Edible-Alpha® Podcast

In Edible-Alpha® podcast #101, FFI’s Brad Rostowfske interviews Bree Breckel and Eric Weninger of B&E’s Trees, a certified-organic maple farm near Viroqua, Wisconsin. Along with tapping trees, the couple makes a value-added product, B&E’s Trees Bourbon Barrel Aged Maple Syrup, and is launching a new consumer-facing brand, Embark Maple.

When Bree and Eric bought their 184-acre farm in 2011, their main goal was to live off the grid while doing fulfilling physical work outdoors. If they could make and sell enough maple syrup to pay the mortgage, they’d be happy. But when their first go at it, in 2012, happened to be the worst maple syrup season on record in Wisconsin, they realized they needed a value-added component. So in 2013, they began collaborating with local Central Waters Brewing, which provides B&E’s Trees with bourbon barrels to age their syrup in for two years, then uses the maple-soaked barrels to age its Maple Barrel Stout.

As their business took off, Bree and Eric realized they wanted to remain a family-sized farm and keep doing the physical labor they loved. So, with about 5,000 taps in their trees, they stepped up their partnerships with other local farmers, businesses, and retailers to add more resilience to their supply chain and business model.

When the COVID-19 pandemic sidelined their usual travel and events plans, Bree and Eric pivoted into another value-added project. Years prior, Eric had the genius idea of offering maple syrup in resealable, packable pouches for adventure races and endurance events. Suddenly having more bandwidth, the two set to work creating the product and building a brand around it: Embark Maple Energy. In doing so they created two separate-but-intertwined business models that are running as two separate entities: B&E Tress remains the farm name and all of their products, including their bourbon barrel-aged maple syrup, is branded as Embark. Business structure aside, the team is now focused on bringing the Embark brand, and its new adventure packs, to life.

As such, Bree and Eric attended several races to hand out prototypes, network, and build brand awareness for Embark. Revenue from their Bourbon Barrel Aged Maple Syrup has carried the business through these hiccups during a pandemic launch period, underscoring the benefits of a diversified business model.

As for funding, Bree and Eric had received a value-added producer grant (VAPG) to propel their brand-building efforts just before the pandemic hit. They had to pivot their spending of that money, which actually proved beneficial by helping them streamline their marketing and communications.

Wrapping up, Bree and Eric discuss navigating their finances through a year where things didn’t go as planned. They share a few lessons they’ve learned while scaling their business and offer advice for other farmers exploring adding value to their farm and launching consumer-facing brands.

In Edible-Alpha® podcast #100, we bring back FFI founder Tera Johnson, who is now CEO of Iroquois Valley Farmland REIT, an organic farmland finance company. She was the featured presenter for our October 26 “Enhancing Farm Revenues with Conservation Practices & Ecosystem Services” webinar, which forms the basis of this podcast.

Tera defines ecosystem services on-farm conservation practices and structural improvements that farmers can get at least partially reimbursed or credited for. Examples include converting cropland to CRP, planting riparian buffers to protect waterways, acquiring high tunnels for controlled growing, or leasing space for solar arrays. Farmers can sometimes stack these practices, purposing the same piece of land for multiple benefits and credits.

The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has a thick catalog of programs and initiatives for farmers, and the financial kickbacks can be significant. However, the options can be tricky to wade through and understand which would make sense on an individual farm. Some USDA offices provide excellent assistance, but this isn’t always the case.

Some conservation practices, such as nutrient mitigation, are gaining traction with other sectors as well. More county and municipal governments and sewage districts are incentivizing farmers to keep phosphorus and other nutrients on-farm and out of waterways. Farmer incentives for solar installation are gaining steam, too, especially in the expansive, sunny West.

The financial benefits of these programs for farmers can be significant. However, the reimbursement process may be complex and drawn out. Sometimes farmers must foot the bill upfront, or their exact earnings may be outcome dependent, such as solar- or wind-power generation.

