Pooh Sprague - Edgewater Farm: EP16

Today’s episode comes to you from Plainfield, New Hampshire where we visit with Pooh Sprague of Edgewater Farm. This episode is a bit of a ramble as a 50 year career in farming is expected to be! That being said in this episode Pooh Shares:

• How he got started in the early 70’s
• Selling bedding plants
• Labor challenges 
• 100 acres, over 30 high tunnels, 7 H2A
• Tracking water usage
• FSMA Produce Safety Rule
• Climate Change 
• Resilience
• Soil stewardship
• Farm transition
• Knowing your market
• Not being organic
• Strawberries
• No-Till and cover crops

Chapters

• 1:57 Background
• 12:28 Farming in various conditions
• 15:12 How did you get started farming?
• 19:45 Bedding plants
• 21:33 Blueberries
• 26:17 Wintertime Labor
• 31:33 Tracking water usage
• 36:13 What are you excited about this year?
• 40:06 Climate Change
• 44:51 Opportunities for Vegetable Growers
• 44:59 Resiliency Practices
• 51:44 High Tunnels & Greenhouses
• 1:00:08 Farm Transition
• 1:05:52 What's in Your Pocket?
• 1:17:24 What is sustainable ag?
• 1:23:33 Key's to success
• 1:30:07 Not being organic
• 1:38:09 Bioplastic
• 1:47:47 Changes in the market
• 2:00:27 FSMA
• 2:17:31 What brings your joy?

Transcript

Pooh Sprague (00:00:00):
Hi, my name is Pooh Sprague, a highly diversified horticultural enterprise, family owned and operated on the Plainfield, New Hampshire on the Connecticut River. 
Andy Chamberlin (00:00:29):
This episode is a bit of a ramble as a 50-year career in farming would be expected to be. That being said in this episode, Pooh shares how he got started in the early '70s, selling bedding plants, the challenges of labor, growing almost 100 acres with over 30 high tunnels, and hiring seven H-2A workers, tracking water usage, the FSMA Produce Safety Rule, climate change, resilience, soil stewardship, farm transitioning, knowing your markets, not being organic, strawberries, no-till and cover crops. This episode is full of stories and information. I hope you enjoy it. Before we get started, I wanted to share a review left on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for sharing the stories of farmers of all sizes. 
(00:01:17):
Thank you to Marigold's person for rating and reviewing this show. If this show has impacted you, I'd love to hear it via email or publicly as a review in the podcast app. The Farmer's Share is supported by the Vermont Vegetable and Berry Growers Association and the Ag Engineering Program of the University of Vermont Extension. If you enjoy the show and want to help support its programming, you can make a one-time or reoccurring donation on our website by visiting thefarmershare.com/support. Now let's get to the show. I wanted to meet with you because you are a long-time grower in the state of Vermont.
Pooh Sprague (00:02:02):
Old guy.
Andy Chamberlin (00:02:02):
You're known around here.
Pooh Sprague (00:02:04):
Old guy.
Andy Chamberlin (00:02:04):
I like to capture some of the stories that you've got to share and how you've turned a lifestyle and a business in agriculture. 
Pooh Sprague (00:02:13):
Okay, my name's Pooh Sprague. I'm at Edgewater Farm in Plainfield, New Hampshire. I'm the de facto, ancient titular head of the farm, but by no means the farm itself. I've been involved in farming for 51 years on the Connecticut River in Plainfield here. Currently, it's a family farm. My daughter works in the greenhouse area. My son is basically the manager of the farm. My wife is the bookkeeper. I'm the guy, I'm the gopher and the idiot that's sent off to do things. But anyway, both Ann and I, my wife Ann and I grew up on dairy farms in New Hampshire. She's about a mile down the road at McNamara Dairy and I grew up on a hill farm in Hillsboro and pick stones and stuff. I was out of the dairy farming business for several years. 
[NEW_PARAGRAPH]When I was in school, I contemplated a career in turf management, music and a few other things. I ended up back here in 1973. We got married in 1973, and we started growing vegetables. We really had no idea what we were getting into and we really didn't have any training. At the University of New Hampshire, I had a degree in Bachelor of Science in Environmental Conservation. My wife had a degree in psychology and elementary education. Probably the best business decision we ever made in regards to what we're doing today was to not get back into the dairy farm business at the time. She knew how to milk cows. I knew how to spread shit and bale hay, but I didn't know how to fix the baler and we didn't know enough about herd health. 
(00:03:54):
We knew we were in over our heads and it didn't look like we were going to be able to get back into it with a capital expense. So, my father-in-law lent us a little ground. We started growing vegetables and trying to sell them with the little general stores and things. That was 1973, did that the year 1973 and 1974. At the end of 1974, the guy who owned this farm, his name was Stan Colby. Stan Colby had been one of the first extension agents back in the day. They were not only held to within their boundaries, but Stan was an extension county agent for Sullivan County, New Hampshire and Windsor County, Vermont. He saw us plugging away down there and he had this family farm. He approached us about buying them, and we did. 
(00:04:42):
So, that's fall of 1974. It'll be 50 years in November that we've actually been on this site. The original farm was pretty small, 29 acres, tillable plus or minus, and we just muddled through. The early years were mostly failures. I mean, we didn't know marketing. We had no background of that. The only preparation we had was what we had in our youth in terms of field work and things like that. Seeing, plowing, harrowing, understanding the first three letters on the fertilizer bag and knowledge was pretty shallow. But we landed in an area on Connecticut River soils, which are pretty much a lucky break at the time because they're stone free. We also landed at a time in an area that was with Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital. 
(00:05:46):
There was some market development and a beginning interest in locally grown things. The third component that really worked to our advantage was when Stanley Colby sold the farm and he retired. The new county agent was a guy named Bill Lord, and Bill Lord probably is a somewhat familiar name, at least to some of the older farmers, as New Hampshire's small fruit specialist. He saw us as pretty malleable and he got us to growing strawberries. So, our first real crop that generated any income was pick your own strawberries. That was 1976. I'd always had an interest in greenhouse growing, although I never had any real experience in it. By 1979, we ventured into bedding plants and that's why all these greenhouses down here are dedicated to ornamentals and things. 
(00:06:50):
That really was of interest to both myself and my wife. We had our first child, Sarah, in 1981 and Ann had been a teacher all those years. That was the breaking point. So, now, we were out there farming and we had to get serious about it in a big way. I had worked. I was still working part-time jobs for shovel and trap rock for a local contractor in septic fields and driving dump truck, bush hogging, and stuff. In the winter, I worked 13 or 14 years [inaudible 00:07:26] got me here in mid-Vermont as a ski patroller during the week. So, it was plenty of time to read up all the extension stuff and do my seed orders at the top of the mountain on somebody else's time when the skiing was bad. So, we had some good opportunities, but we really saw right off that there was no future on small scale. 
(00:07:51):
So, by 1981, we started to know some of the extra guys. So, we had not only extension, but we had other guys doing the same thing. All of a sudden, we were communicating pretty freely. Bob Gray up at Four Corners Farm, he was doing the same thing. As a matter of fact, he bought a farm at one point. They bought that farm. We were looking at buying it in 1981. We met Jake Gas, Dave Pearson, some of these guys, and they said, "Boy, how do you do this?" They said, "Well, this is how we approach it." We share a lot of sharing of information. We quickly realized that we weren't each other's competitors. There's plenty of market for everyone, plenty of room for everybody. So, at that time, Cedar Circle Farm started up with Bob Maryland Stone. 
(00:08:41):
We became good friends with them, some trading of product. We had a guy down in Grantham, Rochatana, Sugar Springs Farm, and he really mentored me on retail. We sold out of the barn for years, but by 1983, we realized that a presence on Route 12A up there would make a big difference. So, this is all part of expansion and growing, found the bedding plant business. There was good demand for that. It dovetailed well with the strawberry thing. So, first, we're doing strawberries. Next, we're doing strawberries as an adjunct in this bed of asparagus. That morphed into adding a couple acres of sweet corn, some tomatoes. 
(00:09:26):
We added a couple kids, some land. Presto, 50 years forward, where we are today, we got about 100 acres tillable and we're cropping probably 70, 75 of that rest in cover crops. Land is highly productive, but markets are good. Ray has been able to develop a wholesale enterprise that I was not able to, and he's very comfortable in that role. He's also very comfortable in managing a lot of people. I don't know if he's comfortable. I know it drives him nuts, but I know my capabilities were people that I could keep within my site. A few more people working in the fields on singular tasks. Now he's got eight people., he's responsible for essentially, not including myself or two other guys I work with just to do the field stuff. That's a juggle and a bit of a nightmare, but he's capable. 
(00:10:38):
He manages to make it happen. So, it's a different animal now for sure. As I say, a greater percentage of what we do is wholesaling vegetables and small fruit. A lot of that has to do with the development of our relationship with the Hanover consumer. Every time I say that, other farmers start drooling out the side of their mouth. Oh yeah, those guys, oh, my God, what a great thing. They have been good. There's been great relationship and we work hard to maintain its health and viability by doing all the right things and being cooperative when we need to. If somebody has to make a trip for a small amount on a Sunday, Ray makes it happen, because it is that good of account. So, that's helped and then other things have come along on the side. 
(00:11:31):
So, at this point, that's where we are. I am not involved in the long-term planning and the long-term planning always, we've been holistic farm management. We try to do some things. We pick up parts, but the five-year plan lasts about six months up here. I think it's even more challenging now, especially I think one of your questions, not to get ahead, with tenure outlook. I mean tenure outlook for anybody in this business is going to be extremely challenging and weather drives that. I mean, I think demand for product is good, but I think a lot of that's got to do is it's going to be harder for the Sun Belt to feed everybody. So, I think the real challenge for us going forward is to be able to produce stuff and given climate change. Michael Smith once said to me, he said, "Farmers are resilient and they're very bright and they can farm in swamps and they can farm on deserts. The problem is we never know what it's going to be, whether it's a desert." That I think the last couple of years back to back have been the exact indication of that. Two years ago in 2022, we had a potato crop on a well-drained soil. We didn't have irrigation. It was a bit of a gamble, but we took it in a shorts and ended up with 25% of the crop. This year, we were on well-drained soil down here and we had cannons and everything ready to go when the tuber size started, the suit size of the tubers and things and how that worked. We didn't run a pump or irrigate a drop of water. 
(00:13:26):
We had a bumper crop because we had more water than we could possibly use. So, trying to figure out what it's going to be and where to place your crops, it drives a challenge of soil stewardship. I just went down the other day after heavy rain and I got less than a 3% slope. You can see. They have cropped all the rye off and there's a little erosion out there. So, there's just so many challenges out there. It's really hard to say what I'm going to do. There's always the market thing. All of a sudden, we have Alternaria in broccoli and that's harder to raise broccoli. So, that wasn't always the case. It used to be in the '70s and '80s and '90s, it was a trash crop, sold a lot of it until George Bush said he didn't like broccoli or something, nonsense, fluctuations. 
(00:14:24):
I can't remember the first time I put cilantro and nobody's going to buy this shit. Smell it. Arugula, we used to put in those mixes from Johnny's and we got it on the pick list. Who's going to pick the fruity pebbles, which was usually a mixture of red lettuce and green lettuce or whatever. How many bunches of fruity pebbles [inaudible 00:14:48]? And then one of my guys says, "I'd really rather not pick the arugula. It stinks," that thing. Now look at it. It's all about these weird little greens and Asian greens and things you'd never heard of, bok choy, bok choy, tatsoi. Those things didn't exist. I'm so old, they didn't exist in any catalog in America in the '80s. How did you get started farming? 
(00:15:14):
Well, I mean, as I mentioned, I was playing music quite a bit in college and I had a year of music school until they told me I was going to have to play tuba in a marching band. That was my exit strategy right there. I went right to the college agriculture. I filled around with ag journalism and a couple other things, and I did the earth-shattering thing when I told them I really wanted to go down to two-year school and take some greenhouse courses. I looked like I was a two-headed monster. But I was thinking about things that I might want to do that really after we got rid of the cows and my family got rid of the cows, I had a year or two I worked out and I realized that I love music, but I just was never going to be a nocturnal. 
(00:16:05):
As much as I still do it, I remember coming home from Jay Peak one night and the horizon was getting light. It really just felt wrong and I never did. I played 27 nights in a row one time and conquered. Even so, it was during the winter and I get up at 11:00 in the morning, go over to rehearsal at 2:00, and that's your breakfast. Rehearse for four hours.
Andy Chamberlin (00:16:34):
Throws your clock off.
Pooh Sprague (00:16:35):
You go have your lunch and you come back and play four hours and then you have dinner. It didn't really feel right. So, I was really looking for an opportunity to try to really... Even if I did something, if I ended up in some traveling lounge act or whatever, eventually, I wanted to get farming. Then with the man's encouragement, our father saying, "I got some land you can try this on." I said, "Well, why not now?" So that was the beginning of all of it. I think last man standing, I think everybody starts out. Now, there's a CSA model, which works for a lot of people to get their fate. They try it. They get rid of some stuff and they got some money coming and they can say, "Well, this is okay, but we got to get more serious about it and this looks like maybe we could do this." They add. 
(00:17:32):
They subtract and we did the same thing. Strawberries were good. I always say that for us, it was the Datsun Truck. We have a child coming. In the Datsun Truck, you can put your foot through in several places, spit through the floorboards. That's fine when you're 26 or 28. You're driving over to the skier in a 1964 four-cylinder Willy's Jeep.
Andy Chamberlin (00:17:58):
Just making it happen. 
Pooh Sprague (00:18:00):
Yeah. It's okay. You're young and that's what it's about. But eventually, you started to see, wow, we got to ramp it up here if we're going to hope to send anybody to school or even pay the T-ball, fine. Now, I am rambling. Where am I going here? 
Andy Chamberlin (00:18:21):
It sounds like the kids were a motivation for you to really step it up so you could provide for somebody else other than yourself. 
