wildlife Trust on Facebook
• Manx Wildlife Trust on Instagram
• Manx Wildlife Trust on Twitter
• Willing Heart Wool on Facebook

Helga Garcia-Garza talks about the farmer opportunities offered by Agri-Cultura Network and La Cosecha CSA, dealing with crippling drought in the Southwest US, and cooperative organic farming.

Hear about how the community-led Agri-Cultura Network began in 2009 with just three small-scale farmers who wanted to build capacity, aggregate products for larger markets and work cooperatively. Helga talks about how the organization has grown into a coalition of 57 farms—the majority less than 3 acres in size—using a shared food-entrepreneur kitchen and other infrastructure, hosting a CSA with a food-access mission, selling to public schools and other institutions, participating in farmer training, partnering on nutrition-education programs, saving seeds, developing food policy and more. 

Learn how acequia water rights govern what and how farmers can grow in New Mexico and what the critical drought looked like in 2022. Related to this, Helga talks about how the Agri-Cultura Network farmers realized they needed to be more serious about saving their own seeds and what exportation of agricultural products means for the land. 

Listen through to the end for Helga’s breakdown of the financial value of each market for the Agri-Cultura Network and some of the wins the New Mexico Food and Ag Policy Council have recently seen.

Follow online:

• Agri-Cultura Network website
• La Cosecha CSA website
• Agri-Cultura Network on Instagram
• Agri-Cultura Network on Facebook

On this episode of Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good, Nathan Harkleroad, Program Director at Agriculture and Land Based Training Association, talks with us about his path to farming, the value of agricultural work, helping people get their own farms going and more.  

A San Diego kid and product of Southern California's surfing scene, Harkleroad had no plans for a career in farming growing up. (He didn't even have 4-H in his urban community.) But opportunities to work on farms abroad in Panama and Scotland planted the seeds for agricultural work in his life. He found work on a university farm upon his return to California, learning the full gamut of farming knowledge to pursue a career in agriculture. Working alongside other farm workers, he heard the hopes and dreams of fellow farm workers to start their own farms. Today, he works as an educator and program director with Agriculture and Land Based Training Association, a role that involves, in part, helping aspiring farmers learn the skills to own and operate their own farms.

Hear Nathan discuss the importance of training and empowering populations that want to do the hard work of farming. Listen in as he talks about cover cropping, which he describes as his favorite type of farming for the value it brings to soil. Learn his favorite farm meal, which he, as a food lover, describes as "ironic," and hear his recommendation for a hearty farm-fresh meal option. Also, peppers!

• Agriculture and Land Based Training Association (ALBA)
• ALBA Facebook
  
• ALBA Instagram

New York urban farmer Maya Marie talks about building your relationship to land, her Deep Routes educational project, irrigation and more.

Hear about how various family members, educational settings and even Sesame Street have contributed to Maya’s life path. She talks about farming Afro-Indigenous crops at East New York Farms, including trying her hand at growing rice and keeping the pollinators in mind. Maya gets into what she sees as the current challenges of growing food for urban and rural farmers and how to be flexible, and then she gives her best advice for finding places to garden when you don’t own your own space. 

Learn about Maya’s Deep Routes educational project to connect people with Afro-Indigenous agricultural and culinary traditions and uplift these stories and foodways. She also covers her work in teaching with Farm School NYC. Keep listening to hear about Maya talk about her favorite topic to teach and one that most of us could learn more about: irrigation. 

• Deep Routes website
• Deep Routes on Instagram
• Deep Routes on TikTok

In our 50th episode of Hobby Farms Presents, Maseualkualli Farms' Pantaleon Florez pays the podcast another visit to update listeners on what he's been up to since episode 16. Listen as the Lawrence, Kansas, farmer and food-systems thinker shares changes to the priorities he's working toward and much more.

Listen in as Panta discusses the important work he's doing with the local Farm2School and Work-based Learning programs as an experiential learning specialist with Lawrence County Schools. In addition to bringing locally grown food into school cafeterias, the Farm2School program seeks to make garden education systemic within the education system and already has 22 school gardens up and going in the Kansas county.

