This transcript was computer generated and edited, but might still contain errors.
Sarah: Alright, we are back from our break and excited to have some guests with us today for our farmer panel.
Sarah: So I’m really excited and grateful to have Steve and Beth with Tipi Produce, and Tommy with Vitruvian Farm with us to kick off our panel. We’re just going to start with a general question of why, or how, did you get into farming? And let’s start with Steve and Beth.
Beth Kazmar: Alright, you started first. So you start answering first.
Steve Pincus: Sure. I grew up in a row house in West Philadelphia and I’d never set foot on a farm until I moved to Wisconsin in my very early twenties. That farming came about because in 1970 I got involved with starting up the Outpost Natural Foods co-op store in Milwaukee. I was part of a group that got it going. I was a produce buyer. I managed the store and I met farmers and I met people who really into food. And by the mid-’70s, I was living in the Driftless Area and living very, very cheaply, but needing something productive to do, and we figured that we were out in the farm area, let’s try farming.
Steve Pincus: We heard there was a cool farmers market starting up in Madison and we could take whatever we could produce there without any warning and it just grew from there. And around 1980, we started selling to Willy Street Co-op during those weekly trips to the farmers market. In the late ‘80s, I moved much closer to Madison and we’ve continued to focus on Willy Street Co-op as a major customer of ours as the farm group.
Beth: So I joined Tipi Produce, this is my 25th growing season. And I am a plant pathologist, I got a Master’s Degree from UW and did research for a while and then joined the farm operation when our daughter was born.
Beth: And my part of the business is running our CSA—Community Supported Agriculture—program. And 25 years—still awesome!
Tommy Stauffer: I’ll go last; I think I started a farm last!
Beth: Okay, we’re going chronologically for sure.
Tommy: Once again, my name is Tommy, I’m one of the owners of Vitruvian Farms. This is our thirteenth year of farming. My business partner, Shawn, and I started our junior year of college at Madison. Like these two, we didn’t necessarily grow up knowing we were gonna be farmers, planning to be farmers. I didn’t grow up on a family farm. I didn’t go to school for agriculture. Neither did Shawn. I went to school for business, John went to school for philosophy and psychology, and we started a farm because we felt like we wanted to do something that could make a difference in our community and our world in a larger sense. And we started with farming.
Tommy: Shawn specifically was really passionate about food miles, and the distance our food was traveling from where it was grown to where it was sold and the desire to re-localize food system and help relocalize the food system. I think it’s really easy to see where we are today and say, “Wow”—especially Madison—”we buy local, we support local. You know, the Co-ops exist, they’re thriving. Our restaurants buy local.” But thirteen years ago, that kind of local food movement—at least on the restaurant wholesale scene—was kind of just really taking off on more of a mainstream level. And we kind of were on the beginning of that movement. We were doing it, but we kind of joined in at that time.
Tommy: And we really want to be able to use farming as a tool to grow food in a way that’s beneficial for the environment as well as beneficial to our community. I’m really passionate, and one of the reasons I got into farming specifically is I just feel that food is, you know, when we’re having a meal together is one, I think we’re at our happiest, and I really want to be a part of utilizing food as a vehicle, to improve our community, bring people together and improve ourselves, not only with each other, but our personal health and our personal wellness.
Steve: When I was first getting involved with Outpost, it was really a political moment. We were looking for something to set something that was an alternative to standard eating, standard way of getting food to people in the cities.
00:05:00
Steve: And it really had a lot to do with setting up alternative systems that we could use as much as the health and welfare of individuals.
Sarah: I feel like you guys are kind of leading into this next question because we know a lot tends to have changed right over the time that you have been farming or over in this kind of movement and these alternative systems. And so you’ve touched on that a little bit, but I’d be curious for you to speak a bit more to what changes you’ve seen in the time that you’ve been farming or kind of thinking about this food work, and how that maybe has impacted your farm practices or the business model for your farm to ensure it remains viable for the long term.
Tommy: I can start, I think there’s so many areas you could focus on. I think one thing that we see it just on a farming side, when we first started it kind of felt like being a small scale farm, there was either hand tools and doing everything by hand or large scale equipment. On the small end of that, a tractor, a huge washing system, things that cost thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of dollars. And when we first started to kind of felt like we had those two options and, at our scale and what we’re trying to do with our farm, there were some things in the first few years that really helped propel us from one step to the next, and these little kind of handheld automated tools.
Tommy: There was kind of this glory around the backyard farmer that really spurred things like these handheld automated harvesters that are driven by a drill, or on these planting tools that all the cells of a transplant tray are connected by paper and instead of pulling each plug out and plopping them in, you can just walk with this thing and they’re set to the right spacing. And these things didn’t exist—or at least exist for buying in this area—when we started, and now they do and it’s really allowed more farms, I think, to find the opportunity, at a small/medium scale, to do things efficiently enough to be somewhat competitive on price and then be able to make a living doing it. It’s not there yet, but I think that’s one of the biggest changes I’ve seen in the farming aspect.