Pooh Sprague (00:18:30):
We had the ornamental thing going. We had the income coming and then it was good. I think Ann wanted to be here, but it was tough to say, "Okay, your free dental plan," which you did have back in those days as the teachers did and the families had. All this insurance and stuff has gone away. This is a big expense. It wasn't just a loss of income. I wasn't making much money playing being a weekend warrior. I was just playing to make myself whole or whatever. So, yeah, we had to say, "We got to make this. How do we do that?" 
(00:19:12):
Well, looks like we can sell this stuff and we just get this big... The truth to be known, I think that Edgewater Farm developed first as a pick your own place. But boy, our serious growth for it happened in the late '80s and '90s with the ornamentals. There were times when we had the discussion about not growing, not growing vegetables, not running a farm stand. You've interviewed Jack, haven't you? 
Andy Chamberlin (00:19:48):
Yeah, yeah. 
Pooh Sprague (00:19:49):
Jack always starts this thing. He puts up pictures of new tractors and toys and he said, "We had a very good year in a greenhouse." There is an element of truth to that. I mean, in the '80s and '90s, if you were a reasonably good grower, you could do no wrong. I mean if you'd have the main season, but you'd find yourself the first of July with four packs of salvia that had two missing. So, you put that in a four-inch pot and it keeps selling. He keeps bedding plants to Labor Day. Then he got into mums. Man, this is easy. Look how smart we are. But then even with Martha Stewart that people all of a sudden outgrew, everybody loved their annual garden and they switched to perennials because it's hard work. This isn't much work as a vegetable garden. I guess I'll get perennials. 
(00:20:41):
All of a sudden, the perennial thing hit because this is enough work. I don't want to read the perennial, but I'll get some bushes. So, all of a sudden, everybody who was selling bed and plants, that shrunk up pretty hard. Growth in the greenhouse area, we still experience it, but it's single digit or low double digits still. But we love doing it and it's what we do. It dovetails with everything else. I mean for everybody, labor is the problem. I mean everybody I talked to, labor is a problem. I'd never think thought we'd have seven H-2A workers here. That was Shelburne Orchards that wasn't going to go on a farm. When we were thinking of putting blueberries years and years ago, I had a couple of young bucks and they were always digging at me. 
(00:21:40):
If we had blueberries, we'd be making all kinds of money. If we had blueberries, this predicated everything. Finally, I said, we went to a New England conference, "I want you guys to go to every goddamn blueberry meeting." I said, "If you can come back and tell me that's still the thing to do, like you dream it," I said, " I'll write the check for it. We'll do it. Let's do it." They went to the meetings. At the end of the first day, they said, "It's off the table." I said, "Well, geez, that didn't take long. What happened?" They said, "It's pretty clear that it's going to be labor-intensive." 
(00:22:21):
We're struggling to get our berries out of the field, trying to take care of a couple of wholesale accounts, because high school kids just aren't there anymore. They're not there in numbers. When they are there, they're not there. So, I mean, things just changed. So, anyway, labor, how did I go down that road? 
Andy Chamberlin (00:22:46):
Berries, strawberries, blueberries. 
Pooh Sprague (00:22:48):
Yeah. So, I mean eventually, once we saw a way to having H-2A labor, we got into the blueberry thing and it's really opened up. We keep adding guys and we've got property that's housing. That's really the transition when Ray came back from college. Everything that Ann and I and Mike had done up to that point and Sarah too, but Sarah's arena was really the greenhouse that she really liked. But everything that we'd done, the groundwork was there. That was home base, that was comfort. This is much what we can handle. He was like the next guy with the cajónes to say, "I think we can do this." 
Andy Chamberlin (00:23:41):
Some fresh energy. 
Pooh Sprague (00:23:43):
We're just like, "I'm getting tired. You sure you want to do that?" He has. He's taken it to a much bigger level than... I mean, I think there's your question down there. Did you imagine? No, no. I didn't imagine anybody and the kids had come back here. I could remember. My father came to me and said, when we were growing up, "I always had been at the ass end of a [inaudible 00:24:13] all my life." When he said, it's not happening anymore, I was like, "Hot damn." I'm going to be rubbing elbows with Carl Yastrzemski, and I'm going to be a Red Sox guy. I'm going to be playing for the Birds. I get my life's all ahead of me. It looks good. Then you find out after a while that it's not what you imagine. 
(00:24:38):
You miss the outdoor component and the variability. I'm attention deficit as you can tell in this interview, but this is perfect. It's a perfect job for guys, because you're never really taxed with anything so long. Even when you're hand pulling carrots or onions, I mean the onions are a drag because you pull them, you bring them home, they've got to go dry them. We don't have a good system yet. It's a lot of work and it's miserable and it's hot and it has to be done at the tail end of the day with various things, but there's an end to it. I say, "How are you guys coming?" Then Ray will say, "We're pulling 40% from the field coming now." Then you're onto potatoes and then you're on to squash or pumpkins. It is always the next thing. 
(00:25:31):
I'm glad strawberries are over. They're getting pretty small. Still blueberries. So, that interests a lot of people. I mean there's some great benefits from being highly diversified and it's a real pain in the ass to be highly diversified. That always brings us back to the question about growing in controlled environments. The greenhouse ornamentals, we know they're going to come. The greenhouse people are pretty much the easiest, least entitled of the retail people. We are retail. There's no question about that. We are.
Andy Chamberlin (00:26:17):
How big is your crew now? 
Pooh Sprague (00:26:19):
The year round crew is really some retail, and there's nobody doing 40 hours a week for the next month. Ray just finished up packing potatoes and carrots. We use that barn not only as a pack out barn. We also use a potting shed because of trophy. You can keep the soil thaws out in there. It's heated. Mike can put together clean flats and store them and they can get a production line out there. So, that all the root washer, all that stuff, rinse conveyor, all that stuff has to get out clean, put away. So, that'll happen for another four to five weeks. So, there's nobody here right now except Ann and I. Ann's busy full-time with the administrative and tax work and all the crap that nobody wants to think about when they take up farming.
Andy Chamberlin (00:27:16):
All the business-y stuff, the financial stuff, the planning stuff.
Pooh Sprague (00:27:19):
All about the 93 goddamn USDA census things. I mean, I come back at 1st of December, it's four inches of them. They want to know one of my hydrophytic plant population census. God, I used to do them willingly, but I mean there's so much stuff. Anyway, so we do what we have to do. I mean, thank God we have to do quarterly registrations with state of New Hampshire or that thing would just be riddled with crap. You know what I mean? But still, the thing took on the internet. Even with what I had available to me, it's still two and a half hours. Maybe I'm an idiot. 
(00:28:16):
We established some attention deficit, but nonetheless, I stayed pretty focused on it. I had a couple of cups of coffee and I got through it. But that's the stuff that goes on to farming and people have to really consider dealing with these various bureaucratic agencies that come along. It's part of life that wasn't there when we started. It is now.
Andy Chamberlin (00:28:39):
Do you think, we'll call it paperwork, that legal and paperwork stuff has accumulated because it's been developed over time or because you're a bigger business now than when you were starting? 
Pooh Sprague (00:28:51):
I think both. It'd be an interesting study, because you can fly under the water, but it's like FSMA, $25,000 gross and you're a farmer. I don't think so. That doesn't buy much. It doesn't buy fuel for your little B series Kubota. You know what I mean? 
Andy Chamberlin (00:29:15):
Yeah. 
Pooh Sprague (00:29:15):
So you have to get onto the radar so you can develop to be a critical mass to make that income. Now what's really a problem here is that I am the diddlywit with the outfit. I mean, I will admit freely to God and country that my wife took my checkbook away two weeks into our marriage. For good reason, I'd bounce a couple of checks on front and she was like, "You're not doing this anymore. Get out of here. Tell me when you need a check. I'll give you a check." That's been great. She's conservative, doesn't want to live beyond the means of the farm. So, development could have been faster and more freewheeling if I was probably left to my devices, but the system of checks and balances has worked pretty well for Edgewater Farms, no question about it. 
(00:30:14):
So, if anybody taking any business advice from me, it would be wise to be very skeptical of it. But yeah, I mean the business of paperwork, at any levels, whether you're today's small farmer and whatever by government definitions is, whatever that medium gross is, there's paperwork. I mean, it's not just federal, but there's also state levels. As I say, we fill quarterly. I didn't know. Vermont didn't. Now that we own property in Vermont, it's just a very different animal. It's like the pesticide thing. We take some online training every year, and it's pretty flexible.
PART 1 OF 5 ENDS [00:31:04]
Pooh Sprague (00:31:00):
Some online training and every year, and it's pretty flexible. When Dan says it's time to do the pesticide report, I got four or five pages.
Andy Chamberlin (00:31:12):
You got to make time for it.
Pooh Sprague (00:31:14):
I got to make time for it. Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (00:31:15):
Yeah.
Pooh Sprague (00:31:17):
So it's very different. Water use, we have quarterly reports. I have meters and things I have to tell everybody. This is very different right now. I think Vermont is now coming to that too, where they're going to say surface water, drill water, where are you guys getting it? So we've had it 20, almost 30 years over here.
Andy Chamberlin (00:31:38):
Oh, wow.
Pooh Sprague (00:31:39):
Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (00:31:39):
Water usage tracking.
Pooh Sprague (00:31:40):
Yeah. And at first it was kind of voluntary and I can remember calling up the contact at DES and saying, "I know the guy down the road's got a pump and he's putting it on his apples and his strawberries. So why am I doing it? What's the point? It's like you say we have to do it, but you're not enforcing it." And the woman who's just a secretary said, "Look, Pooh, this is how it's going to be and this is why you ought to do it." They said, "You don't have to do it. Probably get away with it for years before anybody chases you down." They said, "You need to get on record with your water usage because water's going to be the new oil in short order." And I said, "We've already got issues in New Hampshire over who owns the rights, the water rights on the [inaudible 00:32:27]." Is it Lake Winnipesaukee Boat Owners Association, is it Plaza Way Country Club in Manchester? They said, "You have a better chance of getting your water in the future, or your kids do, most likely, if you are on record-
Andy Chamberlin (00:32:44):
Claiming use.
Pooh Sprague (00:32:45):
... claiming yours, what you're using, you have a timeline that can prove that you did it.
Andy Chamberlin (00:32:50):
That's an interesting perspective. Yeah.
Pooh Sprague (00:32:52):
Yeah. So it was just some secretary. Good information.
Andy Chamberlin (00:32:59):
And I guess the thing that we're thinking about now in Vermont, at least some of the side conversations I've heard is, what are we doing with this data? I know they were talking about reporting or whatever, and it was such a small amount. They were like, we put thousands of gallons a day on the field, but just out of the whole volume of the river, it just seemed like pennies. You've been tracking water for a while now. What have you, we'll say, gotten out of it or what's the data told you?
Pooh Sprague (00:33:34):
Well, the data told, it wasn't reflected in the national one. I made a comment about it. New Hampshire picked this up, because they used to have this really, took hours to do, quarterly and it was tough. It was you punch in, if you don't get the zeros right, the whole screen would explode, start from scratch. But all of a sudden it changed and a lot of it changed because they realized that water use is really dependent on climate. It's like one quarter in 2017, I might use 3 million gallons of water, and the next year they'd come back and say, 'You didn't use any."
Andy Chamberlin (00:34:19):
No, it rained.
Pooh Sprague (00:34:20):
It rained. I just don't have to. What do you think, I'd run a pump because I want to? No, no, we do it when we have to. So they changed it. They were really good about it, they made it so now I have to do it. It's a nuisance. But now it takes, even in the middle of the summer, it takes me a half an hour as opposed to two and a half hours. They were having to try to calculate, well, what day did you use the most amount? Yeah, I know, that kind of thing. And I think there was hints of that in the federal one, too. I think a good agency looks at itself and takes comments and stuff and redoes it, and they streamlined ours a lot. So I'm very grateful for that.
(00:35:06):
But yeah, no, I'm not sure what it's garnered. I think climate change will be reflected on that for those of us that submit them and if they have access to historical weather data, they'll see that and that will make a difference. So instead of allotment, you get 25,000 gallons a month off of this well, they'll be able to say, "Look, the standards-
Andy Chamberlin (00:35:37):
[inaudible 00:35:37] million.
Pooh Sprague (00:35:37):
Yeah, right, right. Well, it depends on that type of thing. And I think the other really good thing about it, we do a lot more on drip now. I've got a pile of number 30 sprinklers. They sit in the strawberry field. Yeah, we have travelers occasionally that would break out, but most of the stuff goes on plastic with drip underneath it. So we're conscious. We think about water now. You didn't think of water in 1980. It's like, it is out the river. Run back the pump up. Let's get something happening here. So yeah, it's different. It's different.
Andy Chamberlin (00:36:14):
What are you excited about in your next year of farming?
Pooh Sprague (00:36:16):
Well, I think I'm mostly excited about how well our transition and ownership or management. It's not easy, but everybody gets very excited. Oh, your family's involved and it's an ugly dance. It's a complicated dance. And Ray and I had been standing in the door yard spitting at each other so mad. I thought he was actually going to hit me one time. And you know how big Ray is? You don't want that to happen. That's not a good scenario. But you get very passionate about things and very invested and it's real difficult.
(00:37:00):
And for me, the hardest part for me is to all of a sudden feel like I'm diminished somehow. Why aren't you doing what I say? I know something, but I got over it. I'm getting over it. It's like [inaudible 00:37:22] Ray says I don't have to be here. I just stop. Take a nap.
Andy Chamberlin (00:37:28):
Fine.
Pooh Sprague (00:37:28):
It's fine. It's not, you're still invested in it. There's no question about it. And you're invested in the people, great people that have been working here for years and years. I got a guy who came to Melk house for my dad in 56. He's 93 and he does all our field work. He does. He comes up, drives up 45 minutes from Bradford, New Hampshire, and he still gets around better than I do. I don't know. He gets on, he's sharp. And a couple of years ago I said to Ray, we got a couple of three bottom rollover Kuhn plows, and they weigh about three tons or whatever. George's head up to hook out the plows, it's first plowing of the year. And I said, "Maybe would you go up and just give him a hand, take a crowbar up in there?"