Hear what Panta means when he talks about "the death of the farm" (spoiler alert: He's not quitting farming) and how traditional beliefs led him to pivot his approach to agriculture. And as a new father, Panta talks about how the arrival of a child into his busy life prompted him to move toward a seed breeding program and other initiatives.

Panta shares his struggles with permanency, experience with no-till techniques, his favorite fruits to grow and much more. 

• Maseualkualli Farms website
• Maseualkualli Farms Instagram
• Lawrence USD497 Farm 2 School Program

Indigenous urban farmer and herbalist Angela Kingsawan talks about gardening in Milwaukee, translating ancient knowledge into modern reality, connecting health care with healthy foods, and more.

Learn about Angela’s early introduction to land stewardship and multicultural approach to herbalism and food production. She tells us about her long-term plan for Yenepa Herbals as a local tea company using vacant lots around her house. Also hear about all of the plants—wild and cultivated—that thrive in Milwaukee’s zone 5 growing climate.

Hear about Angela’s work as artist in residence at Lynden Sculpture Garden and her plant walks and education programs. Angela offers some tips for how to use the plants she finds on those walks, following her belief that a plant “is only invasive if you don’t know what to do with it.” She talks about her line of wearable art using natural dyeing and fabrics. You will want to hear Angela’s funny story about how she grew saffron kind of by accident!

Get excited about the work that Angela is doing with Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield to contract Hmong farmers to grow culturally significant produce for their clients who use Medicaid for their healthcare. Listen until the end to hear what Angela is most excited about related to food and farming in her area.

• Yenepa Herbals on Instagram
• Lynden Sculpture Garden

Denzel Mitchell talks about urban farming in Baltimore, bringing up new farmers, the heirloom Baltimore Fish pepper and more.

Hear about how food and farming have been part of Denzel’s whole life, from his extended family’s 600-acre homestead in Oklahoma to his college English professor’s homestead. His experience running farms in Baltimore—the city and the county—helped to prepare him for his current role of co-executive director of Farm Alliance of Baltimore.

You’ll learn about Farm Alliance of Baltimore’s many programs, including a cooperative farmers market, food assistance doubling, mobile cooking demonstrations, technical assistance, soil testing and nutrient management research, compost coaching, and—the newest and largest program—the Black Butterfly Urban Farm Academy. Two years in, 20 farmers have trained in a 9-month intensive with mentorship, coursework, field days at urban and peri-urban farms, and work days at the teaching and demonstration farm with the intention of getting into their own farming business. Hear about an exciting, brand-new aspect of this program, a 7-acre teaching and demonstration farm that will allow the organization to offer farm-business incubator space for academy graduates.

Have you heard of the Baltimore Fish pepper? Listen to Denzel’s history of this heirloom, how he started growing it, and how you can grow it, too.

Denzel talks about his natural inclination toward being a connector and educator and how this has helped him in his farming journey and has served his vision of seeing more people farming.

Follow along with Denzel as he talks about what it looks like for small-scale farmers to truly have support from their customers and communities, and how farmers can come out and ask for that support.

• Farm Alliance of Baltimore website
• Farm Alliance of Baltimore monthly newsletter
• Farm Alliance of Baltimore on Instagram
• Farm Alliance of Baltimore on Facebook

Pittsburgh apiarist Christina Joy Neumann talks with Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good host Lisa Munniksma about beekeeping, sustainability in the honey industry, and more.

Learn about the evolution of Christina’s Apoidea Apiary and how she sees her career in architecture and her work with bees as intrinsically related. (Think about bees as natural architects!) She shares her fascination with bees as eusocial creatures and with their ability to efficiently make their own food and homes. 

Hear about the 70 to 110 hives that Christina manages and the seasonality of beekeeping in urban Pittsburgh, both from the perspective of the bees and the beekeeper. Christina talks about the high-level craft of creating honey and how she encourages consumers to appreciate her Certified Naturally Grown honey as an artisan farm product.