Beth: Yeah, I completely agree. I feel like the resources have grown so much in the 25 years since I’ve been farming. And when I left UW 25 years ago, organic was—you know, nobody at UW was doing serious research on organic farming systems, and now we have dedicated faculty—
Sarah: A chair sponsored by Clif Bar!
Beth: Yeah, Exactly. And, we’ve watched over time as among the research community, our scales of farming have gained additional credibility and attention from the research community. But then there’s other resources as well. The sharing among farmers that has been coordinated through things like FairShare CSA Coalition and Marbleseed. There’s just a lot more resource-sharing among farmers as well.
Tommy: Yeah, I think one thing I’ve seen with just the community, when I first started, I remember regularly being at a farmer’s market and having somebody comment on the cost of our food being too expensive. And I just feel like in the last maybe, maybe it was around COVID, it felt like there was maybe a unique change to the appreciation for local food and something we never hear anymore is “Your food is too expensive or, you should charge less, the farmers market should be cheap.” And there’s been this, I think, appreciation for not only what it takes to be a small/medium farmer and what those costs are, an effort to want those farmers and the people that help support those farms to have a better life. But also understanding the difference between food grown organically and local and fresh versus something that is coming from far away, something that might not have the same flavor profile, and that there is a difference, and that difference is valuable.
Steve: When I started farming, organic farming was kind of an unknown, open-ended project.
Beth: Make it up as you go.
Steve: Just getting, trying to figure out how to do it. Of course, I hadn’t had any farming background. These people who did were just figuring it out, one year at a time. Right now there’s so much more information available for beginning farmers or even very experienced farmers.
00:10:00
Steve: There are conferences, a lot of information online, books, mentorships, that are actually being subsidized by state and federal governments. There are programs all the time to help people transition from conventional farming into organics and there are markets available that weren’t around for many years after I got started. So it’s so much, I’ll say easier for someone to jump in. And there are paradigms, like Tommy was saying—the small scale tools that are available are so much more sophisticated than what we had. I never had the vision of wanting to be a small farmer. I was really a machine head and I was very attracted to farm equipment and machinery once I got out to the country and saw what was there.
Steve: So being in Wisconsin, there was plenty of equipment and machinery to use. But none of it was really all that suitable for the type of vegetable farming we were doing. So, even today, a lot of our equipment comes from Europe and it’s more suited to the 30-, 20- to 40-acre farms that are really prevalent in Europe.
Tommy: Yeah, our greens harvester is out of Italy. This paper pod transport, I think, originates out of Japan.
Beth: Correct.
Tommy: And so yeah, but that’s one beautiful thing, is being able to utilize those resources to bring that kind of farming, efficiency and style to this area as well.
Steve: Right, there’s enough demand now to bring those equipments over and actually have dealers set up in North America to handle parts and repairs, and to spread the expertise around. It really made a difference for us in the last 10 to 15 years to have those European tools.
Tommy: Yeah, I say one thing that hasn’t changed is that farming is still really hard.
Sarah: He was looking at my question list and would be like “Are you them what time they wake up in the morning?” I bet that hasn’t changed. It’s too early!
Tommy: I don’t wake up better early, personally. I mean, I guess—is six early?
Sarah: Yes, not to me. But for other folks, probably. Yeah.
Steve: No, it’s kind of late.
Tommy: Well, all of our staff is all pretty and all—I’m lucky to get them there by seven-thirty.
Steve: Okay.
Beth: Yeah, okay.
Steve: We actually—our staff comes in at 9 o’clock.
Beth: Yeah.
Sarah: Okay.
Steve: That’s because they, historically, they’ve come from Madison and they want to have time in the evening and not have to wake up at 5:30 [inaudible] drive out to the farm.
Beth: We do have this slightly crazy schedule. It’s Monday to Friday for our crew, Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 5:30, and this is banker’s hours, but we figured out a long time ago that if we keep it to that schedule and we work hard—and you’re tired at the end of that day—but if we keep to that schedule, people gonna have a life outside of work.
Sarah: Yeah.
Beth: And that’s part of why we’ve been very, very fortunate to have returning employees for many years. But nine o’clock! What kind of crazy start time is that for a farm?
Tommy: That’s pretty late.
Beth: That’s pretty late. But we start much earlier.
Tommy: Yeah.
Beth: Yeah.
Steve: Yes.
Beth: Our day doesn’t start at 9.
Sarah: You guys were touching on how the markets have changed, right—there was obviously, there’s a period in time when organic was undefined and now there’s certifications and it’s defined and markets are in different places and now, I think you spoke a little bit how organic has changing and maybe what you’ve seen change in organic farming. But I also want to add in that layer of regenerative culture, which is now garnering a lot of attention. I was just at the regenerative Food Systems Investment Forum last week and hearing, you know, SPINS [which collects grocery product sales data from over 100,000 locations in the US] now has nine months of data on regenerative claims. And so, I love to hear your thoughts on that aspect.