Next, Tera and Andy discuss carbon sequestration, a key tenet of regenerative ag—and a hot topic lately, with more and more stakeholders incentivizing farmers to capture carbon in the soil. But, as Tera notes, we’re in the Stone Age of this market, so it’s kind of a Wild West, lacking universal measurement or impact standards. Many farmers are receiving offers from carbon credit buyers, but don’t know who to trust. And whether organic and regenerative farmers who’ve been sequestering carbon for years are being justifiably recognized or compensated for their efforts is still murky. Tera says these kinks should all get ironed out eventually, as this is clearly the future of ag.

Webinar participant Marie Raboin, who works in phosphorous crediting and adaptive management in Dane County, Wisconsin, while also running Brix Cider, adds important context to the discussion: Even though science shows many conservation practices work, farmers aren’t always eager adopters. This requires them to think very differently about their farm, and they need to feel like they can trust the people and organizations propositioning them. Marie says farm businesses work very differently than most, and outside parties must respect their culture, language and way of doing things.

Despite the complexities and yet-to-be-worked-out aspects of ecosystem services and conservation practices, both Tera and FFI strongly believe they are well worth farmers exploring for their many environmental and economic benefits.

In Edible-Alpha® podcast #99, FFI farm financial consultant Andy Larson interviews Larissa McKenna, humane farming program director of Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT). Founded in 1982, this Chicago-based nonprofit holds the vision that all food-producing animals be raised in a healthy and humane manner and that everyone has access to safe and humanely produced food.

FACT offers grants, scholarships, mentorship and webinars for farmers nationwide to give them the skills and resources to raise animals on well-managed pasture-based systems. Though not a certifying agency, FACT helps farmers take steps toward particular production principles. As Larissa explains, these include ensuring that animals, at minimum, get adequate space, access to the outdoors, clean water and air, the opportunity to express natural behaviors, and natural, healthful diets. Also, antibiotics should be used only when disease is present.

As more consumers are learning about the variation in animal production methods, they are increasingly demanding humanely produced products. FACT helps educate shoppers about packaging labels and claims—which ones are meaningful, which are not—to guide their purchasing decisions. Larissa walks through some of the most reliable third-party certifications, such as Certified Animal Welfare Approved, Certified Humane and Animal Welfare Certified and the American Grassfed Association’s standards. Such certifications can aid farmers’ business by boosting brand awareness, opening grant opportunities and, of course, improving animal welfare.

However, certification isn’t always the goal of the farmers Larissa works with—and that’s perfectly OK. FACT’s mission is to help them improve their production methods, and different farmers have different starting points. For example, some are moving from conventional confinement systems while others come to FACT with some humane practices already in play. Regardless of specific circumstances, Larissa lauds the farmers’ innovation, creativity and cost-efficiency in figuring out ways to improve their systems. There is often a strong economic case for making these changes to complement their multiple environmental and animal-welfare benefits.

Lastly, Andy and Larissa discuss FACT’s myriad offerings, including webinars and trainings covering topics such as grazing management and livestock protection, as well as grants for on-farm improvement projects and scholarships for outside education. And in response to farmer demand for more business- and finance-related assistance, FACT is now teaming up with FFI to offer free boot camps and webinars starting this fall. Our mutual goal in providing these valuable opportunities is to help livestock and poultry farmers’ businesses thrive, so learn more and apply today!

In Edible-Alpha® podcast #98, we flip the script, with Food Finance Institute interim director Sarah Larson interviewing FFI founder and outgoing director Tera Johnson. After building up FFI and the Edible-Alpha® brand over the last eight years, Tera is moving on to her next entrepreneurial venture as CEO of Iroquois Valley Farmland REIT.

To start, Tera explains how she first identified the need for FFI and got it off the ground. Through building teraswhey from scratch and then selling the company, she’d acquired a unique knowledge base and skill set around financing food and agriculture enterprises—expertise that was badly needed. So, Tera pitched her idea to the University of Wisconsin System, the system agreed with the need, and FFI was launched within the Institute for Business and Entrepreneurship.

