Farm Tour with Wes & Bryn of Solid Ground Farm: EP41

Today’s Episode comes to you from Kingston New York where we visit with Bryn and Wes of Solid Ground Farm. They are growing on over a dozen acres, with 4 tunnels of mixed veg for their CSA. 

We start of the episode with a tour of their wash/pack, cooler, CSA Space and growing areas before pulling up a chair in the kitchen to learn what motivates them to be a produce grower and how they are building the business to meet their families needs and how they can be an asset to the community. 

Transcript

Wes Hannah (00:00:09):

I'm Wes Hannah.

Bryn Roshong (00:00:10):

And I'm Bryn Roshong, and we're a Solid Ground Farm in Kingston, New York, which is in the Hudson Valley region of the state, and we are a year-round organic diversified veggie farm. We have a currently about 235 family CSA, and we do a year-round farmers market locally, as well as some winter sales on the farm.

Wes Hannah (00:00:32):

Yeah, we've got about six employees during the season, and we have tried to have a strong focus on sustainability and community building.

Andy Chamberlain (00:00:50):

I'm your host, Andy Chamberlain, and I take you behind the scenes to learn how farmers are building their business in sustainable agriculture. These farmer-to-farmer interviews cover a wide range of topics from cropping systems, marketing channels, lifestyle decisions, and lessons learned along the way. This podcast is supported by the University of Vermont Extension and the Vermont Vegetable and Berry Growers Association. It has funding from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture Food and Markets as part of the Specialty Crop Block Grant. Unfortunately, the end of that grant funding is coming to a close soon. So if you enjoy the show and would like to help keep more episodes coming, please consider making a donation. Any amount is greatly appreciated and can be made on our website, thefarmershare.com/support. Thank you.

(00:01:36):

Today's episode comes to you from Kingston, New York, where we visit with Bryn and Wes of Solid Ground Farm. They're growing on over a dozen acres with four tunnels of mixed veg for their CSA. We start off the episode with the tour of their wash pack, cooler, CSA space, and growing areas before pulling up a chair in the kitchen to learn what motivates them to be a produce grower and how they're building their business to meet their family's needs and how they can be an asset to the community. I hope you enjoy the show. Thanks for listening.

Wes Hannah (00:02:05):

Welcome.

Bryn Roshong (00:02:07):

Yeah. We have been farming since 2015. Wes has been farming the whole time... I mean, since 2010, 15 years.

Wes Hannah (00:02:17):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:02:18):

Not 2015. We've been here... We started farming here in 2017 and living here. Our neighbors own the land, and we lease it. We have a long-term lease, which was one huge thing that makes it possible for us is that stability of land. Our whole property's about 35 acres, but there's about seven in the fence.

Wes Hannah (00:02:43):

Yeah, six or seven.

Bryn Roshong (00:02:46):

Yeah, and we lease another nine just five minutes away down the road, which is great because we can cover crop. The seven acres is not quite enough. We also have, what, like an acre and a quarter under high tunnels and caterpillars, or is it more than that?

Wes Hannah (00:03:01):

Yeah. Well, let's see. Eight tunnels... On the spot. It's about half an acre, yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:03:08):

I think it's more. Anyway, it's four high tunnels and four caterpillar tunnels.

Andy Chamberlain (00:03:12):

Awesome.

Bryn Roshong (00:03:13):

It's for the winter. We grow year round.

Wes Hannah (00:03:15):

We have that auxiliary land. We're primarily a CSA farm. We've got about 250 CSA members. And then we also sell at the local Kingston Farmers Market. Those are about equal amounts, revenue-wise, and then we also do a small amount of restaurant sales, but we've been slowly expanding over the years. We started out with 60 members, and then you just ramped up. We started out doing more farmer's markets. COVID caused us to shrink back a little bit. We were going down to the New York City doing a Manhattan Farmer's Market, and we actually couldn't get anyone to staff that market, 2020, and we decided to just expand the CSA, and it happened to coincide with a huge exodus of city people coming up to the area.

(00:04:06):

That year and the following year, we just had crazy high demands. We filled up way early. We had a 60 or 80 member waiting list. It was a good year for the CSA, even though the farmers markets' were not.

Andy Chamberlain (00:04:21):

Yeah, a good comeback.

Wes Hannah (00:04:23):

Yeah. We had other... Staffing was an issue. Farmer's markets were obviously not great. But yeah, since then, we've been more CSA-focused. Our CSA is very local. We have about half our members picking up here on farm and a lot of those, since we're in a sort of rural area outside of Kingston, we have a lot of members who live within a few streets to here, which is really cool, a lot of our neighbors.

Bryn Roshong (00:04:52):

We have 235 shares this year. Yeah, yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:04:55):

I say 250, but yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:04:56):

250.

Wes Hannah (00:04:58):

And then we have a couple other drop sites in Kingston and Saugerties, so super local. Like I said, we scaled... We were able to geographically shrink down because of increased demand, which was really cool.

Bryn Roshong (00:05:11):

Yeah. People bring their... Our neighbors bring their friends with them or, if they miss a week, they'll send their neighbors down to get their share, and then those people become members. Basically, what happens, that's the way that we've grown, and it's really nice because, I wouldn't say terrible, we don't do any advertising because... I don't know. There's just like no time for it.

Wes Hannah (00:05:34):

Yeah. We've been lucky to not... yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:05:35):

Luckily, it works out here that people are interested in being in the CSA. It's very flexible. They get to choose what they take home each week, whether they're on-site or off-site. Off-site, we have a Google Form and they pick and they get a bag packed for them. A lot of people really, really appreciate that. We get to participate in this program that's called CSA is a SNAP, which I don't know if you have it in Vermont, I think it's a federal program.

Wes Hannah (00:06:03):

It's-

Andy Chamberlain (00:06:03):

Maybe called something different or-

Bryn Roshong (00:06:05):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:06:06):

It's funded by GusNIP, which is a USDA program, but it's a Hudson Valley thing. It's administered by the Glynwood Center, and it's something to... I'm sure there are parallel programs in other places, but it's a lot of SNAP users to be CSA members by fronting the money to us essentially and guaranteeing those sales. SNAP users only... Well, first of all, they have a 50% subsidy. For a $25 CSA share, they're paying 1,250 using their SNAP card. They're paying week to week, and so, if they don't show up, that cost is covered by the fund. It makes it really nice for us because it guarantees those sales the way a normally priced CSA does, and it also is really good for the members who get a discount in addition to being able to use their SNAP benefits.

Bryn Roshong (00:07:02):

Yeah. We have about like 10 SNAP members.

Wes Hannah (00:07:05):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:07:06):

Hoping to do more with... It's been cool the last couple of weeks with the SNAP, like the lapse in funding. We had more than 30 members donate their last shares, their last two shares, of the season. They wanted to send it to the local food pantry. Last week, the food pantry came and picked up a significant amount of veggies, and they're coming again this week. To me, that's a huge win of... That's what we're doing it for is neighbors being in community with each other and just people wanting to contribute directly to food security in the area. We brought it up in a newsletter, and then everyone was like, "Oh, my god, yeah, and I'm going to do something," and now there's CSA members who've encouraged us.

(00:07:52):

We have a winter store. Our CSA is over now, but we do all winter an online farm stand where you... It opens on Sunday night, and you can purchase whatever you'd like, and then you come pick up your bag here. Now, we're going to do one in Kingston too, and there's going to be an option to just donate money to a little fund so we can keep donating to the food pantry. We'd like to do more, but it's our income, so we can totally just donate 100%. So it's helpful when members are like, "We want to support donations." It's small, but it's cool. It's cool that people are pulling together that way. You're going to be talking to our other landlord about leasing more land property-

Wes Hannah (00:08:36):

Yeah, it's probably pretty immature to talk about it. But yeah, we are in talks about it looking for a little more land, but we'll see.

Bryn Roshong (00:08:41):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (00:08:42):

How much do you have in cultivation? 7 + 9, 16-ish?

Wes Hannah (00:08:46):

Yeah, probably I think it adds up to 13 or 14. So yeah, we took on those... Yeah, nine... We say nine acres. But when you actually count up rights and stuff, it's seven.

Andy Chamberlain (00:09:00):

Easily.

Bryn Roshong (00:09:01):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:09:02):

We took that over thinking like, "Oh, this will really let us put a lot of land to rest." And then of course, this year, we were suddenly using 80% of it, and it's like, "It didn't work."

Bryn Roshong (00:09:13):

I think always-

Wes Hannah (00:09:14):

Now, we need a little more land. But yeah, we are... I'm sure a lot of farms face those growing pains where we're like... We're starting to feel we can't go too much bigger without... Even if we had the land access, we would start needing some major infrastructure upgrades, like bigger tractor, bigger cooler, stuff like that, if we really want to keep growing.

Bryn Roshong (00:09:36):

Big-ticket upgrades.

Wes Hannah (00:09:38):

Yeah, so we're happy to just... Again, some more land would be cool so that we can do more cover cropping and stuff, but otherwise I think we're happy to just try to get better where we are rather than continuing to grow. Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:09:55):

Yeah. We got that grain drill last year, I think, for the first time, and that's really helped-

Wes Hannah (00:09:58):

Cover crop seeding.

Bryn Roshong (00:09:58):

... cover cropping. Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:10:03):

Yeah. Every year, we make some improvements. We got a new cultivating tractor. We bought a potato digger this year.

Andy Chamberlain (00:10:11):

Fun stuff.

Bryn Roshong (00:10:12):

Yeah. We tripled the size of the barn cooler-

Wes Hannah (00:10:15):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:10:16):

... and it's full.

Wes Hannah (00:10:17):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (00:10:17):

Of course.

Bryn Roshong (00:10:18):

He did it just in time to cram in pallet bins of squash and cabbages.

Wes Hannah (00:10:24):

Yeah, we had a really good storage. We put a lot of stuff into storage for the winter sales. It was our best year. We've got, I don't know, 20 pallet bins full of like beets and carrots and cabbages and then another few bins of winter squash, which is... We always had some, but it's definitely our most significant storage year. It'll be a good winter as long as our greens production holds up because that's really what brings the customers in the wintertime, but we'll see.

(00:10:56):

Yeah, should we walk around a little?

Bryn Roshong (00:10:57):

Yeah. You mentioned we did-

Wes Hannah (00:10:57):

It's a little messy. Yesterday, or Friday rather, was our last day of the crew. It was our last sort of official day of the season, and now, as of tomorrow, we're in winter mode, and we do have a smaller amount of staff staying on. Anyway, point is, we were doing a lot of end-of-season meetings and stuff, and farm looks a little messy. We spent the last week pulling in a lot of-

Andy Chamberlain (00:11:24):

Don't worry about it. Most farms look messy. The bigger the farmer, the more they got going on, the messier it is.

Wes Hannah (00:11:37):

We actually had a better job of getting fields cleaned up than usual, but we're like... Now, we have to put everything away. But yeah, we're definitely lucky. We've got... This barn is probably more significant infrastructure than a lot of farms our size have, so we feel pretty lucky.

Bryn Roshong (00:12:02):

It was here when we got here.

Wes Hannah (00:12:03):

Yeah, yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:12:04):

We moved in. There was a farmer here before... Well, there were a couple farmers here before us, but I think this was built in like 2008 for... That farmer built it... oh, I mean, the landowners built it. It's kind of a funny shape of that all over there because he had this idea of having sheep and cows, and they would be in there, so like the floors sunk for, what do you call that, deep bedding.

Wes Hannah (00:12:28):

Bedding pack.

Bryn Roshong (00:12:29):

Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, we wanted to actually dismantle most of that and level the concrete and expand our wash, which we'll look at in a minute.

Wes Hannah (00:12:43):

Yeah. Yeah, this is our... Into there is where we do our CSA distribution on there.

Bryn Roshong (00:12:50):

Behind the truck.

Wes Hannah (00:12:51):

Those doors through there are our main coolers, and then this big room-

Bryn Roshong (00:12:55):

Hold over there after.

Wes Hannah (00:12:56):

Yeah. This big room is our auxiliary cooler, which right now is just packed full of-

Bryn Roshong (00:13:00):

Let's see it.

Wes Hannah (00:13:01):

... root crops. In the summertime, we use this as our warm cooler for tomatoes and cucurbits. This is our rodent protection system.

Andy Chamberlain (00:13:16):

It's for what?

Wes Hannah (00:13:18):

Rodent protection.

Andy Chamberlain (00:13:19):

Oh.

Wes Hannah (00:13:20):

Because they would get in there otherwise.

Andy Chamberlain (00:13:22):

That's actually pretty slick and...

Bryn Roshong (00:13:25):

Yeah, this is great. It was before that metal would scrape along the floor every time it was open, so this is much nicer.

Wes Hannah (00:13:31):

This has been a slow-

Bryn Roshong (00:13:32):

We can go in there.

Wes Hannah (00:13:33):

We sprayed them a couple years ago and built this interior wall. And then like Bryn said, this year, we were like, "Oh, we need more space," so we just spray-foam the rest and-

Andy Chamberlain (00:13:42):

Like you said, you know how to fill it.

Bryn Roshong (00:13:47):

Maybe it's like, if you build the cooler, the farm will just grow.

Andy Chamberlain (00:13:52):

Yeah, right. No matter how much space you have, you fill it.

Wes Hannah (00:13:54):

Yeah, it's true.

Andy Chamberlain (00:13:57):

It's insane.

Bryn Roshong (00:13:59):

How much did that cost?

Wes Hannah (00:14:01):

What?

Bryn Roshong (00:14:02):

To spray-foam that side, or altogether, would you say?

Wes Hannah (00:14:06):

It was, altogether, $3,000 at most. We also did some other... We did the other stuff.

Bryn Roshong (00:14:17):

Do you know how many square feet it is?

Wes Hannah (00:14:18):

I don't know.

Bryn Roshong (00:14:18):

No? Okay.

Wes Hannah (00:14:18):

Oh.

Bryn Roshong (00:14:18):

The wash pack is-

Wes Hannah (00:14:25):

We also built ourselves a little office a couple years ago, which has been nice. Prior to this-

Speaker 1 (00:14:32):

Wait, you guys built it?

Wes Hannah (00:14:33):

Oh, grandpa and I built it, yeah. Prior to that, we were using our living room or dining room, so it's been nice to have a real space where-

Speaker 1 (00:14:40):

You made them, Daddy?

Wes Hannah (00:14:43):

Yes.

Andy Chamberlain (00:14:44):

To separate work from home maybe.

Wes Hannah (00:14:46):

Yeah, and now other people on the team can go and print pack sheets or whatever.

Andy Chamberlain (00:14:50):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:14:53):

Again, a little disorganized, but we do have... This is our irrigation nook, which is pretty well organized during-

Bryn Roshong (00:14:59):

[Inaudible 00:15:00].

Wes Hannah (00:15:00):

... most of the year. We have... This is our fertilizer storage area, which is pretty empty now. And then this is all of our packaging-

Andy Chamberlain (00:15:15):

Dry packaging, yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:15:15):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:15:15):

This is our 14 by 16 wash pack room where we do all the-

Andy Chamberlain (00:15:21):

[inaudible 00:15:22] is all the way through. Cool.

Bryn Roshong (00:15:27):

Yeah, the table gets set up, and there's a stock tank, and then so triple-wash arugula, lettuce, power greens.

Wes Hannah (00:15:34):

Yeah. Aside from the dog being in here, this is a New York State 20-C license, certified kitchen-

Andy Chamberlain (00:15:46):

Oh, nice.

Wes Hannah (00:15:46):

... which we do... I know a lot of farms don't...

Speaker 1 (00:15:49):

What is this?

Wes Hannah (00:15:53):

Yeah, spinner.

(00:15:53):

A lot of farms don't need this for... All we use it for officially is washing and packing cut greens, which I know different people have different opinions on whether or not you need the 20-C license. We got nicked our first season. We got a surprise inspection, and we did not actually have the certification because we were selling bagged cut greens to a local grocery store, so I think that put us on their radar. Anyway, we-

Bryn Roshong (00:16:24):

The inspector saw it on the shelf and was like, "Oh." We don't check-

Wes Hannah (00:16:29):

We did get the... It didn't take much to upgrade. We have a three-bin wash system, washable ones and all that.

Andy Chamberlain (00:16:37):

You need that certification for that product?

Wes Hannah (00:16:39):

That, yes.

Bryn Roshong (00:16:41):

Yeah. Putting greens in a bag is arguably a value-added process that requires [inaudible 00:16:48] inspection.

Wes Hannah (00:16:49):

It's a funny thing because I don't know if it's state by state. We've gotten-

Andy Chamberlain (00:16:51):

I think so.

Wes Hannah (00:16:52):

We know a lot of people who do the exact same thing as us and don't get that, have a 20-C license. Even talking to inspectors, they seem very... Talking to people from Ag and Markets, it seems like there's a large gray area, but anyway it was-

Andy Chamberlain (00:17:11):

Yeah, and Vermont at least generally consider it just packaged vegetables, unless you're slicing and dicing it.

Wes Hannah (00:17:21):

Yeah. Right, that makes sense.

Andy Chamberlain (00:17:23):

Even though lettuce mix is ready-to-eat, that's kind of the determination, but...

Wes Hannah (00:17:31):

Yeah. Anyway, we did get certified, and it's no big deal. It's obviously a good thing to be kept on our toes in terms of cleanliness and stuff. But yeah, so this is the room... This is what we use primarily for just washing, like greens, and then also some packing. We also do some packing out under the awning when necessary, just for... If we have six people working, we can't all be in here. This is what we were hoping to build out if we were going to push out that way and... because, right now, we do all of spraying and dunking out on a wash pad out back. One day we will have a more cohesive, inclusive space.

Bryn Roshong (00:18:19):

Yeah. When we were designing it, we struggled... One thing that we were going back and forth on a little bit was whether to put a cooler in the barn or not because... We'll show you. We have a cooler over under our garage that is... It's adequate, but it's inefficient because it's you have to carry crates by hand down a hallway through this kind of funny door.

Wes Hannah (00:18:44):

There's no pallet doors.

Bryn Roshong (00:18:45):

Yeah, so it'd be great to have a cooler with a palletized system, so it's just... Loading the market truck in the morning, I don't do it, but it's very time consuming. Unloading it is very time consuming. But if you just had everything on a pallet and you could just load from there, it'd save yourself probably 20 minutes, half an hour at least.

Wes Hannah (00:19:03):

Right, yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:19:03):

But then there's this question of the market has one set of needs in a way, and then the CSA is over there, so having everything centralized here doesn't make sense for CSA distribution because then you're coming back and forth. So should we have two coolers? Maybe, but then you're... I don't know. So it's like a lot of...

Wes Hannah (00:19:26):

Yeah, no matter what, having the washing and the CSA distribution in different spaces, it's going to be... There's no perfect system.

Bryn Roshong (00:19:33):

Could you CSA over here? Not really. It kind of works pretty well where it is.

Wes Hannah (00:19:40):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:19:40):

But we can show you the pad out back and-

Andy Chamberlain (00:19:42):

Yep.

Wes Hannah (00:19:45):

This is the only part of the barn that is random storage.

Bryn Roshong (00:19:49):

Yeah, this was all here before we got here.

Andy Chamberlain (00:19:51):

But yeah, this is where we do our wash, our spray dunk, and we just set up... We have folding tables and a barrel washer. We set up an easy-up tent when we're here. It's an imperfect system. We got this pad poured two years ago, and I think we kind of held off on going any further in terms of upgrading the space until we had a big picture, but... Yeah, we are going to put on some sort of roof or something because it's a little weird.

Bryn Roshong (00:20:26):

Yeah. We would have liked to... In our grant, we would have brought the wash pack out to here.

Andy Chamberlain (00:20:33):

Right.

Wes Hannah (00:20:33):

Yeah, fill the floor, put some [inaudible 00:20:36] in.

Bryn Roshong (00:20:36):

Have drainage.

Wes Hannah (00:20:38):

And then it could be like one big room with a big door that opens so you could go in and out, you could... We'll do it. We'll get there.

Bryn Roshong (00:20:44):

Yeah, we just got to... It was like 60 grand, and that's a little much for us to self-fund right now, but I think we could pare it down and figure out-

Wes Hannah (00:20:53):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:20:54):

... because I think we definitely need it. It's hard in the winter, especially if it's like... It's hard to... If you're not the owner of the business, standing there in the freezing cold washing veggies is a hard thing to ask someone else to do.

Andy Chamberlain (00:21:09):

Yeah, that's not fun for anybody.

Bryn Roshong (00:21:10):

Wes will do it.

Wes Hannah (00:21:10):

Yeah, yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:21:15):

Yeah, it's just better all around.

Andy Chamberlain (00:21:18):

So would your goal be have that whole area meet the food safety certification, or would it not matter?

Wes Hannah (00:21:25):

I think so, yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:21:25):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:21:27):

I don't know if we would need to, but that would be the goal, to have one big room that had all-

Andy Chamberlain (00:21:32):

What are some of the key requirements for that?

Wes Hannah (00:21:36):

Washable walls, floor drains, I think, and then little things about not having-

Andy Chamberlain (00:21:45):

Fairly achievable.

Wes Hannah (00:21:47):

... stuff off of floor. Yeah, it's stuff that is good hygiene anyway.

Andy Chamberlain (00:21:51):

Right.

Wes Hannah (00:21:51):

I don't think we could have this door officially... This door would have to be closed while it's being a 20C. I don't know if... Maybe we'd have some sort of internal wall or something, so you could do spraying out here if you wanted, but also someone could be washing greens in a professional way inside.

Andy Chamberlain (00:22:12):

Right, right, something that can be closed off from birds and-

Wes Hannah (00:22:16):

Yeah, exactly.

Andy Chamberlain (00:22:18):

... terribly unhygienic dogs and all these things, yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:22:22):

Yeah. This is a nice logical... We can back our... We harvest into bins, into a pickup truck, and then this is where we back up to so you can unload easy. It is a nice space. In terms of the inefficiency of the coolers and this, everything, this is not terrible. You can move stuff out. You could even... We could move stuff by pallet from here to the awning, and then you'd have to walk it in by hand into the cooler itself.

Andy Chamberlain (00:22:54):

Just this pad probably was a nice upgrade.

Wes Hannah (00:22:57):

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's funny, every time you make an upgrade, you're like, "Wow, I can't believe we used to do it any other way."

Andy Chamberlain (00:23:03):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:23:04):

Yeah, right, we were just on the gravel before and it was just-

Bryn Roshong (00:23:09):

Yeah. Is that what you were doing?

Wes Hannah (00:23:09):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:23:12):

Did you... Oh, no, you would do spray.

Wes Hannah (00:23:13):

We'd be under the tree over there.

Bryn Roshong (00:23:15):

Yeah. It was in our driveways, washing away our driveway, and we're like, "Maybe you shouldn't do this." Just getting truckloads of gravel every winter and being like, "Why is this happening?"

Wes Hannah (00:23:24):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:23:26):

Yeah. Yeah, this has been... Yeah, pad is a great thing.

Wes Hannah (00:23:29):

Yeah. Yeah, we actually got another... We got concrete [inaudible 00:23:34]. We bought... This was two years ago, so then this past summer we paid for another concrete pad down below, which is where we... We're buying a lot of compost, and we've always... For six years, we just get compost dumped in the same spot every year, and it was just like... And then we go and scoop it by the tractor bucket. Over time, it was just a gross mud pit, and it would just... Anytime it rained, it would just be this giant marsh that you couldn't... Actually, you could only go in with the tractor to scoop if it was dry out. If it was at all muddy the tractor would get stuck. So yeah, this year. We bought whatever, a $20,000 concrete pad, and-

Bryn Roshong (00:24:15):

So expensive. We're kind of amazed-

Wes Hannah (00:24:16):

... now, the truck backs up, dumps it there, and it's great.

Bryn Roshong (00:24:19):

And it's not big enough already.

Wes Hannah (00:24:20):

Yeah. As soon as we got it, the concrete guy was like, "This is way too big. You should go smaller."

Bryn Roshong (00:24:30):

Oh, really?