Steve: “Regenerative” is kind of like the word “sustainable”; at the moment, it’s undefined. It supposedly means to improve soil conditions to get things back the way they were before we screwed up our land and it’s a very, it’s very vague at the moment, and it’s just getting going. It’s got—I like the idea, but I know that as vegetable farmers, we are fortunate if we can keep our soils about where they are at a high level—
00:15:00
Steve: —not going back to 200 centuries—to 200 years before they were ever farmed, we’re doing pretty well. Different types of farming is pasturing animals, grazing, can be much more amenable to actually regenerating soil, and capturing, you know, a substantial amount of carbon.
Tommy: In some ways annual vegetable farming is somewhat at odds with regenerative agriculture because you’re dealing with bare soil for a lot of the season. And, you know, annual production—you plant in the beginning of the year, you harvest throughout the season, everything is done at the end of year, you replant at the beginning of the year. You have to work really hard with compost additive, green manuring to just hold that soil level. Regenerative definitely leans more to a perennial-based agriculture system—more trees—with what we’re farming, obviously, that’s at odds. I think with our farm we recognize that there is a challenge with annual-based production, and we’re trying to find a balance with that. We are trying to plant more trees at our farm, into the crop planting with hedgerows of trees, with annual production mixed in, but it’s challenging, I think, what you said is, you can do a lot to sustain where you’re at, but it’s tough as an annual production to build soil over time. That requires things that are sequestering carbon, which annuals are generally not.
Steve: Right. I’ve spent the day mixing up cover crop seed and planting, and those cover crops are really important to maintaining, at least, soil, to building back from the damage that we did this year, which we kind of do every year with cultivation and tillage. But as Tommy said, this is a cycle where we kind of beat up our fields and then we help them to get back to where they were.
Beth: We do have a lot of extra areas, and another point about the cover crops is it’s time—we’re planting now so that the soil is covered over the course of the winter and really, that’s a good time to protect your soil. It’s one step that, I think, a lot of conventional growers don’t do, but there is growing interest in cover crops among even conventional farmers and that’s a really hopeful thing. We have a farm that’s 75 acres and we had about 30 in crops this year. So there’s a lot of perimeter, there’s a lot of extra areas.
Beth: And we’ve been working over the last five, ten years, to sort of build up the ecology of these extra areas. So I’m very into prairie; my main hobby is prairie, which is kind of crazy as a farmer because it’s plants and outside it’s a lot of overlap with farming. But we’ve been planting a lot of prairie patches with the intention of supporting pollinators and beneficial insects knowing that insects are declining and need that kind of support. And we envision making our farm sort of a waystation for those populations.
Beth: That’s an area where we feel like—I agree with you, Tommy, that annual vegetables has a lot of open ground every year. And so we have to do what we can with those areas that for us are in perennial crops. And we’re trying to diversify those.
Tommy: Yup. For example we have a 46-acre property; we only farm seven acres. And we’re working hard to do kind of where they’re heading, which is opening some more space so that we can let more fields rest, be in green manure production, but we try to create a full ecosystem around our space. We’re surrounded by woods, a very good natural habitat, planting beneficial things for our pollinators and to see his point, “sustainable,” “regenerative”—there’s not a point at which you say this is sustainable or not necessarily.
Tommy: The goal is to kind of keep working towards. Where can we find practices that are manageable to take that next step? And not to say, like, “annual production is not sustainable, so don’t do it.” It’s like, here’s the things we’re doing to move it closer and closer to something we say is regenerative or more regenerative and try to do the best we can knowing that growing food in that medium is hard to say “You’re building over time.” You tried to sustain, you try to maintain. and that’s what’s really important when you’re doing annual production.
Sarah: And you guys listed some of those practices which are helping impact, probably helping respond to climate change or build better soils, sequester carbon, increase biodiversity—right? This is being a farmer, right?
00:20:00
Sarah: What can we do every day to—like you said—make things better than they were to return things to the soil. What other practices come to mind that you have put into place to help further those efforts. Or are you hoping might be next on the list or, if you had I don’t know what amount of money you would love to implement?
Steve: Well, we bring in organic materials from off the farm. When we can we’ve been fortunate enough for most of our years to be able to leavse from our little city of Evansville, only three miles away. And it’s a way of taking that organic material and putting it into our soils and making produce out of it.