[NEW_PARAGRAPH]He just looked at me and said, "Dad, for Christ's sake, George is the only one that knows how to hook the plows up on a farm. I have no idea." Type of stuff. He's patient, too.
Andy Chamberlin (00:38:26):
Yeah. You got to have that.
Pooh Sprague (00:38:29):
We all want to be like, I want to be like George. I doubt very much at 93 I'll be worth much to this farm. But there's these people, there's a family. It's a farm family and Jamaican guys are the same way. Roy's been with us over 25 years. We know what kind of peach he likes on his birthday. He likes my spaghetti sauce and occasionally I get a big glob of that. So there's just a lot of other stuff going on.
(00:39:05):
We meet great people. We tend to have an older crew. We have a much older crew probably, but that's what it is now. And so, the next year, what's coming up is always the anticipation that starts with, you never outgrow the seed catalog loss. I would admit that I'm not, Ray knows all these varieties when I'm up in the prop house and I'm going, especially on coal crops. What the hell is that? I never heard of that. And I have to ask him and it's a new brussels sprout or something like that. Whatever happened to Oliver? Oh dad, come on. They haven't had Oliver for 20 years. Come on.
[NEW_PARAGRAPH]And so that's fun. It's always fun to see, there's been a lot of product development in the fall ornamentals. So yeah, where are we going to put the melons? Are we going to have a melon crop or any new potatoes? It's still fun. It's still exciting.
(00:40:07):
I'm much more apprehensive about how climate change works out. We didn't have the egregious messes that poor guys up on Lamoille and [inaudible 00:40:26] Rivers. Or even it's like sometimes we forget the apple growers froze out. There wasn't an apple in New England that I knew of.
Andy Chamberlin (00:40:33):
Right.
Pooh Sprague (00:40:35):
There was one orchard down that escaped it and he was allotting apples to all his little farm stands. So you got the orchardist, and then you got the guys with two foot corn up in Franklin County. Bad enough-
Andy Chamberlin (00:40:51):
Full of silt.
Pooh Sprague (00:40:54):
Yeah, really, full of silt. Yeah, no, it's bad enough to be selling a product that you can hardly get any money for. I think dairy farmers are just like, how do they avoid getting their head cut off and then they get this. Can there be anything more depressing? And then you lose crops, but you lose land.
Andy Chamberlin (00:41:16):
Right.
Pooh Sprague (00:41:21):
I have no illusions. We almost lost some land here and I won't tell you how we got it back, but that's tough. That's on top of spraying for striped cucumber beetles, moving row covers. Boy, the cleanup this year was, cleanup was ugly and it was nothing like a wide row cover that's been squirreled around a field and is full of dirt. So anyway, yeah. So you're always optimistic. If we weren't optimistic, we wouldn't get out of bed.
Andy Chamberlin (00:42:00):
Right.
Pooh Sprague (00:42:00):
I think I personally still have that. I'm excited the way Ray's able to do different things. I'm always excited when Sarah and Anne bring in some funny looking heuchera, those beautiful amber colored, where'd you get that? Where's that? Well, that came from land craft. God, that's pretty, and that kind of thing. That excites me.
(00:42:26):
I'm propagating a bunch of geraniums now and every year hope springs eternal. I'll probably always be excited, but I am concerned about the fact that the maples are swelling. The fact that my lilacs bloomed at Thanksgiving. There's some real serious shit afoot. And how do we know in the absence of long-term crystal ball, what we're supposed to do about it?
(00:42:59):
Larry Allen once told me, we're talking, he's an apple grower, and he was saying, "Well, I'm not going back there." They're having a national meeting. They used to have it out in some ski country and they were going to have it at Las Vegas. And he said, "I ain't going to Las Vegas." And is said, "So I thought you'd want to get away and have some fun?" He said, "Jesus Christ." He says, "I do more gambling in one week at home in Westminster. I have no desire to go gamble anything else."
(00:43:33):
And it's true. No matter how much planning you do, you live on the edge, all of us. A couple of bad years and even we'd be on the edge, we'd be looking at condominiums or whatever. That's maybe exaggerating, but it's not that far off.
Andy Chamberlin (00:43:55):
Right.
Pooh Sprague (00:43:56):
We've been here 50 years. So yeah, we got a cushion. But I think some of these smaller growers-
Andy Chamberlin (00:44:02):
Doesn't take much to rock the ship.
Pooh Sprague (00:44:03):
Yeah. No matter how good they are, no matter how successful, they put five successful years together, they're still investing capitalizing upward and they're carrying debt and they can't take two years of this kind of nonsense. So I don't know.
(00:44:23):
I said to one of the Congress people, they were worried about us and I said, "I'm worried about food sustainability." We hear about it all the time. We can't do it. We can't. No matter how good we are, federal government has to get behind getting victory gardens and processing back on people's mind, get them out of golf and second homes. I think things, it's going to be time. I think it'll be good. There are a lot of opportunities for professional growers. I think we probably had never better opportunities if we can survive the weather changes.
Andy Chamberlin (00:45:00):
Are there practices that you've implemented that have added resilience on your farm and hopefully made your farm a little more durable for these climate type of storms?
Pooh Sprague (00:45:16):
You work pretty hard trying to. You say a cover crop, you think about where your crops are going to go. You go to minimum irrigation, you try to build humus, you add amendments, all those practices that have been talked about, that Vern talked about the first year he showed up at a Burlington vegetable meeting. All those things have been important and are doubly so now. Whether we get into permaculture and can do that and make money, things like that, I don't know.
[NEW_PARAGRAPH]But we have to continually think outside the box and not just thinking about growing more and banking more money against a rainy day. We have to be committed to spending money on things that conserve soil, build soil. And we do. We spend probably a higher percentage than a lot of people do, I think, on cover crops. Because we're on sandy soil. My first organic test down below was like 1.4, and I can remember going to a meeting and somebody said, "I've been here 30 years. I got it up to 2.4, 2.7." And they're like going, well, if you're cropping every year in that field, I think you're probably doing okay.
(00:46:53):
But we've lost manure, so we have to look for other things. But I think the whole process about soil stewardship is we have to think about soil stewardship almost more than we have to think about growing good Mokums without [inaudible 00:47:11]. You know what I mean?
Andy Chamberlin (00:47:11):
Right. Because several ways you can go about to make things more resilient. You're mentioning soil, you can make buildings more durable or in safer locations, you could increase crop diversity and range of what you're doing. It seems like soil is the thing you'd focus on as far as resiliency standpoint.
Pooh Sprague (00:47:32):
Well, yeah, that's sort of my bailiwick. Although Ray, he's much better. I think he understands the importance of that. Really does now. And he'll say, "We're done down there." We have a no-till seeder. And he's like, "I want to see it. I'd like to get that down as soon as I can." So somebody goes out and fill them holes and I drag a seeder or whatever and try to minimum till as much as possible. And we're doing a much better job of that.
(00:48:10):
I have a two row no-till corn planter, but we tried it. It doesn't work. It doesn't work because we're not willing to ramp up and change the fertility practices that work for everything else on the farm. We'd have to probably go with anhydrous. You can get lucky with no till corn planting with a cover crop, but delivering the fertility, you got to get down in there somehow. That's been our setback. But anyway, so building fertility through cover cropping and adding amendments, whether that's wood, ash, short paper fiber, rotating out, but you can't get cow manure anymore. Even despite FISMA, even if you wanted to get it, you can't get it because there's less cows around.
(00:48:55):
I have relatives with cows and it's pretty, you can't get cow shit out of them because it's a resource. It's a valuable resource.
Andy Chamberlin (00:49:04):
Dairy farms aren't our neighbors anymore.
Pooh Sprague (00:49:06):
That's right. No, they're not saying, "Hey, come clean out my pit for me." No. So you have to be looking at all these other strategies. One of the ones we were doing is I had Laura Johnson down here. I was trying to assess what nitrogen crops, her focus is pollinators. But I had some land and I said, "I'd like to see some of these different types of clovers and things and see how productive they might be." And whether they might, something we might switch out from peas and oats and vetch and type of thing. And maybe we would ramp up and put two or three acres down to white sweet clover, and that seems to be the one that does biomass.
(00:49:58):
But most of the clovers, red clover, but berseem, crimson, she had a couple others in there and they didn't seem to biomass. Was going to be an issue, but I'm going to try. We're experimenting a little to see what the possibilities are for nitrogen as that's going to be, yeah, that's going to be huge. Although they tell us the price of fertilizers going down, has gone down considerably this coming year. So it's like gas. We're buying gas for $2.84. That just confuses me.
Andy Chamberlin (00:49:59):
Right. I don't know what that means.
Pooh Sprague (00:49:59):
I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
Andy Chamberlin (00:49:59):
It ebbs and flows.
Pooh Sprague (00:50:37):
That's right.
Andy Chamberlin (00:50:43):
Why is everything else getting more expensive, but then some of those [inaudible 00:50:46]-
Pooh Sprague (00:50:46):
Yeah. Who's the great Oz on all of this? Who's behind the curtain? I don't know. It's tough. And you can get yourself wrapped up in social media. I just don't. Oh, this is $2.99. Okay. I guess I'll drive over and fill up while I'm here.
(00:51:09):
But yeah, so I am excited about, I'm optimistic for the future. I think more of it will involve covered pipe and poly. And that bothers me because I just hate poly as a product. It's like when you're done with it, we've used [inaudible 00:51:28], so the full field thing is not a problem. But we're land filling greenhouse skins. There's only so many wood piles in our sphere of influence that I can park a hundred-foot skin up there and see it gone in a week. That kind of thing.
Andy Chamberlin (00:51:45):
How many tunnels do you have?
Pooh Sprague (00:51:46):
More than Jack. I don't know. I think I counted them up above. There's 14 here, there's four down below. That's 18. 10 up above. 28, 29, 33, 34, 35.
Andy Chamberlin (00:52:05):
Holy crap.
Pooh Sprague (00:52:07):
Yeah, yeah. It's funny. They're all Ledgewood greenhouses.
Andy Chamberlin (00:52:17):
Unlike Jack. He's got, we'll call it a museum. They're all a little different. So you've standardized for the most part?
Pooh Sprague (00:52:25):
Yeah, there's a couple of reasons. The anecdotal story. My first water wheel transplant I ever bought, I drove all the way out to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, the Mennonite place. This was before Knowles, before Zimmerman and everything. This guy's making them out there and I got one and I got in and wrote the guy a check and it's the same place. You get out there and the buggies are all lined up in front with the horses and the lights, but inside there's guys with welding helmets and CAD programs.
(00:52:56):
Anyway, so I picked up this thing, we got in the back of the truck and I gave him a check, gave him a bill of sale, so I says, "Is there a parts manual or anything with this thing?" And a guy, without even breaking a smile, just like this, says, "They will never need anything to repair this machine that they cannot buy at a hardware store." And so having one type of greenhouse, we can re-skin six or seven of those in a full day.
Andy Chamberlin (00:53:30):
Yeah, right.
Pooh Sprague (00:53:31):
If you have to.
Andy Chamberlin (00:53:32):
If you know how to work with those.
Pooh Sprague (00:53:34):
Yeah, right. Exactly. And that's pretty much it. Yeah, sure, my dream as a kid was always to have a little gable Lauren-Burnham estate house where the Lauren would pull the chain and a gable vent open, side vents, crank them out. But to get all that in today, guys up there on those [inaudible 00:53:55] dealing with those vents and the more electrical stuff. And I don't know, just for us, it's crude or it's simpler and we can get everything at the hardware store. I got more quarter inch carriage bolts lying around here that have never been used. Really should recycle some of them.
[NEW_PARAGRAPH]But yeah, no, they do a good enough job. Are we getting maximum? I said to somebody at a strawberry meeting, "We're not shooting maximum for maximum production." I got an idea how to make to guarantee 14, 16,000 quarts of it and I don't like the idea very much. And I also know that the inputs are pretty high. So we try to say, "How do we make money doing this?" So far we haven't seen anything besides a matted row that makes any sense for us, even though we're on diseased soils, we have problems.
(00:54:56):
Sometimes I wish Ray wouldn't try to push three years out of them. And sometimes if the year's right and we can feed them enough in the spring and the weather permits, we can do pretty well out third year, but not often anymore. But yeah, you can get caught up with drip and micronutrients and stuff like that. We try not to. We tried everything that's standardized. It's like the first 80 degree day forecasted out here, Anne's in a panic. Everything's going to burn up [inaudible 00:55:36].
Andy Chamberlin (00:55:35):
Yeah, because its in April.
Pooh Sprague (00:55:37):
Yeah. Well, April now. But usually it's May. First of all, it's not going to do it. Finally, she's upset enough so that Ray says, "Okay." And he takes Roy and Mike and they get a bunch of Pepsi bottles, fill them with water and strings and they throw them over and the shade cloths go on. And I'll say, "Could you do mine up? Could you do one up above?" Yeah, we can do that. And before our lunch, eleven greenhouses are covered. Boom, we're done. And so that's the benefit of standardization.
Andy Chamberlin (00:56:10):
Have you mechanized at all? I just think with 33 greenhouses with hand crank roll-up sides, that's does not work. Well, you need a big crew, I guess.
Pooh Sprague (00:56:20):
Yeah, no. Well, I think one of the things that happens, I got old, I'm the guy here, and we used to say cranks were big. I used to do those bars with the cross things, and then somebody got hand whacked one time and then we went to cranks. So we got cranks on. That was good. But still, if things are not perfect on those cranks, if there's a little wee-wah in there, you know what that's like.
Andy Chamberlin (00:56:48):
Yeah, right. They don't crank easy.
Pooh Sprague (00:56:49):
They don't crank so easy. They don't crank up high. So anyway, Ray, two years ago, and last year he bought a bunch more, and I think we'll see some more go on this year, I think at the end of the year.
Andy Chamberlin (00:57:06):
Of the automated roll-up?