Wes Hannah (00:24:30):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:24:30):

Oh, it's funny. I saw it, and I was like, "I think we should have bigger."

Wes Hannah (00:24:31):

She recommend 20 by 30, and we went... it's 30 by 30, and yeah, it's already... Yeah, we get compost delivered by a walking floor tractor trailer. We have something like 100 yards there-

Andy Chamberlain (00:24:44):

Awesome.

Wes Hannah (00:24:45):

... and it's hot.

Bryn Roshong (00:24:45):

So yeah, I think this... It's kind of interesting, but bringing out the wash pack would be great, expanding it, but also putting a cooler in here I think would be awesome, like a pallet door one. But then it's like we lose space for Westby. It's a lot of big round straw bales, and those typically go in here, so then we'd have to build something over there to cover it. So it just goes on and on.

Wes Hannah (00:25:16):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (00:25:18):

Which you could do.

Wes Hannah (00:25:19):

Yeah, we could, for sure.

Andy Chamberlain (00:25:19):

A roof set up, you could extend that to match the other end.

Wes Hannah (00:25:19):

Yeah. I regret... If we had thought things through, we wouldn't have put the... We have a generator over there. That, we just had that five years ago, and I regret it because we could have used this space more efficiently.

Andy Chamberlain (00:25:39):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:25:40):

Yeah, yeah, we definitely can, and we talked about getting some real low-budget prefab metal building that we could just put here for straw bales.

Andy Chamberlain (00:25:51):

Yeah, yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:25:55):

What?

Bryn Roshong (00:25:56):

I can just show you the CSA area. Oh, I'm going to turn off the lights. I'll be right back.

Wes Hannah (00:26:02):

Yeah, it's funny. Obviously, we're very lucky, and I'm not... Wait a minute. I wish also is that we had a septic system in the barn too, because we don't. That's one of our drawbacks is we don't have... We don't have a bathroom, so the crew just uses our house bathroom, which is just fine with us. It just feels unprofessional in terms of providing a professional workspace. And then, also, in the washroom, when we got here, it was just like that... The wash sink in the washroom just ran out. There was just a pipe that went out the building, and so we put in a French drain... a dry well I mean, and it immediately... Within a year, it was full of sand. Last year, we put in a huge 500 gallon dry well that will hopefully last for a while.

(00:26:58):

Yeah, so this is our CSA area. That's just a little storage room. We store CSA supplies. That's where we keep all of our seedling trays and stuff.

Andy Chamberlain (00:27:11):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:27:12):

It's so unphotogenic.

Wes Hannah (00:27:14):

Yeah, I know. Everything's like grainy.

Bryn Roshong (00:27:16):

Oh, man.

Wes Hannah (00:27:17):

Anyway, we have two coolers, this door and then down there. We've been using these as two different temperature coolers, but I think this year we're actually going to take out that interior wall and build one big cooler.

Bryn Roshong (00:27:32):

Yeah. And then where would you put the warm stuff?

Wes Hannah (00:27:34):

In the barn.

Bryn Roshong (00:27:35):

Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 (00:27:35):

Daddy, I almost crashed you.

Wes Hannah (00:27:35):

Oh, that's concerning.

Bryn Roshong (00:27:40):

We buy in and sell some chicken. People self-serve.

Wes Hannah (00:27:43):

We act as a-

Bryn Roshong (00:27:44):

We have a meat CSA.

Andy Chamberlain (00:27:44):

Just shooting here for another time, so... Oh, nice.

Bryn Roshong (00:27:48):

And then this is our main cooler or the one that gets used all the time.

Speaker 1 (00:27:52):

[inaudible 00:27:54]

Andy Chamberlain (00:27:54):

Oh, yeah? Nice.

Bryn Roshong (00:27:58):

She's a workhorse. Wes has replaced the air conditioner only five times.

Andy Chamberlain (00:28:05):

So this location works well for CSA pickup because it's out of the weather and it's right next to the coolers primarily?

Wes Hannah (00:28:12):

Yeah. People come in, park right along here. Obviously, cooler proximity is good too, but it is... Despite what it looks right now, we do make it look pretty nice during CSA, and yeah, dry. We'll get a fresh load of gravel, so it's a little prettier. We have this space over here. It's a nice little pollinator garden that we... Yeah, it is a nice... Yeah, and the CSA, we have... On Tuesdays, we have 120 people coming all within a couple hours, so it's pretty hectic, and yeah, we definitely... We run out of parking space on both sides of the driveway there, and this space here might have 10 different families in it at one time. It's crazy.

Andy Chamberlain (00:29:00):

It's busy.

Wes Hannah (00:29:02):

Which is cool. Actually, we had the-

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:29:04]

Wes Hannah (00:29:03):

... busy.

Andy Chamberlain (00:29:03):

It's busy.

Wes Hannah (00:29:03):

Which is cool. Actually, the town redid the road last year and they actually stopped right at our driveway. So clearly we represent a majority of the traffic on the road that they... That was awkward. So CSA wise, like Bryn said, we try to be very flexible. So we have a point system. So members have seven or nine or five whatever points and they can use those to select whatever they want. So when they come here on the farm, we lay out everything. So we might have 25 or 30 different things available, and then little signs that'll say one bunch of kale is a point or three pounds of tomatoes or whatever. So they can just shop for themselves. And then for the offsite, we just use a simple Google form where I put available what there is, and then at the end of the night before the harvest, we export it to it and create a harvest list, and then put together those pack sheets. So we do it all ourselves just using Google Docs and OpenOffice. And every year we talk about switching to...

Bryn Roshong (00:30:13):

GrownBy.

Wes Hannah (00:30:13):

GrownBy or something.

Bryn Roshong (00:30:15):

We might do it this year. This is our pad. You can see it's covered.

Wes Hannah (00:30:19):

Oh yeah, yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (00:30:19):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:30:20):

Exactly. Yeah, full. Yeah, we also generate a ton of greenhouse compost from shoots and micro greens and stuff. So we were like, "Oh, if we had a bigger pad, we could have had a separate..." Just try to reuse all that potting mix, which otherwise goes to waste.

Andy Chamberlain (00:30:41):

Right.

Bryn Roshong (00:30:42):

Maybe next year put a pad here?

Wes Hannah (00:30:44):

Yeah, potentially.

Bryn Roshong (00:30:46):

This is a CSA pick your own herb garden. It's been really nice.

Andy Chamberlain (00:30:50):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:30:54):

Five years ago or so, we started one and then made the mistake of planting mint and the mint took everything over. And then we tried for two seasons to solarize it and it didn't do it. And then finally, built-

Wes Hannah (00:31:05):

We had a volunteer CSA member who was spending hours every week pulling mint, and finally even she gave up and we built these planters.

Bryn Roshong (00:31:12):

And microphones [inaudible 00:31:13].

Wes Hannah (00:31:13):

Yeah, so we try to-

Andy Chamberlain (00:31:14):

So note to others, put mint in its own bed.

Wes Hannah (00:31:16):

Yeah, yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:31:16):

Yeah. Yes, don't even...

Wes Hannah (00:31:19):

We try to give the CSA members like a really good experience coming here. So I mean that's just our perennial herbs.

Andy Chamberlain (00:31:25):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:31:25):

But we'll have... This upcoming year, this entire field here, this in cover crop is going to be member pick your own. And so it's all in addition to the CSA share that they buy. It's like a...

Bryn Roshong (00:31:41):

It's included.

Wes Hannah (00:31:41):

Just a free included thing. And so this is where we put flowers, herbs, cherry tomatoes, hot peppers, everything.

Bryn Roshong (00:31:48):

But we do pick from it for the market too.

Wes Hannah (00:31:49):

Yeah. And then it works out well, because CSA members are primarily picking this stuff on Tuesday when they come. So then on Friday when we're harvesting for the market, it's a perfect twice a week harvest schedule for things like beans and peas and cherry tomatoes. So yeah, we do get a lot of stuff for ourselves out of it. Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:32:08):

But I don't know, I think we don't charge enough.

Wes Hannah (00:32:11):

It is frankly, a very good deal.

Bryn Roshong (00:32:13):

Yeah. People come out with armloads of flowers and there's still plenty, we're just like, man.

Wes Hannah (00:32:20):

But it's awesome.

Bryn Roshong (00:32:21):

But it makes people so happy. They come here, it's the thing people talk about.

Wes Hannah (00:32:25):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:32:25):

The connection to the land is what is most rewarding for people, I mean the food too, but the people who come here just cry sometimes. They're so happy when they come down here.

Wes Hannah (00:32:36):

Yeah. And the CSA members might be here for an hour at their pickup.

Bryn Roshong (00:32:39):

Oh my gosh, more.

Wes Hannah (00:32:40):

Hang out down here, maybe they play on the playground stuff we have. Yeah, I think it's a high point of a lot of people's week.

Bryn Roshong (00:32:49):

Yeah. It's a whole scene. People come down here, and then they share scissors and they like meet a neighbor they hadn't known. They share... People told me stories of like, "Oh, I just got this great recipe from this other person that I didn't realize also lived on Ashokan Road up here, and I'm going to make this cherry tomato thing." I'm just like, it's a whole world down here in the pick your own. And it's a lot of people's main experience of gardening and nature. It's really nice.

Andy Chamberlain (00:33:16):

You may have said it, but I might have missed it. Is that the pick your own opportunity an option or do all CSA members have that option?

Wes Hannah (00:33:26):

Everyone has it.

Andy Chamberlain (00:33:26):

Yep.

Wes Hannah (00:33:27):

I mean, obviously it's primarily utilized by the people who pick up on the farm, but even people who pick up in Kingston are welcome to drive here.

Andy Chamberlain (00:33:34):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:33:35):

And that's the other thing about the flexibility, is people aren't... I mean, people have one official site that is in our system where they pick up, but week to week they can switch wherever they want.

Andy Chamberlain (00:33:44):

Oh, okay.

Wes Hannah (00:33:45):

So we might have somebody... We might say in our newsletter like, "Oh, the cheery tomatoes are going really strong." And so we'll have somebody from Kingston say that they want to switch to the farm pickup so they can get some tomatoes.

Andy Chamberlain (00:33:57):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:33:59):

Yeah, we're small. I mean 235 is a lot, but it's small enough that we still can be very flexible. I mean, we might spend an hour a week on average doing emails and responding, making changes in the system, but it's not too much of a burden and we know all our members. When we're packing bags, sometimes Adri who works for us will be like, "Oh, I see this person, normally they pick up over there, but they put down this site instead. We should make sure it wasn't a mistake." And I'll text them real quick and just ask if... Yeah, so it's cool to have a close [inaudible 00:34:36].

Andy Chamberlain (00:34:35):

The personal touch?

Wes Hannah (00:34:36):

Yeah. So yeah, like I said, we do a lot of micro greens and shoots and stuff. Looks a little dingy in the light of the sun. But actually the shoots are how we started. Before we were on this land, we started Solid Ground Farm as a shoots and microgreens farm and then we expanded once we got here. So this is a really nice backbone to the CSA. On average, we probably get... If you think about points per week, if we have 230 members times seven points, that's whatever, 1400, a thousand points, whatever it is, probably 10% of them, 10% of those points are generated in the greenhouse, which for a small farm with space constraints is really nice that we can produce so much value out of this space.

Ellie (00:35:38):

[inaudible 00:35:39].

Wes Hannah (00:35:38):

Yes.

Bryn Roshong (00:35:38):

Aim low.

Andy Chamberlain (00:35:38):

Are these cages for rodent control?

Wes Hannah (00:35:44):

Squirrels. Yeah, squirrels or rodents or something. They really like the sunflowers.

Bryn Roshong (00:35:50):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:35:51):

We have traps, and obviously we fill in holes when we find them, but man, they are persistent. So the cages are the only sure thing.

Bryn Roshong (00:35:58):

This spring you guys did the whole digging out the edge and putting a hardware cloth at an L underneath to try to get rodents...

Wes Hannah (00:36:05):

And it held them for six months. And then at some point I think they realized they can just dig a hole. They just chew holes in the plastic.

Andy Chamberlain (00:36:11):

They go deeper? Oh yeah, right.

Wes Hannah (00:36:13):

So yeah, it's...

Bryn Roshong (00:36:15):

These are nice though. This version is nicer than the old one.

Wes Hannah (00:36:17):

Yeah, I think one of the many improvement projects for the winter is to build more of these because it's... I mean, yeah, it's obviously depressing to come out and see, oh, something got into this round spicy microgreens, and we just have to toss it all. It's a huge waste.

Andy Chamberlain (00:36:35):

Yeah, right.

Wes Hannah (00:36:36):

So more cages. I mean, it's a bummer. I wish we could make the space actually animal proof, but yeah, I think we're going to make more cages. We do have a big seedling sale in the fall, so that's part of what this silly hanging system is.

Andy Chamberlain (00:36:52):

Oh, okay.

Wes Hannah (00:36:55):

Just for the month of May, this space is so filled that it's just insane. You can barely get down the aisles, the hanging things are full. Sometimes we've even had to tuck things onto the ground under the shelves.

Bryn Roshong (00:37:09):

Takes an hour and a half to water.

Wes Hannah (00:37:12):

Yeah. Yeah, and the seedlings have been nice. We've been doing that almost since the beginning and it's been slowly growing and it's good. We started out focusing more on selling at the farm, doing a big seedling sale at the farm. I think we're realizing that the farmer's market is a much easier way to sell them and I think we've set ourselves up well as the main seedling seller in May. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of work and there's a lot of costs with the biodegradable pots and all the...

Bryn Roshong (00:37:53):

We do CowPots.

Wes Hannah (00:37:53):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:37:55):

We started as a microgreen and shoot operation in 2015, I think before we had any land. Wes was working at Hearty Roots Farm, which you might know, BR and Lindsay Shute. And we borrowed space in their greenhouse, they were very nice to let us have. Wes built a table in the back and that's where we would grow them. And that's how we started. And we applied to the Kingston Farmers Market and got a spot there just for shoots and microgreens. And we were a very tiny operation and we just hustled and did that. I'm not farming full time anymore and I wasn't at that point either. So Wes was really doing it. On Friday night, he'd bring home all the trays of everything.

Wes Hannah (00:38:41):

Yeah, I lit them up in our van-

Bryn Roshong (00:38:42):

Yeah, bring them home.

Wes Hannah (00:38:42):

... drive the trays home. And then I would stay up until one in the morning cutting and packaging.

Bryn Roshong (00:38:46):

Yeah. And then-

Wes Hannah (00:38:48):

We would just put stuff in our refrigerator because we didn't have a cooler.

Bryn Roshong (00:38:52):

Yeah, it was definitely nuts. We should have had a 20 C and we didn't. But we were very clean, but like yeah, our refrigerator, we would just... It's so funny. And that's all we were allowed to sell at the market. And then we were in north of here at this amazing place called Pathfinder Farm with our mentor, Jimmy Bulich, who I got to graze his cattle, and we got put up a greenhouse and had a garden there. And we started a CSA in 2016 with a combo of our veggies and Hearty Roots veggies and started a small membership.

(00:39:28):

And then in 2016, we were trying to find our own land and we were in Catskill north of here, and we entered into three different negotiation conversations with non-farming landowners who had good farmlands and each one of them fell apart because of just the totally unrealistic expectations of the landowners of like, our rent would be $7,000 a year so they could cover their taxes, or we would have a really, a $50,000 deer fence that looked pretty and made it look like a park.

Wes Hannah (00:40:02):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:40:02):

Or when they realized like, "Oh wait, you're going to be here early in the morning with a tractor and you're going to have piles of compost and all?" They're like, "No, no, no. We don't actually want that on our estate." And we're like, why do all of these non-farming people have the best farmland and we can't use it?

Wes Hannah (00:40:17):

Or in some cases it was somebody had 500 acres of his land and it was just like, "It's not worth the liability of leasing you two acres and all the traffic." Just like-

Bryn Roshong (00:40:29):

It could be that.

Wes Hannah (00:40:29):

... "It's such a hassle that it's just not worth the money," which I respect.

Bryn Roshong (00:40:35):

God, it was really hard. We almost just quit, because after enough of those conversations, you're like, "I guess there's nowhere for us to go." But then this property, our dear friend was leasing here and she was transitioning out of farming and she just encouraged us to take over her lease. And so we were really lucky. We did, and it's been awesome being here just with the community of people who are interested in eating local food and coming to the farm. And the farmer's market's great, it's been really been able to support us.

Andy Chamberlain (00:41:04):

So this property wasn't veggies before you were here?

Wes Hannah (00:41:05):

Mm-hmm. Yeah, there've been at least three farmers that we knew prior to us.

Bryn Roshong (00:41:10):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:41:12):

So far, we've held the record, I think, for the longest tenure here, and obviously we plan to be here forever. But yeah, I don't know-

Andy Chamberlain (00:41:21):

They were used to the tractors and the compost piles at that point, which is good.

Wes Hannah (00:41:25):

Exactly. Yeah, our neighbors are great. I mean, there's only seven neighbors on the street, half of them are CSA members, and everybody's very appreciative and welcoming of us as the farm on the street.

Andy Chamberlain (00:41:37):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:41:37):

And it's great land. I mean, it's along the Esopus Creek. And you probably came along Hurley Mountain Road?

Andy Chamberlain (00:41:42):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:41:42):

And you were driving along those endless farm fields.

Andy Chamberlain (00:41:45):

A lot of farms.

Bryn Roshong (00:41:45):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:41:45):

Yeah, that's gorgeous, man.

Bryn Roshong (00:41:47):

There's the Davenport family who's been here forever. They have a lot of that land. The Farm Hub is a 1600 acre farm along there and it's all this beautiful prime soil bottom land. And our land is uphill a little bit from it, but we're still the same amazing farmland. You can look at the satellite and it's just very cool, this long, long strip of beautiful farmland here that we get to be part of. But it's small here in the little valley, but so that's a challenge is-

Wes Hannah (00:42:17):

Yeah, we learned one thing about the valleys-

Bryn Roshong (00:42:18):

... having two properties.

Wes Hannah (00:42:20):

Yeah, yeah. There's obviously the logistical hassle of that.

Bryn Roshong (00:42:23):

With all of our wash pack here and infrastructure here in every... So the carting back and forth, we're figuring it out.

Wes Hannah (00:42:30):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:42:31):

We used to have a piece of three acres in Kingston 20 minutes away. So Wes was hauling the tractor, having to go out at night, put it on the trailer and get it all ready late at night to go there a couple times or once a week. And then we're paying our crew for people to drive basically 40 minutes a couple days a week. It was just it wasn't...

Wes Hannah (00:42:51):

Yeah, it was dumb.

Bryn Roshong (00:42:53):

It wasn't working.

Andy Chamberlain (00:42:54):

Right.

Bryn Roshong (00:42:55):

Yeah. You were going to say about the land, the valley.

Wes Hannah (00:42:58):

Oh no, I don't know. I was thinking one takeaway we've learned, I guess it's obvious, but we really threw a lot of different irons in the fire as we figured out what would work. So Bryn said, I mean, I think it's noteworthy that we started out, even once we got here at the Kingston market, we started just with the shoots because that's what the market was looking for or willing to take on a shoots vendor and they didn't need a veggie vendor. And if we'd applied as a veggie vendor, we would have not been accepted. So we got our foot in the door, and then a couple years later when we heard they were looking for a veggie vendor, then we were able to expand to that. And we did that, but then like I said, we did the city market. We also-

Bryn Roshong (00:43:47):

Oh yeah, the city market.

Wes Hannah (00:43:49):

... it was the Poughkeepsie Farmers market that we did first season.

Bryn Roshong (00:43:54):

That was terrible.

Wes Hannah (00:43:54):

And we also did a CSA distribution in Catskill, which is 45 minutes away. Oh, we also did a CSA distribution in the city in Washington Heights for three years.

Bryn Roshong (00:44:06):

Oh yeah, the school.

Wes Hannah (00:44:06):

So we've tried a lot of things that failed and we've winnowed out and figured out what things are successful.

Bryn Roshong (00:44:13):

I think that's a great thing about you though, is you always want to try the hard things. I really did not want to ever do a city market. I was just like, "Are you kidding? Getting up at 4:30 in the morning and then coming home at eight at night. And it costs what? $800 just to even go. And how much money do you have to make?" And Wes was like, "No, let's try it." And did it for a number of years and I wouldn't... I mean I think you can't... It's better to do it and learn that it's not working or learn that it is working ideally, than to just not try things if you have the energy and the potential to do it. It's better to have loved and have lost than never have loved at all. Better try the market and it not work out and then through the experience-

Andy Chamberlain (00:44:55):

Then you know and you learn other things along the way., yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:44:59):

Yeah. It helps hone your direction of like, "Okay, now what do I want to do," and you get a real sense of your costs about it. But COVID was a huge reason. We used to go to the city and do a city market.

Wes Hannah (00:45:12):

[inaudible 00:45:13].

Bryn Roshong (00:45:13):

Oh, you did that about the farm store?

Wes Hannah (00:45:17):

Oh no, not that part.

Bryn Roshong (00:45:17):

And so the reason that we started doing our online farm store was because of COVID. And it gave us the willingness to try, because we had just assumed like, oh, not enough people would be interested. I don't remember exactly what all it was. But then we did it and there was a lot of interest and so we... It's great, because it's like a farmer's market essentially. It's the equivalent of a good, decent winter farmers market, but is here on the farm.

Wes Hannah (00:45:45):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:45:45):

And we get to keep a relationship with a lot of our members over the winter, even though we don't want to do a winter CSA, because it's too stressful, I guess. Or I don't know, maybe you could say why, but ...

Wes Hannah (00:46:00):

I mean the farm stand is nice, because we don't have to over come in.

Bryn Roshong (00:46:07):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:46:07):

In mid-January, if it's a really cold week, we can just say like, "We're just not going to harvest any greens this week," and it's not a big deal.

Bryn Roshong (00:46:12):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:46:13):

I don't feel like I'm letting anyone down by...

(00:46:17):

Other noteworthy things when we got here, I mean, as like a lot of farms do, the previous folks had just had fields and beds haphazard to try to maximize space.

Andy Chamberlain (00:46:30):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:46:30):

And we decided even though we actually lose some space, everything is all 200 foot rectangles, so all the reds are 200 feet, which is just so much better. So when you pull out a piece of row cover, you don't have to wonder how long it is, everything's 200 feet. We can reuse sprinkler lines anywhere. I mean, obviously that's a minor thing, but to me that was an innovation.

Andy Chamberlain (00:46:56):

No, no, it's good. You're planning too.

Wes Hannah (00:46:59):

But yeah, so we've got four high tunnels, they're all Rimol, well, except for the one that was here when we got here. They're all Rimol high tunnels.

Bryn Roshong (00:47:06):

Ellie, wait a second.

Wes Hannah (00:47:08):

And then four Caterpillar tunnels that we got from... It's the Farmer Friend design and we bought... We wanted them to be 200 feet long so they could be on our beds. So they don't sell 200 foot Caterpillars, so we buy 200 foot tunnels and then we just connect them to make one big one. So yeah, in the wintertime, all eight of those structures are mostly salanova, spinach, kale and chard, and then we will dedicate... This is an experiment to do green garlic that we're hoping will be available much earlier than our field green garlic. And then we also have bok choy and whatever, other random small greens. And then in the summertime, those eight structures are all tomatoes, cukes, ginger.

(00:48:02):

This year, we've always done a small amount of ginger. This year we expanded and we actually did an entire tunnel, 600 foot beds of ginger, which was really good. I mean, all fall we were just selling... We never ran out. We had it. And in fact, yesterday, we sold the last of it yesterday. We've gotten to the point where I think we figured out the humidity control, so we'll harvest it and control it... Sorry, we'll keep it in the cooler for two or three weeks, which is nice. I mean, that's a really good seller. I haven't worked out the exact... I don't know exactly what's the most profitable for high tunnel space, but I feel like we probably get, I don't know, probably 12 to 1500 bunches of ginger, which is I don't know, eight or $10,000 of that. That seems like a good use of a high tunnel.

Andy Chamberlain (00:48:58):

Yeah, I think so.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:00):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:49:01):

Those numbers are probably optimistic, but I'm sure six or eight at most.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:04):

You did a whole tunnel?