Tommy: Yeah, one really cool thing on our farm in the last three, four years has really expanded our mushroom growing production, which is a product we offer at the co-ops. And what’s cool about that is we take about two byproducts which is organically approved sawdust and organically approved soybean hulls, and those are mixed into a pellet. We create a mushroom block, grow mushrooms on that, and—once that block is harvested—that is then composted and added to our fields. And what’s nice about that is we’re not taking from somewhere and then just adding it back in and kind of trying to—in our minds, we’re taking something that was kind of a byproduct intend to use growing food with it and then being able to take that and add it to our soil, and it does feel like an additive approach. Also the unknown of throwing a lot of mycelium into the field happens. So we’ll see what happens there, over time.
Beth: That sounds like a good system.
Tommy: Yeah, it’s been really cool. It’s actually reduced our compost needs in half, all right?
Beth: Very nice.
Tommy: Yeah, with being able to just take all of that.
Steve: Where do you get those soybean hulls? Where do they come from?
Tommy: That is a great question. Shawn does the ordering for that so I can’t think of the name of the place. But what’s cool now is—just like what we’re saying about tools with farming, there’s been an increase in mushroom production. Actually, the US is a very low consumer compared to the rest of the world for capita, and that’s changing pretty rapidly. And with that is coming new equipment, new products.
Tommy: So when we first started, there was—you buy soybean hulls and you bought sawdust and you mix it together. Now a company makes them in pellets that we can put in there so we’re not getting a ton of dust, and much better work environment, even easier to weigh and manage and get consistent. So, that’s been really cool to see. It’s an expanding, exciting time to be growing mushrooms, be eating mushrooms because there’s so many more people growing up and new varieties being grown regularly by farmers, so it’s cool.
Beth: Yeah
Steve: Right.
Beth: I want to take a turn answering that question as well. So we use energy on our farm. We use fuel, we use electricity, whether it’s for tractors on the farm, delivery trucks, coolers to cool the produce, pumps to pump the water for irrigation. And in an effort to offset that we installed a very big 20, kilowatt solar array, it’s close to—
Steve: Six years ago
Beth: It’s got to be somewhere between six and 10 years, and that’s an investment and we did get some government support for that. But that’s an investment that will pay back over time, but it’s a place that we felt we should put our money because we don’t have a system that we can get ourselves to where we are not—that we are at net zero for energy. So we have to at least do that effort. And that was a big decision and we’re glad that we made that decision.
Steve: Yeah. And it provides about half the electricity that we use on the farm over an entire year.
Beth: Yeah.
Steve: So we’re using more than it produces in the summer and sending back into the—
Beth: We’re tied into the grid. Yeah.
Tommy: Yeah, we’re actually hopefully gonna install ours next year, so we’re excited. We’re on that path as well.
Sarah: That is exciting! Yeah, what have you noticed on your farm? As a result of climate change or environmental shifts?
Beth: It’s such a big question. Yeah.
Steve: Weather is so variable. There we finishing up an extremely dry year where we did more irrigation than ever before. And, if you look just five years back, we had about the wettest year ever, in 2018, where we were just swamped and working in mud the entire season. So is that climate change or is it—
00:25:00
Steve: I mean, yes, the extremes are probably there, but—by using organic techniques by being a good organic farmer, we’re developing a farm that’s resilient, that can handle these extremes and still produce without degrading our soils. So we feel that’s our best way to handle whatever is coming is just to keep organic matter up, keep our rotations tight, and be gentle with our soils.
Beth: And you’re asking about our experience of climate change, but what we see—there’s a lot of variation year to year in the weather and what we see in our narrow slice of experience is it’s not the way to say climate change is happening. I simply press the scientific research that I’ve done, all of these years, the documentation of the rising temperatures, in the air, in the sea, and melting of the polar caps. We just have to accept that it’s there and look beyond what we experience for it.
Beth: I can say that this year, I mean—people have said for a long time “Can we document it or not?” Okay, I think there’s pretty widespread consensus that the Canadian wildfires are being accelerated by climate change. And there’s an example of something that we had to live through this summer. So we’re working outside and the smoke and having to lead our crews through that.
Tommy: It was terrible!
Beth: But you blocked it out, is what he did.
Tommy: Felt like I smoked a pack of cigarettes that day. It was terrible.
Beth: So that’s an example where it is becoming clear that we’re having to work through climate change. But I don’t look to just our own experiences to say “Climate change is real.”
Tommy: I think that’s a point—more than anything, I think what you’re asking is “How do we handle extreme weather?” And for us, I feel like one thing we’ve that’s been hard to get used to is extreme weather events. Really heavy rains. I mean, I feel like every time it rains now at our farm, it either doesn’t rain or rains 5 inches, and that just feels like the norm. And once again, we’ve been in this for 13 years. So has that happened before or not? I just don’t know well enough, but I know that is really hard to take for us. We’ve definitely moved into having parts of our business, a part of our farm that are not weather-dependent.