Dive into what takes place behind the scenes of commercial-scale beekeeping, including the industrialized system of migratory beekeeping, commodified honey processing and labeling, and bee welfare. You’ll hear about the study Christina is participating in with a researcher at Chatham University about the question of what truly sustainable honey production would look like.

Get to know Burgh Bees, a beekeeper education group in Pittsburgh, and Co-Nectar, the honey tasting room, cafe, and art space that Christina and family members are opening in 2023. At the end, Christina touches on the terroir and different flavor profiles of honey.

Apoidia Apiary website

Sign up for Christina’s newsletter

Christina Joy Neumann on Instagram

Co-Nectar on Instagram

Burgh Bees website 

In this episode, shepherd and Diné fiber artist Roy Kady talks about the importance and traditions of the Navajo-Churro sheep breed, flock management, fiber arts, and more.

Recorded on Winter Solstice (in the Northern hemisphere), Roy explains the importance of solstice in Diné lifeways. Learn about the Slow Food USA Navajo-Churro Sheep Presidium, a group created to support and promote endangered foodways—in this case, this rare breed of sheep. Roy tells us what it means to have just 5,000 registered Navajo-Churro sheep and the breed’s their meat, fiber, and hardiness characteristics that make them great sheep for a small farm. (Did you know that when managed on range, these sheep can seek out and forage the plants with the properties they need to keep them healthy?) 

Hear about Roy’s own flock; what he means when he says, “they manage us”; and the seasonal and rotational grazing methods used in his community. Roy explains how responsible grazing improves the soil. He also offers his advice for breeding and culling sheep to maintain and improve a healthy flock. 

Roy tells a story about his family’s history in fiber arts and his own work with wool, from weaving to felting to dying with natural dyes, as well as incorporating nontraditional fibers. Listen until the end to hear about Diné creation stories of the Navajo-Churro sheep and a quick excerpt from a Diné sheep song.

Slow Food USA Navajo-Churro Sheep Presidium

About Navajo-Churro Sheep on The Livestock Conservancy

The Navajo Lifeway (Diné Bé’Iiná)

Navajo-Churro Sheep Association

Navajo Sheep Project

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 isn’t suited for a well but didn’t 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 “volunteers”--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 won’t find soursop, bananas or pittaya growing too many other places in the Midwest! 

Hear, too, about their fellowship with Midwest Grains, the milpas they’re 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 they’ve used to supercharge the soil organic matter on their farm.  

If you’re curious about the name Sobremesa Farm, listen to the very end to hear Juan Carlos’s 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 Farm’s feature during the 2023 Farm Aid benefit concert. Be sure to watch the video, linked below.  

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 

Celina Ngozi is a Black/Igbo agrarian and the founder of Ala Soul Earthworks/Dry Bones Heal Bottomland, joining Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good today to talk about her food-sovereignty work and earth-based practices.

Hear about the Central Texas land that has been in Celina’s family since 1876 and how she, her mother and other members of their family are coming together there. Learn about heirs property and the complexities of owning, enjoying and improving the land, particularly for Black land stewards in the South. Celina talks about her work as a Land Advocacy Fellow with National Young Farmers Coalition, land access issues in the Farm Bill and why that is so important to the future of small-scale farming.

Get some advice on starting a garden from scratch with no motorized equipment, as Celina has done on land that hasn’t been farmed in a few generations. Celina talks about adapting her farming practices from Colorado—where she learned about growing—to this new land, climate and community. She also talks about growing culturally relevant crops on subsistence farming and market gardening scales.

Stay tuned until the end to hear about community building in rural areas and—something a lot of listeners can identify with—Celina’s favorite farm meal.

More about Celina Ngozi Esakawu:

Celina’s work with Ala Soul Earthworks/Dry Bones Heal Bottomland promotes connection to the earth through Afro-Indigenous practices, creativity and nurturing community. 

For a decade, Celina has grown food and worked with frontline communities to develop creative solutions to inequities in the food system. Her work includes food distribution, coordinating community agriculture programs, living on farms, promoting SNAP at farmers markets, advocating for land access, teaching African Diasporic nutrition courses and supporting local food economies across Texas.  

