Greenhorns Radio

This week’s featured farmer is Louisa Conrad. Louisa Conrad owns and operates Big Picture Farm in Townshend, VT with her husband Lucas Farrell. On their hillside farm lives a herd of 37 goats, 2 dogs, 2 cats, 30 or so chickens and an incredible team of employees. Big Picture Farm makes the finest goat milk caramels in the world and for their efforts have been awarded 2 SOFI Awards from the Specialty Food Association, 2 Good Food Awards, & an American Cheese Society Award. This program was brought Heritage Foods USA.

Mary Moody is an organic grower and an organizer and activist around local food, food equity, and sustainable land use. She is a founder of Hope House where hospitality is offered to people who need shelter and communal meals are shared by the hungry and lonely. She is also a founding member of the Dubuque Food Co-op, the Driftless Farm Crawl and Farm to Table Dinners, and serves on the Local Food Systems Working Group and Farm To School Committee for Dubuque County. She lives at New Hope Farm near Dubuque, Iowa which she and her husband founded in 2000 to promote communal living and integrated learning through living on the land. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA.

This week’s featured farmer is Cebastien Rose. Cebastien Rose is the Collective Coordinator and Seed Project Manager of Owl Peak Farm Collective. Owl Peak Farm Collective is an agro-ecology farm providing affordable food, regionally adapted non-GE seed and starts, compost and sustainability education to our local community. We farm in a high desert salty floodplain in the company of beavers, grasshoppers, drought and epic floods. We are an incubator farm (first incubating ourselves), working to model sustainable agriculture enterprises to help revive farming and support self-sufficiency in our community. We are a non-profit organization. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA

“To be denied the right to name your chili, its like being denied the right to use your own name.” [16:15]

“Three corporations control 50 percent of the worlds seed market.” [20:00]

–Cebastien Rose on Greenhorns Radio

Today’s featured farmer: Alice Melendez. Alice has found in Plowshares for Appalachia the chance to tie together threads from her life– learning and teaching, love of the earth, farming heritage, and practical interest in the social structures and cultural tendencies that have set us on a course to destroy so much of what is precious. She has returned to her rural Kentucky roots and the management of the family farm after a 10-year odyssey which took her through extended stays in and study of Central America, Dartmouth College and the “Ivy League” experience, tense times in Philadelphia at the height of the recession, and five years in the “PetroMetro” Houston, Texas where she worked both with established community development and refugee resettlement organizations and with post-Occupy activist groups- particularly focused on anti-extraction work. Today, her two small kids, Ana and Severo, and her husband, Emilio are all happy to be living with wild space and gardens, gone country again. And Alice now has the chance to join her mother, Laura and the other partners in the farm, on the project of making the family farm work– economically, ecologically, and socially. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA.

“It takes more hands on the land to manage land for a profit.” [07:00]

–Alice Melendez on Greenhorns Radio

Today’s featured farmer is Hedda Brorstrom. Hedda Brorstrom is the owner, farmer and florist at Full Bloom Flower Farm in Graton, California. Full Bloom Flower Farm specializes in growing and arranging chemical free, local blooms for weddings, grocery stores, restaurants and events. Hedda grows 80 varieties of cut flowers as well as acting as a host to hundreds of pollinators and birds. Interest in agoecology took hold from a young age having grown up in agricultural rich Sonoma County. Hedda completed her undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley in Conservation and Resource Studies and later got a certificate in Ecological Horticulture from at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz. Inspired by the flower program at UCSC Hedda decided to leave her job as a garden coordinator in San Francisco and begin Full Bloom Flower Farm back in her home town of Graton, just outside of Sebastopol. Hedda is passionate about farmer advocacy and has helped to create the North Bay Flower Collective which provides monthly meetings on flower farms where florists and flower farmers share information, inspiration and work together to promote the Slow Flower Movement. A recent graduate from the California School of Herbal Studies, Hedda hopes to add herbs to production this coming season. Dahlias, rose geranium, and scabiosa stella must grows for Full Bloom Flower Farm, but Hedda changes favorite flowers as the flowers bloom and pass with the seasons. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA.

Today’s featured farmer: Emily Garrity. Emily Garrity was born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska. There she found her love for farming in her late teens working in yard, garden, and flower maintenance.
At the age of 24, she moved to Homer, a seaside community at the end of the road in South Central Alaska. Her first solo commercial endeavor consisted of less than 1Ž4 acre of garden space on borrowed land and a small table at the Homer Farmers Market. In 2005, she began her first CSA season with four subscribing members. Later that year, just over nine acres of south sloping, spring fed, topsoil rich real-estate became home to the farm she now owns and operates as Twitter Creek Gardens.