At first, FFI was just Tera doing one-on-one consulting with clients. With way too much work for one person, she applied for and received a USDA Local Food Promotion Program grant to hire a program director. From there, they began developing curricula for boot camps and webinars, started training consultants nationally and launched the Edible-Alpha® podcast. Before long, FFI was working with food and farm enterprises across the U.S., and the podcast was carrying impact far and wide (46,000 downloads to date!).

Tera intentionally combined the food and farm sectors into FFI’s focus, knowing that many of the same tenets (such as money follows business model) and needs (such as understanding numbers before courting financing) apply to both. The COVID-19 pandemic has blurred the lines even further, with farms pivoting to direct-to-consumer, food hubs pivoting to hunger relief, food brands pivoting from retail distribution to e-commerce, etc. This has made FFI’s financial education and technical assistance all the more pertinent.

Next, Tera and Sarah talk through the biggest financing gaps today. Tera says most food brands need working capital, which remains the toughest to get. Many farms now need working capital too since they’re selling direct-to-consumer, although, unlike brands, farms have access to value-added producer grants. Food hubs and other food system-related entities are finding more help from foundations, economic development funds and government grants.

When asked how she has built both teraswhey and FFI to last, Tera says it’s just like she tells businesses in boot camps: do something defensively unique that people actually want, develop a business model around it and figure out how to finance, staff and market it. Embedded in that is creating a culture and hiring an excellent team - FFI now is 5+ strong - that can carry out the work even without the founder. “What I love about the Edible-Alpha® learning platform, combined with the consultant network, is it doesn’t need one person anymore,” Tera says. “It has grown way beyond me.”

Although FFI is sad to see Tera go, she has left a sound business model behind and a strong staff of experts to carry the torch forward.  Though, as Tera says "she is on the same merryground just riding a different horse"- as the founder having presence on our FFI Vision Board and with so many intersections between Iroquois and FFI, she won’t be far away.

In Edible-Alpha® podcast #97, Tera interviews Jesse Rye, co-executive director of Farm Fresh Rhode Island, a nationally acclaimed nonprofit food hub that connects local farmers and eaters and helps strengthen New England’s food infrastructure. Launched as a Brown University student project in 2004, the organization has grown tremendously and recently built a 60,000-square-foot permanent home in Providence.

With a $4.2 million annual budget, Farm Fresh Rhode Island runs several successful programs. There’s Mobile Market, which aggregates and distributes food from over 115 local farmers and producers, and Harvest Kitchen, which produces value-added products from local produce while providing job training for at-risk youth. Farm Fresh also operates 10 farmers markets and provides the infrastructure for 25 more. Additionally, the organization has a farm-to-school and community education program, and it facilitates Bonus Bucks, a one-to-one match for people using SNAP.

Of course, Farm Fresh Rhode Island didn’t start out so ambitiously. It began by developing a food guide to link local farmers with locavore consumers and businesses. Then over time, Jesse says, “we’ve had strong organizational growth, driven through technological innovation, sound business and organizational practices, and an extremely dedicated staff and team of volunteers.”

Jesse joined Farm Fresh as managing director in 2012, amidst a rapid growth phase. He found his niche implementing support structures around growth, including financial systems, collections management and human resources—"all the things a young food hub or organization needs to think about.”

Around 2015, the organization, then renting office, market and warehouse space in Pawtucket, began discussing finding a forever home. Over the next few years, they refined their vision, pitched to potential funders and built momentum around the project.

“We were out there selling people the idea of a hub where Farm Fresh could grow as an organization and keep doing our mission-driven work, but also as a place where density of other business focused on farming and food could come together,” Jesse says. “It’s very much a cluster of economic activity that could bolster the regional food system but also have a really big impact on those businesses.”

Ultimately, Farm Fresh secured government funding, plus significant philanthropic support—a mix that Jesse says has been crucial. In 2017, the group purchased a 3-acre property in Providence, began building an environmentally conscious, purpose-designed facility, and started courting other food and farm businesses to rent spaces.