Her multi-ethnic background informs her earth-based practices. She focuses on growing culturally relevant foods of the Global South on land that has been in her family for 150 years. She is currently developing a program for people of color that promotes (re)membering ancestral knowledge in order to support future generations of agrarians. Celina is a 2022-2023 Land Advocacy Fellow with the National Young Farmers Coalition.

Links:

Ala Soul Earthworks/Dry Bones Heal Bottomland

One Million Acres Campaign

Federation of Southern Cooperatives land retention resources

In this episode of Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good, Dr. Mehmet Öztan talks seed justice, selecting seeds for saving, the Seedy Talks speaker series, and more about his work as an underrepresented minoritized farmer in West Virginia.

Hear about how Dr. Öztan went from receiving a PhD in civil engineering to starting Two Seeds in a Pod heirloom seed company with his wife, Dr. Amy Thompson, all because he wanted to recreate the flavors he remembered from his childhood in Turkey. He shares the challenges of tracking down seeds and histories of vegetable and herb varieties whose stories are largely passed down by oral tradition. 

Listen—with horror—to Dr. Öztan’s story about that time he got a call that a cow was loose in his garden on leased land and appreciate other complexities of growing and maintaining rare and culturally significant seeds. Get Dr. Öztan’s advice for selecting the plants from which you want to save seeds and understand what it takes to get a variety ready for commercial availability.

Go behind the scenes in the seed industry, from Dr. Öztan’s take on how your seed purchases shape the seed industry to navigating seed importation and accessing USDA germplasm seed banks, plus the problematic nature of seed expeditions. 

Finally hear about the Seedy Talks seed-justice conversation series that Dr. Öztan hosts as part of his work at West Virginia University.

• Two Seeds in a Pod online
• Email Dr. Öztan
• Two Seeds in a Pod on Facebook
• Two Seeds in a Pod on Instagram
• Seedy Talks at West Virginia University
• Dr. Amy Thompson on Instagram
• The Collards edition of Crop Stories, with an article by Dr. Öztan

Master Composter Reingard Rieger, Ph.D., breaks down composting, urban gardening and Seattle’s Master Composter Sustainability Steward program in this episode of Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good. 

Learn about Tilth Alliance’s Master Composter Sustainability Steward program, which trains 30 to 35 volunteers each year to go into the community and educate others about composting, soil health, recycling, stormwater management and more. From mandatory food-waste composting to mandatory recycling, Seattle’s sustainability programs have had a big payoff: From 2004-2019, the tonnage of compostable material going to the landfill was reduced by 40 percent, even while the city’s population grew by 30 percent. 

Get Reingard’s professional advice to start or improve your own composting or, as she says, “farming the microbes.” Hear about vermiculture (worm composting) basics, worms’ preferred vegan diet and the science behind how we get worm castings. And learn about food-digester worm bins, which are easy to build and use in your own garden.

Reingard shares her experience in building a 10,000-square-foot backyard garden and a front-yard rain garden in Seattle and talks about her family’s farming background in Austria, too. 

• Tilth Alliance
• Master Composter Sustainability Steward Program
• Tilth Alliance’s composting resources
• Seattle Public Utilities food and yard waste resources

New Jersey farmer Jeff Tober talks farming for ecological and community health, pasture-raised pigs, farm planning, and more with host Lisa Munniksma in this episode of Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good.

Hear about how a potato growing in a compost pile in the Philadelphia suburbs sparked a curiosity in Jeff as a young person that put him on a winding path to farming and eventually to the Pinelands Preservation Alliance’s Rancocas Creek Farm. Learn about the Pinelands Preservation Alliance’s work to preserve the 1.1-million-acre, ecologically important Pinelands National Reserve, including how they came into the 72 acres that is now their Rancocas Creek Farm. 

Jeff talks about developing this farm from essentially a blank slate into a thriving natural space in a way that is chemical-free, involves diverse communities, restores soil health, mitigates stormwater flow, supports pollinators and wildlife, is economically sustainable, and brings in constituents new to PPA. Learn about getting federal Natural Resources Conservation Service and New Jersey’s State Agriculture Development Committee funds for your farm projects and other ideas to “chase every dollar,” as farmers often have to do.