Wes Hannah (00:49:05):

Yeah, this year we did six beds.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:07):

That's great. Yeah, we sold really all of it.

Wes Hannah (00:49:10):

Yeah, we sold them last of it yesterday.

Andy Chamberlain (00:49:11):

That's the best part.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:12):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (00:49:13):

Sell all the tunnels out of anything. That's good.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:16):

Yeah. And it's a funny thing at the... We give it in our CSA as a point also, so people get a good deal on that, because the point is really 450, but a bunch of garlic-

Wes Hannah (00:49:27):

I think to a member the cost is 450.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:30):

But a bunch of ginger is 650 or six?

Wes Hannah (00:49:34):

Six.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:34):

Six.

Wes Hannah (00:49:34):

At the market, yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:34):

So they get a little bit of a deal. And at the market, it's fun because people get it and then it has a long green. So they put it in their bag and people walk around with this flag.

Andy Chamberlain (00:49:45):

It's like a flag.

Wes Hannah (00:49:45):

Yeah, exactly. [inaudible 00:49:45], "Where did you get that?"

Bryn Roshong (00:49:45):

And other people see it, and they're like, "Where did you get that?" And they're like, "Oh." And I noticed there's another vendor that does that with fennel, where they leave the tops on and because it's a similar thing of like, "Oh, where'd you get that?" "Oh, over there." So it's so funny.

Andy Chamberlain (00:49:54):

Yeah, it's smart.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:55):

Yeah. Big, long, showy things are great for markets.

Andy Chamberlain (00:50:00):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:50:01):

Yeah. Like Bryn said, we buy in a lot of straw mulch just from a local farm and we try to do a lot of straw mulching. We've been experimenting... Truthfully, we do do some or whatever, I feel like we do the standard amount of plastic mulch. I don't love the plastic. We do sometimes get feedback from members who don't love it, but it is necessary. We do plastic on all of our solonums, cucurbits, and our kale, just because the kale's in the ground so long that it gets awful if we don't.

Andy Chamberlain (00:50:39):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:50:39):

We do do some landscape fabric. I mean, in some cases we use landscape fabric between plastic aisles on vining, like cucurbits and sweet potatoes. We also do a little bit of just landscape fabric, like our Caterpillar tunnels with the tomatoes. We have holes burned. This year we experimented for the first time with a little bit of a no-till thing that was spearheaded by our farm manager, Dominic. And it was a success, though I think we can upgrade it, but we had a rye vetch bed that we should have crimped it, but we weren't planning ahead, so we mowed it instead.

(00:51:19):

And then we did a no-till, we just used a single shank to cut a trench, which we fertilized and then planted into, and it worked pretty well. I mean, eventually the weeds did take over. We should have had a thicker cover crop pack or something, but it was fun. I mean, the point is, we're trying to figure out ways we can reduce the plastic while also still keeping the weeds at bay. We have a couple of cultivating tractors, which we use for a lot of our small, like lettuces and baby brassicas and stuff. We do try to cultivate every week. But oftentimes it's just for one reason or another, we don't get to things and plastic is obviously really nice.

Andy Chamberlain (00:52:06):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:52:07):

For cultivating, we have some old Gs and an Oggun, which we didn't realize we were actually a guinea pig for that one.

Wes Hannah (00:52:14):

Yeah. Do you know Oggun?

Andy Chamberlain (00:52:14):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:52:18):

Yeah, it's fine. I mean, on the record, it's fine. I wish we had gone with...

Bryn Roshong (00:52:23):

Tilmor?

Wes Hannah (00:52:25):

Tilmor.

Bryn Roshong (00:52:25):

It's just a more trusted, tested brand.

Wes Hannah (00:52:26):

But yeah, it's been all right. A few things broke on it. We've had to fix some things and the-

Bryn Roshong (00:52:35):

Wes has redesigned things and they've been like, "Can you send us..."

Wes Hannah (00:52:41):

All right. The folks at Oggun have been nice and responsive.

Bryn Roshong (00:52:42):

Yes.

Andy Chamberlain (00:52:43):

No, but I know their model we'll say, is very more DIY.

Wes Hannah (00:52:48):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:52:48):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:52:51):

Yeah, I wish I were a welder because then I feel like we would have been better at fixing things, so it was annoying-

Bryn Roshong (00:53:00):

We had to get things welded for us.

Wes Hannah (00:53:00):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:53:00):

So now you have it working.

Wes Hannah (00:53:00):

Yeah, so it was down for a month when something needed to get welded and we just couldn't get around to it.

Andy Chamberlain (00:53:05):

And you needed to cultivate?

Wes Hannah (00:53:06):

Yeah, exactly.

Bryn Roshong (00:53:08):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:53:08):

And so we have a couple of the Allis-Chalmers Gs, which are really fun.

Bryn Roshong (00:53:12):

One's always broken.

Wes Hannah (00:53:14):

I mean, they're definitely [inaudible 00:53:16]. They're not something that I think the average person can just jump on. Our crew can't all jump on them the way they could with the Oggun, and they also just don't have the clearance, so you can't go over and till stuff. But yeah, we do, speaking of that-

Bryn Roshong (00:53:32):

Come back to the house, it's starting to rain down.

Wes Hannah (00:53:34):

... something we've been toying with or, I don't know, struggling with is we try to... So like I said, we had six full-time people this year.

Andy Chamberlain (00:53:45):

What's this mix here?

Wes Hannah (00:53:46):

This is just rye vetch.

Andy Chamberlain (00:53:48):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:53:48):

I'm sorry, oats peas.

Andy Chamberlain (00:53:49):

Oats peas?

Wes Hannah (00:53:50):

And then, yeah, the two main things we do are anything that comes out of production early enough by early September, we do oats peas, and then at that point we then switch to rye vetch mix for the goal of getting almost everything covered by the end.

Andy Chamberlain (00:54:05):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:54:05):

So we were seeding... I mean, we have some... Oh yeah, well, I mean those beds over there, that was rye vetch that we just seeded a couple weeks ago, which is it's barely going to be germinated by the time winter hits, but we figure it'll-

Andy Chamberlain (00:54:19):

No, there's a huge stand going into winter.

Wes Hannah (00:54:21):

Yeah, yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (00:54:23):

I got winter rye. It's an inch tall.

Wes Hannah (00:54:26):

Oh, sorry.

Andy Chamberlain (00:54:28):

So that's nice and luscious.

Wes Hannah (00:54:30):

Yeah. Yeah, so this is where the CSA picky run will be next year. Oh yeah, also notable, we do strawberries also. That's been something we've been slowly...

Ellie (00:54:44):

Strawberry?

Wes Hannah (00:54:44):

Yeah. We've been slowly upping... We do six, 200 foot beds, it's not crazy. But that is a nice boost at the market. We've been realizing over the... You can look at the farmer's market revenue as like, there's a big boost for the seedling sale in the beginning, and then early summer we get a big strawberry boost, and then we get a big tomato boost, and those are really our anchors. And then obviously people are buying salad and kale and stuff, but...

Bryn Roshong (00:55:17):

I was thinking about that when we were thinking about the last bunch of weeks and why it hasn't been as good. I think the salad is one, definitely a significant contributor.

Wes Hannah (00:55:24):

Yeah. Due to heat and lack of rain and stuff in early fall, we didn't have a ton of greens coming into the late fall, which was a bummer for the CSA and for the market.

Bryn Roshong (00:55:38):

People come, they ask for them. They really come to us for that, but we do that-

Wes Hannah (00:55:41):

And I'm like, "Don't you want these turnips instead?"

Bryn Roshong (00:55:46):

Well, you kept the power greens and you get some amazing arugula too, but people, they want the lettuce, the special lettuce mix.

Wes Hannah (00:55:55):

What I was going to say before, is we have six crew members, team members during the year, and we try to have a mentality where everybody's involved in everything. So everybody gets trained on the tractor, which is good. I know that makes it appealing for prospective employees to know that they'll get tractor experience. It's also good for us so that I can just say to anyone, "Hey, could you go mow that thing?" without having to have the right person be available. And then we do have a person who was a farm manager or assistant manager, who was in charge of things day to day, and then we also had a crew leader underneath him, who was there just to make sure everybody was always on page, even if he was unavailable, and just be a pacesetter and stuff. So we've been dealing with evolving our management hierarchy systems and it's cool.

(00:57:05):

It definitely is a funny... There are some drawbacks, there's still some things that not everyone can do, like operating the Gs. And I don't know, we're trying to provide a well-rounded experience to give people a good time. This year we participated in a program also administered by the Glynwood Center called the Hudson Valley Apprenticeship Program. Because Glynwood and other nonprofit farms in the region have really nice year long apprenticeship programs, so they wanted to give the benefits of those apprenticeships to farms like ours. So the program, it has funding to... We had two employees who were participating and they worked with us full time, but then on average once every other week they would go to-

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:58:04]

Wes Hannah (00:58:04):

... and on average, once every other week, they would go to some educational event at Glenwood or somewhere at another farm where they covered everything from business planning to tractor repair. And it was on paid time, but paid by the program. So it was really neat, it allowed us to sort of advertise a really well-rounded apprenticeship, but we didn't have to do all the educational work.

Speaker 2 (00:58:31):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:58:32):

And I thought it was cool too because they had cool programming around management for [inaudible 00:58:38]-

Wes Hannah (00:58:38):

Oh yeah, that's right. And they also-

Bryn Roshong (00:58:39):

It was really helpful.

Wes Hannah (00:58:41):

The Hudson Valley apprenticeship program as a whole gave us as managers some training and also sort of held us to a higher standard. Somebody from Glenwood came out every few months to sort of have a long chat and check in. So it was nice. It kept us accountable.

Andy Chamberlain (00:59:03):

What does sustainable farming mean to you and what are you doing to achieve it?

Wes Hannah (00:59:08):

Okay, good question. Well, I guess sustainable means both ecological and social. So from the ecological side, we're certified organic. We also are proudly certified by the Real Organic Project. So we have a goal of trying to improve the land every year rather than extracting from it. We do a ton of, in addition to our regular fertilizer regimen, we spend like probably $5,000 or $10,000 a year buying in like compost and other amendments. And we do ... We are not a no-till farm. I would love to figure out ways we can reduce tillage. We do have a spader which we bought a few years ago and that has largely replaced the roto-tiller as like a final bed prep. And yeah, we don't do much like Moldboard plowing. So we try to be conscientious of soil disturbance and whatnot. Although to be clear, we are not no- or I wouldn't even call us low-till. We're just aspiring to be lower-till.

(01:00:28):

And we also, I mean, from the social level, I mean, all the stuff we talked about, just like building community, I think is really important. We have over the years developed really close relationships with our CSA members and we feel like the farm is a significant part of the community in a way that I'd like to think it's part of building a larger community. Yeah, in terms of like other sustainability things, I mean, we are trying to make this a place where we, or at least I can like work full-time in a way that compensates me enough and also our employees. As I'm sure many farms struggle with, that's a difficult area. We try to keep our prices low. Our goal really is to be accessible to everyone. And like when we go to the farmer's market, we set our prices ... We're not trying to get like a big certified organic premium. We want good food to be accessible. So we try to keep our prices as low as possible. We often will like go to the local grocery store and just confirm that like our prices are actually cheaper than theirs.

(01:01:53):

But it does come at the cost of like ... Yeah, we don't have a huge surplus income, so we try to ... I think our wages are on par for the region. We pay like this year our starting was $20 an hour. We offer a bonus. We have paid time off and stuff, but it's not ... I recognize that it's not ... It's difficult for that to be like a career position and the money ... Nobody's getting rich. I mean, I don't make much more than that. I think if you actually like add up my hours and divide it.

(01:02:37):

So yeah, we're still trying to figure out how we can be more socially sustainable to keep staff and this year ... And that is, I should say, part of why we started doing the winter production is we wanted to be able to offer year round employment. So this year we're going to have three, out of our staff of six, three people are going to stay on. Well, four including myself, and keep employed through the winter. So that's really great. But yeah, I mean, I would love to figure out ways we can, I don't know, have some sort of other benefits, healthcare, stuff like that. That's a bit unsustainable, or it's a bit out of reach right now.

Andy Chamberlain (01:03:23):

Yeah. Unachievable.

Wes Hannah (01:03:24):

Unachievable, yeah. And housing is a huge problem. And it's probably like this everywhere, but Mid-Hudson Valley and Kingston, it's so difficult to live here. When we moved to Kingston 10 years ago, a third of the houses were vacant and you could buy a house for $40,000. And now rents are a couple thousand dollars a month and it's made it hard for us to attract people. It used to be, we would get applicants from all over when we posted jobs and it was no big deal for them to move to Kingston to work here, but now it's ... The people who ... We've had great employees every year and I'm really ... I think we're so lucky, but we've noticed like they're not coming from far away. They're not moving here. And if they do, they see what like cost of living is and reconsider this job.

(01:04:16):

So most of our folks are people who are already living here and have figured out some housing solution. But yeah, housing's a huge issue. I wish we could have on farm housing. We don't. I mean, that's both a huge cost and I have no idea what the zonings and stuff like that. I think that's unrealistic.

Bryn Roshong (01:04:40):

Whenever we have people who apply and they're like, "Oh, I'm going to ..." They're from another state and they're like, "Yeah, I'll just find housing when I come." We're like, "Oh man. There's-"

Andy Chamberlain (01:04:48):

Oh, no.

Bryn Roshong (01:04:50):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (01:04:51):

Please look around before you come in.

Bryn Roshong (01:04:53):

Yeah. It's really tough. But people figure stuff out. I don't know.

Wes Hannah (01:05:00):

Yeah. Like I said, we've been really lucky. Every year we've had fantastic people and we do have good retention and that's something I assume this is seen across the board, but when we started farming 15 years ago, it was kind of standard that in this like small local farm organic movement, you worked over a season and then you moved on and there wasn't a lot of ... I felt like when we started farming, it was rare for someone to stay at a farm more than a year, as just a crew member, not management.

Andy Chamberlain (01:05:31):

Right.

Wes Hannah (01:05:33):

And yeah, since then there's been more ... This year, for example, we had four people return from last year ... I'm sorry, three people returned from last year, three out of five from last year. So that was great. And like we've had one person who's been here, this was his ninth year.

Andy Chamberlain (01:05:51):

Wow.

Wes Hannah (01:05:52):

Another person, this is her fourth year. So we've been lucky to have good retention, but it's an issue. I mean, personally, that like hiring, the whole hiring process is my least favorite. If we were to ever radically change things or stop farming, it would just be because of the stress of constant hiring. And like right now, as I think about the spring, we just had to say goodbye to people who, some of whom might come back, but probably some won't. And now thinking about, "Oh, we're going to have to hire new people." And then it's just like, "Are they going to be good? Is it going to be terrible? What's the learning curve going to be?" It's stressful.

Andy Chamberlain (01:06:30):

How do they fit in with people who already know what's going on and each other?

Wes Hannah (01:06:33):

Yeah. Like I said, we've been lucky so far, but I feel like the HR side of things is ... It's not something people think about when they think about like what it means to have a farm.

Andy Chamberlain (01:06:49):

No, people don't get into farming for the HR [inaudible 01:06:55].

Wes Hannah (01:06:56):

Yeah. And in a nutshell, that's sustainable farming.

Andy Chamberlain (01:07:03):

What are you excited about in this next year?

Wes Hannah (01:07:06):

Well, let's see. I mean, as we mentioned, there's the possibility of some additional land, so that would be really cool. And even if that doesn't come through, I think we are going to keep feelers out to try to see if we can expand our production base a little bit. I am excited about the new wash space as a whole. At the end of ...

(01:07:35):

Actually on Friday, we did end of year the exit interviews with everybody and one of my questions was, "If you were in charge of ... If you had $20,000 to make some upgrades to the farm, what would you recommend?" And like four out of five people said, "The washroom." So that makes sense. I didn't realize they were so ...

Andy Chamberlain (01:07:59):

[inaudible 01:08:00].

Wes Hannah (01:07:59):

Yeah, I thought there would be like [inaudible 01:08:04], but everybody was like, "Yeah, washroom is so inefficient." So we're going to do something, even if we don't do like our big unified, comprehensive washroom expansion, we'll at least, like I said, put a roof and make that wash pad a little bit more of like a real space. I don't know, every year we ... Like I mentioned before, we're thinking about, we'd like to continue toying with the no-till system, thinking about maybe trying it out next year on winter squash or our cucumbers and yeah, hoping we can reduce plastic usage there.

Andy Chamberlain (01:08:48):

Do you have any long-term plans to make any significant changes to the business model or keep things relatively similar at this point?

Wes Hannah (01:08:57):

I think we're pretty happy where we are. The CSA is really nice, both in terms of obviously the guaranteed revenue and the community, just feeling like we're very integrated into the local community. The Kingston market is like a no-brainer to stay in. When we joined, it was like a mid-tier market, I think. And at this point, I feel like it's probably one of the biggest Hudson Valley farmers markets.

Bryn Roshong (01:09:28):

Yeah, I think it's the biggest. Yeah.

Wes Hannah (01:09:29):

Yeah. It's great. And we are so lucky to have ... I mean, we were so fortunate to have gotten our foot in the door 12 years ago when we started doing shoots. There's eight produce vendors and we're one of the larger ones, even though we're organic. And yeah, it's great. I mean, it's 10 minutes down the road.

Bryn Roshong (01:09:52):

We have three tents-

Wes Hannah (01:09:53):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (01:09:53):

... Which is like one of the bigger ... It's a lot.

Andy Chamberlain (01:09:53):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (01:09:58):

We're probably like truthfully not ... We're not going to like drop the restaurant sales altogether, but it has been over the years, the smaller and smaller percent of what we do. I think maybe with COVID or other things, we just ... A lot of places closed or a lot of maybe like dropped how much local purchasing they were doing. So that's been fine. We've made up for those sales in other ways, but I feel like in the beginning we were ... Restaurants were like maybe a quarter of our sales and now it's-

Bryn Roshong (01:10:31):

I think it's the personality too. I think chefs really want to talk about varieties.

Wes Hannah (01:10:38):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (01:10:39):

And they want the very specific, everything the same size and like tiny and whatever. And we're just kind of not ... That's like not our ...

Wes Hannah (01:10:45):

Yeah, truthfully, we kind of approached the restaurant sales as like, when we have a lot of things, we'll sell ... If we have a ton of salad or arugula, we'll sell it, but we're not growing primarily for the restaurants. It's more when we've already satisfied our CSA. I mean, I feel like you can't do a CSA and also be focusing on something else too strongly because then you're really not giving your CSA members what they paid for, in my opinion. But yeah, I mean...

Bryn Roshong (01:11:20):

... I mean, I think a next milestone is we have kids and it's important to spend as much time with them as we can while they're here. So I think still continuing to work on balancing Wes's time because you make a plan to be like, "Okay, we'll have someone be able to rotate market Saturdays," but it just always has ended up that like Wes has had to do it every Saturday and we all go. But it's just like, it's fun and we like it, but it's also having that demand always on your schedule in addition to everything else is just ... It gets hard after a while. I mean, just it's been a big transition for ... I mean, having kids, Wes really had to cut back a lot of the time, couldn't work until 8:00 every night anymore and had to be done at 5:00 every day and has ... That's been great, but it's still kind of like, okay, now how can we even get more family time?

Andy Chamberlain (01:12:22):

What kind of adjustments have you made in order to make more family time?

Wes Hannah (01:12:27):

We've had really great staff and so some of it has been just learning or realizing that we can delegate more work to the staff, more managerial work so that I don't need to spend a lot of evening time making plans for the next day. And I mean, otherwise just constant equipment upgrades. I think that as we gotten better with our cultivating tractors, it's reduced the workload. I feel like there were ... I remember times when I would, just because we were so behind everything, I would be like out at night with a headlamp on weeding or hoeing and like I definitely don't do that anymore. And yeah, maybe some of it also is just a realization that things ... We have to let some things go. So now I'm not going to ... I do a lot of work at night after the kids go to bed, but I'm not going to ... I'm far less willing to give up on ... Sunday's my only day off and I'm far less willing to say like, "Okay, I'm just going to work this one Sunday to get some tractor work done." Now I used to do that, but now Sundays are definitely off limits.

Andy Chamberlain (01:13:41):

Line in the sand.

Wes Hannah (01:13:41):

Yeah. And if that means that we don't get a field prepped in time, that's fine. We'll just accept it.

Bryn Roshong (01:13:48):

Yeah. Yeah. I think having kids and those boundaries made you step up your game in the way you've been saying of sort of like, "This is not acceptable, so I have to figure out a solution because I have to be done with work earlier," which is kind of a nice side effect, I guess.

Wes Hannah (01:14:09):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (01:14:09):

Forces you to reprioritize and think about what you're doing.

Wes Hannah (01:14:10):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (01:14:13):

Knowing what you know now after 15 years, what do you wish you knew when you got started?

Wes Hannah (01:14:17):

I mean, we definitely had made a lot of false starts on sales channels, but that wasn't ... Those were just learning lessons. We raised chickens for five years and then we finally realized that that was just so much work and it wasn't a strong enough focus that it was actually profitable and so there were things like that when if I could talk to myself back and then I would just say, "Don't even try doing chickens unless you really want to go all in. " But what's your answer?

Bryn Roshong (01:14:52):

Oh, I was going to, something like I wish I'd known it ... The one thing is that I think in the beginning we were very harsh and critical of the concept of sort of like any food business, a farm needs investment from outside people or friendly community members or whatever it's going to be. And I think we had this impression of ourselves, both being like we'd pay it off our student loans ourselves by working and we're very like self-sufficient, but being basically like ... We're both, we don't come from like intergenerational wealth or anything. We just like went to college, which was great and an amazing privilege, paid off the loans and then we were just like sort of at square one being like, "Okay, so we want to farm, but we wanted to build everything like ourselves with what we had."

(01:15:48):

And we would kind of look at maybe like, there'd be like nonprofit farms that we'd kind of be like, "Ugh, like they have all these like benefits that like are ..." We kind of like scoff at it a little bit, but now I've realized that every single farm has its own story and like the tradition in our country is that farmers that were our age getting into farming would inherit a farm or like step into a farm business.

(01:16:16):

And we didn't have that. We were these like landless first generation farmers thinking that we were like in the same, like that we had this individualistic sort of vision of how to make the business succeed. And so just, I wish I could tell myself like, "Look for partnerships more." And we did finally, that's like the thing that helped us succeed was like the grace of finding this land with a landowner who's very supportive of what we're doing and giving us a long term lease that's a very generous-

Wes Hannah (01:16:47):

A lot of networking.

Bryn Roshong (01:16:47):

What did you say?

Wes Hannah (01:16:47):

A lot of networking.

Bryn Roshong (01:16:48):

Yeah. Yeah.

Wes Hannah (01:16:48):

We made the connection with like a local cafe in town and that they now host a third of our members. Like we have a distribution, CSA distribution at a cafe.

Bryn Roshong (01:16:58):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (01:16:58):

And that was, we were lucky to have like networked into our way into that relationship.

Bryn Roshong (01:17:03):

Yeah. Yeah. And like the more ... Just like take yes for an answer sometimes if someone's willing to help you out and it feels right, like just like do it because the more relation ... For me, this work is about relationships and the more relationships you have honestly, the better. And just, yeah, I think it's good advice early to think about it that way of like, yeah, trying to say yes when opportunities come your way and build relationships, especially if you're a landless first generation farmer.

Wes Hannah (01:17:37):

I have-

Bryn Roshong (01:17:37):

And like also, sorry, also to understand that like you do need a fair bit ... If you don't have your own money, you need money from somewhere to help with getting started. And it can be from a landowner, but just make sure it's not a like predatory venture capitalist situation because anyone who wants a return on their investment, I would say just like don't, because it's not ... Especially people with a lot of money who are looking to a farmer to pay them like money back for their investment, it's kind of like backwards anyway.

Andy Chamberlain (01:18:10):

They likely don't understand quite how a farm works.

Wes Hannah (01:18:12):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (01:18:14):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (01:18:14):

[inaudible 01:18:15].