Pooh Sprague (00:57:08):
Yeah. And of course I can't even run a cell phone. I can't even run an electric guitar. I don't have a pedal. I got rid of my pedal board in 1990. I'm done with this. A jack goes into a fender deluxe [inaudible 00:57:23]. Close enough, and then the guy goes through his board. He adds digital harmony. But that's my level. I don't do that. And so we have a Monet system that monitors temperatures and it's tied in with the roll-ups, and it gets hot in there. Things happen. And that's a tremendous labor savings and Ray's really very good at that. Everything he's done this year, see how it goes. Pretty much anything he's done has worked out to be a labor-saving device. This year he spent a bunch of money on a portable conveyor that extends and so that we can-
Andy Chamberlin (00:58:03):
A harvest conveyor?
Pooh Sprague (00:58:04):
No.
Andy Chamberlin (00:58:05):
Just a rolling?
Pooh Sprague (00:58:05):
Just a rolls conveyor. It's got a motorized belt on it and so the way we do it currently, we build our flats and pots and things over there, put them in apple [inaudible 00:58:19], bring them over with the skid steer, take them in the house as well now. All that stuff can happen. We just roll up the conveyor, put it out there, and two guys can fill a house with hanging baskets. There's not so much compaction on the soil. There's a whole bunch of benefits to be gained from that culturally, as well as the labor-saving and people walking, one person with six flats walking up and down the thing. Now it just goes, hopefully it'll just go out.
(00:58:44):
So yeah, those kind of things you spend the money, but then the roll-ups, yeah, he's got his eyes open on that kind of stuff much more than I do. I get overwhelmed when I open a greenhouse grower and I see stuff like that. He's got the Terrateck.
Andy Chamberlin (00:59:08):
Terrateck. Yeah.
Pooh Sprague (00:59:08):
Yeah, he's got that. I am concerned service and parts on that.
Andy Chamberlin (00:59:14):
They have a bunch of stuff. They're cultivating tractor or they're greens harvester?
Pooh Sprague (00:59:19):
Yeah. Well, I don't know. Ours are pretty much as a cultivating tractor.
Andy Chamberlin (00:59:23):
Okay. Yeah.
Pooh Sprague (00:59:24):
And he got it and he's been on it. And if he's comfortable and he can get on it and make the time to do that, that pays dividends. I have only backed that tractor, in three years, out of the shop and I had trouble [inaudible 00:59:40] it because I didn't hit the right disconnect. But be that as it may, and I think we have that level. We also got old toolbars with sweeps and knives and things. The ratty old iron has a place on the farm. We're pretty well set up. We always wish we could do more with everything.
Andy Chamberlin (01:00:08):
I want to talk about the transition in management. How long ago did that start and how has that transition, how did it go? How's it going?
Pooh Sprague (01:00:22):
Well, of course we never expected our kids to come back at all. We never took summer vacations until Sarah was a senior in high school. I thought that maybe they'd resent the lifestyle and Sarah was vocal about it, in high school, about this sucks. And it did in some level, unless you have some reason to really like it. If you're a teenager, why would you? And Ray was okay with it, but I didn't want to push that. So we never thought it was going to happen.
(01:00:58):
When Ray came out of college, he was fully certified to be a climbing instructor, an [inaudible 01:01:05] instructor, adventure education. He had all that stuff. And I just thought, maybe he'll come back when he's 30, 35. He'll do that. But why wouldn't he want to do that? Why wouldn't you want to be in glacier and fly-fishing on your day off? I would.
(01:01:24):
But it turns out, and I didn't know this until a month before he graduated, that he was coming home and I got that information from his cousin. I said, "You know, has Ray said anything to you about what he's doing?" She said, "I think he's coming home to work with Roy. That's what he told me." I said, "Really? Okay." So he was here so that all of a sudden presented, was not just a summer. All of a sudden he was acting like he was interested in the thing.
(01:01:54):
I had another guy who's worked for us for 40 years and he still works for us, so we started inquiring of-
PART 2 OF 5 ENDS [01:02:04]
Pooh Sprague (01:02:00):
It still works for us. So, we started inquiring, I said, "Do you want to be part of this thing?" He said, "I'm already involved with your dysfunctional family. I don't want any part of this. Thank you very much." 
Andy Chamberlin (01:02:14):
I don't need any more involvement. I already am.
Pooh Sprague (01:02:19):
Exactly, bad enough. He says, "All right, I'm picking up the pieces for your wife, for you. So, I don't want to get involved." Sarah likes the farm, but she doesn't want that kind of locked in. She'll lock in for the greenhouse stuff and she loves that. So, we try to pay her well for that, for her services, which are needed. I mean, she's a highly valued employee, but she does not want to go to the farm stand. So, that's her choice. Ray's willing to take responsibility of the whole thing. So, I don't know how many years ago it was, we started saying... Well, once you hit the 60, 65, you started saying, "It could happen." 
(01:03:09):
When you start seeing your buddy, whoa, what happened to Bill? Damn and stuff like that. So, we said, "Let's get the wheels in motion." We had our county agent at the time, Seth Willner, who's now New Hampshire farm business management guy. He was a county agent. This was an area that he was interested in. So, we had holistic farm meetings. People talked about what they wanted to do, what they didn't want to do, a direction they'd like to take it. That morphed later on into talking about estate work and things. So, we're pretty far along on all of it right now. I mean, as I say, Ray's in charge on paper, he's in charge of the LLC. We're employees theoretically or whatever, or maybe-
Andy Chamberlin (01:04:00):
Technically speaking. 
Pooh Sprague (01:04:01):
... indentured servants or whatever. So, we're getting there. We're getting there. But beyond the legal mechanics and that type of stuff, changing EIN numbers and things like that, I think everything works pretty well. I mean, I get on my knees. I can pick two flats and then somebody's got to lift me up and carry me to the end of the field. Those days are long gone, but I still do track to work. I still do propagation, seeding, go for deliveries on occasionally, whatever that thing needs a light physical work, some of the mowing. So, there's plenty to do for gumpers and gophers. So, that's my title. Ann is in charge of all the book work and all the administrative stuff. 
(01:05:07):
I think we're trying to figure out who we could get to replace her that we would have the confidence in and would do the job that she does. That will be an expensive nut to cross and a difficult one, because you are working with a family. It's essentially dysfunctional unit anyway. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:05:32):
Yeah, you've figured out how to make it work together.
Pooh Sprague (01:05:36):
Those are the challenges and that's where we are in it. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:05:49):
It is time for our special segment. What's in your pocket? 
Pooh Sprague (01:05:52):
I'm not a Leatherman fan. I think I just have one of those Johnny's knives. Not Johnny's, not the harvest knife, but the Victoria Swiss Army, the thin one. But there's always a knife. There's usually a large National D'Addario thumb pick somewhere in the pockets, and they come out in the wash frequently. Because I never clean my pockets. I have snot rags and the regular stuff that comes out, chaff, potting soil in season, dead geranium leaves, but yeah, that's it. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:06:31):
All right. I like this one. If you could restart, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently? 
Pooh Sprague (01:06:39):
Is this under the what would you recommend somebody doing? 
Andy Chamberlin (01:06:42):
Sure. 
Pooh Sprague (01:06:44):
I've gotten away with a lot. I'd call, I'm the last man standing. If you're willing to do that, yeah, you'll eventually make it work and figure, unless you're really stupid. But if somebody was smart today and nobody wants to hear that, "Boy, I want to get on the farm. Where should I go?" I'd say, "You can go anywhere," but the first thing you want to take is you want to take some basic accounting and business skills. It is like a lot of things. It's the language of the business. It's not the fun thing. The fun thing is the ag tractors, the green field, weed fields. It's the pictures we take of our cover crops. That's the good shit, but there's this other thing too. The same thing in music, I can play by ear. I can do a lot of stuff. 
(01:07:31):
I'm a journeyman guy and I can fit in anywhere and I can make a pretty modest living if I had to do it. But I wish I'd stayed in music school so that I could learn to write music. I don't mean write music like Nirvana. I mean write on staff in different clefs, understand key signatures time. It was the language of music, because that's the same thing. You're marginalized if you don't have that. I think as a farmer, you're marginalized if you don't have those skills and you're not willing to recognize what they tell you. It's the most boring thing. That's what I didn't want anybody to tell me when I was growing up either, but now I don't think you can be lucky now. There's no gobs of land going cheap. 
(01:08:29):
I don't know how young people, I should say, could get into farming with the capital cost of everything, 3,500 bucks. Buy a pretty decent tractor in 1975. That wouldn't buy you scrap metals. So, I think that if I had over to do it, I really try to know more about what I was doing. There were no models. There were no models back then. I mean, we were all learning from another. I mean, Jake Guest at Killdeer Farm came out of a commune. Let's have some pigs. Let's raise our own food and try to go like that. He developed beyond that. Bob Gray got on farming because he wanted to have something to sell in the summer to supplement his Olympic career because he had to self-fund. He found that if he grew tomatoes in Putney, wow, that worked pretty good. So, when push came to shove, he started doing more of the same. I don't think Howard ever took any classes. Did he? 
Andy Chamberlin (01:09:42):
Yeah. I don't know. 
Pooh Sprague (01:09:43):
All the guys who are my contemporaries came from different things. They were ski racers or whatever. I'm essentially a music major. So, we had to learn from each other. Dave Chapman was instrumental and Elliot was important. They went to France and they saw all the growing that was done then, the intensive stuff. They brought that back and we were going like, "Holy shit, it can be done and this is how we do it." The industry grew with us. First, it was old Planet, the Jupiter wheel hoe up in Heinsberg. They reissued the Planet Junior thing, and all of a sudden, wheel hose, people knew what they were for. Everybody knew what they were for in 1880, but by 1980, just hippie vegetable growers. 
(01:10:39):
So, I just say to anybody today and you as an extension person, we always have this thing at meetings. How do we get people to go to twilight meetings? Somehow we made time for it when we were less busy, but it's just so hard. We used to take the Jamaican guys. We love going outside of the fact, you stop, have dinner on the way home or whatever.
Andy Chamberlin (01:11:05):
Field trip. 
Pooh Sprague (01:11:06):
We'll see what these guys are doing. Why do you do it that way? He'd come on the way home. He said, "Well, Jesus Christ, I would never make any sense, would it?" But sure look cool down there, that type of stuff. That's a lot of money to do it that way, but anyway, I miss that. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:11:27):
the learning from your peers?
Pooh Sprague (01:11:29):
Or go make an appointment, go upstate. I've been meaning to go up and see Anna Doyle. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:11:39):
Oh yeah. 
Pooh Sprague (01:11:39):
Yeah. She worked for us for a couple of years. [inaudible 01:11:42]. These are all people that had a little bit of a foundation and they're smart people. I want to see what the hell they're doing. I'm sure they're doing some we should be doing. That's part of getting on the other farm. People talk.
Andy Chamberlin (01:11:57):
I think, like you said, now there are different models of farming. It could be CSA farming, could be market gardening, intensive vegetable production. If somebody wanted to get into, we'll say, a large acreage wholesale mixed veg operation, like what you've got, your 75 acres of field production, I guess two-part question. Do you think you would do the same thing, bedding plants and massive field production? Secondly, how do you think one would get into that operation now?
Pooh Sprague (01:12:37):
That's really out of my purview, I think. First of all, you got to really know something about your market. Howard was in a meeting one time. Some guy wanted me to assemble all these growers, because we wanted a packing house in Hartford, Connecticut. He wanted to buy all the tomatoes that we could produce, cherry tomatoes, all the cherry tomatoes. I called up Chris Hemingway and Steve Fulton and Howard Jake came down, David Pearson. This guy went on and on. We thought, "Well, maybe this is a chance to ramp up." Well, the candy coating, the lure is out there. I'll buy all you can make. I'd heard that before. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:13:34):
Oh, yeah, right. That saying is not new. 
Pooh Sprague (01:13:37):
Right. It happened to us the first year. I had a guy say, "I'll buy all the peas you can grow me next year." He did. He didn't even say anything to me until he was able to buy them for a couple of bucks a bushel cheaper. Then I was stuck with my ass in the breeze. Ann and I are picking peas, and we sold a few bushels to him at a reduced price. They were nice peas. They weren't crap. I mean, they were nice. They were nights and they were fortified peas and every pod and everything. So, we got burned and I said, "I'm not going back. I'm never going to wholesale it again. I just went the other way. I'm never going to trust these people again." 
(01:14:21):
So I am hesitant to say, "Let's get out and put 75 acres." There's a couple of guys in Vermont that used to do that. They'd have one good year on one acre. Next year, they'd have 24 acres of it. You know what that does? Not only to them, but also to everybody else. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:14:37):
It ripples the whole market. The markets of these northeast sizes, it's a big impact. 
Pooh Sprague (01:14:51):
I wouldn't recommend to anybody. I think it's a recipe for disaster. All these guys, I know there's big people coming in and putting greenhouses up to produce. I mean, we got a cannabis operation across the street here, across the river, and I bought some LED lights, just a little couple of strips for my propagating bench up there. They're expensive. But I mean, over here, there's like nine 35 by 135 harness or whatever over there. I met the grower. She's a sharp woman, really smart. But that's a lot of dope. That's a lot of dope. It's like CBD. Wait a minute. We went from one half acre to 60. Oh, we can hope there's nobody around to process it. Who knew? I mean, boom. Yeah. So, I like saying, "Boy, that's a dangerous root to grow." 
(01:15:53):
I'm more of a like, you got to test the waters and keep your day job. I don't know. They have deeper products. We were fortunate. I mean, of course, back in the '70s, it didn't make much less than you do for four hours now. The travel's more expensive. So, there's less money now arguably than it was. So, I was making pretty good weekend warrior money and Ann was teaching. We had the strawberries. So, a couple of years, you could see things developed, but it developed at a comfortable pace. First, greenhouse was not a range. It was a 40 by 10 pit greenhouse with old Cypress sash. We got rid of that. So, it was incremental steps. I like to say to myself, well, I would've done this in a bigger way. Maybe you would've done a different structure if you knew. 