COVID-19 struck just as construction was complete—a lucky break because it let Farm Fresh move its summer farmers market inside. But with institutional customers dropping out rapidly, its other programs were impacted overnight. Within a week, Farm Fresh opened its wholesale ordering platform to home delivery. Orders jumped tenfold; one day they delivered $90,000 in food. The food hub also partook in the USDA Farmers to Families Food Box Program, which segued into hunger relief work that continues today.

As the pandemic has settled down, Farm Fresh has been able to move some tenants into the building and push forward with many initiatives. We’re excited to see how this dynamic organization continues to scale and evolve. This podcast is packed with inspiration, so definitely tune in!

In Edible-Alpha® podcast #96, Tera welcomes Jennifer Bloeser, co-founder and CEO of Oregon Coast Wasabi, the largest wasabi farm in the U.S. Launched in 2010, the e-commerce company sells an array of fresh and shelf-stable wasabi products to restaurants, retailers, distributors and consumers, as well as plant starts to gardeners.

First, Jennifer demystifies wasabi, a slow-growing perennial that most Americans only know as the spicy green paste served with sushi. Wasabi is brassica native to Japanese streambeds, so it prefers shade and cool temperatures, making the foggy, temperate Oregon shoreline near Tillamook the ideal place to grow it. That’s precisely why Oregon Coast Wasabi set up shop there, cultivating plants in nine low-tech greenhouses.

Next, Jennifer explains wasabi’s growth cycle and details the flavor, heat factor and culinary potential of each plant part. The revered plant also has many traditional medicinal properties. She says that while growing wasabi at scale requires infrastructure, home gardeners can easily maintain a few plants in pots.

Oregon Coast Wasabi is one of only three wasabi growers nationwide, and in the beginning, they sold only wholesale to food distributors. A few years in, they expanded into restaurants and retail and set up an e-commerce site for consumer sales. Though it took some time—and stress—to dial in shipping methods, Jennifer figured it out and the business grew steadily.

She says the company has benefitted from consumers becoming more adventurous with food and more people discovering that the wasabi at sushi restaurants is usually fake. Early media coverage helped too. And with so little competition in this niche market, customers easily find Oregon Coast Wasabi, so they haven’t needed to invest much in marketing—yet. Jennifer knows that with continued growth, that will change.

Right now, the company is in the midst of expanding. They’d been pressing the limits of the current greenhouse space for a while, so Jennifer had been eying a land purchase. The uncertainties brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic made her hesitant, but after the company weathered last year just fine, she went for it, signing a sale agreement on a 4-acre property in May.

The previous owner let her start building infrastructure and greenhouses right away, and she self-financed and did much of the construction herself. After closing on the property in August, a construction loan will kick in, allowing the company to pay down its bills. They’ve completed four 3,000-square-foot greenhouses so far, and the property can hold 12 to 14 more. Retaining the original greenhouses will keep sales coming in over the 12 to 18 months it will take for the new crops to mature.

In Edible-Alpha® podcast #95, Tera sits down with Kevin Bachhuber, founder of Bachhuber Consulting and Madison Cricket Farm to learn about the emergent industry of insect agriculture and its potential for pet food, human food and so much more.

Kevin, quite simply, is a cricket guy. Inspired by a 2013 United Nations report advising the world to eat more insects, he started Big Cricket Farms, the nation’s first FDA-inspected human food–grade cricket-growing operation. With this pioneering venture, Kevin helped carve out the federal regulatory framework and built deep relationships with fellow insect farmers. He ran that business for two years, until unforeseen circumstances forced its shutdown.

Then in 2016, Kevin launched Bachhuber Consulting, a niche agency dedicated to insect agriculture and related systems. Leveraging his first-hand expertise and industry relationships, he offers advice, technical assistance and training to insect growers nationwide. Recently, Kevin caught the farming bug again and, this past January, opened his own operation, which raises and sells bandit crickets into the live feed market, with a focus on pet store owners.