Bryn Roshong (01:18:15):

Like they heard a TED Talk or something, but like realistically, the way our food system is, it's so subsidized and geared toward big commodity crops and like the way we're trying to farm, it's like we're really at a disadvantage because we do get like some government grants to help us with our high tunnels and things like that, but we're trying to ... We're making all these investments that have no ... We compost and we cover crop and all this stuff that we do because it's right and ultimately it's the best thing for the land and it's how ... It's the ecological way to do it and we believe in it, but like we don't get anything, you know, any money back. That's investments we just make. We just make those investments and the return is hopefully like healthier crops and people join our community because they believe in what we're doing, but there's no like government subsidy that's like, here's 10 grand for you to use compost and cover crop and things like that.

(01:19:14):

And there's no crop insurance for people our size. And so there's a lot of disadvantages, but ... Well, there is, but not really.

Wes Hannah (01:19:23):

But yeah, also, and we've definitely done more and more. We've tried to build a lot of community and get to know, like do as much networking as possible. We've always been involved in the Hudson Valley Young Farmers Coalition, which is a chapter of the National Young Farmers Coalition, but we've also... Like Bryn Scott is on the board of like the Marble Town Land Preservation Committee. I'm on the advisory board for like the Hudson Valley CSA Coalition. I was elected as the ...

Bryn Roshong (01:19:55):

[inaudible 01:19:56].

Wes Hannah (01:19:58):

I was just reelected as our FSA like county representative and we're also like, we went to our first Farm Bureau meeting this year. So we've been realizing like this-

Andy Chamberlain (01:20:09):

Trying to be involved.

Wes Hannah (01:20:10):

Yeah. And trying to make host connections. But wait, I had a better answer than ... I'm sorry, a better than my first answer answer. I feel like when we started farming, the idea of like personnel management seemed very ... It was like, we didn't get into this for that reason and you know, we both came from a very like labor rights organizing background.

Bryn Roshong (01:20:36):

We were union organizers [inaudible 01:20:38].

Wes Hannah (01:20:37):

Yeah. So if you had talked to like 23 year old Wes about, "You need to like learn to be a good manager," I would have thought that was the enemy. But now I'm realizing like we've learned a lot. I mean, I was objectively probably not the best manager in the very beginning and I'm sure that I still have a lot to learn, of course, but I feel like in the last couple of years, I've been trying to like step it up and like I'm taking ... Like this year I'm going to be taking the Being the Employer of Choice training program and other things. I'm realizing how important it is to be a really good manager so as to help people deal with like the inevitable stresses of this sort of work. And yeah, that's something I would not have thought of 10 years ago.

Bryn Roshong (01:21:40):

I think that's one of the most important things like-

Wes Hannah (01:21:45):

It is. I'm realizing.

Bryn Roshong (01:21:46):

... If you're going to have other people work for you.

Wes Hannah (01:21:48):

Yeah. And I'm realizing we focus ... And if you were to think about like all the trainings and workshops we went to, everything was so technical about like things like soil science.

Bryn Roshong (01:22:00):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (01:22:00):

And all that side of farming, but I'm realizing my big deficiency that I'm trying to address is all the managerial side of things.

Andy Chamberlain (01:22:13):

If you were aware of that when you started, do you think you would have done anything differently or is just people management something that you've really needed the experience to learn from?

Wes Hannah (01:22:23):

I mean, I'm sure experience is a huge teacher. I mean, there are programs, like the program that I'm taking. Well, I wish I had taken it five years ago, certainly. Yeah, I'm not sure. I remember like my first manager job was when I was working at Hardy Roots Farm and I didn't ... I'm sure I did a decent job, but I wish I had maybe gone into it more with like a ... Asked if I could have more of like, what's the word? Like a mentor while doing that. I wish instead of just saying like, "Yeah, I can manage a team of six people and just jumping in," I wish I had at that time sought out somebody who I could like ask questions constantly. That would have been really cool.

Bryn Roshong (01:23:20):

Yeah. And I think like also this season you've done more with like structuring your feedback.

Wes Hannah (01:23:28):

Yeah. Creating mechanisms for feedback.

Bryn Roshong (01:23:31):

Like structure like one-on-ones that happen at a regular interval, which is like standard, or not standard business, but like good general business practices and it's cool to see that like on the farm too.

Wes Hannah (01:23:46):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (01:23:47):

Check in and ...

Wes Hannah (01:23:48):

Yeah. Yeah, we really like making sure we start our day with like a big meeting where we talk about not just what we're doing, but why we're doing it, how it fits into like the bigger picture of our agenda and yeah, like regular check-ins. I think next year we'll do even more. I really ... And that was some of the feedback I got this week on our exit interviews is I think we can do a better job of communicating even more what, like not just what the tasks are for this week, but like how the arc of the season goes overall. And I think that will actually help people be motivated because that's ...

Andy Chamberlain (01:24:28):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (01:24:29):

One of the things I've been talking about with our manager is in mid-season and everybody's stressed and there's a lot of burnout and it's important like we were talking about how ... If you have the big picture in mind, if you think this needs to happen this week because next week we don't have to have to do it because we've got these six other things to do next week. And if you just have like ... The bigger picture you can keep in your view, the more motivated you are, I think, to like really push hard.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:05):

Right. You understand that.

Wes Hannah (01:25:07):

Right, exactly.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:07):

You know the season overseas and you know the business, you know what you need to be doing next week.

Wes Hannah (01:25:10):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:10):

But your employee doesn't.

Wes Hannah (01:25:13):

Yeah. And I get it.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:15):

And they know what's going on next week, but they don't understand the implications of a week later seeding date.

Wes Hannah (01:25:22):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:22):

Like that's critical.

Wes Hannah (01:25:24):

You can spend an hour on the cultivation tractor this week and if you don't get to it's going to be five hours with the hoe next week. And if you don't do it then it's going to be 20 hours [inaudible 01:25:32] the next week.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:32):

Right, get on that tracker now.

Wes Hannah (01:25:35):

And I get, I mean, any shortcoming of that vision is I think on me. I need to be better at communicating that.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:42):

Well, it takes time to explain all of that.

Wes Hannah (01:25:45):

Yeah, of course.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:46):

It doesn't feel value added. You're just like, "All right, let's just get to the chase. [inaudible 01:25:49]."

Wes Hannah (01:25:51):

Yeah, exactly. Right. You're tempted to just jump in, but yeah, we got to make sure we're a cohesive team.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:57):

Yeah. What advice do you have for a beginning grower?

Wes Hannah (01:26:02):

Well, I mean, it's a bit repetitive, but yeah, we tried a lot of different things at first and I think it was important, first of all, to be willing to try a lot of different things, like a lot of different farmer's markets and building relationships with different landowners. It has been equally important and the harder lesson has been knowing when to walk away from something. We spent an entire year selling at a local farmer's market that was terrible and we were never making as much money as it costs to be there, like paying for staffing and harvest time and all that. And I wish we had walked away a lot sooner. So yeah, it's been important. I feel like casting a wide net has been really important, but then also like learning how to walk away from the bad decision or from the things that aren't good for the farm.

Andy Chamberlain (01:26:59):

Well, it's hard to figure out like, because it takes time to build up a

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:27:04]

Andy Chamberlain (01:27:03):

... hard to figure out because it takes time to build up a reputation or for people to know you're there and to give it a valid chance. And then you don't want to cut that too soon.

Wes Hannah (01:27:11):

Yeah, certainly.

Andy Chamberlain (01:27:12):

But at the same time you've got to cut the losses.

Wes Hannah (01:27:15):

Yeah. No, right. You never know. And maybe we should have stayed with that farmer's market. I don't know. But yeah, that has been an important lesson. Just knowing when to cut something off, make a decision where you're walking away from something unprofitable or something that's more cost than it's worth.

Bryn Roshong (01:27:43):

I think also, and then with that listening to your heart and your gut when you're like, well, it can be a hard decision and it might be hard to choose, should I leave this farmer's market or not? But ultimately for, I don't enjoy this. That's a huge thing where sometimes farming can be so hard. A lot of it is hard work and you were like, I don't enjoy every second of it because, but you just, that's farming. You've got to do the job until it's done and don't think too much about it all the time. But overall, like I enjoy this for a variety of reasons. But with selling your produce, if you're spending a lot of time doing an outlet that you just don't enjoy anymore, then don't do it anymore because it's going to make you so unhappy or pay someone else to do it or figure it out. That's an important thing is, it's not just a business, it's also your life. And you have to make sure you're enjoying it to some degree.

(01:28:39):

And I also think something that we did that's been helpful is just make lots of friends, just be super friendly with other young farmers your age. And also, it's something I think if we could do again, I would have tried to do more would be to find mentors in farming that we could call. I feel like Wes has a lot of folks that he can talk to about a variety of things, but I do feel like there were times when I didn't feel like we had an elder who we could call on the phone or go visit and just be like, "We're having trouble with this decision." And for them to hear us. It's our kids' school.

(01:29:24):

For someone who has experience who would be like, that we trust that could help us through decisions or even just give advice on a variety of things. I think there are, I can think of times when it would have been nice to have more of that. And we've started to develop some relationships, going to conferences and glomming onto some older farmers that were like, "Oh, we know you." But I think that's something that I've seen really help out other farmers our age is having those mentor relationships, but having friends is a huge help.

(01:30:02):

We're going to this thing this afternoon, we're going to see a couple friends and also going to see the younger folks getting into farming, so that'll be nice. Nice to see. But in this area in the Hudson Valley, there's a pretty rich culture of first generation farmers. We started around 2009, 2010, and there was this big wave. And so some of those folks aren't farming anymore, but they're still around. But some of them are still farming. So we're getting to be the slightly older generation, but being able to talk to them. And there's a community of people, we have a listserv, the Hudson Valley and Farmers Coalition, people share, they ask questions, people post jobs, people are looking for stuff, looking for advice.

(01:30:45):

 And there's, I think a pretty open collaborative mindset, which I think is a great mindset that I always encourage people to have in general. Just, to be honest when you have an issue, because you'll find that other people are experiencing the same thing. Don't try to present your farm as perfect all the time, especially if you can find a few friends you trust and you can actually say, "We're really struggling with this thing or we feel like we're failing at this." And then your friends could actually have an answer for you or be like, "No, no, like do it this way." And it actually like, we did this and it worked and you never know when you can, you can get solutions that way.

Andy Chamberlain (01:31:29):

Or you're right, "The spring sucked. I had terrible germination too."

Bryn Roshong (01:31:33):

"Yeah, me too." Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. We did have that actually. We're at the market. We're complaining to somebody and they're like, "Me too. My carrots are ruined." We're like, "Oh, ours too." We're like, "Okay, it's not just us."

Andy Chamberlain (01:31:48):

Yeah. There's a lot of weight to those conversations.

Bryn Roshong (01:31:54):

Yeah. Knowing you're not alone actually helps a lot.

Andy Chamberlain (01:31:57):

Along those lines, what fulfills you in this career? What keeps you going?

Wes Hannah (01:32:05):

Ultimately, I mean, I love every element of the job. It's very stressful. We don't make a lot of money. I often feel frustrated by all the various things that go wrong, but ultimately I love farming and I can't ever imagine doing something different. I love being outside. I mean, being outside all the time, working in the dirt is great. Sometimes it's muddy and cold and you wish you were sitting at a computer, but ultimately it's great to just be working with my body outside.

(01:32:47):

My favorite element is I think problem solving. We have not just, I mean, there's systems problem solving where like we have some task and you spend even just a minute thinking about, "What's going to be the most efficient way to do this?" That's really fun. And just the diversity of the work allows for a lot of those problem solving moments. So any given day, we might be doing 10 different things and so that's an opportunity. Obviously we remember the way we did it last time, but nonetheless, the diversity of the workload allows for constant challenging yourself to think about better ways to do things.

(01:33:29):

And then I love fixing things. I enjoy, we have a nice little workspace in the barn and I kind of like it when things break and I have to fix them. We're lucky...

Andy Chamberlain (01:33:43):

That's good.

Wes Hannah (01:33:46):

When we got our second tractor, that was really nice because then if something broke down, it was an imposition, but it didn't shut down the farm. So now we had our other tractor had something in the hydraulic, not the hydraulic pump, but actually where the hydraulic pump attaches to the engine block broke. So we had to take apart the whole tractor, replace that part of the engine. And so the tractor was down for a couple of weeks while we were waiting for parts to arrive. But I really liked it. I like taking apart the tractor and learning how it worked. It's been fun. I mean, I've never been to diesel mechanic school or anything, so every time something breaks, it's an opportunity to learn how something works.

Bryn Roshong (01:34:38):

That is another actually piece of advice for new growers is, it's not just the vegetables. You have to think about your whole infrastructure. So you're going to find yourself, if you have a CoolBot, it's going to just not work one day and you're going to be standing there in front of it like, "Oh no." So either really learning about mechanics or having someone on your team or maybe it's your partner or your dad or your mom, whoever, everyone's got somebody who they can call because Wes is amazing at fixing everything. And I think about that all the time of like, man, if you didn't have those skills, it's like so limiting. There'd just be so much downtime when stuff is broken because stuff is always breaking. And so having those skills either yourself or someone you can count on is a huge leg up.

Andy Chamberlain (01:35:31):

Yeah. And if you know the basics, a lot of the stuff that breaks like, "Oh, that's not a big deal because you know how to do it." If you don't know how to do anything, all of a sudden you get a flat tire and you might as well split the tractor. You're down.

Wes Hannah (01:35:48):

I feel like self-confidence is the main tool because I mean, you can figure out how anything works, how to repair anything using like YouTube and other Google... I mean, the number of tractor forums are so cool. I can post some really esoteric thing of like, "I have this model tractor and it's making this weird sound in this part." And within six hours, some old timer will respond with a long list of what you need to do. And it's cool. So that the knowledge is out there. It's just, I guess having the self-confidence to know like, "I can take this apart and fix it." I know how to use tools and that's all you need.

Bryn Roshong (01:36:30):

And friends. Having friends can be helpful too. Call. There's been one or two times when something's broken and you've called someone to be like, "What did you do?"

Wes Hannah (01:36:38):

Yeah, for sure.

Andy Chamberlain (01:36:39):

Any advice on how to make those friends you've mentioned a few times?

Bryn Roshong (01:36:43):

I think, unless you have immediate ideas, but things like-

Wes Hannah (01:36:49):

I mean, the Hudson Valley is like a hotbed for local farms, so we're very lucky in that way. When we started, we had both like the Craft Network, which is the Creating Regional Apprenticeship Farm Training, I'm sorry, something like that.

Bryn Roshong (01:37:08):

Collaboration for Regional Apprenticeship Farm Training.

Wes Hannah (01:37:10):

Yeah. There were just like weekly or biweekly farm tours. And so we got to know a lot of other people, not only getting to see other farms, which is meeting other people in our sort of cohort or experience level was great. And like Bryn said now 15 years later, we're still friends with a lot of those people who are now running their own farms.

(01:37:32):

The Young Farmers Coalition has been fantastic. We were organizers for our chapter for a number of years. We've now stepped back in the last few years and it's still going strong with a new group of leaders, but I mean, that was huge, that's where like we met tons of people. And when we started farming, we moved to the Hudson Valley. So in other words, when our first farm year, we didn't have a single friend in the area. So literally 100% our friends were made through farming.

Bryn Roshong (01:38:07):

Yeah, through the farm tourism.

Wes Hannah (01:38:07):

It was all through that.

Bryn Roshong (01:38:09):

Social events. Yeah, like one thing, like a mindset of like, if you're at, say you're vending at a farmer's market, seeing the other farmers there as friends and not being afraid to talk to them because you think they're going to hate you because you're selling veggies also, but being as friendly as you can, some people have trouble, but just approaching in a kinship way of, we're both farmers and just trying to share information and say hi and talk about... Yeah, because like we have just friendly interpersonal relationships with for the most part, all the other farmers at our market and it's nice. We just chat with each other and we see each other as friends and not competitors really because there's enough people to feed. There's an endless need for people to eat so you don't have to worry if you're both selling tomatoes, who cares? Just try to-

Wes Hannah (01:39:08):

Yeah, and I mean we both benefit from a strong market and the more good vendors there are, I mean within reason, the stronger the market is. So I don't think-

Bryn Roshong (01:39:18):

But I'm using that as an analogy, really a way to because like if you just have that mindset all around, I think that is really helpful and gets you, people see you as a friendly collaborative person, then you'll like, the channels are open to make more friends. And also throw a party or if someone's like, "We need to host Cornell Cooperative Extension." In New York at least, they're looking to host an event like, maybe throw your hand up. And it's hard and it's like time-consuming, but it's always a good thing to be part of those, throw an event or go to the events or be willing, I don't know, host a garlic day at your farm or if they're looking for presenters for a thing, have some confidence that you have something useful to say and people hear about you.

Wes Hannah (01:40:10):

We also, I mean a couple of years ago we were still feeling like we had a lot to learn about winter production. So we reached out to a handful of other winter greens producers and hosted some little get togethers just where we could have an open chat. And it was in the back of our heads we're like, "These are the people who are competing for the same customers as us." There was some awareness of that, but then also we realized there's enough demand out there that we're not competitors. And yeah, we learned a lot from other folks.

Bryn Roshong (01:40:53):

Yeah, it was so fun. We should do that again.

Andy Chamberlain (01:40:55):

Well, I want to be mindful of time. That was most of my questions. Is there anything else that you guys wanted to share?

Wes Hannah (01:41:01):

I mean, I just want to say, if it didn't come through in the things we've said thus far, we have been so lucky to have a lot of support from a ton of people and while we talk about the importance of like hard work and all like the hard decisions we've made and all that, I know that we wouldn't be here without a lot of luck and a lot of good relationships. There's always I think the risk of presenting too much of a pull yourself up by the boot straps sort of thing when, it is important to work hard, but I don't want to take all the credit. We've lucked out in some ways and I want to recognize that.

Bryn Roshong (01:41:41):

Yeah. It's more of a nitty-gritty detail, but I don't want to pass up the chance to just advocate for people having a bookkeeper. And we, again, it was a luck thing. I had a little bit of business or finance and business experience from my job working in a food production facility and dealing with some of the finance side of it, but we didn't have QuickBooks or anything for eight years or so or seven years and then we had an amazing CSA member reach out and she said, "I love you guys so much. If you ever need bookkeeping help, I'm a bookkeeper. I could do some barter, some pay." And I just jumped at that opportunity.

Andy Chamberlain (01:42:30):

Actually...

Bryn Roshong (01:42:30):

I was like, "You came at the exact right time." And because of her-

Wes Hannah (01:42:33):

And she was blown away by the complexity of all of our finances, "How do you do this? "

Bryn Roshong (01:42:41):

She's like, "You have how many currencies that people pay you in?" And like, "Oh my God, the state." Yeah, she was just like, "What?" It's very complicated. She's like, "You should feel overwhelmed because it is a little bit overwhelming." But she helped me set up our QuickBooks, which is a huge hurdle and really, unless you're a QuickBooks pro, I wouldn't recommend doing it by yourself, but if you have someone in the community who's a bookkeeper who will give you a discount because it can be expensive, but it is worth it.

Wes Hannah (01:43:10):

At least get you set up.

Bryn Roshong (01:43:12):

Get you set up and then be there to help you on a monthly basis or train you. I can do our journal entries and I can reconcile our books because she taught me how to do all that, but having everything in QuickBooks and being able to pull up a P& L and a balance sheet whenever we need to, my goal for even doing it, even getting everything in QuickBooks was to help us be able to make a decision like when Wes if it's July and he's just like, "We're so behind and I really wish we could hire someone." We could actually look and see where we're at and be like, "Oh, it looks like we're on track that we can afford to hire someone." And make the decision more confidently than just emotionally or just always be like, "No, we can't."

(01:43:58):

Because actually seeing our books has always been actually for us like, "Oh, okay, we're doing okay." Whereas without it, you're like, "Oh." You don't really know. I really think it's important, you don't have to do it right away. You don't need QuickBooks in your maybe first year or two if you have a small CSA, don't sweat it, but at some point it's really, really, it pays to have that system in place and get a little bit of financial literacy, have someone help you understand how to read a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet so you just have ideas of how your business is going. I think that's been really nice.

Wes Hannah (01:44:38):

Yeah, you're right. It has been emotionally sustainable in that way because it is helpful to me in the height of the summer for Bryn to be able to say like, "No, look, we're doing okay." I mean like the other day or this past week we gave bonuses to folks at the end of the season. And I mean we've always given bonuses, but I've never actually known, it's not until later that I'm like, "Oh crap, we gave out too much money." So now it was good to have a sense of wherever we stood. That seems really obvious, but yeah, I mean I will admit, I don't think we're that, nobody wants to admit it, but I think many farms were in the position we were in where we really did not have a good financial sense of the farm.

Bryn Roshong (01:45:28):

Until we did our taxes.

Wes Hannah (01:45:29):

Yeah, we would do our taxes.

Bryn Roshong (01:45:31):

We do our schedule up.

Wes Hannah (01:45:31):

"Oh, this is how much money we made." And it might have been $20,000 or $50,000 and that was crazy.

Bryn Roshong (01:45:39):

Isn't that probably common?

Wes Hannah (01:45:41):

I'd like to think that's not... I don't know. We're better now.

Bryn Roshong (01:45:45):

Try to get to it before year eight. I would recommend, try to get there year four if you can.

Andy Chamberlain (01:45:53):

Get your feet underneath year one and two.

Bryn Roshong (01:45:55):

Yeah, don't worry about it. Yeah, I had someone who's brand new who was like, "Should I get QuickBooks?" I was like, "Ah, what are you doing?"

Andy Chamberlain (01:46:02):

Find your market first.

Bryn Roshong (01:46:02):

Yeah, exactly. Just don't worry too much about it. You get the money in the bank account and then make sure you have something. Yeah.

Wes Hannah (01:46:11):

Yeah, actually our very first year when it was just a part-time job, when it was just a nights and weekends business, we actually, we spent, I think our net profit at the end of it, I think our revenue was $10,000. It was just a hobby thing. And I think our net profit was $ 1000. And we paid somebody to do our taxes and it was $600 for them to do our business taxes and we were just like, "Wow, that was a terrible idea." That was funny.

Bryn Roshong (01:46:46):

Yeah, we're trying to get in with Farm Credit East this year because we have an accountant that is, we chose her because she has some knowledge of farms, which is really important for an accountant to have farm experience because there's all these programs and tax, I don't know there's all stuff that you need to know for farms. It's different than other businesses, but I think people have been telling me they're like, "You need to get Farm Credit East as your tax preparers because they'll find you money, they'll even look at the last five years of your tax returns." Someone told me, he was like, "They got me $20,000 back that I hadn't realized I'd overpaid." I was like, "Oh, interesting." But yeah, that part of it.

(01:47:28):

The other thing is too, thinking about the whole picture, thinking about, "Okay, I'm on the farm, I'm running this business, but how do I have healthcare or how do I have backup finance?" And just thinking of your whole life as part of the picture, if your partner is someone who has a job and you get healthcare through them, just to see that as, that's really great and you're taking care of yourself by if you have that kind of situation and not to think of it as some sort of, I don't know, you know what I'm trying to say? Like a privilege that other people don't have or something, but just make sure you're taking care of your like very basic needs because the farm, at least in the first five years or so, you just don't know what's going to happen and you just, you don't want to have an accident or get sick and then everything falls apart. You want to make sure you know how you're going to pay medical bills. It's easier said than done, but it's a real thing that can be the difference between keeping going and not.

Andy Chamberlain (01:48:49):

And that was The Farmer's Share. I hope you enjoy this episode with Bryn and Wes of Solid Ground Farm. 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 this podcast until March of 2026. 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. If you enjoy this 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.

(01:49:44):

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.

(01:50:23):

Access the Community Accreditation for Produce Safety, also known as CAPS. This program is designed for growers by growers to help you easily meet market and regulatory food safety expectations. You can access the VVBGA's 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. Camaraderie, enhanced communication and fellowship among commercial growers.