(01:16:58):
I wouldn't have put up a pit greenhouse with Ashley wood stove in it, because there was some book that said that's what you should do. I would look around and say, "This is more appropriate." But yeah, I would say just be damn careful about your size and what you allocate for size. It's really easy to plow up an acre of ground. It's really miserable to be hand weeding carrots. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:17:22):
That's right. What does sustainable farming mean to you and how are you achieving it? 
Pooh Sprague (01:17:30):
I don't know. I guess sustainable farming to me meant at the end of the day, you're farming in such a way that when you retire, when it comes to the end of it, you don't have to sell it for house lots. You can sell it as a farm. Hopefully, because usually with any business, the only thing you pass on in your business is your name if it's worth anything at all. But I thought before the kids came back that it was my intent to make sure that this was either protected through conservation easement or that hopefully somebody might want to farm it. That's hard for farmers to do. They can't let go. 
(01:18:12):
I had trouble letting go to my kid. It's like, "What are you doing?" So you can imagine how hard that is if somebody has to drive by, they're retired, they got nothing to do, and they're driving by and looking at the guy screw up the strawberries.
Andy Chamberlin (01:18:29):
Why did they put it there? I knew that field was always cold. 
Pooh Sprague (01:18:32):
Goddamn fools! Anyway, so that sustainable meant just being able to keep it in productive agricultural land. Because even in the '70s, you could look back 30 years and say there's a pile of people coming down the road. In 50 years, we've seen a pile of people show up on the planet and it's having some serious effects. I think we need to be taking care of our ag land among other things. Although we're doing a pretty good job of eliminating the population. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:19:12):
Self-correcting in ways. 
Pooh Sprague (01:19:14):
Well, it's all of that. So, yeah, so that was always an important thing for us. Having Ray farming is a real benefit. I mean, the other thing is that we can stay here. We can even just take out a jug iced tea if it's a hot day. I still participate in the lifestyle or whatever benefits there are. The second part of the question obviously you're getting into is, "How do you treat your land?" I think that's really important. I think I've always felt that. I grew up reading a guy named Louis Bromfield, and he was actually not a farmer to start with. He was a journalist. He was a writer for the New York Times or something. He had a book called Malabar Farm. All he did is he bought a bunch of land and farms that post-Dust Bowl area in Kentucky, Tennessee somewhere. 
(01:20:21):
He had anecdotal stuff about he'd studied with Rodale or I met Rodale. So, he did organic farming. He made a good case for moving back to old ways as opposed to endorsing all new highly mechanized chemical type of farming. My dad had the book actually, and it was a great book and a great read. It made me think more about farming in sustainable ways. So, the land component is what are we doing? Everything we do, whether we're organic, certified organic, or whether we're conventional, the nature of what we do is just terrible for the soil. Soil does not want to grow strips of carrots. It wants to grow box elders in a most random way. You know what I mean? 
(01:21:29):
I heard a wonderful discussion by Rich Banana one time. Somebody accused him of being very conventional, because he is conventional to a degree, but his answer is somebody took him to task at it. He always had the unenviable position of having to describe, tell about the new licenses and pesticides. You're always talking about pesticides, terrible thing for the planet. Why don't you ever talk about cultivation and stuff like that? He was nice to the guy. He was nice. He really was nice. He said, "Look, I grow lettuce on 65 acres to stuff our star market." He says, "So here's the deal." He said, "Every time I go out, I have to look at the weather. I put the plants in a certain point."
(01:22:14):
Some point along the way, he says, "This I know. I can either put a chemical on my land, but the benefit of that chemical is I don't have to take my G out there three times. Because every time I take the G out there, I oxidize my humus." So I said, "You can decide. You have to make that decision, but you shouldn't make it in the vacuum." End of story. That was his. I think we think about that. We can use some herbicides here, but I'm cognizant of the fact that even if I can produce pictures of beautiful cover crops, like everybody, I don't make the illusion that I've solved the problem. I think you just have to say, this is the best I can do under these circumstances, rain, wind with a year or whatever. 
(01:23:12):
This is the best I can do. I have to go forward doing the best I can do for the soil and the future. I have to think about that, think about that as hard as I have to think about keeping the mokums clean and alternate area off. You know what I mean? Yeah. I have to make that focus. Ray has to make that focus too. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:23:34):
You've been in business now 50 years this next year. What do you think has been one of the key things that has allowed the business to keep going? 
Pooh Sprague (01:23:48):
Shit luck, I think. Last man standing, we had no business. There was no market strategy. I was married to Ann. I chased a woman up to Plainfield, and we wanted to do something that we felt was rewarding. This looked like an interesting challenge. We were under some illusion that it might be easier than dairy farming. I understand that. I think my dad said that to me. He said, "This is great. You've got time off in the winter." In those days, we probably did. Ann and I was down at the ski area, and I might be filling out a seed order, but snow's coming down later outside. Repeat the question. I'll try to address it more. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:24:42):
What's one thing that you think has really enabled you to stay in business for 50 years? 
Pooh Sprague (01:24:46):
Well, I mean, I'm pretty serious about the shit luck thing to a certain degree. We landed in a great place. We had Bill Lord as a guy who encouraged us and mentored us with strawberries. We had marketing possibilities. We had people close by, population center. That didn't happen by design. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:25:09):
Good location. 
Pooh Sprague (01:25:10):
Location. It didn't happen by design. It happened because I was in love with my wife. It's not exactly part of anybody's smart business, but it worked out. I mean, we could have gone to Washington County, New York and bought a real farm and grown all sorts of stuff. Who will we sell it to? Who knows? So we were lucky and the area continued to prosper, and we have an abundance of people who might be considered competition. We all seem to be doing okay and doing well. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:25:51):
What made you almost quit and why didn't you? 
Pooh Sprague (01:25:56):
Oh, I don't know. During the mid-70s when I first got up here for the first couple of years, one of the odd jobs I did, blue collar jobs was Ann's cousin owned Frederick Johnson Pianos up in Hartford. They were essentially the biggest Steinway Piano dealer, north of Steinway in New York. It was an interesting job moving pianos, but we got to drive all over everywhere and we got to move pianos and rent pianos to the Eagles and Linderonstadt and things like that. But the moving piano things took a toll on me. I'm very short-legged. I have a long spine and I beat my back to a pulp. It got hard. I mean, I had a lot of radiating pain most of my life. I actually had a lot of radiating pain. I was taking 14 Advil a day, things like that. I didn't really have start having surgery surgeries till 2003. 
(01:27:03):
But back then, it was really bad. My parents, bless them, I was pretty bad off. My dad had come up to do some plowing and they could see I was a lot of pain. I wasn't faking. I was getting by. I was going out in the hoeing and doing things, but I was miserable. They see me hanging, laying down on something hard or whatever, trying to do exercises. My folks came to me and said... They knew I loved music. I don't think they ever embraced it. They didn't understand it because I was a bar band. I was the guy on the Trailways bus. I got off and played Elvis music or whatever. I mean, that's the level it would've been. I make $34,000 to $30,000 a year if I was lucky back then. 
(01:27:49):
But that's the career that was ahead of me and my parents, bless their soul, they came up one time, said, "Look, we can see this has been a hard road ahead for you and Ann. If you want to go to Berkeley and get some real skills, we'll fund it." That was a consideration because by then, I had a pretty good idea what I had needed to do to make a living in music and how to get around it. Plus, it would do the whole thing we talked about, the language of music and whatnot. So, that was a pretty tough consideration. I didn't consider it long, because one, I wasn't confident that I would be a good teacher. I think I probably would've been a good teacher because it's like coaching youth hockey. The parallels are unbelievable. But at the time, I was like, "I don't know. I don't know. I would be outside if I can just make this work." So I just dragged the bad back along for years. I would go get a little physical therapy, I'd be better, go along. Actually, playing pond hockey and skiing at the area really helped it the years when I finally got on skis.
Andy Chamberlin (01:29:04):
Staying active.
Pooh Sprague (01:29:05):
Staying active. So, that was all part of it, but that's as close as it ever got, because I think it's like everybody knows it's not drudgery if it's interesting to you. It's always been interesting to me and rewarding. I'm the artistic idiot guy that'll shut the tractor off and watch the sunset if nobody's looking. We live in a beautiful area. We were just saying the other day, we've got this laying on Windsor. Shut the wood processor off and the lights behind Mount of Scotney, it's parish blues coming up all the place, like holy shit. Maybe that's just a function of age. Maybe as you get older that you take stock of that stuff more, but I've always had that in me. I like being outside. Look at that. I don't see any four-foot pigweeds. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:30:00):
Exactly. 
Pooh Sprague (01:30:01):
That's perfect. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:30:03):
Yeah, right. You know what it takes to look pretty in nature. 
Pooh Sprague (01:30:06):
Yeah. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:30:08):
Organic versus not? You're not organic, right? 
Pooh Sprague (01:30:11):
No, no. I first got up here, I just didn't have the skills in the early '70s to do it. I didn't have the imagination. I mean, I was on the magazine cover of organic farming, but only because I was trying to do strawberries with weeder geese. Another bad idea. Well, FISMA would not allow that now, but there was some guys that do it. But anyway, no, I mean, had enough failure. I was going into fields that had been atrazine and stuff and that wasn't the limiting factor. I mean, then there was no organics. Vermont was actually fairly early in on the certification process. I mean, I believe in organics, but it's not a level playing field. There's cosmetic things, and we are in competition with conventional cosmetology of vegetables. It has to look perfect. 
(01:31:16):
People can say what they want about how they support it, but they pick over the organic stuff to get the perfect fruit and that type of stuff. So, I just thought I'm trying to make sustainability as something to do with profitability. If I'm going to make money, I want the full toolbox. That's pretty much the way I did it. When Ray came back and his wife, Jenny, who was also very involved with the farm, a CSA person, does a lot of our social media and stuff and as well as a grunt laborer, I said, "Do you guys want to transition? Do you want the certification? Do you want to make this commitment?" They said, "No, no, we just want to try to make a living and do this the best way we can." I mean, it's a half-assed mixture. I think Eric Seidman one time, he says, "You're our favorite wannabe organic farmer." 
(01:32:29):
When the tarnished plant bugs show up in numbers in the strawberries, I want them to go away. I want to protect them the best I can. So, yeah, it's a crop tool. I used to feel real defensive about it. Now I'm getting too goddamn old to worry. It's like this is what we do. This is what we try to do. I respect your choice if you want organic. What I don't do well is have a customer start laying into me about what we can do. I caught a customer one time complaining.
PART 3 OF 5 ENDS [01:33:04]
Pooh Sprague (01:33:00):
... you know, complaining, "I would shop here more often but you're not organic," and whatnot. I said, "Look at the basil. I didn't spray it with anything. You see the holes? Are you feeling good about that?"
(01:33:15):
But then the person went right over, and delivering me this kind of, "I know a little thing ..." Went over and bought a big bunch of grapes, and I said, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You just bought some Chilean grapes, which most likely have DDT on them. So, what are you doing here? Are you going to dump ..." That kind of thing.
(01:33:36):
That's not the face of retail you want. They cannot take shit well. Something about when you hit 40, 45, all of a sudden, it gets worse, I can tell you, it gets worse. I think one time my daughter, I was sampling cantaloupes up there, maybe 10, 15 years ago, and the college students seemed to be feeding themselves and hoarding and not buying anything, and I called their attention, "It's not a feeding frenzy here. The idea is that you try and maybe buy something." They were chagrined enough, so they, at least, quit eating cantaloupes-
Andy Chamberlin (01:34:14):
Stuffing their face.
Pooh Sprague (01:34:15):
Anyway, Sarah came, she put her arm around me, she said, "Dad, I think we're good here. I think we've got it from here on," and that was my last ... I didn't do anything at the farm stand. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:34:25):
Back to the field?
Pooh Sprague (01:34:28):
Yeah. It's tough. Retail is another tough part of what we do, and we need to be retail. I think all farmers that see us there, whatever you have, you have to as much as you can out of your labors. You know? It's a long winter. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:34:48):
Right. 
Pooh Sprague (01:34:48):
Anyway.
Andy Chamberlin (01:34:49):
From Vermont, there are a lot of, and I work with a lot of organic farms, and many of them are very vocal and I think there's actually ... Out of Vermont, I work with more organic farms than not in the vegetable space, which I think is unique for the industry. 
Pooh Sprague (01:35:08):
It is, but it's always been [inaudible 01:35:10], and it's less attractive ... The National Organic Standards, I don't know how many people are doing the real organic or not, but, to me, the National Organic Standards has diminished the whole concept of ... Because, look, it's like I've had this argument for 20 years, and I don't know if you can still do it. 
(01:35:33):
They don't allow Biotelo. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. But the fact of the matter is is that is not the position they should be making you people grow on, making the organic people grow on Biotelo or biodegradable, but they trumped up ... Eric tried to explain it to me several times what the rationale ... But it's trumped up. Nothing in the field versus our farm, it would not be a wheeler load. It would not be three wheeler loads. It'd be a tip trailer of stuff going into a landfill.
(01:36:11):
It's bad enough that we can't recycle our greenhouse plastics, because of the fossil fuel industry. It's unconscionable the National Organic Standards will allow the things that they allow, so it annoys me that so many people buy the label. 
(01:36:33):
I have the utmost respect for the Paul Harlows and the Jakes and David and all the guys that do what they do organically. It's harder. They're better than me. I'm happy to say that, but it doesn't mean as much as it did when Vermont controlled its own destiny I think. I've always said that, I said Vermont was running a certification, they should have never given it up. They should have remained the republic of Vermont, and kept that, because it really meant something, and they could justify why they did what they did, this whole thing about how many acres of grazing and stuff. That's just crap. Perdue's Chicken as opposed to Misty Knoll's. Pretty dramatic.
Andy Chamberlin (01:37:31):
Yeah. Right. 
Pooh Sprague (01:37:33):
Yeah. Yeah. No. I like to think a lot of those guys that I've gotten a lot of what we do here out of sharing information, and doing what we can to model ourselves as best we can after a more organic model.