Over the past nine years Emily has spent most of her waking moments and all of her income on the infrastructure of the farm. One 26’x96′ high tunnel, three homemade low tunnels, a large passive solar greenhouse, a root cellar, two work-shops, and a little farm house now make up the complex. Incorporating animals into the farmstead has been her newest endeavor. Small flocks of laying hens, broiler chickens, and hogs have made their way into the field rotations, providing much of the soil nutrients required to grow the current one-acre vegetable plot. The farm supplies food for a 20 member CSA, the Farmers Market, local restaurants, as well as the cast of characters who work the land.
Emily sits on the Homer Farmers Market board, Homer Soil and Water Conservation District Board of Supervisors, and heads a farm-to-school project at the Homer Flex High School. She looks forward to the expansion of local agriculture and food security in the state of Alaska.

This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA

“I was really interested in the CSA model initially. That’s where I got started, I used borrowed land and had four members just to get the ball rolling.” [04:00]

–Emily Garrity on Greenhorns Radio

This week’s featured farmer is Ginger Edwards. Ginger Edwards is an organic farmer and owner of R-evolution Gardens. She began in 2008 as a market gardener on a 1/2 acre of heavy wet clay and tree stumps and since has grown her farm to serve a 65 member CSA, a weekly farmers market and many coastal wholesale accounts from a lush 2 acres of diverse organic vegetables. Farmer Ginger, in addition to being a full time food producer, is a passionate educator of young farmers and a founding board member of the Nehalem Valley Farm Trust, a nonprofit that expands the vision and practice of sustainable agriculture throughout the north coast of Oregon. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA.

“If you don’t have access to investment capital you’re reliant on banks, and credit cards, etc.” [07:00]

“Not everybody can be a farmer, but everybody can be supportive and be a part of the food styem thats supporting farmers. Thats what we need more of anyways.” [17:00]

–Ginger Edwards on Greenhorns Radio

Jared Zystro is Organic Seed Alliance’s research and education assistant director. He has a master’s degree in plant breeding and plant genetics from the University of Wisconsin. Jared has worked in the organic seed industry for over 10 years, managing seed production at two farms and conducting research and education projects with OSA. In his work at OSA, he manages OSA’s regional development, conducts participatory breeding projects and variety trials, and teaches farmers about seed production and plant breeding through publication and at workshops, conferences and field days. Jared lives in the coastal town of Arcata, CA with his wife Lisa and son Toby. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA.

“The word heirloom often makes you think it’s something that gets passed down from generation to generation. The reality is that seed and heirloom varieties do change – they are part of our global ecosystem.” [11:00]

–Jared Zystro on Greenhorns Radio

Today’s featured farmer: Alice Melendez. Alice has found in Plowshares for Appalachia the chance to tie together threads from her life– learning and teaching, love of the earth, farming heritage, and practical interest in the social structures and cultural tendencies that have set us on a course to destroy so much of what is precious. She has returned to her rural Kentucky roots and the management of the family farm after a 10-year odyssey which took her through extended stays in and study of Central America, Dartmouth College and the “Ivy League” experience, tense times in Philadelphia at the height of the recession, and five years in the “PetroMetro” Houston, Texas where she worked both with established community development and refugee resettlement organizations and with post-Occupy activist groups- particularly focused on anti-extraction work. Today, her two small kids, Ana and Severo, and her husband, Emilio are all happy to be living with wild space and gardens, gone country again. And Alice now has the chance to join her mother, Laura and the other partners in the farm, on the project of making the family farm work– economically, ecologically, and socially. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA.

“To get value out of the land, it takes more people on the land.” [13:00]

–Alice Melendez on Greenhorns Radio

Today’s featured farmer: Rich Lee, Co – owner, Tender Soles Farm, Dresden, ME. Tender Soles Farm is a horse-powered, MOFGA certified organic, mixed vegetable, herb, and flower farm in Dresden, ME. Kate Del Vecchio and Rich Lee own and run the farm business on a leased farm and are currently in the process of closing on the purchase of a farm of their own in the neighboring town of Richmond where they plan to continue to sell through a farm stand, two farmers markets, a local buying club and coop, and several wholesale accounts. In addition to growing crops, they enjoy making their own hay loose, collecting eggs, and logging in the winter with their three draft horses Jess, Tony, and Molly. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA.

“We’re just keeping out eyes on the prize. We know [owning land] is what we want to do.” [09:00]

“There’s definitely room for more value added products. People are excited to try different things – they are really opening up their palates” [12:00]

“I think there’s certainly a romantic side to working with horses – that’s definitely what threw me into it.” [17:00]

–Rich Lee on Greenhorns Radio