(01:51:01):

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, high tunnel production, test management, pollinators, produce safety, and soil health. Become a member today to be a part of and further support the veg and berry industry.

(01:51:31):

You can visit thefarmershare.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. 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. In Apple Podcasts, 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. Thanks for listening.

PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:52:30]

 Wes Hannah (00:00:09):

I'm Wes Hannah.

Bryn Roshong (00:00:10):

And I'm Bryn Roshong, and we're a Solid Ground Farm in Kingston, New York, which is in the Hudson Valley region of the state, and we are a year-round organic diversified veggie farm. We have a currently about 235 family CSA, and we do a year-round farmers market locally, as well as some winter sales on the farm.

Wes Hannah (00:00:32):

Yeah, we've got about six employees during the season, and we have tried to have a strong focus on sustainability and community building.

Andy Chamberlain (00:00:50):

I'm your host, Andy Chamberlain, and I take you behind the scenes to learn how farmers are building their business in sustainable agriculture. These farmer-to-farmer interviews cover a wide range of topics from cropping systems, marketing channels, lifestyle decisions, and lessons learned along the way. This podcast is supported by the University of Vermont Extension and the Vermont Vegetable and Berry Growers Association. It has funding from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture Food and Markets as part of the Specialty Crop Block Grant. Unfortunately, the end of that grant funding is coming to a close soon. So if you enjoy the show and would like to help keep more episodes coming, please consider making a donation. Any amount is greatly appreciated and can be made on our website, thefarmershare.com/support. Thank you.

(00:01:36):

Today's episode comes to you from Kingston, New York, where we visit with Bryn and Wes of Solid Ground Farm. They're growing on over a dozen acres with four tunnels of mixed veg for their CSA. We start off the episode with the tour of their wash pack, cooler, CSA space, and growing areas before pulling up a chair in the kitchen to learn what motivates them to be a produce grower and how they're building their business to meet their family's needs and how they can be an asset to the community. I hope you enjoy the show. Thanks for listening.

Wes Hannah (00:02:05):

Welcome.

Bryn Roshong (00:02:07):

Yeah. We have been farming since 2015. Wes has been farming the whole time... I mean, since 2010, 15 years.

Wes Hannah (00:02:17):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:02:18):

Not 2015. We've been here... We started farming here in 2017 and living here. Our neighbors own the land, and we lease it. We have a long-term lease, which was one huge thing that makes it possible for us is that stability of land. Our whole property's about 35 acres, but there's about seven in the fence.

Wes Hannah (00:02:43):

Yeah, six or seven.

Bryn Roshong (00:02:46):

Yeah, and we lease another nine just five minutes away down the road, which is great because we can cover crop. The seven acres is not quite enough. We also have, what, like an acre and a quarter under high tunnels and caterpillars, or is it more than that?

Wes Hannah (00:03:01):

Yeah. Well, let's see. Eight tunnels... On the spot. It's about half an acre, yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:03:08):

I think it's more. Anyway, it's four high tunnels and four caterpillar tunnels.

Andy Chamberlain (00:03:12):

Awesome.

Bryn Roshong (00:03:13):

It's for the winter. We grow year round.

Wes Hannah (00:03:15):

We have that auxiliary land. We're primarily a CSA farm. We've got about 250 CSA members. And then we also sell at the local Kingston Farmers Market. Those are about equal amounts, revenue-wise, and then we also do a small amount of restaurant sales, but we've been slowly expanding over the years. We started out with 60 members, and then you just ramped up. We started out doing more farmer's markets. COVID caused us to shrink back a little bit. We were going down to the New York City doing a Manhattan Farmer's Market, and we actually couldn't get anyone to staff that market, 2020, and we decided to just expand the CSA, and it happened to coincide with a huge exodus of city people coming up to the area.

(00:04:06):

That year and the following year, we just had crazy high demands. We filled up way early. We had a 60 or 80 member waiting list. It was a good year for the CSA, even though the farmers markets' were not.

Andy Chamberlain (00:04:21):

Yeah, a good comeback.

Wes Hannah (00:04:23):

Yeah. We had other... Staffing was an issue. Farmer's markets were obviously not great. But yeah, since then, we've been more CSA-focused. Our CSA is very local. We have about half our members picking up here on farm and a lot of those, since we're in a sort of rural area outside of Kingston, we have a lot of members who live within a few streets to here, which is really cool, a lot of our neighbors.

Bryn Roshong (00:04:52):

We have 235 shares this year. Yeah, yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:04:55):

I say 250, but yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:04:56):

250.

Wes Hannah (00:04:58):

And then we have a couple other drop sites in Kingston and Saugerties, so super local. Like I said, we scaled... We were able to geographically shrink down because of increased demand, which was really cool.

Bryn Roshong (00:05:11):

Yeah. People bring their... Our neighbors bring their friends with them or, if they miss a week, they'll send their neighbors down to get their share, and then those people become members. Basically, what happens, that's the way that we've grown, and it's really nice because, I wouldn't say terrible, we don't do any advertising because... I don't know. There's just like no time for it.

Wes Hannah (00:05:34):

Yeah. We've been lucky to not... yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:05:35):

Luckily, it works out here that people are interested in being in the CSA. It's very flexible. They get to choose what they take home each week, whether they're on-site or off-site. Off-site, we have a Google Form and they pick and they get a bag packed for them. A lot of people really, really appreciate that. We get to participate in this program that's called CSA is a SNAP, which I don't know if you have it in Vermont, I think it's a federal program.

Wes Hannah (00:06:03):

It's-

Andy Chamberlain (00:06:03):

Maybe called something different or-

Bryn Roshong (00:06:05):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:06:06):

It's funded by GusNIP, which is a USDA program, but it's a Hudson Valley thing. It's administered by the Glynwood Center, and it's something to... I'm sure there are parallel programs in other places, but it's a lot of SNAP users to be CSA members by fronting the money to us essentially and guaranteeing those sales. SNAP users only... Well, first of all, they have a 50% subsidy. For a $25 CSA share, they're paying 1,250 using their SNAP card. They're paying week to week, and so, if they don't show up, that cost is covered by the fund. It makes it really nice for us because it guarantees those sales the way a normally priced CSA does, and it also is really good for the members who get a discount in addition to being able to use their SNAP benefits.

Bryn Roshong (00:07:02):

Yeah. We have about like 10 SNAP members.

Wes Hannah (00:07:05):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:07:06):

Hoping to do more with... It's been cool the last couple of weeks with the SNAP, like the lapse in funding. We had more than 30 members donate their last shares, their last two shares, of the season. They wanted to send it to the local food pantry. Last week, the food pantry came and picked up a significant amount of veggies, and they're coming again this week. To me, that's a huge win of... That's what we're doing it for is neighbors being in community with each other and just people wanting to contribute directly to food security in the area. We brought it up in a newsletter, and then everyone was like, "Oh, my god, yeah, and I'm going to do something," and now there's CSA members who've encouraged us.

(00:07:52):

We have a winter store. Our CSA is over now, but we do all winter an online farm stand where you... It opens on Sunday night, and you can purchase whatever you'd like, and then you come pick up your bag here. Now, we're going to do one in Kingston too, and there's going to be an option to just donate money to a little fund so we can keep donating to the food pantry. We'd like to do more, but it's our income, so we can totally just donate 100%. So it's helpful when members are like, "We want to support donations." It's small, but it's cool. It's cool that people are pulling together that way. You're going to be talking to our other landlord about leasing more land property-

Wes Hannah (00:08:36):

Yeah, it's probably pretty immature to talk about it. But yeah, we are in talks about it looking for a little more land, but we'll see.

Bryn Roshong (00:08:41):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (00:08:42):

How much do you have in cultivation? 7 + 9, 16-ish?

Wes Hannah (00:08:46):

Yeah, probably I think it adds up to 13 or 14. So yeah, we took on those... Yeah, nine... We say nine acres. But when you actually count up rights and stuff, it's seven.

Andy Chamberlain (00:09:00):

Easily.

Bryn Roshong (00:09:01):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:09:02):

We took that over thinking like, "Oh, this will really let us put a lot of land to rest." And then of course, this year, we were suddenly using 80% of it, and it's like, "It didn't work."

Bryn Roshong (00:09:13):

I think always-

Wes Hannah (00:09:14):

Now, we need a little more land. But yeah, we are... I'm sure a lot of farms face those growing pains where we're like... We're starting to feel we can't go too much bigger without... Even if we had the land access, we would start needing some major infrastructure upgrades, like bigger tractor, bigger cooler, stuff like that, if we really want to keep growing.

Bryn Roshong (00:09:36):

Big-ticket upgrades.

Wes Hannah (00:09:38):

Yeah, so we're happy to just... Again, some more land would be cool so that we can do more cover cropping and stuff, but otherwise I think we're happy to just try to get better where we are rather than continuing to grow. Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:09:55):

Yeah. We got that grain drill last year, I think, for the first time, and that's really helped-

Wes Hannah (00:09:58):

Cover crop seeding.

Bryn Roshong (00:09:58):

... cover cropping. Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:10:03):

Yeah. Every year, we make some improvements. We got a new cultivating tractor. We bought a potato digger this year.

Andy Chamberlain (00:10:11):

Fun stuff.

Bryn Roshong (00:10:12):

Yeah. We tripled the size of the barn cooler-

Wes Hannah (00:10:15):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:10:16):

... and it's full.

Wes Hannah (00:10:17):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (00:10:17):

Of course.

Bryn Roshong (00:10:18):

He did it just in time to cram in pallet bins of squash and cabbages.

Wes Hannah (00:10:24):

Yeah, we had a really good storage. We put a lot of stuff into storage for the winter sales. It was our best year. We've got, I don't know, 20 pallet bins full of like beets and carrots and cabbages and then another few bins of winter squash, which is... We always had some, but it's definitely our most significant storage year. It'll be a good winter as long as our greens production holds up because that's really what brings the customers in the wintertime, but we'll see.

(00:10:56):

Yeah, should we walk around a little?

Bryn Roshong (00:10:57):

Yeah. You mentioned we did-

Wes Hannah (00:10:57):

It's a little messy. Yesterday, or Friday rather, was our last day of the crew. It was our last sort of official day of the season, and now, as of tomorrow, we're in winter mode, and we do have a smaller amount of staff staying on. Anyway, point is, we were doing a lot of end-of-season meetings and stuff, and farm looks a little messy. We spent the last week pulling in a lot of-

Andy Chamberlain (00:11:24):

Don't worry about it. Most farms look messy. The bigger the farmer, the more they got going on, the messier it is.

Wes Hannah (00:11:37):

We actually had a better job of getting fields cleaned up than usual, but we're like... Now, we have to put everything away. But yeah, we're definitely lucky. We've got... This barn is probably more significant infrastructure than a lot of farms our size have, so we feel pretty lucky.

Bryn Roshong (00:12:02):

It was here when we got here.

Wes Hannah (00:12:03):

Yeah, yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:12:04):

We moved in. There was a farmer here before... Well, there were a couple farmers here before us, but I think this was built in like 2008 for... That farmer built it... oh, I mean, the landowners built it. It's kind of a funny shape of that all over there because he had this idea of having sheep and cows, and they would be in there, so like the floors sunk for, what do you call that, deep bedding.

Wes Hannah (00:12:28):

Bedding pack.

Bryn Roshong (00:12:29):

Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, we wanted to actually dismantle most of that and level the concrete and expand our wash, which we'll look at in a minute.

Wes Hannah (00:12:43):

Yeah. Yeah, this is our... Into there is where we do our CSA distribution on there.

Bryn Roshong (00:12:50):

Behind the truck.

Wes Hannah (00:12:51):

Those doors through there are our main coolers, and then this big room-

Bryn Roshong (00:12:55):

Hold over there after.

Wes Hannah (00:12:56):

Yeah. This big room is our auxiliary cooler, which right now is just packed full of-

Bryn Roshong (00:13:00):

Let's see it.

Wes Hannah (00:13:01):

... root crops. In the summertime, we use this as our warm cooler for tomatoes and cucurbits. This is our rodent protection system.

Andy Chamberlain (00:13:16):

It's for what?

Wes Hannah (00:13:18):

Rodent protection.

Andy Chamberlain (00:13:19):

Oh.

Wes Hannah (00:13:20):

Because they would get in there otherwise.

Andy Chamberlain (00:13:22):

That's actually pretty slick and...

Bryn Roshong (00:13:25):

Yeah, this is great. It was before that metal would scrape along the floor every time it was open, so this is much nicer.

Wes Hannah (00:13:31):

This has been a slow-

Bryn Roshong (00:13:32):

We can go in there.

Wes Hannah (00:13:33):

We sprayed them a couple years ago and built this interior wall. And then like Bryn said, this year, we were like, "Oh, we need more space," so we just spray-foam the rest and-

Andy Chamberlain (00:13:42):

Like you said, you know how to fill it.

Bryn Roshong (00:13:47):

Maybe it's like, if you build the cooler, the farm will just grow.

Andy Chamberlain (00:13:52):

Yeah, right. No matter how much space you have, you fill it.

Wes Hannah (00:13:54):

Yeah, it's true.

Andy Chamberlain (00:13:57):

It's insane.

Bryn Roshong (00:13:59):

How much did that cost?

Wes Hannah (00:14:01):

What?

Bryn Roshong (00:14:02):

To spray-foam that side, or altogether, would you say?

Wes Hannah (00:14:06):

It was, altogether, $3,000 at most. We also did some other... We did the other stuff.

Bryn Roshong (00:14:17):

Do you know how many square feet it is?

Wes Hannah (00:14:18):

I don't know.

Bryn Roshong (00:14:18):

No? Okay.

Wes Hannah (00:14:18):

Oh.

Bryn Roshong (00:14:18):

The wash pack is-

Wes Hannah (00:14:25):

We also built ourselves a little office a couple years ago, which has been nice. Prior to this-

Speaker 1 (00:14:32):

Wait, you guys built it?

Wes Hannah (00:14:33):

Oh, grandpa and I built it, yeah. Prior to that, we were using our living room or dining room, so it's been nice to have a real space where-

Speaker 1 (00:14:40):

You made them, Daddy?

Wes Hannah (00:14:43):

Yes.

Andy Chamberlain (00:14:44):

To separate work from home maybe.

Wes Hannah (00:14:46):

Yeah, and now other people on the team can go and print pack sheets or whatever.

Andy Chamberlain (00:14:50):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:14:53):

Again, a little disorganized, but we do have... This is our irrigation nook, which is pretty well organized during-

Bryn Roshong (00:14:59):

[Inaudible 00:15:00].

Wes Hannah (00:15:00):

... most of the year. We have... This is our fertilizer storage area, which is pretty empty now. And then this is all of our packaging-

Andy Chamberlain (00:15:15):

Dry packaging, yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:15:15):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:15:15):

This is our 14 by 16 wash pack room where we do all the-

Andy Chamberlain (00:15:21):

[inaudible 00:15:22] is all the way through. Cool.

Bryn Roshong (00:15:27):

Yeah, the table gets set up, and there's a stock tank, and then so triple-wash arugula, lettuce, power greens.

Wes Hannah (00:15:34):

Yeah. Aside from the dog being in here, this is a New York State 20-C license, certified kitchen-

Andy Chamberlain (00:15:46):

Oh, nice.

Wes Hannah (00:15:46):

... which we do... I know a lot of farms don't...

Speaker 1 (00:15:49):

What is this?

Wes Hannah (00:15:53):

Yeah, spinner.

(00:15:53):

A lot of farms don't need this for... All we use it for officially is washing and packing cut greens, which I know different people have different opinions on whether or not you need the 20-C license. We got nicked our first season. We got a surprise inspection, and we did not actually have the certification because we were selling bagged cut greens to a local grocery store, so I think that put us on their radar. Anyway, we-

Bryn Roshong (00:16:24):

The inspector saw it on the shelf and was like, "Oh." We don't check-

Wes Hannah (00:16:29):

We did get the... It didn't take much to upgrade. We have a three-bin wash system, washable ones and all that.

Andy Chamberlain (00:16:37):

You need that certification for that product?

Wes Hannah (00:16:39):

That, yes.

Bryn Roshong (00:16:41):

Yeah. Putting greens in a bag is arguably a value-added process that requires [inaudible 00:16:48] inspection.

Wes Hannah (00:16:49):

It's a funny thing because I don't know if it's state by state. We've gotten-

Andy Chamberlain (00:16:51):

I think so.

Wes Hannah (00:16:52):

We know a lot of people who do the exact same thing as us and don't get that, have a 20-C license. Even talking to inspectors, they seem very... Talking to people from Ag and Markets, it seems like there's a large gray area, but anyway it was-

Andy Chamberlain (00:17:11):

Yeah, and Vermont at least generally consider it just packaged vegetables, unless you're slicing and dicing it.

Wes Hannah (00:17:21):

Yeah. Right, that makes sense.

Andy Chamberlain (00:17:23):

Even though lettuce mix is ready-to-eat, that's kind of the determination, but...

Wes Hannah (00:17:31):

Yeah. Anyway, we did get certified, and it's no big deal. It's obviously a good thing to be kept on our toes in terms of cleanliness and stuff. But yeah, so this is the room... This is what we use primarily for just washing, like greens, and then also some packing. We also do some packing out under the awning when necessary, just for... If we have six people working, we can't all be in here. This is what we were hoping to build out if we were going to push out that way and... because, right now, we do all of spraying and dunking out on a wash pad out back. One day we will have a more cohesive, inclusive space.

Bryn Roshong (00:18:19):

Yeah. When we were designing it, we struggled... One thing that we were going back and forth on a little bit was whether to put a cooler in the barn or not because... We'll show you. We have a cooler over under our garage that is... It's adequate, but it's inefficient because it's you have to carry crates by hand down a hallway through this kind of funny door.

Wes Hannah (00:18:44):

There's no pallet doors.

Bryn Roshong (00:18:45):

Yeah, so it'd be great to have a cooler with a palletized system, so it's just... Loading the market truck in the morning, I don't do it, but it's very time consuming. Unloading it is very time consuming. But if you just had everything on a pallet and you could just load from there, it'd save yourself probably 20 minutes, half an hour at least.

Wes Hannah (00:19:03):

Right, yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:19:03):

But then there's this question of the market has one set of needs in a way, and then the CSA is over there, so having everything centralized here doesn't make sense for CSA distribution because then you're coming back and forth. So should we have two coolers? Maybe, but then you're... I don't know. So it's like a lot of...

Wes Hannah (00:19:26):

Yeah, no matter what, having the washing and the CSA distribution in different spaces, it's going to be... There's no perfect system.

Bryn Roshong (00:19:33):

Could you CSA over here? Not really. It kind of works pretty well where it is.

Wes Hannah (00:19:40):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:19:40):

But we can show you the pad out back and-

Andy Chamberlain (00:19:42):

Yep.

Wes Hannah (00:19:45):

This is the only part of the barn that is random storage.

Bryn Roshong (00:19:49):

Yeah, this was all here before we got here.

Andy Chamberlain (00:19:51):

But yeah, this is where we do our wash, our spray dunk, and we just set up... We have folding tables and a barrel washer. We set up an easy-up tent when we're here. It's an imperfect system. We got this pad poured two years ago, and I think we kind of held off on going any further in terms of upgrading the space until we had a big picture, but... Yeah, we are going to put on some sort of roof or something because it's a little weird.

Bryn Roshong (00:20:26):

Yeah. We would have liked to... In our grant, we would have brought the wash pack out to here.

Andy Chamberlain (00:20:33):

Right.

Wes Hannah (00:20:33):

Yeah, fill the floor, put some [inaudible 00:20:36] in.

Bryn Roshong (00:20:36):

Have drainage.

Wes Hannah (00:20:38):

And then it could be like one big room with a big door that opens so you could go in and out, you could... We'll do it. We'll get there.

Bryn Roshong (00:20:44):

Yeah, we just got to... It was like 60 grand, and that's a little much for us to self-fund right now, but I think we could pare it down and figure out-

Wes Hannah (00:20:53):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:20:54):

... because I think we definitely need it. It's hard in the winter, especially if it's like... It's hard to... If you're not the owner of the business, standing there in the freezing cold washing veggies is a hard thing to ask someone else to do.

Andy Chamberlain (00:21:09):

Yeah, that's not fun for anybody.

Bryn Roshong (00:21:10):

Wes will do it.

Wes Hannah (00:21:10):

Yeah, yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:21:15):

Yeah, it's just better all around.

Andy Chamberlain (00:21:18):

So would your goal be have that whole area meet the food safety certification, or would it not matter?

Wes Hannah (00:21:25):

I think so, yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:21:25):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:21:27):

I don't know if we would need to, but that would be the goal, to have one big room that had all-

Andy Chamberlain (00:21:32):

What are some of the key requirements for that?

Wes Hannah (00:21:36):

Washable walls, floor drains, I think, and then little things about not having-

Andy Chamberlain (00:21:45):

Fairly achievable.

Wes Hannah (00:21:47):

... stuff off of floor. Yeah, it's stuff that is good hygiene anyway.

Andy Chamberlain (00:21:51):

Right.

Wes Hannah (00:21:51):

I don't think we could have this door officially... This door would have to be closed while it's being a 20C. I don't know if... Maybe we'd have some sort of internal wall or something, so you could do spraying out here if you wanted, but also someone could be washing greens in a professional way inside.

Andy Chamberlain (00:22:12):

Right, right, something that can be closed off from birds and-

Wes Hannah (00:22:16):

Yeah, exactly.

Andy Chamberlain (00:22:18):

... terribly unhygienic dogs and all these things, yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:22:22):

Yeah. This is a nice logical... We can back our... We harvest into bins, into a pickup truck, and then this is where we back up to so you can unload easy. It is a nice space. In terms of the inefficiency of the coolers and this, everything, this is not terrible. You can move stuff out. You could even... We could move stuff by pallet from here to the awning, and then you'd have to walk it in by hand into the cooler itself.

Andy Chamberlain (00:22:54):

Just this pad probably was a nice upgrade.

Wes Hannah (00:22:57):

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's funny, every time you make an upgrade, you're like, "Wow, I can't believe we used to do it any other way."

Andy Chamberlain (00:23:03):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:23:04):

Yeah, right, we were just on the gravel before and it was just-

Bryn Roshong (00:23:09):

Yeah. Is that what you were doing?

Wes Hannah (00:23:09):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:23:12):

Did you... Oh, no, you would do spray.

Wes Hannah (00:23:13):

We'd be under the tree over there.

Bryn Roshong (00:23:15):

Yeah. It was in our driveways, washing away our driveway, and we're like, "Maybe you shouldn't do this." Just getting truckloads of gravel every winter and being like, "Why is this happening?"

Wes Hannah (00:23:24):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:23:26):

Yeah. Yeah, this has been... Yeah, pad is a great thing.

Wes Hannah (00:23:29):

Yeah. Yeah, we actually got another... We got concrete [inaudible 00:23:34]. We bought... This was two years ago, so then this past summer we paid for another concrete pad down below, which is where we... We're buying a lot of compost, and we've always... For six years, we just get compost dumped in the same spot every year, and it was just like... And then we go and scoop it by the tractor bucket. Over time, it was just a gross mud pit, and it would just... Anytime it rained, it would just be this giant marsh that you couldn't... Actually, you could only go in with the tractor to scoop if it was dry out. If it was at all muddy the tractor would get stuck. So yeah, this year. We bought whatever, a $20,000 concrete pad, and-

Bryn Roshong (00:24:15):

So expensive. We're kind of amazed-

Wes Hannah (00:24:16):

... now, the truck backs up, dumps it there, and it's great.

Bryn Roshong (00:24:19):

And it's not big enough already.

Wes Hannah (00:24:20):

Yeah. As soon as we got it, the concrete guy was like, "This is way too big. You should go smaller."

Bryn Roshong (00:24:30):

Oh, really?

Wes Hannah (00:24:30):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:24:30):

Oh, it's funny. I saw it, and I was like, "I think we should have bigger."

Wes Hannah (00:24:31):

She recommend 20 by 30, and we went... it's 30 by 30, and yeah, it's already... Yeah, we get compost delivered by a walking floor tractor trailer. We have something like 100 yards there-

Andy Chamberlain (00:24:44):

Awesome.