(01:37:52):
All we have to do is take away the pesticides from all of us, and it's a level playing field. I think it's evolved with the National Organic Standard, but as far as the practices of Edgewater Farm, yeah, I would like to be able to not have to use some of the things we use sometimes.
Andy Chamberlin (01:38:10):
You mentioned how you use Biotelo or biodegradable plastic mulch. How long have you been doing that? If that's part of your field production system, how come you still choose to go [inaudible 01:38:23] with strawberries?
Pooh Sprague (01:38:26):
They've been doing it, at least, 25 years. We were some of the first guys to ... Michael Smith saw it in Italy. Michael Smith is the cress cultivator guy, if you don't remember. Short guy. I think he's still with the cress, but he farmed next door to me. 
(01:38:50):
He loved technology. He went to the Italian show, and he saw this stuff, and he said, "We'd had photodegradable plastic before," but that was just shredded and ended up in the trees, and really didn't go away much. 
(01:39:05):
But he said, "This stuff is corn starch-based, and they're going to get it in Canada. Eric is going to get it into ..." That does all the real covers, and, anyway, he's going to get some, and we got it. 
(01:39:16):
It worked pretty good. It wasn't 1.5 ML black plastic, but at the end of the year, mow the tomatoes and the peppers often, by spring, gone for the most part, nothing left, and so there was tremendous upfront costs but there was just not all that schwag that had to be gathered up and put in a landfill, and so we thought that was really appropriate, and so we used them for that.
(01:39:46):
Okay, so that ... We've been using it ever since. The second part of the question was plasticulture berries. We tried plasticulture berries. It's really labor-intensive, it's really hard to get the second year out of them, because crowns, they're great ... Of course, they had Chandlers in those days, and Chandlers, they were wonderful for one year, but you got one year out of them, and so now you got the expensive plastic, and then you got the [inaudible 01:40:19] ... They're sticking way up, because when we get through the plastics, the crowns are exposed, and so they take a beating the second year. 
(01:40:29):
Well, then you've got to pull up the drip tape out of plastics, and the strawberries, and it's just more infrastructure and plastic, so every once in a while, we talk about it, but we've done it three or four times, and it's like, "This is a mess to deal with, and it's not that ..." We don't enterprise it probably as closely as we should, but the gut feeling is that this isn't worth it, to renovating ... We tried to renovate for a second year back when ... We tried for a while. First couple of years, we tried conventional, 1.25 ML poly plastic and black plastic, but you got runner clipping and all that type of stuff. 
(01:41:24):
I'm sure you can go up to Charlie Gray, he'll tell you a different story, but they love it. They love it, and it works for them, at some level but it just doesn't for us. It's just a little more holistic or organic, I almost used the word. 
(01:41:41):
I'm not so sure that drip tape is not ... Dave Pearson up in Bradford, I don't think he gets the credit that he does. He's a small operation, but he's been growing good berries on the same 11 acres for 60 years. His father has been growing all that, so, again, they have never fumigated, they never ... He just rotates around the best he can do, and he puts drip irrigation under his plants, and he feeds them. 
(01:42:14):
He gets really good results. Not earth-shattering, not record-breaking, but I always looked at his model, and say, "That boy is no fool." So, that works really well.
(01:42:27):
Now does that translate down on our soils? I'm not sure. If we ever got really pent-up for space and stuff, and really had to say we've only got fruit, two acres of berries a year, that's it. That's all the land we're going to devote to that, and that would be different. Then we might look at something more intensive or whatever, but, yeah, I'm just not that much a fan of black plastic and black tape, and a lot of extra work.
(01:42:59):
As I say to Raymond, my mantra has always been, "If you want to do something, I'm happy to ... Let's do it, but what are you giving up to do it? What responsibilities can you give up to make time for this?" At one point, I think he was really interested in grapes and stuff. He put out some table grapes and we had some great ... The Jap beetles, [inaudible 01:43:30] most of the time, but I said, "If you want to ..."
[NEW_PARAGRAPH]We did it that way a couple of years, and I said, "Look, if we're going to do this, you want to do table grapes, let's talk to George." George Hamilton was doing grape trials, and he was really into it. I didn't see the numbers as being worth the labor, but I said to Ray, "If you really want to do it, this is the crop you want to grow, let's put in a critical amount," I said, "Paul actually will get on a sprayer and spray them."
Andy Chamberlin (01:43:59):
Right. Let's turn it into an enterprise, not just a-
Pooh Sprague (01:44:01):
Yeah. Let's do it.
Andy Chamberlin (01:44:01):
... little thing.
Pooh Sprague (01:44:03):
Yeah. Let's spend, get the trellising, get the plants, and do it up. By that time, I can see that carrots might make more sense. You know? Anyway, that's how the decisions get made around here.
Andy Chamberlin (01:44:22):
How many strawberries are you doing?
Pooh Sprague (01:44:25):
We're fruiting about five acres a year.
Andy Chamberlin (01:44:28):
Okay.
Pooh Sprague (01:44:29):
Yeah. Yeah, and less and less of that ... It's pretty much wholesale, retail, pick your own is really a hit or miss, due to the weather. When we first cropped in 1976, I think we picked enough quarts for the family, and strawberry shortcakes, and the rest went out pick your own.
(01:44:48):
Now was it a clean harvest? No. Probably not, but I can ... It really put us on the map. Only other person was Stu Shepard, and then the Grays were in Hartland, Hartland Four Corners, Hartland Four Corners Farm. Actually, we went up there and looked at it, and they bought it the week we looked at it, so it was really kind of interesting how it really worked out, so that was an enterprise that worked for us, but it was all pick your own then.
(01:45:22):
We used to have ... For a while, we were in partnership with our neighbors at Riverview Farm, and Paul and I had two walkie-talkies, and we were exhausted. We'd have 40 cars out there at a time, and we were just trying to find places to park cars. It was just different. 
(01:45:39):
Now it's like you go down, and if it's a foggy morning, there will be nobody there until 8:30, 9:00, and they don't pick anywhere near the volume. We used to have people that would come every day, 6:00 with their coffee and their families, and they either resold them or did something with them or processed them, they'd routinely take out 150 quarts a day, families-
Andy Chamberlin (01:46:04):
So, you've noticed a decline in pick your own?
Pooh Sprague (01:46:07):
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (01:46:08):
Why do you think that is?
Pooh Sprague (01:46:11):
I don't know. There's economics. Use of time. I think it's got a lot to do with the economic demographic, and a disconnect. It's entertainment. You know? We used to give these slips. You had a sliding scale of you'd pay so much to 20 pounds, you'd pay a little less at 25. Once you picked 150 pounds of berries, you were cruising, and you were paying very little for it, and we were happy to have you. But nobody picks 20-
Andy Chamberlin (01:46:47):
Right. 
Pooh Sprague (01:46:48):
... six people, they pick, that's it for the year. So, down here, it's entertainment, and you can tell by the weather. I used to go out in the fields, and say, "You've got to get out of here. There's a storm coming up the river, and that's [inaudible 01:47:05]. You've got to get out of here, I'm telling you," and people would pick in the rain, they'd pick in snow, strawberry season was just different. They'd come with their cups of coffee, and a bunch of elderly family members, and they'd just get on their hands and knees and do it. You know? They'd pick clean and they were just great people to have. You became great friends ... Christmastime, you'd get a card from them or somebody would bring you some strawberry jam or something. Whatever. It's great.
(01:47:29):
It's just very different now. Anne still does the pick your own, and she has a woman working with her there again. It's harder for me to go out and see the waste. "There's no berries out here."
Andy Chamberlin (01:47:43):
I filled my quart in just a few-
Pooh Sprague (01:47:46):
Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (01:47:48):
Are there any other changes in the market that you've observed?
Pooh Sprague (01:47:55):
There's a demand that wasn't there 20 years ago. Yes. I've always had trouble ... There comes a time, when we have trouble, we have stuff we can't get rid of it, and that's ... But by and large, it's more people seeking growers out for stuff, whether it's people have little processing things, caterers, we have a caterer that has become a big account for Ray. "Really, a caterer? They buy that much?" It used to be restaurants and stuff, but we don't do the restaurant, because of the guys in town have done it, and it's their business, and so we haven't done, looked into that. We'll do farm stands and other people that come to us when they come to us.
(01:48:41):
Ray puts out a list every week on his cellphone, "This is what we've got this week. If you need it, give me a buzz," or whatever, and so that works. But I think that all translates into there's more demand than there used to be. There's certainly plenty of growers around. We got a guy, as I say ... And there's growers I don't even know. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:49:02):
Right.
Pooh Sprague (01:49:04):
I say, "Ray, who is this [inaudible 01:49:06] Harvest Farm? Where are they?" You know? "They're in Reading, so they're in Brownsville. I know Brownsville. Where are they?" 
(01:49:13):
And so there's constantly ... That's why I say I kind of miss ... When I was president of New Hampshire Vegetables Growers Association, I really meant to [inaudible 01:49:24] one week, and just go all the places that turned up, because I wanted to get membership back in, and we didn't have the robust participation that Vermont does. There were people, and I said, "I see you at the Vermont meetings. I know you've [inaudible 01:49:44]. How about some dues for Becky Sideman? You should help us out."
(01:49:49):
Anyway, so-
Andy Chamberlin (01:49:50):
Earlier on, you mentioned no-till corn, your two rows a year, and how that hasn't worked great for you. Just to give you some background, last year was my first year taking over management of our family farm, Chamberlin's Farm up in Underhill. My grandpa has done it since '76, roadside farm stand, seven acres of sweet corn, 60 acres of hay, pick your own pumpkins. Used to do two acres of strawberries, so that's what I grew up doing.
(01:50:22):
Now we've dropped the strawberries, but I'd like to bring them back. We're not doing the farm store, but I'm planning to bring that back, trying to breathe some life back into the farm. We are conventional. I'd like to use less herbicides than we do. I've seen some real pretty fields of no-till corn, but I know it's also quite challenging to do. Andre Cantelmo speaks loudly about that, and I know he's done it well, which has been interesting.
Pooh Sprague (01:50:47):
Who is this?
Andy Chamberlin (01:50:48):
Andre Cantelmo. 
Pooh Sprague (01:50:49):
Oh, Andre. Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (01:50:50):
Yeah. I know he's done it. That's something that I would like to get towards is more no-till, less conventional, in both pumpkins and/or sweet corn, so I'd be interested to hear your experiences with no-tilling on your corn planter.
Pooh Sprague (01:51:11):
Well, the first year we had it, we didn't have a no-till corn planter. We had my NRCS, my nephew Jeffrey McNamara was doing a lot of new things for them, and he had access to a six row corn planter, and so I think we grow peas and oats crop or something after the first thing in the spring, it would look robust but I don't know what was there.
(01:51:41):
But, anyway, he came up and Ray and he planted a couple acres of what I call Hail Mary, end of the season stuff. Came up in a heartbeat. I mean that came up in two days. Astounding. 
(01:51:59):
I really liked that stuff. That year, I forget ... I think I went out once before a storm and I spun on like 100 pounds to the acre of [inaudible 01:52:14], something like that, and the corn was just astounding. It was like ... I had been part of the New Hampshire's team that went down to Beltsville when they first started doing the counter crop and stuff, and so we were just amazed at what we saw these guys who ... The conventional growers in Pennsylvania and everything, that was really astounding work.
(01:52:38):
We had the success, and it was like, "Oh, boy, we're doing this. This is our future." A lot of it was because, that time of the year, the moisture in the soil was perfect. It was just like ... And it's warm, so you put it down there, and it's got the moisture it needs to germinate. It worked great, and it grew well, and it got through whatever events, timely application of fertilizer, and we did use a herbicide. I think we used a mixture of Roundup and Callisto at the time, and so the weakened soil was good. There might have been some LASSO in there or dual or whatever, whatever standard corn fertilizer, and we put that right down on top of the peas and oats. It worked great, and it looked good. It just was textbook. 
(01:53:31):
Well, the next year we did it in another field, and came up great. The weakened soil came along, but fertility raised its ugly head, and so we tried to spin stuff on. It was like we picked half a crop, and it happened pretty much the same way, the third crop, so we really felt that we grow maybe ... I don't know. We grow a little more now, because we push the envelope so far into the fall, it's crazy, but we don't grow a lot of sweet corn, and so we would have to invest in some sort of ammonia, nitrous ammonia, ejecting knives and things like that.
(01:54:25):
We have the planter and stuff, but we just said, "This is a lot more infrastructure, a lot more capitalization"-
Andy Chamberlin (01:54:33):
In order to side dress the nitrogen-
Pooh Sprague (01:54:35):
Just deliver a standard fertility or something. Knifing dry fertilizer in the ground, corn ground is like ... It can be pretty dicey. It can burn your stuff pretty hard. 
(01:54:50):
So, then most of the guys that do no-till do that. They have knives and inject that way, so it just seemed like ... My heart wasn't into it. We had two years of failure, and so that was like four or five acres of wasted time and-
Andy Chamberlin (01:55:10):
Right.
Pooh Sprague (01:55:11):
... I said, "I think better we just have open ground where we can manage fertility a little easier," and just continue to do what we do, row crops, and so that's where we went down the road of getting a no-till seeder, which I think has paid better dividends or was our concession to doing no-till like that. We really have reduced tillage that used to open up seedbeds and things like that with a no-till planter. They're expensive but we worked out a deal with NRCS where we did a pollinator, a quart a year pollinator, perennials and stuff and got some matching funding-
Andy Chamberlin (01:55:58):
For a seed drill? For the seed drill?
Pooh Sprague (01:56:00):
Yeah. It gave us a critical mass of money towards a seed drill.
Andy Chamberlin (01:56:03):
Yeah. You primarily use that seed drill, you're saying for cover crops and pollinator plantings-
Pooh Sprague (01:56:11):
Yeah. Yeah. 
Andy Chamberlin (01:56:11):
Yeah.
Pooh Sprague (01:56:12):
Well, not pollinator ... We haven't done anything very ... We've scaled back ... When NRCS came out, there's all these very exotic blends of things, and it was like some of them, I was kind of like [inaudible 01:56:29]. We had a meeting up here, and I said, "So, Cecilia doesn't do much. It's a nice little flower, but what are we doing here with it?" 