Crickets have a super speedy lifecycle, so they multiply fast. This allowed Madison Cricket Farm to break even in less than two months and scale up very quickly, recently relocating from a 700-sqare-foot facility to a 3,000-square-foot home base. Still, the business has a long way to grow. Kevin says a mature cricket farm typically has 100,000 to 250,000 square feet of rearing space—the size of two city blocks! He’s unsure whether he’ll want to get that big, or maybe go bigger. Since there’s a lot of unmet need in the Upper Midwest, he says the first step is sizing out that market.

Next, Kevin and Tera discuss the human food market, which Madison Cricket Farm isn’t ready to explore yet, partly due to its relatively small footprint. But also, the live feed industry yields higher margins and isn’t easily disrupted by cheap cricket powders from overseas like the human food market is.

Still, if and when Americans embrace eating protein-packed insects, likely for sustainability reasons, there will be ample opportunities for Kevin’s company. He can see maybe collaborating on product development in the future, but he knows his expertise and passion lie in the production side. For now, he’s most interested in growing his bug population, optimizing processes and exploring full-cycle agriculture, such as selling cricket poop to vegetable growers.

Along with the endless possibilities with cricket farming, there continue to be challenges, namely finding suitable facilities and navigating the murky regulatory environment. But Kevin, with his unique knowledge and eagerness to learn, build and test out new things, is certainly set up to succeed.

In Edible-Alpha® podcast #94, Tera chats with James Maiocco, chief operations officer at Barn2Door, a Seattle-based provider of software and services that help farmers grow and manage direct sales. The company was already growing fast before COVID-19. But now, with even more farmers looking to direct-market and more consumers embracing e-commerce and seeking out local products, Barn2Door’s business is booming.

Before founding the company six years ago, CEO Janelle Maiocco started an online marketplace to connect chefs and consumers with local farmers. But she soon realized the marketplace concept didn’t fully meet farmers’ needs or facilitate direct farmer-buyer relationships, so she scrapped that business and launched Barn2Door. With this innovative new model, farmers pay a software fee but keep 100% of their sales and totally own their relationships with customers.

James says that nine out of 10 consumers want to buy local, but they just don’t know how to discover farmers. That’s why Barn2Door teaches farmers—many of whom are new to e-commerce and intimidated by everything it entails—how to be discovered, accessible, engaging and easy to purchase from so they can cultivate recurring sales and enduring one-on-one relationships with buyers.

On the software side, Barn2Door’s turnkey solutions help farmers manage their products, reach customers and conduct transactions through multiple channels and touchpoints. The most successful farmers, James says, do business on two to three channels, such as email, social media or Nextdoor. Barn2Door’s close partnerships with Mailchimp, Square Space and other entities enable seamless integration among channels, ultimately saving farmers time, money and headaches.

These partnerships also allow Barn2Door to capture a wealth of data, which it readily shares with farmers to help them make better-informed decisions on sales and marketing strategies. Whether it’s which packaging sizes or product mixes sell best, how frequent blog posts should be, how many calls to action they need per webpage, or how much farmers can charge for delivery, data are available to guide them.

But of course, Barn2Door’s work entails a lot more than backend engineering and numbers. Knowing that every farmer’s situation, priorities and goals are unique, the company assigns each an account manager who works closely with them to strategize the best tactics to implement for success. Barn2Door also offers virtual bootcamps and academies for further education and to foster farmers learning from one another.

This is just a teaser of Tera and James’s conversation! He shares a bunch of valuable insights throughout this podcast—and even a few data-supported marketing tips that can make a big difference in any farmer’s business.

We revisit a podcast from our archives, episode #43 with Peter Robertson, founder of RP’s Pasta and co-founder of Tribe 9 Foods. Peter touches on managing growth and changing with the consumer.

The Good Acre’s David Van Eeckhout talks with Tera about the Twin Cities food hub’s evolving role in uplifting diverse farmers, supporting local food makers and increasing community access to high-quality local produce.