00:30:00
Tommy: And so we’ve moved into mushroom growing because it’s indoors, it does not matter whether it’s sunny or cloudy or rainy or dry—we can produce mushrooms. We do more greenhouse growing to be able to manage our water to what we need versus what the weather says. We’re opening a grocery store on our farm, a little farm store, to once again just move away from seasonal reliance on— We produce a lot of salad on the farm in the summer and they’re so delicate that a heavy rain can knock out an entire harvest. And so we’ve addressed that; that’s how we manage large-scale weather events. Like they said, I fully believe climate change is real and happening. I don’t know if I can say what specifically on the farm is related to climate change because any weather can be hard. I mean drought was hard but drought was also kind of nice in some ways because you got to control the water.
Steve: Yeah,
Beth: Yeah.
Tommy: And so it was weird when the fires hit because stuff grew differently—it was cloudy! it was weird. Yeah it actually was noticeable. I mean there were days where you swear that the produce had a smell to it.
Sarah: Yeah
Tommy: And so that kind of stuff is just—it’s almost hard to even wrap your brain around “what does that mean for the farm?” Or “What did we experience with that?” Because you’re kind of in the grind and you’re just getting through it. But yeah.
Steve: You’re making a really great point about being diverse on your farm. I mean, these farms’ve got different enterprises. We’re really all outdoors. We’re one of the few farms these days that do not use the hoop house or greenhouse to grow produce; everything is outside. But we have crops from the beginning of the season, we’re out in the field the first of April roughly and we start harvesting a few perennials like asparagus, and rhubarb in early May, and we go all the way typically to right about Thanksgiving in the field. And then we have a huge stash of root crops and cabbage that we stash away from the winter sales. So because we grow about 40 different crops on the farm; if something doesn’t do well, normally, it’s not a big deal.
00:35:00
Steve: Something else will be doing excellently. And that diversity of crops and the space of chronological diversity, really makes a difference. We could have terrible weather in June but really terrific weather in September and it balances out when you look at the entire season.
Beth: And that diversity that Steve describes—sort of year-round selling of produce—has been a way to stabilize our farm. So you describe different enterprises outside, different operations for us, we grow produce for wholesale to Willy Street Co-op and to co-ops called Outpost Natural Foods down in Milwaukee that Steve already mentioned, and then we have a CSA in which customers buy from us directly.
Beth: And so summer production is largely CSA then we transition into—and wholesale as well—and we transition into all wholesale in the winter, and it allows us to spread out the work of a fairly short growing season, and I’m sure you’re doing the same with your mushroom production year round, right?
Tommy: The big thing for us, it was obviously the financial side of having some stability but year round growing for us has allowed us to retain employees.
Beth: I was gonna have that point!
Tommy: We were able for six, seven years on the farm, we were 100% seasonal. We didn’t have any employees stay. We hired a lot of very young people that were kind of doing this for a one summer thing. So, have your staff, end of the year they’re gone, you start over at the beginning of the year. And that was really hard. We couldn’t build. And so we started to find these ways. “How can we support financially enough going on so that people can stay?” And people can say, “I’m gonna farm here with you for a while. I’m gonna choose this as a career. Or at least a job for multiple years.” And that’s been one of the biggest changes in our farm in the last five years, is having people having stability that we can grow. Say “Here’s responsibilities, here’s things you could take on and allow us to—” You know, also as owners for us to be able to also make things better every year, and not just get stuck in the work all the time.
Beth: it has the same effect, having our winter sales to the co-ops has the same effect for us. We can offer year round employment to our best employees.
Tommy: Yeah.
Beth: And so we have one woman Maggie—I’ll call her out by name—who’s been with us, we think, 27 years I believe. Yeah, those old payroll records are buried in an old—somewhere, we’re not sure. Simone’s been with us 20, this is her 24th season.
00:40:00
Beth: We’ve been very lucky to have numerous people stay with us for 10 years, 14 years, 15 years, and then you get this resident knowledge, and people have the responsibilities that they return to year after year. And if you have a short crap and it’s only there for a month, you don’t have to retrain everyone. There’s this body of knowledge, and the winter work is—and year-round employment is—why people stay. Yeah.
Sarah: I’m glad you guys touched on that because I think that there’s the diversification in labor and such big pieces and I think hearing you guys have that conversation is super valuable.
[We edited out the quorum count section of the video.]Sarah: I think I was going to transition to asking you a little bit about your kind of production planning process. Sometimes I think the Cooperative folks get requests for “Can you grow Broccolini” or bring in this item? And so I’d love for you guys to speak a little bit to what factors you consider when determining what crops to grow, and it could be that after 25 years, you have your mix and it’s no longer as much of a consideration. But if you guys could sit on that for a moment and then I’m gonna check in with Ben and how our vote is. We’re going to keep going for a little bit, okay, so I’m gonna toss it over to you guys to speak to that question.