(01:56:41):
Really, I think the answer ... [inaudible 01:56:43] there was an answer, but [inaudible 01:56:45] sunflowers and I don't know if this is a real answer or whether the guy was fishing and trying to come up with something, but he said, "Well, the sunflowers call attention to the cover crop, because we're trying to promote this," and I thought, "So, sunflowers don't really do anything at all, so we're putting those in the mix, because we want to show that we're doing cover crops."
(01:57:07):
But I was looking at the mixes, and, God, I don't know, I just said we're not getting biomass, we're not getting nitrogen, so if we're not building carbon, what are we doing? We're spending a lot of extra money on this stuff.
(01:57:25):
I went backwards on it, and now we have peas and oats, and we have rai veg and daikon for anything, and, of course, the veg goes out of it by Labor Day, because you're really ... You can go later than Labor Day, but, boy, the first October, it's just a waste of money. It'll come up another year as a weed. You know? And not when it's supposed to.
(01:57:54):
That's kind of where we are. We get a pretty good biomass. I'd like to do more with [inaudible 01:58:08] and things like that, for ... We're expanding our land, and our land usage is ... When Ray first bought his farm, and came in, I thought, "I'm going to learn [inaudible 01:58:21] you as well." No. We go later in the season, he'd fill up every ... He's young. He fills up everything, and that's good, but I thought, "I'd have a full season of stuff," and usually I'd have half-seasons at best, and put something in there, and we'll use that for a third planting of carrots or something like that, take it out at that point. That's sort of the thought process.
(01:58:47):
Yeah. No. I'd like to see biomass, and I'd like to be convinced that we're getting some nitrogen in there too. I'm digressing here, but that explained to me all these different species, other guys say they foster different bio in the soil, and so that's what I've heard, which, yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (01:59:10):
But like you said, you're looking at the big triggers.
Pooh Sprague (01:59:14):
Yeah. Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (01:59:15):
The biomass, the organic matter-
Pooh Sprague (01:59:17):
Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (01:59:17):
... the nitrogen that really feeds the plants.
Pooh Sprague (01:59:20):
The low-hanging fruit.
Andy Chamberlin (01:59:21):
Yeah. 
Pooh Sprague (01:59:21):
Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (01:59:22):
Less so than each little ... I'm sure there is a lot of biological activity with a wide-ranging crop mix, but that's harder to measure.
Pooh Sprague (01:59:33):
Yeah. Yeah. It is. It's harder to justify ... That's the other thing. It's like so often times you get these things, Ray will say, "We're going to pull a pipe out of that field. We'd really like to get that down to rai veg as soon as you can."
(01:59:50):
Well, if you're buying an NRCS mix, you have to have the foresight to buy that winter whatever specified blend that's pre- bagged by Albert Lee, in the spring, and have it on hand. That's not the case with farming, so you really need something that you can go to Aldi and Oliver, you can go to Connecticut River and Island will have on hand, "What do you got?"
Andy Chamberlin (02:00:11):
I just got to run to town and grab something, because a space opened up.
Pooh Sprague (02:00:14):
Right. It always comes down to Brad Law. "Brad, it's Pooh. Can you blend me some rai and veg and how soon can you have it there?" Of course, he's very good about getting stuff onboard.
Andy Chamberlin (02:00:27):
I asked my colleague Chris last night, I said, "Hey, I'm going to talk to Pooh. Is there anything that you would want to bring up?" He mentioned that you were an early voice in the FSMA, in the produce safety roll-out we'll say. What was your involvement with that early on and then how do you think it's gone?
Pooh Sprague (02:00:47):
Well, the original food safety shit came out in 2011. The original mandate, and Seth Wilner was our county agent, and so I think once I started looking at it, Seth came to me, and said, "Dude, this thing's 1400 pages long. We got to figure it out."
(02:01:11):
So, New Hampshire had really got its act together. They got a committee together right off in 2011 of Heather Bryant, Seth, Jennifer Gornnert from the state government, Garrick Williams from our department of markets, Steve Felt, and myself, Trevor, and it was pretty big, and we would meet periodically to, in some way, to read a portion of the original mandates, and earmark what we ... We had concerns and we had a lot of concerns. 
(02:01:52):
The first writing of the FSMA mandate was draconian, money-wise, the things you would have to implement were beyond believable. The other guy that was involved with this was Rich Bonanno, who was Farm Bureau of Massachusetts and a grower. He was friends with George Hamilton, and I had met him a couple of times, and we had a good relationship with him, and he would explain to me ... Because there's a lot of science involved, and it's like, "How does this translate and how does this translate?" 
(02:02:23):
We just thought it was just going to be a big stumbling block, and I don't think ... I can remember having a discussion with a couple of people in Vermont at the time, who didn't feel ... That, "This is never going to happen" kind of thing, and it'll be straightened away.
(02:02:37):
Well, it really didn't get straightened away, and so the committee invited the FDA to Hanover, and we'd come up and explain as best they could, and we were loaded-
Andy Chamberlin (02:02:55):
You had your notes ready.
Pooh Sprague (02:02:56):
"What do you mean by this? You mean to say that this is going to ..." I think that all of a sudden, that was sort of the tipping point where everybody said, "Holy shit. Really? We're going to be doing this?" It's like condemn four acres of produce if you found a bird turd in the middle of the field.
(02:03:20):
The trouble was it was already ... There was already a thing in place. USDA had cap. It would have been fine, but this was another case of empire building. The FDA wanted to get on it. I can remember they were in here looking at all our setup one time, and I was listening to the conversation with the USDA and the FDA going ... I finally interrupted. I couldn't control myself. "You mean you guys sit down the street from one another in Washington, and this is the first time you've met is on my property and you've got the same program?" I said, " Shame on you people." I was pissed. I was so-
PART 4 OF 5 ENDS [02:04:04]
Pooh Sprague (02:04:00):
Shame on you people. I was pissed. I was so infuriated. And not one of my finer moments, I admit. But it was like, at the time Mike Taylor says, "This isn't that big a deal." I said, "Mike, you're putting small farms out of business. It's a big deal."
Andy Chamberlin (02:04:19):
Right. Right.
Pooh Sprague (02:04:21):
I said, "We might survive this, but it's going to cost us a lot of money, and I know a lot of people who are not going to survive this." So they started taking rewrites and criticisms and, God love Heather Bryant, she did a lot. And then Chris was involved. There was another woman over from Vermont that he worked with before Liz left.
Andy Chamberlin (02:04:45):
Ginger Nickerson.
Pooh Sprague (02:04:46):
Nickerson, yep.
Andy Chamberlin (02:04:46):
Yep.
Pooh Sprague (02:04:47):
She was involved and we were meeting and trying to sort the whole thing out and it really ... And I said before on our own group, I had the meeting, our annual meeting. And people were like, "This isn't going to happen." I said, "Dude, you better get your act together."
Andy Chamberlin (02:04:47):
It's happening.
Pooh Sprague (02:05:03):
"You're going to have your underwear handed to you real shortly and you're not going to like it, so you've got to participate now." And so we wrote editorials and did what we had to do. If I hadn't been president, I probably would've taken the passive route thing type, "Oh, this'll work its way out. I'll find a way around it." Unfortunately, even with the rewrites, we had FDA running mock inspections up here. It was unbelievable.
(02:05:33):
I kid you not, he showed up here, there were a couple of guys. One guy was a Latino guy working, he was good. He was good. He was trying to temper us a little bit. I said, "You're right. But I think this can be ..." But this guy that showed up, he was head of the team, and he wasn't malicious, he was just a bureaucrat.
Andy Chamberlin (02:05:55):
Show up in uniform?
Pooh Sprague (02:05:58):
Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (02:05:58):
Really?
Pooh Sprague (02:05:59):
A blue suit and a hat, he looked like an admiral.
Andy Chamberlin (02:06:03):
Yeah.
Pooh Sprague (02:06:04):
It was like, "What are we doing here? Who is this guy?"
Andy Chamberlin (02:06:08):
And, really?
Pooh Sprague (02:06:10):
So we had the washings out by the back barn. We had all the Nolt's baskets all washed and set up there for the inspection out on plastic pallets, and right outside the side of the building. And he said, "Well, this will never pass." I said, "We want plastic, they're all clean." He says, "Well, no." He said, "They're under the drip line. You need to put a shed here."
(02:06:44):
I said, "They're under the drip line, is there a problem? They're going to be taken out in the field and so on the dirt." I mean, I'm not sure I understand this.
Andy Chamberlin (02:06:56):
Take a step back and then realize. Yeah.
Pooh Sprague (02:06:57):
"You want to explain this to me?" He said, "Well, a bird's rooster on the roof and they defecate on the roof, it will run down on the baskets." So that's what we were working with. He was going on. He had Ray out there at one time, because they have their protocols on if you find deer pellets in the field. They had dumbed down the condemnation to, what do you do when they do these things? And so we said, "Not pick the deer shit?" I don't know. This is, is it a trick question?
(02:07:29):
What common sense dictate? Maybe you don't pick it out, you don't shake it out of the lettuce and put the lettuce in the bucket. I'm not sure. So we said, "Well, we're not sure of the full protocol." He said, "Well, what you need to do is to get a spade and pick it up and take it out of the field." And so Ray's going, "So that's a great idea except for one thing, what happens if one of the pellets rolls off?" Have pellets on, have you ever done that? Or, put deer on a round point shuffle? He said, "Well, I'd never thought of that." And that response, "I never thought of that," was the whole problem.
(02:08:04):
FISMA would've been, a lot of the problems with FISMA and it could have been designed better, and it could have been if they put farmers in the room when they do this stuff and they did not. And they do it intentionally. They put USDA in the room, and that was a real frustration for me and what really aggravated me a great deal.
(02:08:26):
Did it turn out okay? I think so. I mean I guess, we learned some stuff along the way, I think we all have. And we try to reinforce it every year, training isn't a bad thing. And knowing your water, that's been really, it's been interesting actually, in the water testing and find out... I can remember one time we had a real dry year and we were testing the water out of the river. I got into it for September, and I said, "This is going to be soup. Now, this is going to be fun, I'll send this one in." And it came back and it was 10 parts per million E. Coli, was it 175 or 125 units?
(02:09:12):
I called up Endyne Labs. I said, "How can this be?" I said, "We're at the, right below Hartford, Hartford dumps into it. And the sewage treatment plant's right up the way. I am sure they get most of it, but there's such a low flow in the river. I had to walk out 30 yards to get the sample out of running water." And the guy said, "Look, it's not... E. Coli flourishes in warm weather." He said, "They don't propagate themselves, unless it's really warm temperature." Anyway, stuff like that. So you have a better idea. Okay, so the river's flooded. We don't need to irrigate after the flood, you know what I mean?
Andy Chamberlin (02:10:01):
Right.
Pooh Sprague (02:10:02):
So it's going to clean itself probably. So you just learn some obvious stuff that was good. But I think it goes down to the person who shows up the day for inspection, your inspector. We have Vicky Smith, and Vicky Smith is our old organic's inspector. She's about doing things as much by the book, but she's not looking to really make things hard for you. So I think that's really been helpful.
(02:10:38):
The day inspector comes, and he's got a white coat and he's got a biology degree from... that's when things will get bad. And that's what I worry about, I think. And the other thing that I don't like about PISMA or anything is that it keeps a bureaucracy on, most things that was just [inaudible 02:11:04]. But rarely does any of these bureaucracies say, "Okay, we've achieved what we want to do. Okay, let's go home and do something else." They self-perpetuate and there's always these upgrades and changes, and water use and manure management and they tweak it and up it a little bit all the time.
(02:11:23):
So I'm concerned, I mean I'm 73, I shouldn't really be that concerned about anything. I should be more concerned about my next meal or how long it is before Ray sends me off to shady pines. But right now, I think it has served a purpose, but it wouldn't have served a purpose if we hadn't made a stink about it.
Andy Chamberlin (02:11:44):
Mm-hmm.
Pooh Sprague (02:11:45):
Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (02:11:45):
Well it's good that you provided your feedback early on to help curb some of that.
Pooh Sprague (02:11:51):
Yeah, I think a lot of people do. I think what we did is, as I was just a loud mouth and that helped other people think, well, that maybe it was worth looking into. And when they did, they realized how out of control the thing was, the original one, it took a long time. It was rewritten in 2014 and there were still things that were tweaked. So what it was, is 2017, was that the first one? I think so, somewhere there. So Ray deals with it completely now, and so far so good.
Andy Chamberlin (02:12:22):
Produce safety is what brought me into extension. That was the funding that got this position started. And we've figured out that a lot of produce safety is involved with post-harvest handling and the pack shed. Chris mentioned you made a significant investment in your post-harvest handling, bigger than you ever could have imagined, he says.
Pooh Sprague (02:12:44):
Well, I think that was, we always say, "If you had to do it over again." I think I really said, "To get around this thing, let's not scrimp." When we put our farm stand up, we had a situation, we had a commercial kitchen going on. So I mean, Mike and Ray were going to auctions and buying used commercial dishwashers and sinks and stuff. And I said, "Look, if you're going to have a commercial kitchen, why don't we just call the Department of Health and have the person that will be inspecting our kitchen come up and say, "What do you think about this, and what do you want?" It was great and it streamlined the whole thing so easily. You don't need to do this, but buddy, these are, you can't have this. You've got to have a real grease trap.
(02:13:37):
And it's like the fire department come in. The fire department came in and said, "What are you going to do here?" And I said, "Well, what can't we do?" He says, "Well." I said, "We'd like to avoid an overhead fire system that's going to put the kibosh on it." The guy said, "All you need is, if you don't want to fry donuts and stuff like french fries and donuts in here, you can get away with a couple of Halon fire extinguishers. Just do your bake. Just bake, bake and do salad prep and do your canning. It's the fryer later that kills you."
Andy Chamberlin (02:14:15):
Interesting.