Have your pastured-pig curiosity piqued and consider the ways they can fit into farm ecosystems. Dive deeper into farm planning, from observation to implementation. Get a great idea for engaging the community and getting more organic material for your farm with Rancocas Creek Farm’s Project Pizza Box. Hear also about the New Jersey Agricultural Society, the Farmers Against Hunger program (and how to get your farm involved), and the role of County Agricultural Development Boards in New Jersey. 

Pinelands Preservation Alliance

PPA on Instagram

PPA on Facebook

Rancocas Creek Farm

Rancocas Creek Farm on Instagram

Email Jeff Tober

New Jersey Agricultural Society

New Jersey Farmers Against Hunger

Kentucky farmer and community organizer Tiffany Bellfield covers family land and legacies, pollinator habitats, Community Farm Alliance, and more on this episode of Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good.

Hear about the deep history of Ballew Estates, the land that Tiffany’s great-grandfather, Atrus Ballew, who was born an enslaved person, eventually bought and Tiffany now stewards with her cousin, Jim Embry. Learn about how you can build up a natural pollinator habitat on your own farm.

Tiffany talks about being an herbalist and a doula and how opening her farm to women in the community is an act of holistic care. For anyone who’s visited the iconic Alfalfa Restaurant in Lexington, Kentucky, Tiffany gets personal about what the restaurant’s transition into catering and food truck has looked like and how that ties in with her struggle with heir’s property rights.

Get to know the work of Community Farm Alliance in Kentucky, including the equity work this organization has committed to, which resulted in the Kentucky Black Farmer Fund. Also hear about why you should be paying attention to the Farm Bill and how the Inflation Reduction Act is and is not helping farmers—in particular BIPOC farmers.

Ballew Estates

Ballew Estates on Instagram

Ballew Estates on Facebook

Community Farm Alliance

CFA on YouTube

CFA on Facebook

Email CFA

Email Tiffany

Kentucky Black Farmer Fund

Episode 34: Meighen Lovelace on the Farm Bill

National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition Farm Bill info

This episode features Arwen Donahue, her life on a Kentucky farm and her new book, Landings: A Crooked Creek Farm Year.

Arwen tells us about her and her husband, David Wagoner’s, Three Springs Farm. You’ll hear about how they searched for their niche and revived themselves from burnout in small-scale farming, from 18 years of having a vegetable CSA to growing food for a local restaurant group. Learn about some of the foragable goodies on Arwen’s farm and how you can incorporate foraged items into a CSA.

Arwen discloses the struggles of writing and illustrating a book while farming and also the beauty in combining a farming life and a creative life. Listen to her read a page from Landings and explain how this book depicting drawings and daily journal entries of the farm came into being.

Arwen Donahue’s website

Find Landings at Hub City Press and on Bookshop.org

Holly Hill & Co.

Listen in on this conversation with land steward, Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance Executive Director and Hopi Tribe member Lilian Hill as she talks about dryland farming, traditional foodways, farming systems and more. 

Hear about Lilian’s family and community heritage and how she connects with traditional agriculture methods, foodways and food sovereignty work. She tells us about her and her husband’s founding of the Hopi Tutskwa Permaculture Institute—which provides outlets to explore areas of food production, energy, water and small-scale food cooperatives—plus the 15-acre area of farmland her grandparents once farmed and another 2-acre permaculture demonstration site that she and her family continue to steward. Learn, too, about the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance’s work in restoring food systems that support tribal self-determination and community wellness.  

Lilian shares an indigenous point of view—and is real about the difficulty of accessing and sharing this knowledge—on the major weather issues we’re seeing right now and how we can work to restore a balance in nature. Take note of Lilian’s dryland farming advice, from seed selection to soil conditions to water retention and conservation. Stay tuned to the end to hear about what Lilian finds inspiring in the food system today.

Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance

NAFSA on Facebook

NAFSA on Instagram

Hopi Tutskwa Permaculture Institute

In this episode of Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good, Pete Charlerie dives into financial sustainability for small farms, free equipment and information resources, USDA incentives and more.

Pete tells us about his journey from his family’s citrus grove in Trinidad to the University of Maryland, where he earned a degree in ag economics, setting the stage for his farm consultancy work today. Hear about the value of niche farm products, from cut flowers to sweet potato greens to value-added products. When you need a market for your products, sometimes you need to start your own, and Pete talks about his role in starting the Hollywood Farmers Market in Maryland.

Learn about Pete’s work as a farm consultant, as he tells us how to get better prices on materials, find USDA and NRCS resources and financial incentives, and use shared equipment. FARMS (the Family Agriculture Resource Management Service) is another resource for legal, marketing and production help for small-scale farmers in the US and the Caribbean. Stay tuned for the story about how FARMS helped one farmer save three hours of labor a day!

Pete also talks about his SunSplash Farm and how farming taught him about much more than growing food. At the very end, you’ll get tips for growing taro, a versatile and productive root crop that’s well known in the tropics.

Pete Charlerie on LinkedIn

FARMS (Family Agriculture Resource Management Service)

Nebraska farmer Kirstin Bailey talks intergenerational farming, farm transitions, and the free support for farmers offered by the Center for Rural Affairs.

Hear about the four generations of Kirstin’s family living on Fox Run Farms, where they grow fruits and vegetables and keep bees. Kirstin talks about planning a farm business in a rural area, accessing nearby urban markets and bringing the community to the farm. Learn about what it’s like to farm in a place that swings from 100-degree-F-plus temperatures in the summer to -16-degree-F temperatures in the winter.

With a farm that’s been in her family for 123 years, Kirstin talks about how her family has made intentional decisions about succession planning and farm transitions, including the importance of having support to create new farm enterprises to keep the farm viable through the years. Learn about the free support that the Center for Rural Affairs offers to beginning farmers, from business planning to crop- and livestock-specific training. Kirstin has a great success story about a beginner veteran farmer who’s gone through CFRA programs and now has his own thriving farm. 

You have to listen to the end to hear Kirstin’s advice for getting your farm dreams started and keeping them moving! Plus, Kristin shares with us her 13-year-old son’s farm dreams and a little shot of hope for the future of family farming in rural America.

Center for Rural America

Email Kirstin Bailey

Farmer Demetra Markis joins Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good for a chat about her farm, Milleflora Farm, where she and her partner grow medicinal herbs for natural medicine clients and a small vegetable harvest to share with neighbors. Demetra talks about this farming endeavor, as well as sharing about her community grazing efforts, where she and neighbors graze sheep to reduce tall, dry grass that can contribute to wildfires in her home state of California.

Demetra digs into participating in community-level farming, as well as discussing tried-and-true flock protection against predators—all the predators, actually, including mountain lions. And as an experienced community acupuncturist and licensed herbalist, she discusses some of her experience growing medicinal herbs. Plus, she shares the pleasure of enjoying olive oil made from homegrown olives.

Plus, we cover biointensive growing, a particularly helpful technique for areas like California with constraints on land and resources.

Milleflora Farm

Sara Wittenberg on Pollinators and How to Build a Pollinator Garden

Pollinator Week is June 17-23, 2024. Without pollinators, we wouldn’t 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 they’re 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 are—not 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 program—the first time she’s mentioned it to the public—the 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 Sara’s 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 Sara’s best advice for how to build a pollinator garden on your own land, backyard or balcony. (Hint: The Pollinator Partnership’s garden recipe cards can help get you started.)

Links from this episode:

Bee Friendly Gardening website

Pollinator Partnership website

Native plants in your region

Filipino-Hawaiian farmer Emily Trabolsi joins Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good to talk about what farming in the Pacific Northwest looks like from a cooperative perspective. Learn about growing upland rice just outside Seattle. Hear about the Agrarian Trust organization and their concept of land and resource sharing, and then Emily shares examples of successful cooperatives from around the world. 

