Eatwell Farm, in California’s Sacramento Valley just over an hour from San Francisco, is 105 acres of deep, flat, fertile ground. There, Nigel Walker conducts a symphony of employees, cover crops, lavender chickens, vegetables, fruits, and herbs, to provide for a CSA of 550 shares a week as well as the Ferry Plaza farmer’s market. Nigel describes his systems for training and delegating to employees to create pride in their work and profits for the business, and we dig deep on the cover crop and chicken management system on his farm that allows him to grow vegetables year-round without fertilizer or pesticides.

The Farmer to Farmer Podcast is generously supported by Vermont Compost Company.

Rebecca Thistlethwaite, author of The New Livestock Farmer, currently lives and raises livestock near Hood River, Oregon. She and her husband ran TLC Ranch near Watsonville, California, where they raised ten thousand broiler chickens, five thousand laying hens, and 300 hogs each year on twenty acres of irrigated pasture for many years. We discuss ways farmers who are focused on livestock and farmers who have livestock as a secondary enterprise can make the most of their critter-based efforts. Along the way we get into the importance of matching the scale of your livestock enterprise to the equipment and infrastructure you have on hand, the considerations of selling meat through different outlets and in different ways, and how to make the most of your water, feed, and fencing.

The Farmer to Farmer Podcast is generously supported by Vermont Compost Company.

Collin Thompson manages Michigan State University’s North Farm near the village of Chatham in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The North Farm hosts a two-year residential incubator program in the extremely short season of the Northwoods, with their last frost in the first week of June, and the first frost right about now, in the second week of September. We talk about the ins and outs of running a market farm as part of the University, practical successes for overwintering crops in high and low tunnels for early spring production, and ways Collin has worked with and around the 190 inches of annual snowfall in Chatham. We also had a chance to get into the culture of root cellaring in the north, and I had a chance to take a nice rant about food safety and barrel washers.

The Farmer to Farmer Podcast is generously supported by Vermont Compost Company.

For more than twenty years, Mushroom Mountain’s Tradd Cotter has been working to think like a mushroom as he worked to build a business based on his mycological adventures. Since 1996, South Carolina’s Mushroom Mountain has produced edible mushrooms and served as a laboratory for Tradd’s explorations into the use of mushrooms for everything from mycoremediation to personalized antibiotics. Tradd and Chris explore Tradd’s low-tech and no-tech strategies for growing mushrooms, including the fundamentals of mushroom production and strategies for fitting mushrooms into a vegetable operation, getting into the psychology and physiology of the fungal kingdom.

The Farmer to Farmer Podcast is generously supported by Vermont Compost Company.

Anton Burkett started Early Morning Farm in 1999 with three acres, three friends, and a rototiller. Since that time, this farm in the Finger Lake region of upstate New York has grown to 100 acres and 1,500 CSA shares. Anton and Chris talk about how he has managed this rapid growth year over year. Anton has a thoughtful approach to issues of scale, and we talk about how he’s leveraged his CSA to solve the land-access problem, his approach to personnel management and hiring, and how he’s strategically managed machinery investments and reinvestments as his farm has grown.

The Farmer to Farmer Podcast is generously supported by Vermont Compost Company.

Adam and Mel Millsap own Urban Roots Farm, a four season micro farm set in the West Central neighborhood of Springfield, Missouri. We talk about their family and neighborhood involvement as they grow about a third of an acre of intensive produce, including three mobile high tunnels. Adam and Mel share their experiences managing the extremely wet weather in southern Missouri this summer, and how they care for the natural landscape in their urban environment.

The Farmer to Farmer Podcast is generously supported by Vermont Compost Company.

University of Vermont Extension Professor Vern Grubinger does not fit the conventional extension agent mode. For twenty-five years, Vern has worked to develop a co-learning community among the professional vegetable- and berry-growers of Vermont. In this episode, we talk about the challenges facing Vermont vegetable farmers, from soil fertility basics and phytophthora to human resources, food safety certification, and costs of production – and about how a healthy food system, from marketing to education, is all about relationships.

The Farmer to Farmer Podcast is generously supported by Vermont Compost Company.

Dan Kaplan has managed Brookfield Farm in Amherst, Massachusetts, since 1994. Brookfield Farm was one of the first CSAs in the United States, and currently supports 525 shares of produce, plus an additional 200 winter shares. Our conversation reflected on the growth of CSA and local foods from Brookfield Farm’s founding in 1984 to now, including how Brookfield has embraced a contemporary way of looking at its CSA shares without losing the core of its CSA community. Dan reflects at length on shared risk – and shared loss – as the core value of the CSA concept, binding the producer and consumer in a way that no other marketing model does. We also discuss Dan’s popular crop-planning spreadsheets, and his aspiration to time travel.

The Farmer to Farmer Podcast is generously supported by Vermont Compost Company.

Dave Paulk farms at Sassafras Farm on the western side of Chesapeake Bay, near Leonardtwon, Maryland. Sassafras Farm is based around its four acres of vegetables, although Dave has many more acres in cover crops and grains on his 46 total tillable acres. Dave and his wife, Jennifer, started the farm in 2011 after Dave retired from the Navy. Dave and I talk about how his career in the military – and just having a career before he started farming – has shaped the development of his farm and business, from hiring and training employees to planning and making use of a wide range of resources.

The Farmer to Farmer Podcast is generously supported by Vermont Compost Company.

Jim Crawford raises thirty acres of vegetables at New Morning Farm in Hustontown, Pennsylvania. Jim started New Morning Farm in 1972, and has gained a reputation for an excellent operation with great employee engagement. In this episode, we talk about New Morning Farm’s marketing strategy (including the Tuscarora Organic Growers Cooperative, which Jim founded with neighboring organic farms), investment and debt, the H2A guest-worker program, irrigation, and controlling pests in sweet corn. The value Jim places on knowledge sharing and collaboration shines through in this episode.

The Farmer to Farmer Podcast is generously supported by Vermont Compost Company.