Beth: So we are pretty stable in our crop mix at this point and having as long as history as we do. But that said, we make changes every single year. And, for the CSA, when we say we have 40 crops, that’s driven by the need to have diverse boxes for our CSA customers. So they’ve committed to us for 25 weeks of the year, just about half the year, and our job is to pack nice boxes. So we have to have to have diversity of herbs and different things, and we respond to them. So, for example, a big effort over the last couple years was every year, on the annual poll, they said they want more sweet corn. And so we put in some effort to figure out a different sort of seeding system and transplant system to have a longer season steady or supply. So the changes that we make are on the one hand tweaks but are in response to our customers, whether it’s the CSA members or you guys at the Co-op, telling us that you want us to grow more or less of something.
Sarah: Great. Thank you.
Tommy: I think what’s just—specifically on the co-op—I think what’s so unique and cool about one how the Co-op treats vendors is that annual meeting. We have an annual meeting with the buyers and we get to sit down, “What went well, how was your growing season,” and then talk about what are things that may be on the grower side we want to grow more of, or [what] is there a demand for it in the Co-ops, or what are they looking for that maybe we could grow.
Tommy: For example, this year, we have been dabbling—we grow a salad mix that has a bunch of different components, and one of the components is a mixed kale, and we’re like, we could just package that up by itself. Would the co-ops want to buy it? And the buyer said, “Yeah, we’ll try it.” And now it’s a staple product that we offer here during the season, which is really cool. it’s just not that common. We’re a little different than you in that actually the primary business of ours is wholesale. We have about 70 restaurant clients that we deliver direct to, whether primarily in Madison but some in Milwaukee. And we meet with them every winter and they’ll give us a variety of options. They will tell us what crops maybe they’re not getting locally that they want. We try to match that into our system. But, in general, we are pretty hesitant to take on crop requests from chefs because it can be very fleeting—
Beth: Um-hm, yeah!
Tommy: Whether they end up having and how much they need, whether they’re still at that restaurant by the time we have it. So, for us, we have a CSA as well, so we grow a diverse amount of crops but we try to do the approach of “get good at a certain amount of crops and then add 1, or 1 or 2, get better at those, add another one,” and try to have a strong base and then—over time—build and not try to go to crazy on variety and then just have too much going on each plant.
00:45:00
Tommy: Even each variety can have their own unique needs, and so you need to be able to give them that attention. So yeah.
Steve: We had a period of several years where we did deal with a lot of restaurants, and it was very unstable. Chefs are in and out, restaurants are in and out of business, and we were pretty glad to move into a CSA.
Beth: Yeah, that’s where the transition to CSA.
Steve: Also away from that. This winter meeting that we have with the Co-op here, in this building, often is essential for what we’re going to grow. there’s always a forecast—our lists of what we provide the Co-op is fairly stable, as Beth has said, we’ve been doing it for so long, but they’re often little tweaks. There may be a new variety or something that you guys want to try, some vegetable that’s usually green and might be a red variant, and you often like to try out. It has a lot to do with how things are going in your business. Are you going to buy more? Is business increasing? How’s the North store [Willy North] doing? Things like that. It gives us a chance to really talk about some of the details with the managers at the store during the summertime. We just take orders and we fill them; we don’t get into too much detail beyond that.
Sarah: I love that. Just how relational it has to be, right, to assist with that, planning in the fall to buy the seeds. To be able to focus on, like you said, the growing and then the sale because, at that point, it’s planted, here’s what’s gonna happen. And so I appreciate you guys speaking to that a bit and just sharing what that has been like. Tommy, I think you mentioned that one thing that has changed in farming is that nobody comes up to you anymore and is shocked, has price sticker shock, and partially maybe because of the supply chain issues that came out of the pandemic, partially because of familiarity. I just wanted to circle back to that a little bit and just ask if there’s anything you want to speak to about kind of how all the work you do on your farm to be a good steward of the environment impacts the price and quality of your products, and how you’ve seen consumers respond to how you had to price your products or kind of what’s in the market?
Tommy: I think once again being organic alone is a cost; the cost of every single input is more expensive. The seed is more expensive, the soil additive choices are more expensive.
Beth: Additional documentation, the cost of certification.
Tommy: Yeah. And, you know, I could talk all day on my feelings on having to pay to be certified. I still think that that proves to you that the verdict is not out, that organic is the right way to go because—if it was, you would be encouraged to. And it’s a heavy cost, it’s a heavy burden to be organic, and not only do you have to do all the work, pay the extra to get all the inputs. But then you have to pay to have someone certify you, and I think it’s great that we have it and I’d rather do that than not have it. But it is interesting, when you think about, that if it was a collective agreement that organic is a good thing, you wouldn’t have to then pay, because you’re already taking on that burden of being organic.
Beth: Yeah, yeah. It’s gonna be putting it.