Washington Farmland Trust expanded to have a statewide presence in fall 2021, and that’s where Emily’s work with them comes in. She explains how she helps to connect farmers with land and resources and to facilitate equitable, long-term lease arrangements through the Farm to Farmer program. Emily enthusiastically talks about ideas to bring people together and support new farmers.

Emily brings us into the concept of “putting the culture back in agriculture,” becoming connected to our food system, and why that $6 bag of salad mix is worth every bit of $6.

Finally, she shares her two favorite farm meals—because she couldn’t pick just one. The recipe for a delicious Filipino pork dish is linked below!

• Email Emily Trabolsi
• Emily Trabolsi’s personal on Instagram
• Emily Trabolsi’s farming Instagram
• Washington Farmland Trust
• Farm to Farmer
• Agrarian Trust
• Kamayan Farm  
• Ayeko Farm
• Modest Family Solutions
• Emily’s go-to recipe for humba

Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good brings you part two of the conversation with Colorado farmer Meighen Lovelace. In this episode, Meighen talks about the Colorado Blueprint to End Hunger and John Ikerd’s work in bringing to life a community food utility—like a rural electric cooperative, but for regionally produced food. Learn about zoning, what you need to know about these rules that dictate how you are allowed to use your property, and who you need to know to change the law, whether you farm in the city, suburbs or country. 

Then, get a Farm Bill primer! The Farm Bill is that massive piece of national legislation that is renewed every five years and affects pretty much everything that touches your life, from energy to conservation to nutrition to beginning-farmer programs and more. Meighen breaks down the parts of the Farm Bill and flags areas that you as a small-scale farmer should pay attention to. And Meighen and Lisa offer a little pep talk for you to call your legislators and share your Farm Bill wants.

Listen to the end for Meighen’s favorite farm meal. (This is the first time we’ve heard this veggie as a favorite from all of the podcast guests!)

Be sure to listen back to Episode #33 for the first part of Meighan Lovelace’s conversation, including talk about farming in a water-scarce area, year-round farming with the Salvation Army, permaculture forest greenhouses and more.

Mountain Harvest Consulting

Meighan Lovelace on Twitter

Colorado Blueprint to End Hunger

John Ikerd on community food utilities

On this episode of Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good, Colorado farmer Meighen Lovelace talks water issues in the West, empowering people to grow food in community, and your chance to speak truth to power with the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health. This is episode one of two with Meighen. Check back in for the rest of the conversation in two weeks!

Listen in for Meighen’s take on how to work with your land, including the hard decision she’s made to put her San Luis Valley farmland in cover crops for a couple of seasons, and the challenges of working with water rights of farmers and communities throughout the Western US. Meighen tells us about a gardening project she helped start at the Salvation Army when she was a client there herself and how it’s grown into a year-round urban farm with a four-season greenhouse and a training and job placement program. Then, Meighen talks about her Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute training and the permaculture forest greenhouse concept (including the simple climate battery, which you have to hear about!).

Listen in to the end for details about the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health—the first to be held since 1969. As a small-scale farmer and someone interested in food systems, you have a chance to have your voice heard! Meighen tells us about how.

• • Mountain Harvest Consulting
  • Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute
  • The Alliance to End Hunger
  • White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health

In this episode, fourth-generation Mississippi farmer Felicia Bell talks about traditional agriculture, family business, farmers helping farmers, and more. 

Find out how you can get free sustainable farming advice and technical assistance from the National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT) from a specialist like Felicia. 

Felicia explains what she means by “traditional agriculture” and why she prefers this phrase to describe popular agricultural methods instead of saying “sustainable agriculture” or “regenerative agriculture.” Hear about Felicia’s self-sufficient homestead upbringing on what she now calls RD & S Farm and how the farm has changed since her grandparents were teaching her their farming ways. 

Listen until the end for Felicia’s advice for maintaining healthy pasture for grazing animals and to learn the most inexpensive way to keep deer out of your garden!

National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT) 

RD & S Farm on Facebook

RD & S Farm on Instagram