Wes Hannah (00:24:45):

... and it's hot.

Bryn Roshong (00:24:45):

So yeah, I think this... It's kind of interesting, but bringing out the wash pack would be great, expanding it, but also putting a cooler in here I think would be awesome, like a pallet door one. But then it's like we lose space for Westby. It's a lot of big round straw bales, and those typically go in here, so then we'd have to build something over there to cover it. So it just goes on and on.

Wes Hannah (00:25:16):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (00:25:18):

Which you could do.

Wes Hannah (00:25:19):

Yeah, we could, for sure.

Andy Chamberlain (00:25:19):

A roof set up, you could extend that to match the other end.

Wes Hannah (00:25:19):

Yeah. I regret... If we had thought things through, we wouldn't have put the... We have a generator over there. That, we just had that five years ago, and I regret it because we could have used this space more efficiently.

Andy Chamberlain (00:25:39):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:25:40):

Yeah, yeah, we definitely can, and we talked about getting some real low-budget prefab metal building that we could just put here for straw bales.

Andy Chamberlain (00:25:51):

Yeah, yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:25:55):

What?

Bryn Roshong (00:25:56):

I can just show you the CSA area. Oh, I'm going to turn off the lights. I'll be right back.

Wes Hannah (00:26:02):

Yeah, it's funny. Obviously, we're very lucky, and I'm not... Wait a minute. I wish also is that we had a septic system in the barn too, because we don't. That's one of our drawbacks is we don't have... We don't have a bathroom, so the crew just uses our house bathroom, which is just fine with us. It just feels unprofessional in terms of providing a professional workspace. And then, also, in the washroom, when we got here, it was just like that... The wash sink in the washroom just ran out. There was just a pipe that went out the building, and so we put in a French drain... a dry well I mean, and it immediately... Within a year, it was full of sand. Last year, we put in a huge 500 gallon dry well that will hopefully last for a while.

(00:26:58):

Yeah, so this is our CSA area. That's just a little storage room. We store CSA supplies. That's where we keep all of our seedling trays and stuff.

Andy Chamberlain (00:27:11):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:27:12):

It's so unphotogenic.

Wes Hannah (00:27:14):

Yeah, I know. Everything's like grainy.

Bryn Roshong (00:27:16):

Oh, man.

Wes Hannah (00:27:17):

Anyway, we have two coolers, this door and then down there. We've been using these as two different temperature coolers, but I think this year we're actually going to take out that interior wall and build one big cooler.

Bryn Roshong (00:27:32):

Yeah. And then where would you put the warm stuff?

Wes Hannah (00:27:34):

In the barn.

Bryn Roshong (00:27:35):

Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 (00:27:35):

Daddy, I almost crashed you.

Wes Hannah (00:27:35):

Oh, that's concerning.

Bryn Roshong (00:27:40):

We buy in and sell some chicken. People self-serve.

Wes Hannah (00:27:43):

We act as a-

Bryn Roshong (00:27:44):

We have a meat CSA.

Andy Chamberlain (00:27:44):

Just shooting here for another time, so... Oh, nice.

Bryn Roshong (00:27:48):

And then this is our main cooler or the one that gets used all the time.

Speaker 1 (00:27:52):

[inaudible 00:27:54]

Andy Chamberlain (00:27:54):

Oh, yeah? Nice.

Bryn Roshong (00:27:58):

She's a workhorse. Wes has replaced the air conditioner only five times.

Andy Chamberlain (00:28:05):

So this location works well for CSA pickup because it's out of the weather and it's right next to the coolers primarily?

Wes Hannah (00:28:12):

Yeah. People come in, park right along here. Obviously, cooler proximity is good too, but it is... Despite what it looks right now, we do make it look pretty nice during CSA, and yeah, dry. We'll get a fresh load of gravel, so it's a little prettier. We have this space over here. It's a nice little pollinator garden that we... Yeah, it is a nice... Yeah, and the CSA, we have... On Tuesdays, we have 120 people coming all within a couple hours, so it's pretty hectic, and yeah, we definitely... We run out of parking space on both sides of the driveway there, and this space here might have 10 different families in it at one time. It's crazy.

Andy Chamberlain (00:29:00):

It's busy.

Wes Hannah (00:29:02):

Which is cool. Actually, we had the-

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:29:04]

Wes Hannah (00:29:03):

... busy.

Andy Chamberlain (00:29:03):

It's busy.

Wes Hannah (00:29:03):

Which is cool. Actually, the town redid the road last year and they actually stopped right at our driveway. So clearly we represent a majority of the traffic on the road that they... That was awkward. So CSA wise, like Bryn said, we try to be very flexible. So we have a point system. So members have seven or nine or five whatever points and they can use those to select whatever they want. So when they come here on the farm, we lay out everything. So we might have 25 or 30 different things available, and then little signs that'll say one bunch of kale is a point or three pounds of tomatoes or whatever. So they can just shop for themselves. And then for the offsite, we just use a simple Google form where I put available what there is, and then at the end of the night before the harvest, we export it to it and create a harvest list, and then put together those pack sheets. So we do it all ourselves just using Google Docs and OpenOffice. And every year we talk about switching to...

Bryn Roshong (00:30:13):

GrownBy.

Wes Hannah (00:30:13):

GrownBy or something.

Bryn Roshong (00:30:15):

We might do it this year. This is our pad. You can see it's covered.

Wes Hannah (00:30:19):

Oh yeah, yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (00:30:19):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:30:20):

Exactly. Yeah, full. Yeah, we also generate a ton of greenhouse compost from shoots and micro greens and stuff. So we were like, "Oh, if we had a bigger pad, we could have had a separate..." Just try to reuse all that potting mix, which otherwise goes to waste.

Andy Chamberlain (00:30:41):

Right.

Bryn Roshong (00:30:42):

Maybe next year put a pad here?

Wes Hannah (00:30:44):

Yeah, potentially.

Bryn Roshong (00:30:46):

This is a CSA pick your own herb garden. It's been really nice.

Andy Chamberlain (00:30:50):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:30:54):

Five years ago or so, we started one and then made the mistake of planting mint and the mint took everything over. And then we tried for two seasons to solarize it and it didn't do it. And then finally, built-

Wes Hannah (00:31:05):

We had a volunteer CSA member who was spending hours every week pulling mint, and finally even she gave up and we built these planters.

Bryn Roshong (00:31:12):

And microphones [inaudible 00:31:13].

Wes Hannah (00:31:13):

Yeah, so we try to-

Andy Chamberlain (00:31:14):

So note to others, put mint in its own bed.

Wes Hannah (00:31:16):

Yeah, yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:31:16):

Yeah. Yes, don't even...

Wes Hannah (00:31:19):

We try to give the CSA members like a really good experience coming here. So I mean that's just our perennial herbs.

Andy Chamberlain (00:31:25):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:31:25):

But we'll have... This upcoming year, this entire field here, this in cover crop is going to be member pick your own. And so it's all in addition to the CSA share that they buy. It's like a...

Bryn Roshong (00:31:41):

It's included.

Wes Hannah (00:31:41):

Just a free included thing. And so this is where we put flowers, herbs, cherry tomatoes, hot peppers, everything.

Bryn Roshong (00:31:48):

But we do pick from it for the market too.

Wes Hannah (00:31:49):

Yeah. And then it works out well, because CSA members are primarily picking this stuff on Tuesday when they come. So then on Friday when we're harvesting for the market, it's a perfect twice a week harvest schedule for things like beans and peas and cherry tomatoes. So yeah, we do get a lot of stuff for ourselves out of it. Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:32:08):

But I don't know, I think we don't charge enough.

Wes Hannah (00:32:11):

It is frankly, a very good deal.

Bryn Roshong (00:32:13):

Yeah. People come out with armloads of flowers and there's still plenty, we're just like, man.

Wes Hannah (00:32:20):

But it's awesome.

Bryn Roshong (00:32:21):

But it makes people so happy. They come here, it's the thing people talk about.

Wes Hannah (00:32:25):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:32:25):

The connection to the land is what is most rewarding for people, I mean the food too, but the people who come here just cry sometimes. They're so happy when they come down here.

Wes Hannah (00:32:36):

Yeah. And the CSA members might be here for an hour at their pickup.

Bryn Roshong (00:32:39):

Oh my gosh, more.

Wes Hannah (00:32:40):

Hang out down here, maybe they play on the playground stuff we have. Yeah, I think it's a high point of a lot of people's week.

Bryn Roshong (00:32:49):

Yeah. It's a whole scene. People come down here, and then they share scissors and they like meet a neighbor they hadn't known. They share... People told me stories of like, "Oh, I just got this great recipe from this other person that I didn't realize also lived on Ashokan Road up here, and I'm going to make this cherry tomato thing." I'm just like, it's a whole world down here in the pick your own. And it's a lot of people's main experience of gardening and nature. It's really nice.

Andy Chamberlain (00:33:16):

You may have said it, but I might have missed it. Is that the pick your own opportunity an option or do all CSA members have that option?

Wes Hannah (00:33:26):

Everyone has it.

Andy Chamberlain (00:33:26):

Yep.

Wes Hannah (00:33:27):

I mean, obviously it's primarily utilized by the people who pick up on the farm, but even people who pick up in Kingston are welcome to drive here.

Andy Chamberlain (00:33:34):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:33:35):

And that's the other thing about the flexibility, is people aren't... I mean, people have one official site that is in our system where they pick up, but week to week they can switch wherever they want.

Andy Chamberlain (00:33:44):

Oh, okay.

Wes Hannah (00:33:45):

So we might have somebody... We might say in our newsletter like, "Oh, the cheery tomatoes are going really strong." And so we'll have somebody from Kingston say that they want to switch to the farm pickup so they can get some tomatoes.

Andy Chamberlain (00:33:57):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:33:59):

Yeah, we're small. I mean 235 is a lot, but it's small enough that we still can be very flexible. I mean, we might spend an hour a week on average doing emails and responding, making changes in the system, but it's not too much of a burden and we know all our members. When we're packing bags, sometimes Adri who works for us will be like, "Oh, I see this person, normally they pick up over there, but they put down this site instead. We should make sure it wasn't a mistake." And I'll text them real quick and just ask if... Yeah, so it's cool to have a close [inaudible 00:34:36].

Andy Chamberlain (00:34:35):

The personal touch?

Wes Hannah (00:34:36):

Yeah. So yeah, like I said, we do a lot of micro greens and shoots and stuff. Looks a little dingy in the light of the sun. But actually the shoots are how we started. Before we were on this land, we started Solid Ground Farm as a shoots and microgreens farm and then we expanded once we got here. So this is a really nice backbone to the CSA. On average, we probably get... If you think about points per week, if we have 230 members times seven points, that's whatever, 1400, a thousand points, whatever it is, probably 10% of them, 10% of those points are generated in the greenhouse, which for a small farm with space constraints is really nice that we can produce so much value out of this space.

Ellie (00:35:38):

[inaudible 00:35:39].

Wes Hannah (00:35:38):

Yes.

Bryn Roshong (00:35:38):

Aim low.

Andy Chamberlain (00:35:38):

Are these cages for rodent control?

Wes Hannah (00:35:44):

Squirrels. Yeah, squirrels or rodents or something. They really like the sunflowers.

Bryn Roshong (00:35:50):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:35:51):

We have traps, and obviously we fill in holes when we find them, but man, they are persistent. So the cages are the only sure thing.

Bryn Roshong (00:35:58):

This spring you guys did the whole digging out the edge and putting a hardware cloth at an L underneath to try to get rodents...

Wes Hannah (00:36:05):

And it held them for six months. And then at some point I think they realized they can just dig a hole. They just chew holes in the plastic.

Andy Chamberlain (00:36:11):

They go deeper? Oh yeah, right.

Wes Hannah (00:36:13):

So yeah, it's...

Bryn Roshong (00:36:15):

These are nice though. This version is nicer than the old one.

Wes Hannah (00:36:17):

Yeah, I think one of the many improvement projects for the winter is to build more of these because it's... I mean, yeah, it's obviously depressing to come out and see, oh, something got into this round spicy microgreens, and we just have to toss it all. It's a huge waste.

Andy Chamberlain (00:36:35):

Yeah, right.

Wes Hannah (00:36:36):

So more cages. I mean, it's a bummer. I wish we could make the space actually animal proof, but yeah, I think we're going to make more cages. We do have a big seedling sale in the fall, so that's part of what this silly hanging system is.

Andy Chamberlain (00:36:52):

Oh, okay.

Wes Hannah (00:36:55):

Just for the month of May, this space is so filled that it's just insane. You can barely get down the aisles, the hanging things are full. Sometimes we've even had to tuck things onto the ground under the shelves.

Bryn Roshong (00:37:09):

Takes an hour and a half to water.

Wes Hannah (00:37:12):

Yeah. Yeah, and the seedlings have been nice. We've been doing that almost since the beginning and it's been slowly growing and it's good. We started out focusing more on selling at the farm, doing a big seedling sale at the farm. I think we're realizing that the farmer's market is a much easier way to sell them and I think we've set ourselves up well as the main seedling seller in May. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of work and there's a lot of costs with the biodegradable pots and all the...

Bryn Roshong (00:37:53):

We do CowPots.

Wes Hannah (00:37:53):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:37:55):

We started as a microgreen and shoot operation in 2015, I think before we had any land. Wes was working at Hearty Roots Farm, which you might know, BR and Lindsay Shute. And we borrowed space in their greenhouse, they were very nice to let us have. Wes built a table in the back and that's where we would grow them. And that's how we started. And we applied to the Kingston Farmers Market and got a spot there just for shoots and microgreens. And we were a very tiny operation and we just hustled and did that. I'm not farming full time anymore and I wasn't at that point either. So Wes was really doing it. On Friday night, he'd bring home all the trays of everything.

Wes Hannah (00:38:41):

Yeah, I lit them up in our van-

Bryn Roshong (00:38:42):

Yeah, bring them home.

Wes Hannah (00:38:42):

... drive the trays home. And then I would stay up until one in the morning cutting and packaging.

Bryn Roshong (00:38:46):

Yeah. And then-

Wes Hannah (00:38:48):

We would just put stuff in our refrigerator because we didn't have a cooler.

Bryn Roshong (00:38:52):

Yeah, it was definitely nuts. We should have had a 20 C and we didn't. But we were very clean, but like yeah, our refrigerator, we would just... It's so funny. And that's all we were allowed to sell at the market. And then we were in north of here at this amazing place called Pathfinder Farm with our mentor, Jimmy Bulich, who I got to graze his cattle, and we got put up a greenhouse and had a garden there. And we started a CSA in 2016 with a combo of our veggies and Hearty Roots veggies and started a small membership.

(00:39:28):

And then in 2016, we were trying to find our own land and we were in Catskill north of here, and we entered into three different negotiation conversations with non-farming landowners who had good farmlands and each one of them fell apart because of just the totally unrealistic expectations of the landowners of like, our rent would be $7,000 a year so they could cover their taxes, or we would have a really, a $50,000 deer fence that looked pretty and made it look like a park.

Wes Hannah (00:40:02):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:40:02):

Or when they realized like, "Oh wait, you're going to be here early in the morning with a tractor and you're going to have piles of compost and all?" They're like, "No, no, no. We don't actually want that on our estate." And we're like, why do all of these non-farming people have the best farmland and we can't use it?

Wes Hannah (00:40:17):

Or in some cases it was somebody had 500 acres of his land and it was just like, "It's not worth the liability of leasing you two acres and all the traffic." Just like-

Bryn Roshong (00:40:29):

It could be that.

Wes Hannah (00:40:29):

... "It's such a hassle that it's just not worth the money," which I respect.

Bryn Roshong (00:40:35):

God, it was really hard. We almost just quit, because after enough of those conversations, you're like, "I guess there's nowhere for us to go." But then this property, our dear friend was leasing here and she was transitioning out of farming and she just encouraged us to take over her lease. And so we were really lucky. We did, and it's been awesome being here just with the community of people who are interested in eating local food and coming to the farm. And the farmer's market's great, it's been really been able to support us.

Andy Chamberlain (00:41:04):

So this property wasn't veggies before you were here?

Wes Hannah (00:41:05):

Mm-hmm. Yeah, there've been at least three farmers that we knew prior to us.

Bryn Roshong (00:41:10):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:41:12):

So far, we've held the record, I think, for the longest tenure here, and obviously we plan to be here forever. But yeah, I don't know-

Andy Chamberlain (00:41:21):

They were used to the tractors and the compost piles at that point, which is good.

Wes Hannah (00:41:25):

Exactly. Yeah, our neighbors are great. I mean, there's only seven neighbors on the street, half of them are CSA members, and everybody's very appreciative and welcoming of us as the farm on the street.

Andy Chamberlain (00:41:37):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:41:37):

And it's great land. I mean, it's along the Esopus Creek. And you probably came along Hurley Mountain Road?

Andy Chamberlain (00:41:42):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:41:42):

And you were driving along those endless farm fields.

Andy Chamberlain (00:41:45):

A lot of farms.

Bryn Roshong (00:41:45):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:41:45):

Yeah, that's gorgeous, man.

Bryn Roshong (00:41:47):

There's the Davenport family who's been here forever. They have a lot of that land. The Farm Hub is a 1600 acre farm along there and it's all this beautiful prime soil bottom land. And our land is uphill a little bit from it, but we're still the same amazing farmland. You can look at the satellite and it's just very cool, this long, long strip of beautiful farmland here that we get to be part of. But it's small here in the little valley, but so that's a challenge is-

Wes Hannah (00:42:17):

Yeah, we learned one thing about the valleys-

Bryn Roshong (00:42:18):

... having two properties.

Wes Hannah (00:42:20):

Yeah, yeah. There's obviously the logistical hassle of that.

Bryn Roshong (00:42:23):

With all of our wash pack here and infrastructure here in every... So the carting back and forth, we're figuring it out.

Wes Hannah (00:42:30):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:42:31):

We used to have a piece of three acres in Kingston 20 minutes away. So Wes was hauling the tractor, having to go out at night, put it on the trailer and get it all ready late at night to go there a couple times or once a week. And then we're paying our crew for people to drive basically 40 minutes a couple days a week. It was just it wasn't...

Wes Hannah (00:42:51):

Yeah, it was dumb.

Bryn Roshong (00:42:53):

It wasn't working.

Andy Chamberlain (00:42:54):

Right.

Bryn Roshong (00:42:55):

Yeah. You were going to say about the land, the valley.

Wes Hannah (00:42:58):

Oh no, I don't know. I was thinking one takeaway we've learned, I guess it's obvious, but we really threw a lot of different irons in the fire as we figured out what would work. So Bryn said, I mean, I think it's noteworthy that we started out, even once we got here at the Kingston market, we started just with the shoots because that's what the market was looking for or willing to take on a shoots vendor and they didn't need a veggie vendor. And if we'd applied as a veggie vendor, we would have not been accepted. So we got our foot in the door, and then a couple years later when we heard they were looking for a veggie vendor, then we were able to expand to that. And we did that, but then like I said, we did the city market. We also-

Bryn Roshong (00:43:47):

Oh yeah, the city market.

Wes Hannah (00:43:49):

... it was the Poughkeepsie Farmers market that we did first season.

Bryn Roshong (00:43:54):

That was terrible.

Wes Hannah (00:43:54):

And we also did a CSA distribution in Catskill, which is 45 minutes away. Oh, we also did a CSA distribution in the city in Washington Heights for three years.

Bryn Roshong (00:44:06):

Oh yeah, the school.

Wes Hannah (00:44:06):

So we've tried a lot of things that failed and we've winnowed out and figured out what things are successful.

Bryn Roshong (00:44:13):

I think that's a great thing about you though, is you always want to try the hard things. I really did not want to ever do a city market. I was just like, "Are you kidding? Getting up at 4:30 in the morning and then coming home at eight at night. And it costs what? $800 just to even go. And how much money do you have to make?" And Wes was like, "No, let's try it." And did it for a number of years and I wouldn't... I mean I think you can't... It's better to do it and learn that it's not working or learn that it is working ideally, than to just not try things if you have the energy and the potential to do it. It's better to have loved and have lost than never have loved at all. Better try the market and it not work out and then through the experience-

Andy Chamberlain (00:44:55):

Then you know and you learn other things along the way., yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:44:59):

Yeah. It helps hone your direction of like, "Okay, now what do I want to do," and you get a real sense of your costs about it. But COVID was a huge reason. We used to go to the city and do a city market.

Wes Hannah (00:45:12):

[inaudible 00:45:13].

Bryn Roshong (00:45:13):

Oh, you did that about the farm store?

Wes Hannah (00:45:17):

Oh no, not that part.

Bryn Roshong (00:45:17):

And so the reason that we started doing our online farm store was because of COVID. And it gave us the willingness to try, because we had just assumed like, oh, not enough people would be interested. I don't remember exactly what all it was. But then we did it and there was a lot of interest and so we... It's great, because it's like a farmer's market essentially. It's the equivalent of a good, decent winter farmers market, but is here on the farm.

Wes Hannah (00:45:45):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:45:45):

And we get to keep a relationship with a lot of our members over the winter, even though we don't want to do a winter CSA, because it's too stressful, I guess. Or I don't know, maybe you could say why, but ...

Wes Hannah (00:46:00):

I mean the farm stand is nice, because we don't have to over come in.

Bryn Roshong (00:46:07):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:46:07):

In mid-January, if it's a really cold week, we can just say like, "We're just not going to harvest any greens this week," and it's not a big deal.

Bryn Roshong (00:46:12):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:46:13):

I don't feel like I'm letting anyone down by...

(00:46:17):

Other noteworthy things when we got here, I mean, as like a lot of farms do, the previous folks had just had fields and beds haphazard to try to maximize space.

Andy Chamberlain (00:46:30):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:46:30):

And we decided even though we actually lose some space, everything is all 200 foot rectangles, so all the reds are 200 feet, which is just so much better. So when you pull out a piece of row cover, you don't have to wonder how long it is, everything's 200 feet. We can reuse sprinkler lines anywhere. I mean, obviously that's a minor thing, but to me that was an innovation.

Andy Chamberlain (00:46:56):

No, no, it's good. You're planning too.

Wes Hannah (00:46:59):

But yeah, so we've got four high tunnels, they're all Rimol, well, except for the one that was here when we got here. They're all Rimol high tunnels.

Bryn Roshong (00:47:06):

Ellie, wait a second.

Wes Hannah (00:47:08):

And then four Caterpillar tunnels that we got from... It's the Farmer Friend design and we bought... We wanted them to be 200 feet long so they could be on our beds. So they don't sell 200 foot Caterpillars, so we buy 200 foot tunnels and then we just connect them to make one big one. So yeah, in the wintertime, all eight of those structures are mostly salanova, spinach, kale and chard, and then we will dedicate... This is an experiment to do green garlic that we're hoping will be available much earlier than our field green garlic. And then we also have bok choy and whatever, other random small greens. And then in the summertime, those eight structures are all tomatoes, cukes, ginger.

(00:48:02):

This year, we've always done a small amount of ginger. This year we expanded and we actually did an entire tunnel, 600 foot beds of ginger, which was really good. I mean, all fall we were just selling... We never ran out. We had it. And in fact, yesterday, we sold the last of it yesterday. We've gotten to the point where I think we figured out the humidity control, so we'll harvest it and control it... Sorry, we'll keep it in the cooler for two or three weeks, which is nice. I mean, that's a really good seller. I haven't worked out the exact... I don't know exactly what's the most profitable for high tunnel space, but I feel like we probably get, I don't know, probably 12 to 1500 bunches of ginger, which is I don't know, eight or $10,000 of that. That seems like a good use of a high tunnel.

Andy Chamberlain (00:48:58):

Yeah, I think so.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:00):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:49:01):

Those numbers are probably optimistic, but I'm sure six or eight at most.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:04):

You did a whole tunnel?

Wes Hannah (00:49:05):

Yeah, this year we did six beds.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:07):

That's great. Yeah, we sold really all of it.

Wes Hannah (00:49:10):

Yeah, we sold them last of it yesterday.