Steve: You’re right. We can get a $750 dollar a year supplement from the federal government towards our certification, which does help. It’s a percentage of what it costs us. But I think that that definition is really important, “certified organic” rather than just “no spray.” Or we’re “organic,” but what does that really mean? It’s very hard, even though you might have a close relationship with the farmer at a market, you don’t know what’s on their farm. But if you’re certified and you’re willing to make, hey, the extra cost of that, it gives—well, it’s absolutely necessary to sell in the wholesale market, to sell to a store, because you guys—and all our wholesale customers—have to pass that certification on. You, are certifiers, our vouching that we’re doing the right job, and then that goes through the entire chain with that produce. So it is an important expense.
00:50:00
Steve: One cost that is much higher in organic farming is typically labor, it just takes more time. The inputs are definitely more expensive, but the biggest input is really people and the work that needs to get done in order to make crops work.
Beth: Yeah, our mechanized farm, we are an efficient farm, but we still have a lot of hand labor, and that comes with organic. And an additional cost that comes with organic is increased risk. So that if anything that we can do to combat disease or insect problems is all preventative. Once you have a disease or an insect problem, you really can’t do anything to stop it. And so we carry that risk and do the work of prevention, whereas the conventional grower, you know, can pull out the sprayer and do some crop rescue. So we carry greater risk. We are biological farmers. I think we know more than the conventional farmers in terms of biology and how the ecology for our farm works. I just think we do, because of that effort to try and anticipate problems and prevent them in advance. So it’s another cost that is part of organic farming. Yeah.
Sarah: Thank you for speaking to that. I think sometimes we know that there is an added cost, but hearing how that impacts and all those components that come into it.
Tommy: And I think one final point to kind of that change: I think that people started to maybe be more appreciative of the price that local food is partially because places like the Co-op, and then that expanded outward, started to buy more local. And so, you couldn’t go to the grocery store and find something for a quarter of the price or a half the price, and that’s starting to be less and less common. And I do believe that overall, at least what I have seen, I feel like vegetable quality is improving as a whole in your consumer spaces. And I think, because of that, I see Harmony Valley at Metcalfe’s now. For example, it’s where beets used to be $2.50 a bunch. Now they’re $5.50, $6. And it’s like the farmers market is back to competitive. And I think that’s also been part of [it]; there’s not just this crazy difference where you may have seen that a few years ago.
Steve: And we’re becoming better farmers. Twenty years ago, thirty years ago, we were just glad to get a crop of just about anything. But now we’re reliable, the quality is higher of what we produce—we really know what we’re doing. And when I say “we,” I mean many, many dozens of farmers, even young farmers can get up to a pretty high level fairly quickly these days. So what people are paying for is better than it used to be.
Sarah: Yeah, Absolutely. Did I approve the minutes yet? I did get note that we did get an approval of the minutes. So thank you, everyone for voting on that. And I think we have about 10 to 15 minutes left and so I am going to it’s kind of piggyback.on—I think what we were just speaking to kind of those consumer values and behavior and how they’ve kind of shifted with you and the farm and your products. How have you seen those consumer values change over time? And how has your farm adapted to that, and if we haven’t quite covered it all yet.
Tommy: I mean, at least for me, I think that there is an increasing level of appreciation for quality and flavor.
Beth: Recognition of that quality.
Tommy: And being able to say, “Wow, that carrot tastes better, I want that.” And I think I’m seeing that and—our CSA program, I get to talk to a lot of individuals and I just see a lot of people that are cooking more, putting that appreciation into the vegetables. I also see a lot more people dabbling in gardening, and especially in this area, which I’ve always encouraged it. A lot of people will say, “does that—if they’re gardening, they won’t buy from me.” I’m like “No, then they’ll realize they have to quality and they’re gonna appreciate it that much more, and now I only can get from local farms because it’s different, it’s better.” And that’s for me, I think there’s just been a better, a larger appreciation of quality.
Steve: I think once people eat good quality, local, organic food, it’s very disappointing to have to go back to the supermarket—right?—and feed yourself through the winter there.
00:55:00
Steve: So that keeps more people on our side.
Tommy: I mean, I can’t eat a tomato in the winter.
Steve: Yeah, we don’t bother, but—
Beth: We have a freezer full.
Tommy: I’ll eat our frozen, but it’s—yeah.
Beth: I can’t do it.
Tommy: Yeah, I can’t do it.
Steve: Maybe a lemon or a lime, but not much more than that. I don’t believe in the standard grocery store.
Sarah: Is there anything else you’d like to add about how farmers markets or retailers and consumers going and purchasing from outlets like that really help your farm be successful?
Steve: Without you folks coming to the Co-op and buying our food, we wouldn’t have a farm. I mean we’ve in particular have kind of grown up together with Willy Street. We’ve been selling to you for more than 40 years and selling through you to all of you out there, and we appreciate you. And apparently— because you keep buying what we take to the Co-op, you appreciate what we have also. So it’s very mutual, we need you and at the moment you apparently need us. And eventually you’re going to need other farms, because we’re not going to stay at this forever. There are plenty of young farms who will take over what we’ve been doing when the time comes.