Pooh Sprague (02:14:17):
Done deal. So that worked really well up there. And so when this came up, we were involved and we could see what was coming down. And I'm still not sure about the brush washer thing, I mean we still have one. And I think, I'm not sure the whole cleaning of the brush washer thing is, it's pretty hard.
(02:14:41):
And so what qualifies is really, most people don't eat the skins of their slicers and field cucumbers, they peel them. And even if they do, I don't know, we try to clean them as best we can, but there's got to be something in there, I would think. I don't know, but anyway, so we got that. We said "That may not fly, so we really need to buy the rinse washer."
(02:15:10):
That was big. Pooling was when draining, how we drained the pack shed. We were building the pack shed at the same time. It made no sense when we were building this big building to not do that, do you know what I mean?
Andy Chamberlin (02:15:23):
Right.
Pooh Sprague (02:15:24):
The pack shed. I mean, I think originally I was against it because I was like, "We really going to store stuff and pack it out all winter? Is that what you want, when you could be up at smuggler's notch?"
Andy Chamberlin (02:15:38):
Right. Right.
Pooh Sprague (02:15:39):
I don't understand this. But anyway, it has through that building, that structure has worked out really well for, not just for increasing sales and profit, but also the efficiencies that were gained. I mean we were essentially over in this little barn here and we were having our arguments about having a pack shed, and Ray adroitly sometimes said, "Dad, do me a favor tomorrow. I need you to go get four bushels of carrots out of the cooler and take them down to Chris." I said, "Okay son, I'll be right there." And walk in the barn. It's just floor-to-ceiling stuff. The tomatoes over here and fans trying to keep the fruit flies moving, a brush washer and a packing table. And then our little tiny cooler I got in there ahead. I had U-boats and dollies to juggle around. It was like a chess game. And I said, "Okay, all right, well maybe it is coming there." But it helped, it helps in the efficiencies.
Andy Chamberlin (02:16:41):
If you could have penciled out some of those gains from the beginning, do you think that would've helped your decision-making in the investment of this big building?
Pooh Sprague (02:16:50):
I don't know. I thought we did a pretty good job of trying to be as forward-thinking as we could about our needs and where we wanted to be in a couple of years. And the response from Mike was, after the first year and we get the potatoes and sweet potatoes and the onions and all the stuff in there and stuff out on the dock, "If we had made the goddamn thing three times bigger, we'd have been better off," that kind of thing. But as far as food safety, I think it was pretty clean over there. We worked pretty hard at it anyway. But this one's a little easier to deal with and we are continually doing that.
Andy Chamberlin (02:17:32):
What do you do outside farming that brings you joy?
Pooh Sprague (02:17:37):
Well, I think I still have a bad habit. I like guitars, music. I like all kinds of music, whether it's stage, classical. I play in a little bluegrass band now. I play in R&B bands and show bands and stuff, and I like all kinds of music. So that's my recreation, whether I do it, participate in a group format or whether I'm at home. My wife never has to worry about porn. It's always YouTube and it's all music. I can kill a lot of time doing that.
(02:18:16):
I like to fly fish. I used to skate in an old guy's hockey league and I used to ski. And those things have escaped me as I've gotten older. So I still have music, and I'd like to read more than I do. But the fact of matter is my father once said, "Oh yeah, your winter's off." You don't really, I mean you have slower times. But we try to do, everything is predicated on trying to avoid moving in the winter a lot. Machinery doesn't function well when it's cold. It hasn't been cold, we were cutting firewood 10 days ago. It was great, beautiful.
Andy Chamberlin (02:18:54):
The 40s here.
Pooh Sprague (02:18:55):
Yeah. That's not happened no more. It's over.
Andy Chamberlin (02:18:58):
Winter finally showed up.
Pooh Sprague (02:18:59):
Yeah, it did that with a vengeance. With a vengeance.
Andy Chamberlin (02:19:01):
Yeah. No, those are great hobbies to disconnect and take your mind off of things. Did you have any techniques or strategies in order to stop working? Because the farming has a never-ending to-do list. So how did you stop at the end of the day, or has that been...?
Pooh Sprague (02:19:23):
Oh, I think that age dictates it. I mean we lament the days, it's like anything. We think of it as, "Oh, I'll never be able to ski Tuckerman's again. I'll probably never get on boards again," that kind of thing. That's really disappointing. But if you think about it, it's just part of the process. There was a time I used to come in at 6:30 and grab a beer and a sandwich. And I got one light on the old 420, I'm going out and harrow the clinic field. And I tell you, 5:30, six o'clock at night in the summer I'm whimpering. I'm done, I'm done. I'm, "Oh, I'm tired." So it really dictates on the tasks you're doing.
(02:20:11):
But I do all the spraying. I do a lot of the field work and there's a lot of moving machinery around and stuff because spread out, we're not not all together. And so the day ends when it's convenient, and when other people are ending. It's still pretty late during the sunny part of the year, on season. This is why I think farmers love this time of year, I don't know about you.
Andy Chamberlin (02:20:41):
Oh, yeah.
Pooh Sprague (02:20:42):
When it's 4:30 and it's getting dark. Yeah, but, okay, yeah, it's getting cold. Okay, I go unload the wood box and make dinner. I like that. Seth Wilner has also, has some licensing teach holistic farm management. And that's always the trick for all of us, and it is just finding balance, what makes you whole and what gives you enough time to decompress.
(02:21:10):
We travel, I'm happy to travel with farm buddies. I mean it's different, I mean it is different and you just exchange of ideas and you pick up knowledge, see different things. And I find that most of my farm buddies is fascinating. They are on the Sunday and out there, they were artists. They were politically motivated.
Andy Chamberlin (02:21:31):
What do you think was easy or hard in the beginning, and it's easy or hard now?
Pooh Sprague (02:21:40):
I think for us, it was hard to be legitimate. When I went to college, it was all about conventional agriculture. The thought process was, you got an inert substance and you make things grow out of it by adding NPK. And that all changed in the '80s. Okay, so going back to why that's different. So you come out of college and you put winter rye down. And you're young and you're trying to grow vegetables, immediately you're branded as some sort of socio. I mean I've always gone through life with the farmers, I'm older now and people, they know I'm a mediocre guitar player, I'm a strawberry grower.
(02:22:31):
But in the old days it was like I'd play in bands and people would like, who didn't get farming, "What are you doing? And why wouldn't you want to go down to SUNY in New York on the middle of June?" So they didn't get me and yet all the farmers around here, I was just a hippie kid. I wasn't a hippie kid. I grew up on a dairy farm, I shoveled shit, but I knew how to get balloon torn out and pull calves. I milked cows who had mastitis, and I got that. I wasn't expert at it, but I knew something about it. I wasn't a hippie, I didn't live in a commune, but it didn't make any difference.
(02:23:07):
So the strawberries were a great breakthrough because that's something everybody wanted and they didn't care. And when they came here, it became, "Oh, you got great strawberries. Okay. Oh, he's a pretty good guy." These things, "He's doing a good job," whatever. And so I think it was harder then to have legitimacy and support to start out with. Now I think you come out, and you can put out some flyers and go to a couple of meetings and you can drum up a CSA. I'm your local, I'm doing this down here. And people like that.
(02:23:40):
You don't realize, I always thought people liked it that it was just all about what I grew, but it isn't. It's how people perceive you and look at it. But they like the way River Road looks. They like that the fact, we have a nice looking farm stand that, that's really important to people and that makes them want to embrace you. So that's a little easier now, and that's important because that also makes your mark, you easier to develop sale's paths, if you will.
Andy Chamberlin (02:24:11):
Those were my questions. We went down a lot of rabbit holes. Is there anything else that you wanted to share that didn't get brought up?
Pooh Sprague (02:24:19):
And there were times, yeah, we said when there were the times you wanted to quit? I always said the time would be for me to quit is when Amy Lou Harris calls me and said, "I need you to play bass." Or, Jackson Brown realizes that I'm his bass player, that kind of thing. But it would've taken something like that.
(02:24:37):
As a matter of fact, I find the outdoor life, I find the physical activity has been all great. A farm is a great place to bring up your kids. It's a good place for us to bring up grandkids. I get so much pleasure out of walking out behind the pack barn, seeing four little kids from three to 10 with, they've rifled all the drill guns, battery-operated drill guns and they've got pallets put together and they made... We had the Trump Hotel out, the Trump Mar-a-Lago out behind the pack barn all summer and it was just great. They're all crawling all through it. Ray had to sleep out there with them one night.
Andy Chamberlin (02:25:21):
Of course. Yeah.
Pooh Sprague (02:25:22):
So that kind of stuff, that's the best of it. But I think, seeing the grandkids around and playing and being creative with stuff, that really is worth something, the imaginations that kids have when they're outside. That's good. Seeing something actually come out like you hoped it would. Sometimes finding stuff that amazes you that you didn't think was possible.
(02:25:52):
We had two rows of watermelons maybe, oh, maybe 350 feet long down there. And the floods came and the cultivating tractors couldn't get in there and the waters between the plastic and the grass came up and the four-foot pigweeds. And you couldn't even go down and look at Daniel's Meadow. The back end had washed out and the corn was... Now, we started picking corn, I don't know.
(02:26:21):
Ray called up one day, he said, "Daddy, why don't you bring down four collapsible bins?" And I said, "What are you digging?" And he says, " Well, we're going to go through those weeds and get the melons." We had four bins. I thought, "Is there any more melons?"
Andy Chamberlin (02:26:21):
A little ambitious?
Pooh Sprague (02:26:39):
I said, "Yeah, is there any melons in there at all?" He said, "Oh, I don't know. I see a couple." We got a 100 bushel of melon out of, and they were under water. I didn't eat that much watermelon this year and I should have, but I can't imagine they even survived. I mean that kind of thing. It's the same with the sweet potatoes, they were flooded all the time. Then the deer ate them and then we mowed them off, we cut out the sides with the hillside cultivators. They pulled them up and we had sweet potatoes. Who'd have thought? I didn't think they'd make it but.
(02:27:19):
So that kind of stuff is really cool. You're getting to be in nature. And I think everybody enjoys that, that does this. There's no economic, real economic, there's easier ways to make money. If Anne had been a teacher, she'd have been an administrator. She'd have made more, and I could play two nights a week at the local DFW and we'd have been better off financially, but probably. But we got all this and Ray's going to do it and that's cool, if you stop and think about it. Yeah, just got lucky.
Andy Chamberlin (02:27:56):
It's as easy as that?
Pooh Sprague (02:27:58):
Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (02:27:58):
Work hard, get lucky.
Pooh Sprague (02:28:00):
Well, we say that we're masters of our own destiny, and I think there is some of the truth. But boy, if you don't count luck, either the kind that hits you in a bad way or the stuff that hits you in a good way. If you don't, if that's not in your business plan, then you really aren't thinking hard enough about your business plan. Because I think that's why, that's the thing that says, don't put in 75 acres of mixed vegetables with the idea they're going to Black River. Just don't do that, put in 10. Because if you're really unlucky, you could lose a lot of money, big time.
Andy Chamberlin (02:28:40):
Right. Right. I think that's a show. Thanks for coming on the show, and chatting farming with me.
Pooh Sprague (02:28:45):
Well, thanks for having me.
Andy Chamberlin (02:28:54):
I received an email from Pooh after our conversation, and it says, I quote, " It occurs to me that I didn't acknowledge my peers and colleagues as influences and mentors."
(02:29:06):
As I once said, "I never had an original idea I couldn't steal from Bob Gray or Jack Mannix." And that was The Farmer's Share. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Pooh of Edgewater Farm.
(02:29:19):
The Farmer's Share is supported by a grant offered by the USDA Specialty Crop Block Program from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture Food and Markets. This funding helps to cover some of my time and travel in order to produce these podcasts for the next two and a half years. The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service supports projects that address the needs of US specialty crop growers and strengthens local and regional food systems. I have no doubt that this podcast will meet those needs and help educate growers to support the industry.
(02:29:52):
This show also is supported by the Ag Engineering Program of the University of Vermont Extension. If you enjoy the show and want to help support its programming, you can make a one-time or reoccurring donation on our website by visiting thefarmersshare.com/support. We also receive funding from the Vermont, Vegetable and Berry Growers Association. The VVBGA is a nonprofit organization funded in 1976 to promote the economic, environmental and social sustainability of vegetable and berry farming in Vermont. Their membership includes over 400 farms across Vermont and beyond, as well as about 50 businesses and organizations that provide products and services of all types to their members. Benefits to members include access to the VVBGA Listserv to buy, sell plants and equipment, share farming information, and tap the vast experience of our growers. Access the community accreditation for produce safety, also known as CAPS. This program is designed for grower, by growers, to help you easily meet market and regulatory food safety expectations. You can access the VVBGA Soil Health Platform where you can organize all the soil tests and create and store your soil amendment plans and records, access to webinars for growers in the VVBGA annual meeting, an email subscription to the Vermont Vegetable and Berry Newsletter Comradery, enhanced communication and fellowship among commercial growers. Memberships are on a per farm per calendar year basis, and annual dues this year are $80. These funds pay for the organization's operating costs and support educational programs and research projects. These funds also support projects that address grower needs around ag engineering, eye tunnel production, pest management, pollinators, produce safety, and soil health.
(02:31:50):
Become a member today to be a part of and further support the veg and berry industry. You can visit thefarmersshare.com to listen to previous interviews, or see photos, videos or links discussed from the conversation. If you don't want to miss the next episode, enter your email address on our website and you'll get a note in your inbox when the next one comes out.
(02:32:13):
The Farmers Share has a YouTube channel with videos from several of the farm visits. We're also on Instagram, and that's where you can be reminded about the latest episode or see photos from the visit. Lastly, if you're enjoying the show, I'd love it if you could write a review. An Apple podcast, just click on the show, scroll down to the bottom, and there you can leave five stars in a comment to help encourage new listeners to tune in. I'd also encourage you to share this episode with other grower friends or crew, who you think would be inspiring for them.
(02:32:44):
Thanks for listening.
PART 5 OF 5 ENDS [02:32:52]