Andy Chamberlain (00:49:11):

That's the best part.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:12):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (00:49:13):

Sell all the tunnels out of anything. That's good.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:16):

Yeah. And it's a funny thing at the... We give it in our CSA as a point also, so people get a good deal on that, because the point is really 450, but a bunch of garlic-

Wes Hannah (00:49:27):

I think to a member the cost is 450.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:30):

But a bunch of ginger is 650 or six?

Wes Hannah (00:49:34):

Six.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:34):

Six.

Wes Hannah (00:49:34):

At the market, yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:34):

So they get a little bit of a deal. And at the market, it's fun because people get it and then it has a long green. So they put it in their bag and people walk around with this flag.

Andy Chamberlain (00:49:45):

It's like a flag.

Wes Hannah (00:49:45):

Yeah, exactly. [inaudible 00:49:45], "Where did you get that?"

Bryn Roshong (00:49:45):

And other people see it, and they're like, "Where did you get that?" And they're like, "Oh." And I noticed there's another vendor that does that with fennel, where they leave the tops on and because it's a similar thing of like, "Oh, where'd you get that?" "Oh, over there." So it's so funny.

Andy Chamberlain (00:49:54):

Yeah, it's smart.

Bryn Roshong (00:49:55):

Yeah. Big, long, showy things are great for markets.

Andy Chamberlain (00:50:00):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:50:01):

Yeah. Like Bryn said, we buy in a lot of straw mulch just from a local farm and we try to do a lot of straw mulching. We've been experimenting... Truthfully, we do do some or whatever, I feel like we do the standard amount of plastic mulch. I don't love the plastic. We do sometimes get feedback from members who don't love it, but it is necessary. We do plastic on all of our solonums, cucurbits, and our kale, just because the kale's in the ground so long that it gets awful if we don't.

Andy Chamberlain (00:50:39):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:50:39):

We do do some landscape fabric. I mean, in some cases we use landscape fabric between plastic aisles on vining, like cucurbits and sweet potatoes. We also do a little bit of just landscape fabric, like our Caterpillar tunnels with the tomatoes. We have holes burned. This year we experimented for the first time with a little bit of a no-till thing that was spearheaded by our farm manager, Dominic. And it was a success, though I think we can upgrade it, but we had a rye vetch bed that we should have crimped it, but we weren't planning ahead, so we mowed it instead.

(00:51:19):

And then we did a no-till, we just used a single shank to cut a trench, which we fertilized and then planted into, and it worked pretty well. I mean, eventually the weeds did take over. We should have had a thicker cover crop pack or something, but it was fun. I mean, the point is, we're trying to figure out ways we can reduce the plastic while also still keeping the weeds at bay. We have a couple of cultivating tractors, which we use for a lot of our small, like lettuces and baby brassicas and stuff. We do try to cultivate every week. But oftentimes it's just for one reason or another, we don't get to things and plastic is obviously really nice.

Andy Chamberlain (00:52:06):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:52:07):

For cultivating, we have some old Gs and an Oggun, which we didn't realize we were actually a guinea pig for that one.

Wes Hannah (00:52:14):

Yeah. Do you know Oggun?

Andy Chamberlain (00:52:14):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:52:18):

Yeah, it's fine. I mean, on the record, it's fine. I wish we had gone with...

Bryn Roshong (00:52:23):

Tilmor?

Wes Hannah (00:52:25):

Tilmor.

Bryn Roshong (00:52:25):

It's just a more trusted, tested brand.

Wes Hannah (00:52:26):

But yeah, it's been all right. A few things broke on it. We've had to fix some things and the-

Bryn Roshong (00:52:35):

Wes has redesigned things and they've been like, "Can you send us..."

Wes Hannah (00:52:41):

All right. The folks at Oggun have been nice and responsive.

Bryn Roshong (00:52:42):

Yes.

Andy Chamberlain (00:52:43):

No, but I know their model we'll say, is very more DIY.

Wes Hannah (00:52:48):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:52:48):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:52:51):

Yeah, I wish I were a welder because then I feel like we would have been better at fixing things, so it was annoying-

Bryn Roshong (00:53:00):

We had to get things welded for us.

Wes Hannah (00:53:00):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:53:00):

So now you have it working.

Wes Hannah (00:53:00):

Yeah, so it was down for a month when something needed to get welded and we just couldn't get around to it.

Andy Chamberlain (00:53:05):

And you needed to cultivate?

Wes Hannah (00:53:06):

Yeah, exactly.

Bryn Roshong (00:53:08):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:53:08):

And so we have a couple of the Allis-Chalmers Gs, which are really fun.

Bryn Roshong (00:53:12):

One's always broken.

Wes Hannah (00:53:14):

I mean, they're definitely [inaudible 00:53:16]. They're not something that I think the average person can just jump on. Our crew can't all jump on them the way they could with the Oggun, and they also just don't have the clearance, so you can't go over and till stuff. But yeah, we do, speaking of that-

Bryn Roshong (00:53:32):

Come back to the house, it's starting to rain down.

Wes Hannah (00:53:34):

... something we've been toying with or, I don't know, struggling with is we try to... So like I said, we had six full-time people this year.

Andy Chamberlain (00:53:45):

What's this mix here?

Wes Hannah (00:53:46):

This is just rye vetch.

Andy Chamberlain (00:53:48):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:53:48):

I'm sorry, oats peas.

Andy Chamberlain (00:53:49):

Oats peas?

Wes Hannah (00:53:50):

And then, yeah, the two main things we do are anything that comes out of production early enough by early September, we do oats peas, and then at that point we then switch to rye vetch mix for the goal of getting almost everything covered by the end.

Andy Chamberlain (00:54:05):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (00:54:05):

So we were seeding... I mean, we have some... Oh yeah, well, I mean those beds over there, that was rye vetch that we just seeded a couple weeks ago, which is it's barely going to be germinated by the time winter hits, but we figure it'll-

Andy Chamberlain (00:54:19):

No, there's a huge stand going into winter.

Wes Hannah (00:54:21):

Yeah, yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (00:54:23):

I got winter rye. It's an inch tall.

Wes Hannah (00:54:26):

Oh, sorry.

Andy Chamberlain (00:54:28):

So that's nice and luscious.

Wes Hannah (00:54:30):

Yeah. Yeah, so this is where the CSA picky run will be next year. Oh yeah, also notable, we do strawberries also. That's been something we've been slowly...

Ellie (00:54:44):

Strawberry?

Wes Hannah (00:54:44):

Yeah. We've been slowly upping... We do six, 200 foot beds, it's not crazy. But that is a nice boost at the market. We've been realizing over the... You can look at the farmer's market revenue as like, there's a big boost for the seedling sale in the beginning, and then early summer we get a big strawberry boost, and then we get a big tomato boost, and those are really our anchors. And then obviously people are buying salad and kale and stuff, but...

Bryn Roshong (00:55:17):

I was thinking about that when we were thinking about the last bunch of weeks and why it hasn't been as good. I think the salad is one, definitely a significant contributor.

Wes Hannah (00:55:24):

Yeah. Due to heat and lack of rain and stuff in early fall, we didn't have a ton of greens coming into the late fall, which was a bummer for the CSA and for the market.

Bryn Roshong (00:55:38):

People come, they ask for them. They really come to us for that, but we do that-

Wes Hannah (00:55:41):

And I'm like, "Don't you want these turnips instead?"

Bryn Roshong (00:55:46):

Well, you kept the power greens and you get some amazing arugula too, but people, they want the lettuce, the special lettuce mix.

Wes Hannah (00:55:55):

What I was going to say before, is we have six crew members, team members during the year, and we try to have a mentality where everybody's involved in everything. So everybody gets trained on the tractor, which is good. I know that makes it appealing for prospective employees to know that they'll get tractor experience. It's also good for us so that I can just say to anyone, "Hey, could you go mow that thing?" without having to have the right person be available. And then we do have a person who was a farm manager or assistant manager, who was in charge of things day to day, and then we also had a crew leader underneath him, who was there just to make sure everybody was always on page, even if he was unavailable, and just be a pacesetter and stuff. So we've been dealing with evolving our management hierarchy systems and it's cool.

(00:57:05):

It definitely is a funny... There are some drawbacks, there's still some things that not everyone can do, like operating the Gs. And I don't know, we're trying to provide a well-rounded experience to give people a good time. This year we participated in a program also administered by the Glynwood Center called the Hudson Valley Apprenticeship Program. Because Glynwood and other nonprofit farms in the region have really nice year long apprenticeship programs, so they wanted to give the benefits of those apprenticeships to farms like ours. So the program, it has funding to... We had two employees who were participating and they worked with us full time, but then on average once every other week they would go to-

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:58:04]

Wes Hannah (00:58:04):

... and on average, once every other week, they would go to some educational event at Glenwood or somewhere at another farm where they covered everything from business planning to tractor repair. And it was on paid time, but paid by the program. So it was really neat, it allowed us to sort of advertise a really well-rounded apprenticeship, but we didn't have to do all the educational work.

Speaker 2 (00:58:31):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (00:58:32):

And I thought it was cool too because they had cool programming around management for [inaudible 00:58:38]-

Wes Hannah (00:58:38):

Oh yeah, that's right. And they also-

Bryn Roshong (00:58:39):

It was really helpful.

Wes Hannah (00:58:41):

The Hudson Valley apprenticeship program as a whole gave us as managers some training and also sort of held us to a higher standard. Somebody from Glenwood came out every few months to sort of have a long chat and check in. So it was nice. It kept us accountable.

Andy Chamberlain (00:59:03):

What does sustainable farming mean to you and what are you doing to achieve it?

Wes Hannah (00:59:08):

Okay, good question. Well, I guess sustainable means both ecological and social. So from the ecological side, we're certified organic. We also are proudly certified by the Real Organic Project. So we have a goal of trying to improve the land every year rather than extracting from it. We do a ton of, in addition to our regular fertilizer regimen, we spend like probably $5,000 or $10,000 a year buying in like compost and other amendments. And we do ... We are not a no-till farm. I would love to figure out ways we can reduce tillage. We do have a spader which we bought a few years ago and that has largely replaced the roto-tiller as like a final bed prep. And yeah, we don't do much like Moldboard plowing. So we try to be conscientious of soil disturbance and whatnot. Although to be clear, we are not no- or I wouldn't even call us low-till. We're just aspiring to be lower-till.

(01:00:28):

And we also, I mean, from the social level, I mean, all the stuff we talked about, just like building community, I think is really important. We have over the years developed really close relationships with our CSA members and we feel like the farm is a significant part of the community in a way that I'd like to think it's part of building a larger community. Yeah, in terms of like other sustainability things, I mean, we are trying to make this a place where we, or at least I can like work full-time in a way that compensates me enough and also our employees. As I'm sure many farms struggle with, that's a difficult area. We try to keep our prices low. Our goal really is to be accessible to everyone. And like when we go to the farmer's market, we set our prices ... We're not trying to get like a big certified organic premium. We want good food to be accessible. So we try to keep our prices as low as possible. We often will like go to the local grocery store and just confirm that like our prices are actually cheaper than theirs.

(01:01:53):

But it does come at the cost of like ... Yeah, we don't have a huge surplus income, so we try to ... I think our wages are on par for the region. We pay like this year our starting was $20 an hour. We offer a bonus. We have paid time off and stuff, but it's not ... I recognize that it's not ... It's difficult for that to be like a career position and the money ... Nobody's getting rich. I mean, I don't make much more than that. I think if you actually like add up my hours and divide it.

(01:02:37):

So yeah, we're still trying to figure out how we can be more socially sustainable to keep staff and this year ... And that is, I should say, part of why we started doing the winter production is we wanted to be able to offer year round employment. So this year we're going to have three, out of our staff of six, three people are going to stay on. Well, four including myself, and keep employed through the winter. So that's really great. But yeah, I mean, I would love to figure out ways we can, I don't know, have some sort of other benefits, healthcare, stuff like that. That's a bit unsustainable, or it's a bit out of reach right now.

Andy Chamberlain (01:03:23):

Yeah. Unachievable.

Wes Hannah (01:03:24):

Unachievable, yeah. And housing is a huge problem. And it's probably like this everywhere, but Mid-Hudson Valley and Kingston, it's so difficult to live here. When we moved to Kingston 10 years ago, a third of the houses were vacant and you could buy a house for $40,000. And now rents are a couple thousand dollars a month and it's made it hard for us to attract people. It used to be, we would get applicants from all over when we posted jobs and it was no big deal for them to move to Kingston to work here, but now it's ... The people who ... We've had great employees every year and I'm really ... I think we're so lucky, but we've noticed like they're not coming from far away. They're not moving here. And if they do, they see what like cost of living is and reconsider this job.

(01:04:16):

So most of our folks are people who are already living here and have figured out some housing solution. But yeah, housing's a huge issue. I wish we could have on farm housing. We don't. I mean, that's both a huge cost and I have no idea what the zonings and stuff like that. I think that's unrealistic.

Bryn Roshong (01:04:40):

Whenever we have people who apply and they're like, "Oh, I'm going to ..." They're from another state and they're like, "Yeah, I'll just find housing when I come." We're like, "Oh man. There's-"

Andy Chamberlain (01:04:48):

Oh, no.

Bryn Roshong (01:04:50):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (01:04:51):

Please look around before you come in.

Bryn Roshong (01:04:53):

Yeah. It's really tough. But people figure stuff out. I don't know.

Wes Hannah (01:05:00):

Yeah. Like I said, we've been really lucky. Every year we've had fantastic people and we do have good retention and that's something I assume this is seen across the board, but when we started farming 15 years ago, it was kind of standard that in this like small local farm organic movement, you worked over a season and then you moved on and there wasn't a lot of ... I felt like when we started farming, it was rare for someone to stay at a farm more than a year, as just a crew member, not management.

Andy Chamberlain (01:05:31):

Right.

Wes Hannah (01:05:33):

And yeah, since then there's been more ... This year, for example, we had four people return from last year ... I'm sorry, three people returned from last year, three out of five from last year. So that was great. And like we've had one person who's been here, this was his ninth year.

Andy Chamberlain (01:05:51):

Wow.

Wes Hannah (01:05:52):

Another person, this is her fourth year. So we've been lucky to have good retention, but it's an issue. I mean, personally, that like hiring, the whole hiring process is my least favorite. If we were to ever radically change things or stop farming, it would just be because of the stress of constant hiring. And like right now, as I think about the spring, we just had to say goodbye to people who, some of whom might come back, but probably some won't. And now thinking about, "Oh, we're going to have to hire new people." And then it's just like, "Are they going to be good? Is it going to be terrible? What's the learning curve going to be?" It's stressful.

Andy Chamberlain (01:06:30):

How do they fit in with people who already know what's going on and each other?

Wes Hannah (01:06:33):

Yeah. Like I said, we've been lucky so far, but I feel like the HR side of things is ... It's not something people think about when they think about like what it means to have a farm.

Andy Chamberlain (01:06:49):

No, people don't get into farming for the HR [inaudible 01:06:55].

Wes Hannah (01:06:56):

Yeah. And in a nutshell, that's sustainable farming.

Andy Chamberlain (01:07:03):

What are you excited about in this next year?

Wes Hannah (01:07:06):

Well, let's see. I mean, as we mentioned, there's the possibility of some additional land, so that would be really cool. And even if that doesn't come through, I think we are going to keep feelers out to try to see if we can expand our production base a little bit. I am excited about the new wash space as a whole. At the end of ...

(01:07:35):

Actually on Friday, we did end of year the exit interviews with everybody and one of my questions was, "If you were in charge of ... If you had $20,000 to make some upgrades to the farm, what would you recommend?" And like four out of five people said, "The washroom." So that makes sense. I didn't realize they were so ...

Andy Chamberlain (01:07:59):

[inaudible 01:08:00].

Wes Hannah (01:07:59):

Yeah, I thought there would be like [inaudible 01:08:04], but everybody was like, "Yeah, washroom is so inefficient." So we're going to do something, even if we don't do like our big unified, comprehensive washroom expansion, we'll at least, like I said, put a roof and make that wash pad a little bit more of like a real space. I don't know, every year we ... Like I mentioned before, we're thinking about, we'd like to continue toying with the no-till system, thinking about maybe trying it out next year on winter squash or our cucumbers and yeah, hoping we can reduce plastic usage there.

Andy Chamberlain (01:08:48):

Do you have any long-term plans to make any significant changes to the business model or keep things relatively similar at this point?

Wes Hannah (01:08:57):

I think we're pretty happy where we are. The CSA is really nice, both in terms of obviously the guaranteed revenue and the community, just feeling like we're very integrated into the local community. The Kingston market is like a no-brainer to stay in. When we joined, it was like a mid-tier market, I think. And at this point, I feel like it's probably one of the biggest Hudson Valley farmers markets.

Bryn Roshong (01:09:28):

Yeah, I think it's the biggest. Yeah.

Wes Hannah (01:09:29):

Yeah. It's great. And we are so lucky to have ... I mean, we were so fortunate to have gotten our foot in the door 12 years ago when we started doing shoots. There's eight produce vendors and we're one of the larger ones, even though we're organic. And yeah, it's great. I mean, it's 10 minutes down the road.

Bryn Roshong (01:09:52):

We have three tents-

Wes Hannah (01:09:53):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (01:09:53):

... Which is like one of the bigger ... It's a lot.

Andy Chamberlain (01:09:53):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (01:09:58):

We're probably like truthfully not ... We're not going to like drop the restaurant sales altogether, but it has been over the years, the smaller and smaller percent of what we do. I think maybe with COVID or other things, we just ... A lot of places closed or a lot of maybe like dropped how much local purchasing they were doing. So that's been fine. We've made up for those sales in other ways, but I feel like in the beginning we were ... Restaurants were like maybe a quarter of our sales and now it's-

Bryn Roshong (01:10:31):

I think it's the personality too. I think chefs really want to talk about varieties.

Wes Hannah (01:10:38):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (01:10:39):

And they want the very specific, everything the same size and like tiny and whatever. And we're just kind of not ... That's like not our ...

Wes Hannah (01:10:45):

Yeah, truthfully, we kind of approached the restaurant sales as like, when we have a lot of things, we'll sell ... If we have a ton of salad or arugula, we'll sell it, but we're not growing primarily for the restaurants. It's more when we've already satisfied our CSA. I mean, I feel like you can't do a CSA and also be focusing on something else too strongly because then you're really not giving your CSA members what they paid for, in my opinion. But yeah, I mean...

Bryn Roshong (01:11:20):

... I mean, I think a next milestone is we have kids and it's important to spend as much time with them as we can while they're here. So I think still continuing to work on balancing Wes's time because you make a plan to be like, "Okay, we'll have someone be able to rotate market Saturdays," but it just always has ended up that like Wes has had to do it every Saturday and we all go. But it's just like, it's fun and we like it, but it's also having that demand always on your schedule in addition to everything else is just ... It gets hard after a while. I mean, just it's been a big transition for ... I mean, having kids, Wes really had to cut back a lot of the time, couldn't work until 8:00 every night anymore and had to be done at 5:00 every day and has ... That's been great, but it's still kind of like, okay, now how can we even get more family time?

Andy Chamberlain (01:12:22):

What kind of adjustments have you made in order to make more family time?

Wes Hannah (01:12:27):

We've had really great staff and so some of it has been just learning or realizing that we can delegate more work to the staff, more managerial work so that I don't need to spend a lot of evening time making plans for the next day. And I mean, otherwise just constant equipment upgrades. I think that as we gotten better with our cultivating tractors, it's reduced the workload. I feel like there were ... I remember times when I would, just because we were so behind everything, I would be like out at night with a headlamp on weeding or hoeing and like I definitely don't do that anymore. And yeah, maybe some of it also is just a realization that things ... We have to let some things go. So now I'm not going to ... I do a lot of work at night after the kids go to bed, but I'm not going to ... I'm far less willing to give up on ... Sunday's my only day off and I'm far less willing to say like, "Okay, I'm just going to work this one Sunday to get some tractor work done." Now I used to do that, but now Sundays are definitely off limits.

Andy Chamberlain (01:13:41):

Line in the sand.

Wes Hannah (01:13:41):

Yeah. And if that means that we don't get a field prepped in time, that's fine. We'll just accept it.

Bryn Roshong (01:13:48):

Yeah. Yeah. I think having kids and those boundaries made you step up your game in the way you've been saying of sort of like, "This is not acceptable, so I have to figure out a solution because I have to be done with work earlier," which is kind of a nice side effect, I guess.

Wes Hannah (01:14:09):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (01:14:09):

Forces you to reprioritize and think about what you're doing.

Wes Hannah (01:14:10):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (01:14:13):

Knowing what you know now after 15 years, what do you wish you knew when you got started?

Wes Hannah (01:14:17):

I mean, we definitely had made a lot of false starts on sales channels, but that wasn't ... Those were just learning lessons. We raised chickens for five years and then we finally realized that that was just so much work and it wasn't a strong enough focus that it was actually profitable and so there were things like that when if I could talk to myself back and then I would just say, "Don't even try doing chickens unless you really want to go all in. " But what's your answer?

Bryn Roshong (01:14:52):

Oh, I was going to, something like I wish I'd known it ... The one thing is that I think in the beginning we were very harsh and critical of the concept of sort of like any food business, a farm needs investment from outside people or friendly community members or whatever it's going to be. And I think we had this impression of ourselves, both being like we'd pay it off our student loans ourselves by working and we're very like self-sufficient, but being basically like ... We're both, we don't come from like intergenerational wealth or anything. We just like went to college, which was great and an amazing privilege, paid off the loans and then we were just like sort of at square one being like, "Okay, so we want to farm, but we wanted to build everything like ourselves with what we had."

(01:15:48):

And we would kind of look at maybe like, there'd be like nonprofit farms that we'd kind of be like, "Ugh, like they have all these like benefits that like are ..." We kind of like scoff at it a little bit, but now I've realized that every single farm has its own story and like the tradition in our country is that farmers that were our age getting into farming would inherit a farm or like step into a farm business.

(01:16:16):

And we didn't have that. We were these like landless first generation farmers thinking that we were like in the same, like that we had this individualistic sort of vision of how to make the business succeed. And so just, I wish I could tell myself like, "Look for partnerships more." And we did finally, that's like the thing that helped us succeed was like the grace of finding this land with a landowner who's very supportive of what we're doing and giving us a long term lease that's a very generous-

Wes Hannah (01:16:47):

A lot of networking.

Bryn Roshong (01:16:47):

What did you say?

Wes Hannah (01:16:47):

A lot of networking.

Bryn Roshong (01:16:48):

Yeah. Yeah.

Wes Hannah (01:16:48):

We made the connection with like a local cafe in town and that they now host a third of our members. Like we have a distribution, CSA distribution at a cafe.

Bryn Roshong (01:16:58):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (01:16:58):

And that was, we were lucky to have like networked into our way into that relationship.

Bryn Roshong (01:17:03):

Yeah. Yeah. And like the more ... Just like take yes for an answer sometimes if someone's willing to help you out and it feels right, like just like do it because the more relation ... For me, this work is about relationships and the more relationships you have honestly, the better. And just, yeah, I think it's good advice early to think about it that way of like, yeah, trying to say yes when opportunities come your way and build relationships, especially if you're a landless first generation farmer.

Wes Hannah (01:17:37):

I have-

Bryn Roshong (01:17:37):

And like also, sorry, also to understand that like you do need a fair bit ... If you don't have your own money, you need money from somewhere to help with getting started. And it can be from a landowner, but just make sure it's not a like predatory venture capitalist situation because anyone who wants a return on their investment, I would say just like don't, because it's not ... Especially people with a lot of money who are looking to a farmer to pay them like money back for their investment, it's kind of like backwards anyway.

Andy Chamberlain (01:18:10):

They likely don't understand quite how a farm works.

Wes Hannah (01:18:12):

Yeah.

Bryn Roshong (01:18:14):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (01:18:14):

[inaudible 01:18:15].