Tommy: Well, like me.
Beth: Exactly.
Tommy: I think that one really important point you say is just: in the end, a farm can only succeed if people buy our stuff and want it. And the Co-ops are such an amazing medium for not only our farms, but all the local producers and makers to have a very accessible opportunity. It’s very hard to get into grocery stores, and we’ve tried a bunch of different ones outside of the Co-ops. And—not that it was easy; we had to work to get to that level, to that quality, to that consistency. But once we’re in, it’s been just been such an important part of our growth is knowing the Co-ops are there for us to say, “We want to support you. We want to offer your stuff. Grow with us.”
Tommy: And having that support has fueled us to do better, do more, grow the food in a higher quality, think more about how we can be better about the environment. Because having that consistent, reliable source of sale is imperative to being—especially in an industry where, week to week, you can’t just produce a bunch and put it in. I mean, in some ways, I guess, you can put it away, but it’s not like we just have this inventory that we just slowly sell, it doesn’t go bad. It requires consistency, it requires effort by you, by the buyer, to say, “I’m gonna come here, I’m gonna support you. Let’s grow these farms. Let’s prove to them that you can be successful here.” And for us it’s been really great.
Sarah: Yeah, I think the reason and— think both ways. The gratitude for the stewardship of the land and the tasteful quality of all those products is so very much appreciated. And yeah, I can never go back to the tomato or carrot that is not—no, you can’t do that once you’ve actually had a good, full-bodied one.
Beth: I do want to add that it we have through this entire journey we’ve felt strongly—not just strongly but warmly supported by the people who buy the produce, by the Co-op. As both these guys said, it’s partnership. And then our customers through the CSA who we know as individuals, but then we hear from customers from the Co-op as well, who send little love notes about the carrots. And it’s been a—we get these little notes in the mail saying, “This is the most delicious carrot I’ve ever eaten.”
Tommy: That’s awesome.
Beth: Yeah. Very sweet. We get the little hand drawn letters from children and it’s very sweet. So the warmth of the support through this entire journey has been extraordinary, and I don’t think that’s—that does not happen in a grocery store! People who are supplying grocery stores. I just wanted to acknowledge that.
Tommy: It is very unique.
Beth: That both at the Co-op level and the individual consumer, we feel that it is that regard.
Tommy: I can’t speak to other co-ops, just because this is our Co-op—
01:00:00
Tommy: —but this feels like such a community- based experience shopping at the Co-op. And everyone that’s working there feels like they live down the street, that’s where they shop too. It’s that level of experience of community when you’re in a Co-op here. And it’s where I shop, I drive into town for it because that’s the option.
Beth: We do too.
Steve: Yes this is where we buy our food. Yeah.
Beth: Not too much produce.
Sarah: Yeah, I’m also hearing if you’ve ever considered sending a love note about a carrot to a farmer, make sure you do. Say yes, send the email.
Tommy: Let’s get those mushroom love letters.
Sarah: Get the mushroom love letters to Tommy, you know; make it happen. I’m really grateful and thank you for joining us and kind of sharing more about your farm and your practices. Are there any other kind of final thoughts you’d like to share or anything that comes to mind that you’d want Owners or anyone to think about first the best support, small local farms and to help them remain viable for the long term?
Steve: Just keep doing what you’re doing! Keep going to farmers markets, keep buying from the Co-op, be conscious about your choices, and take the time to feed yourself and your family well. We’ll provide the raw ingredients. but there’s a lot of work that you still have to do, and it’s worth the time.
Tommy: Yeah, I think—if you have friends and family that could be buying more local that don’t, don’t necessarily pressure them to but give them good reasons why they should and—
Beth: Spread the word.
Tommy: I think one thing we talk about all the time is “How, as farmers, to not fight over the same pool of customers, but how to grow the pool?”
Steve: Yup.
Tommy: And, a very small percentage of people overall buy organic, buy from the Co-ops in Madison, and there’s a lot of people that could be that aren’t, and I think the question is, “Have they not had the right experience yet to get them to? Have they not had that dinner that blew their mind?” That said, okay I need to eat—for me it was a night out at a restaurant that was so unbelievable that kind of changed my view of food forever, and so what I don’t know, it’s just trying to grow that and encourage more people to support these places like the Co-ops or Tipi or Vitruvian, and all the other producers and makers in this area that are all working really hard that are—so many locally owned businesses are sold and supported by the Co-ops. So it’s great because when you buy something there, you pretty much are likely to know that the owner is living in this area and is excited that sales are up for them so it’s really exciting. So yeah: convince more people to buy local and keep doing what you’re doing.
Steve: Yeah we have a fantastic food system and variety of creative products and farmers and food entrepreneurs here in Madison. So use it! Make use of it. Get out there and buy these foods.
Tommy: And write more love letters.
Sarah: Yes! And write more love letters. I hope you get many mushroom love letters as a result of this.