Bryn Roshong (01:18:15):

Like they heard a TED Talk or something, but like realistically, the way our food system is, it's so subsidized and geared toward big commodity crops and like the way we're trying to farm, it's like we're really at a disadvantage because we do get like some government grants to help us with our high tunnels and things like that, but we're trying to ... We're making all these investments that have no ... We compost and we cover crop and all this stuff that we do because it's right and ultimately it's the best thing for the land and it's how ... It's the ecological way to do it and we believe in it, but like we don't get anything, you know, any money back. That's investments we just make. We just make those investments and the return is hopefully like healthier crops and people join our community because they believe in what we're doing, but there's no like government subsidy that's like, here's 10 grand for you to use compost and cover crop and things like that.

(01:19:14):

And there's no crop insurance for people our size. And so there's a lot of disadvantages, but ... Well, there is, but not really.

Wes Hannah (01:19:23):

But yeah, also, and we've definitely done more and more. We've tried to build a lot of community and get to know, like do as much networking as possible. We've always been involved in the Hudson Valley Young Farmers Coalition, which is a chapter of the National Young Farmers Coalition, but we've also... Like Bryn Scott is on the board of like the Marble Town Land Preservation Committee. I'm on the advisory board for like the Hudson Valley CSA Coalition. I was elected as the ...

Bryn Roshong (01:19:55):

[inaudible 01:19:56].

Wes Hannah (01:19:58):

I was just reelected as our FSA like county representative and we're also like, we went to our first Farm Bureau meeting this year. So we've been realizing like this-

Andy Chamberlain (01:20:09):

Trying to be involved.

Wes Hannah (01:20:10):

Yeah. And trying to make host connections. But wait, I had a better answer than ... I'm sorry, a better than my first answer answer. I feel like when we started farming, the idea of like personnel management seemed very ... It was like, we didn't get into this for that reason and you know, we both came from a very like labor rights organizing background.

Bryn Roshong (01:20:36):

We were union organizers [inaudible 01:20:38].

Wes Hannah (01:20:37):

Yeah. So if you had talked to like 23 year old Wes about, "You need to like learn to be a good manager," I would have thought that was the enemy. But now I'm realizing like we've learned a lot. I mean, I was objectively probably not the best manager in the very beginning and I'm sure that I still have a lot to learn, of course, but I feel like in the last couple of years, I've been trying to like step it up and like I'm taking ... Like this year I'm going to be taking the Being the Employer of Choice training program and other things. I'm realizing how important it is to be a really good manager so as to help people deal with like the inevitable stresses of this sort of work. And yeah, that's something I would not have thought of 10 years ago.

Bryn Roshong (01:21:40):

I think that's one of the most important things like-

Wes Hannah (01:21:45):

It is. I'm realizing.

Bryn Roshong (01:21:46):

... If you're going to have other people work for you.

Wes Hannah (01:21:48):

Yeah. And I'm realizing we focus ... And if you were to think about like all the trainings and workshops we went to, everything was so technical about like things like soil science.

Bryn Roshong (01:22:00):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (01:22:00):

And all that side of farming, but I'm realizing my big deficiency that I'm trying to address is all the managerial side of things.

Andy Chamberlain (01:22:13):

If you were aware of that when you started, do you think you would have done anything differently or is just people management something that you've really needed the experience to learn from?

Wes Hannah (01:22:23):

I mean, I'm sure experience is a huge teacher. I mean, there are programs, like the program that I'm taking. Well, I wish I had taken it five years ago, certainly. Yeah, I'm not sure. I remember like my first manager job was when I was working at Hardy Roots Farm and I didn't ... I'm sure I did a decent job, but I wish I had maybe gone into it more with like a ... Asked if I could have more of like, what's the word? Like a mentor while doing that. I wish instead of just saying like, "Yeah, I can manage a team of six people and just jumping in," I wish I had at that time sought out somebody who I could like ask questions constantly. That would have been really cool.

Bryn Roshong (01:23:20):

Yeah. And I think like also this season you've done more with like structuring your feedback.

Wes Hannah (01:23:28):

Yeah. Creating mechanisms for feedback.

Bryn Roshong (01:23:31):

Like structure like one-on-ones that happen at a regular interval, which is like standard, or not standard business, but like good general business practices and it's cool to see that like on the farm too.

Wes Hannah (01:23:46):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (01:23:47):

Check in and ...

Wes Hannah (01:23:48):

Yeah. Yeah, we really like making sure we start our day with like a big meeting where we talk about not just what we're doing, but why we're doing it, how it fits into like the bigger picture of our agenda and yeah, like regular check-ins. I think next year we'll do even more. I really ... And that was some of the feedback I got this week on our exit interviews is I think we can do a better job of communicating even more what, like not just what the tasks are for this week, but like how the arc of the season goes overall. And I think that will actually help people be motivated because that's ...

Andy Chamberlain (01:24:28):

Yeah.

Wes Hannah (01:24:29):

One of the things I've been talking about with our manager is in mid-season and everybody's stressed and there's a lot of burnout and it's important like we were talking about how ... If you have the big picture in mind, if you think this needs to happen this week because next week we don't have to have to do it because we've got these six other things to do next week. And if you just have like ... The bigger picture you can keep in your view, the more motivated you are, I think, to like really push hard.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:05):

Right. You understand that.

Wes Hannah (01:25:07):

Right, exactly.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:07):

You know the season overseas and you know the business, you know what you need to be doing next week.

Wes Hannah (01:25:10):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:10):

But your employee doesn't.

Wes Hannah (01:25:13):

Yeah. And I get it.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:15):

And they know what's going on next week, but they don't understand the implications of a week later seeding date.

Wes Hannah (01:25:22):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:22):

Like that's critical.

Wes Hannah (01:25:24):

You can spend an hour on the cultivation tractor this week and if you don't get to it's going to be five hours with the hoe next week. And if you don't do it then it's going to be 20 hours [inaudible 01:25:32] the next week.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:32):

Right, get on that tracker now.

Wes Hannah (01:25:35):

And I get, I mean, any shortcoming of that vision is I think on me. I need to be better at communicating that.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:42):

Well, it takes time to explain all of that.

Wes Hannah (01:25:45):

Yeah, of course.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:46):

It doesn't feel value added. You're just like, "All right, let's just get to the chase. [inaudible 01:25:49]."

Wes Hannah (01:25:51):

Yeah, exactly. Right. You're tempted to just jump in, but yeah, we got to make sure we're a cohesive team.

Andy Chamberlain (01:25:57):

Yeah. What advice do you have for a beginning grower?

Wes Hannah (01:26:02):

Well, I mean, it's a bit repetitive, but yeah, we tried a lot of different things at first and I think it was important, first of all, to be willing to try a lot of different things, like a lot of different farmer's markets and building relationships with different landowners. It has been equally important and the harder lesson has been knowing when to walk away from something. We spent an entire year selling at a local farmer's market that was terrible and we were never making as much money as it costs to be there, like paying for staffing and harvest time and all that. And I wish we had walked away a lot sooner. So yeah, it's been important. I feel like casting a wide net has been really important, but then also like learning how to walk away from the bad decision or from the things that aren't good for the farm.

Andy Chamberlain (01:26:59):

Well, it's hard to figure out like, because it takes time to build up a

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:27:04]

Andy Chamberlain (01:27:03):

... hard to figure out because it takes time to build up a reputation or for people to know you're there and to give it a valid chance. And then you don't want to cut that too soon.

Wes Hannah (01:27:11):

Yeah, certainly.

Andy Chamberlain (01:27:12):

But at the same time you've got to cut the losses.

Wes Hannah (01:27:15):

Yeah. No, right. You never know. And maybe we should have stayed with that farmer's market. I don't know. But yeah, that has been an important lesson. Just knowing when to cut something off, make a decision where you're walking away from something unprofitable or something that's more cost than it's worth.

Bryn Roshong (01:27:43):

I think also, and then with that listening to your heart and your gut when you're like, well, it can be a hard decision and it might be hard to choose, should I leave this farmer's market or not? But ultimately for, I don't enjoy this. That's a huge thing where sometimes farming can be so hard. A lot of it is hard work and you were like, I don't enjoy every second of it because, but you just, that's farming. You've got to do the job until it's done and don't think too much about it all the time. But overall, like I enjoy this for a variety of reasons. But with selling your produce, if you're spending a lot of time doing an outlet that you just don't enjoy anymore, then don't do it anymore because it's going to make you so unhappy or pay someone else to do it or figure it out. That's an important thing is, it's not just a business, it's also your life. And you have to make sure you're enjoying it to some degree.

(01:28:39):

And I also think something that we did that's been helpful is just make lots of friends, just be super friendly with other young farmers your age. And also, it's something I think if we could do again, I would have tried to do more would be to find mentors in farming that we could call. I feel like Wes has a lot of folks that he can talk to about a variety of things, but I do feel like there were times when I didn't feel like we had an elder who we could call on the phone or go visit and just be like, "We're having trouble with this decision." And for them to hear us. It's our kids' school.

(01:29:24):

For someone who has experience who would be like, that we trust that could help us through decisions or even just give advice on a variety of things. I think there are, I can think of times when it would have been nice to have more of that. And we've started to develop some relationships, going to conferences and glomming onto some older farmers that were like, "Oh, we know you." But I think that's something that I've seen really help out other farmers our age is having those mentor relationships, but having friends is a huge help.

(01:30:02):

We're going to this thing this afternoon, we're going to see a couple friends and also going to see the younger folks getting into farming, so that'll be nice. Nice to see. But in this area in the Hudson Valley, there's a pretty rich culture of first generation farmers. We started around 2009, 2010, and there was this big wave. And so some of those folks aren't farming anymore, but they're still around. But some of them are still farming. So we're getting to be the slightly older generation, but being able to talk to them. And there's a community of people, we have a listserv, the Hudson Valley and Farmers Coalition, people share, they ask questions, people post jobs, people are looking for stuff, looking for advice.

(01:30:45):

 And there's, I think a pretty open collaborative mindset, which I think is a great mindset that I always encourage people to have in general. Just, to be honest when you have an issue, because you'll find that other people are experiencing the same thing. Don't try to present your farm as perfect all the time, especially if you can find a few friends you trust and you can actually say, "We're really struggling with this thing or we feel like we're failing at this." And then your friends could actually have an answer for you or be like, "No, no, like do it this way." And it actually like, we did this and it worked and you never know when you can, you can get solutions that way.

Andy Chamberlain (01:31:29):

Or you're right, "The spring sucked. I had terrible germination too."

Bryn Roshong (01:31:33):

"Yeah, me too." Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. We did have that actually. We're at the market. We're complaining to somebody and they're like, "Me too. My carrots are ruined." We're like, "Oh, ours too." We're like, "Okay, it's not just us."

Andy Chamberlain (01:31:48):

Yeah. There's a lot of weight to those conversations.

Bryn Roshong (01:31:54):

Yeah. Knowing you're not alone actually helps a lot.

Andy Chamberlain (01:31:57):

Along those lines, what fulfills you in this career? What keeps you going?

Wes Hannah (01:32:05):

Ultimately, I mean, I love every element of the job. It's very stressful. We don't make a lot of money. I often feel frustrated by all the various things that go wrong, but ultimately I love farming and I can't ever imagine doing something different. I love being outside. I mean, being outside all the time, working in the dirt is great. Sometimes it's muddy and cold and you wish you were sitting at a computer, but ultimately it's great to just be working with my body outside.

(01:32:47):

My favorite element is I think problem solving. We have not just, I mean, there's systems problem solving where like we have some task and you spend even just a minute thinking about, "What's going to be the most efficient way to do this?" That's really fun. And just the diversity of the work allows for a lot of those problem solving moments. So any given day, we might be doing 10 different things and so that's an opportunity. Obviously we remember the way we did it last time, but nonetheless, the diversity of the workload allows for constant challenging yourself to think about better ways to do things.

(01:33:29):

And then I love fixing things. I enjoy, we have a nice little workspace in the barn and I kind of like it when things break and I have to fix them. We're lucky...

Andy Chamberlain (01:33:43):

That's good.

Wes Hannah (01:33:46):

When we got our second tractor, that was really nice because then if something broke down, it was an imposition, but it didn't shut down the farm. So now we had our other tractor had something in the hydraulic, not the hydraulic pump, but actually where the hydraulic pump attaches to the engine block broke. So we had to take apart the whole tractor, replace that part of the engine. And so the tractor was down for a couple of weeks while we were waiting for parts to arrive. But I really liked it. I like taking apart the tractor and learning how it worked. It's been fun. I mean, I've never been to diesel mechanic school or anything, so every time something breaks, it's an opportunity to learn how something works.

Bryn Roshong (01:34:38):

That is another actually piece of advice for new growers is, it's not just the vegetables. You have to think about your whole infrastructure. So you're going to find yourself, if you have a CoolBot, it's going to just not work one day and you're going to be standing there in front of it like, "Oh no." So either really learning about mechanics or having someone on your team or maybe it's your partner or your dad or your mom, whoever, everyone's got somebody who they can call because Wes is amazing at fixing everything. And I think about that all the time of like, man, if you didn't have those skills, it's like so limiting. There'd just be so much downtime when stuff is broken because stuff is always breaking. And so having those skills either yourself or someone you can count on is a huge leg up.

Andy Chamberlain (01:35:31):

Yeah. And if you know the basics, a lot of the stuff that breaks like, "Oh, that's not a big deal because you know how to do it." If you don't know how to do anything, all of a sudden you get a flat tire and you might as well split the tractor. You're down.

Wes Hannah (01:35:48):

I feel like self-confidence is the main tool because I mean, you can figure out how anything works, how to repair anything using like YouTube and other Google... I mean, the number of tractor forums are so cool. I can post some really esoteric thing of like, "I have this model tractor and it's making this weird sound in this part." And within six hours, some old timer will respond with a long list of what you need to do. And it's cool. So that the knowledge is out there. It's just, I guess having the self-confidence to know like, "I can take this apart and fix it." I know how to use tools and that's all you need.

Bryn Roshong (01:36:30):

And friends. Having friends can be helpful too. Call. There's been one or two times when something's broken and you've called someone to be like, "What did you do?"

Wes Hannah (01:36:38):

Yeah, for sure.

Andy Chamberlain (01:36:39):

Any advice on how to make those friends you've mentioned a few times?

Bryn Roshong (01:36:43):

I think, unless you have immediate ideas, but things like-

Wes Hannah (01:36:49):

I mean, the Hudson Valley is like a hotbed for local farms, so we're very lucky in that way. When we started, we had both like the Craft Network, which is the Creating Regional Apprenticeship Farm Training, I'm sorry, something like that.

Bryn Roshong (01:37:08):

Collaboration for Regional Apprenticeship Farm Training.

Wes Hannah (01:37:10):

Yeah. There were just like weekly or biweekly farm tours. And so we got to know a lot of other people, not only getting to see other farms, which is meeting other people in our sort of cohort or experience level was great. And like Bryn said now 15 years later, we're still friends with a lot of those people who are now running their own farms.

(01:37:32):

The Young Farmers Coalition has been fantastic. We were organizers for our chapter for a number of years. We've now stepped back in the last few years and it's still going strong with a new group of leaders, but I mean, that was huge, that's where like we met tons of people. And when we started farming, we moved to the Hudson Valley. So in other words, when our first farm year, we didn't have a single friend in the area. So literally 100% our friends were made through farming.

Bryn Roshong (01:38:07):

Yeah, through the farm tourism.

Wes Hannah (01:38:07):

It was all through that.

Bryn Roshong (01:38:09):

Social events. Yeah, like one thing, like a mindset of like, if you're at, say you're vending at a farmer's market, seeing the other farmers there as friends and not being afraid to talk to them because you think they're going to hate you because you're selling veggies also, but being as friendly as you can, some people have trouble, but just approaching in a kinship way of, we're both farmers and just trying to share information and say hi and talk about... Yeah, because like we have just friendly interpersonal relationships with for the most part, all the other farmers at our market and it's nice. We just chat with each other and we see each other as friends and not competitors really because there's enough people to feed. There's an endless need for people to eat so you don't have to worry if you're both selling tomatoes, who cares? Just try to-

Wes Hannah (01:39:08):

Yeah, and I mean we both benefit from a strong market and the more good vendors there are, I mean within reason, the stronger the market is. So I don't think-

Bryn Roshong (01:39:18):

But I'm using that as an analogy, really a way to because like if you just have that mindset all around, I think that is really helpful and gets you, people see you as a friendly collaborative person, then you'll like, the channels are open to make more friends. And also throw a party or if someone's like, "We need to host Cornell Cooperative Extension." In New York at least, they're looking to host an event like, maybe throw your hand up. And it's hard and it's like time-consuming, but it's always a good thing to be part of those, throw an event or go to the events or be willing, I don't know, host a garlic day at your farm or if they're looking for presenters for a thing, have some confidence that you have something useful to say and people hear about you.

Wes Hannah (01:40:10):

We also, I mean a couple of years ago we were still feeling like we had a lot to learn about winter production. So we reached out to a handful of other winter greens producers and hosted some little get togethers just where we could have an open chat. And it was in the back of our heads we're like, "These are the people who are competing for the same customers as us." There was some awareness of that, but then also we realized there's enough demand out there that we're not competitors. And yeah, we learned a lot from other folks.

Bryn Roshong (01:40:53):

Yeah, it was so fun. We should do that again.

Andy Chamberlain (01:40:55):

Well, I want to be mindful of time. That was most of my questions. Is there anything else that you guys wanted to share?

Wes Hannah (01:41:01):

I mean, I just want to say, if it didn't come through in the things we've said thus far, we have been so lucky to have a lot of support from a ton of people and while we talk about the importance of like hard work and all like the hard decisions we've made and all that, I know that we wouldn't be here without a lot of luck and a lot of good relationships. There's always I think the risk of presenting too much of a pull yourself up by the boot straps sort of thing when, it is important to work hard, but I don't want to take all the credit. We've lucked out in some ways and I want to recognize that.

Bryn Roshong (01:41:41):

Yeah. It's more of a nitty-gritty detail, but I don't want to pass up the chance to just advocate for people having a bookkeeper. And we, again, it was a luck thing. I had a little bit of business or finance and business experience from my job working in a food production facility and dealing with some of the finance side of it, but we didn't have QuickBooks or anything for eight years or so or seven years and then we had an amazing CSA member reach out and she said, "I love you guys so much. If you ever need bookkeeping help, I'm a bookkeeper. I could do some barter, some pay." And I just jumped at that opportunity.

Andy Chamberlain (01:42:30):

Actually...

Bryn Roshong (01:42:30):

I was like, "You came at the exact right time." And because of her-

Wes Hannah (01:42:33):

And she was blown away by the complexity of all of our finances, "How do you do this? "

Bryn Roshong (01:42:41):

She's like, "You have how many currencies that people pay you in?" And like, "Oh my God, the state." Yeah, she was just like, "What?" It's very complicated. She's like, "You should feel overwhelmed because it is a little bit overwhelming." But she helped me set up our QuickBooks, which is a huge hurdle and really, unless you're a QuickBooks pro, I wouldn't recommend doing it by yourself, but if you have someone in the community who's a bookkeeper who will give you a discount because it can be expensive, but it is worth it.

Wes Hannah (01:43:10):

At least get you set up.

Bryn Roshong (01:43:12):

Get you set up and then be there to help you on a monthly basis or train you. I can do our journal entries and I can reconcile our books because she taught me how to do all that, but having everything in QuickBooks and being able to pull up a P& L and a balance sheet whenever we need to, my goal for even doing it, even getting everything in QuickBooks was to help us be able to make a decision like when Wes if it's July and he's just like, "We're so behind and I really wish we could hire someone." We could actually look and see where we're at and be like, "Oh, it looks like we're on track that we can afford to hire someone." And make the decision more confidently than just emotionally or just always be like, "No, we can't."

(01:43:58):

Because actually seeing our books has always been actually for us like, "Oh, okay, we're doing okay." Whereas without it, you're like, "Oh." You don't really know. I really think it's important, you don't have to do it right away. You don't need QuickBooks in your maybe first year or two if you have a small CSA, don't sweat it, but at some point it's really, really, it pays to have that system in place and get a little bit of financial literacy, have someone help you understand how to read a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet so you just have ideas of how your business is going. I think that's been really nice.

Wes Hannah (01:44:38):

Yeah, you're right. It has been emotionally sustainable in that way because it is helpful to me in the height of the summer for Bryn to be able to say like, "No, look, we're doing okay." I mean like the other day or this past week we gave bonuses to folks at the end of the season. And I mean we've always given bonuses, but I've never actually known, it's not until later that I'm like, "Oh crap, we gave out too much money." So now it was good to have a sense of wherever we stood. That seems really obvious, but yeah, I mean I will admit, I don't think we're that, nobody wants to admit it, but I think many farms were in the position we were in where we really did not have a good financial sense of the farm.

Bryn Roshong (01:45:28):

Until we did our taxes.

Wes Hannah (01:45:29):

Yeah, we would do our taxes.

Bryn Roshong (01:45:31):

We do our schedule up.

Wes Hannah (01:45:31):

"Oh, this is how much money we made." And it might have been $20,000 or $50,000 and that was crazy.

Bryn Roshong (01:45:39):

Isn't that probably common?

Wes Hannah (01:45:41):

I'd like to think that's not... I don't know. We're better now.

Bryn Roshong (01:45:45):

Try to get to it before year eight. I would recommend, try to get there year four if you can.

Andy Chamberlain (01:45:53):

Get your feet underneath year one and two.

Bryn Roshong (01:45:55):

Yeah, don't worry about it. Yeah, I had someone who's brand new who was like, "Should I get QuickBooks?" I was like, "Ah, what are you doing?"

Andy Chamberlain (01:46:02):

Find your market first.

Bryn Roshong (01:46:02):

Yeah, exactly. Just don't worry too much about it. You get the money in the bank account and then make sure you have something. Yeah.

Wes Hannah (01:46:11):

Yeah, actually our very first year when it was just a part-time job, when it was just a nights and weekends business, we actually, we spent, I think our net profit at the end of it, I think our revenue was $10,000. It was just a hobby thing. And I think our net profit was $ 1000. And we paid somebody to do our taxes and it was $600 for them to do our business taxes and we were just like, "Wow, that was a terrible idea." That was funny.

Bryn Roshong (01:46:46):

Yeah, we're trying to get in with Farm Credit East this year because we have an accountant that is, we chose her because she has some knowledge of farms, which is really important for an accountant to have farm experience because there's all these programs and tax, I don't know there's all stuff that you need to know for farms. It's different than other businesses, but I think people have been telling me they're like, "You need to get Farm Credit East as your tax preparers because they'll find you money, they'll even look at the last five years of your tax returns." Someone told me, he was like, "They got me $20,000 back that I hadn't realized I'd overpaid." I was like, "Oh, interesting." But yeah, that part of it.

(01:47:28):

The other thing is too, thinking about the whole picture, thinking about, "Okay, I'm on the farm, I'm running this business, but how do I have healthcare or how do I have backup finance?" And just thinking of your whole life as part of the picture, if your partner is someone who has a job and you get healthcare through them, just to see that as, that's really great and you're taking care of yourself by if you have that kind of situation and not to think of it as some sort of, I don't know, you know what I'm trying to say? Like a privilege that other people don't have or something, but just make sure you're taking care of your like very basic needs because the farm, at least in the first five years or so, you just don't know what's going to happen and you just, you don't want to have an accident or get sick and then everything falls apart. You want to make sure you know how you're going to pay medical bills. It's easier said than done, but it's a real thing that can be the difference between keeping going and not.

Andy Chamberlain (01:48:49):

And that was The Farmer's Share. I hope you enjoy this episode with Bryn and Wes of Solid Ground Farm. 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 this podcast until March of 2026. 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. If you enjoy this 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.

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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.

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Access the Community Accreditation for Produce Safety, also known as CAPS. This program is designed for growers by growers to help you easily meet market and regulatory food safety expectations. You can access the VVBGA's 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. Camaraderie, enhanced communication and fellowship among commercial growers.

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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, high tunnel production, test management, pollinators, produce safety, and soil health. Become a member today to be a part of and further support the veg and berry industry.

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You can visit thefarmershare.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. 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. In Apple Podcasts, 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. Thanks for listening.

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