Denzel Mitchell talks about urban farming in Baltimore, bringing up new farmers, the heirloom Baltimore Fish pepper and more.

Hear about how food and farming have been part of Denzel’s whole life, from his extended family’s 600-acre homestead in Oklahoma to his college English professor’s homestead. His experience running farms in Baltimore—the city and the county—helped to prepare him for his current role of co-executive director of Farm Alliance of Baltimore.

You’ll learn about Farm Alliance of Baltimore’s many programs, including a cooperative farmers market, food assistance doubling, mobile cooking demonstrations, technical assistance, soil testing and nutrient management research, compost coaching, and—the newest and largest program—the Black Butterfly Urban Farm Academy. Two years in, 20 farmers have trained in a 9-month intensive with mentorship, coursework, field days at urban and peri-urban farms, and work days at the teaching and demonstration farm with the intention of getting into their own farming business. Hear about an exciting, brand-new aspect of this program, a 7-acre teaching and demonstration farm that will allow the organization to offer farm-business incubator space for academy graduates.

Have you heard of the Baltimore Fish pepper? Listen to Denzel’s history of this heirloom, how he started growing it, and how you can grow it, too.

Denzel talks about his natural inclination toward being a connector and educator and how this has helped him in his farming journey and has served his vision of seeing more people farming.

Follow along with Denzel as he talks about what it looks like for small-scale farmers to truly have support from their customers and communities, and how farmers can come out and ask for that support.

• Farm Alliance of Baltimore website
• Farm Alliance of Baltimore monthly newsletter
• Farm Alliance of Baltimore on Instagram
• Farm Alliance of Baltimore on Facebook

Pittsburgh apiarist Christina Joy Neumann talks with Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good host Lisa Munniksma about beekeeping, sustainability in the honey industry, and more.

Learn about the evolution of Christina’s Apoidea Apiary and how she sees her career in architecture and her work with bees as intrinsically related. (Think about bees as natural architects!) She shares her fascination with bees as eusocial creatures and with their ability to efficiently make their own food and homes. 

Hear about the 70 to 110 hives that Christina manages and the seasonality of beekeeping in urban Pittsburgh, both from the perspective of the bees and the beekeeper. Christina talks about the high-level craft of creating honey and how she encourages consumers to appreciate her Certified Naturally Grown honey as an artisan farm product.

Dive into what takes place behind the scenes of commercial-scale beekeeping, including the industrialized system of migratory beekeeping, commodified honey processing and labeling, and bee welfare. You’ll hear about the study Christina is participating in with a researcher at Chatham University about the question of what truly sustainable honey production would look like.

Get to know Burgh Bees, a beekeeper education group in Pittsburgh, and Co-Nectar, the honey tasting room, cafe, and art space that Christina and family members are opening in 2023. At the end, Christina touches on the terroir and different flavor profiles of honey.

Apoidia Apiary website

Sign up for Christina’s newsletter

Christina Joy Neumann on Instagram

Co-Nectar on Instagram

Burgh Bees website 

In this episode, shepherd and Diné fiber artist Roy Kady talks about the importance and traditions of the Navajo-Churro sheep breed, flock management, fiber arts, and more.

Recorded on Winter Solstice (in the Northern hemisphere), Roy explains the importance of solstice in Diné lifeways. Learn about the Slow Food USA Navajo-Churro Sheep Presidium, a group created to support and promote endangered foodways—in this case, this rare breed of sheep. Roy tells us what it means to have just 5,000 registered Navajo-Churro sheep and the breed’s their meat, fiber, and hardiness characteristics that make them great sheep for a small farm. (Did you know that when managed on range, these sheep can seek out and forage the plants with the properties they need to keep them healthy?) 

Hear about Roy’s own flock; what he means when he says, “they manage us”; and the seasonal and rotational grazing methods used in his community. Roy explains how responsible grazing improves the soil. He also offers his advice for breeding and culling sheep to maintain and improve a healthy flock. 

Roy tells a story about his family’s history in fiber arts and his own work with wool, from weaving to felting to dying with natural dyes, as well as incorporating nontraditional fibers. Listen until the end to hear about Diné creation stories of the Navajo-Churro sheep and a quick excerpt from a Diné sheep song.

Slow Food USA Navajo-Churro Sheep Presidium

About Navajo-Churro Sheep on The Livestock Conservancy

The Navajo Lifeway (Diné Bé’Iiná)

Navajo-Churro Sheep Association

Navajo Sheep Project

Celina Ngozi is a Black/Igbo agrarian and the founder of Ala Soul Earthworks/Dry Bones Heal Bottomland, joining Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good today to talk about her food-sovereignty work and earth-based practices.

Hear about the Central Texas land that has been in Celina’s family since 1876 and how she, her mother and other members of their family are coming together there. Learn about heirs property and the complexities of owning, enjoying and improving the land, particularly for Black land stewards in the South. Celina talks about her work as a Land Advocacy Fellow with National Young Farmers Coalition, land access issues in the Farm Bill and why that is so important to the future of small-scale farming.

Get some advice on starting a garden from scratch with no motorized equipment, as Celina has done on land that hasn’t been farmed in a few generations. Celina talks about adapting her farming practices from Colorado—where she learned about growing—to this new land, climate and community. She also talks about growing culturally relevant crops on subsistence farming and market gardening scales.

Stay tuned until the end to hear about community building in rural areas and—something a lot of listeners can identify with—Celina’s favorite farm meal.

More about Celina Ngozi Esakawu:

Celina’s work with Ala Soul Earthworks/Dry Bones Heal Bottomland promotes connection to the earth through Afro-Indigenous practices, creativity and nurturing community. 

For a decade, Celina has grown food and worked with frontline communities to develop creative solutions to inequities in the food system. Her work includes food distribution, coordinating community agriculture programs, living on farms, promoting SNAP at farmers markets, advocating for land access, teaching African Diasporic nutrition courses and supporting local food economies across Texas.  

Her multi-ethnic background informs her earth-based practices. She focuses on growing culturally relevant foods of the Global South on land that has been in her family for 150 years. She is currently developing a program for people of color that promotes (re)membering ancestral knowledge in order to support future generations of agrarians. Celina is a 2022-2023 Land Advocacy Fellow with the National Young Farmers Coalition.

Links:

Ala Soul Earthworks/Dry Bones Heal Bottomland

One Million Acres Campaign

Federation of Southern Cooperatives land retention resources

In this episode of Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good, Dr. Mehmet Öztan talks seed justice, selecting seeds for saving, the Seedy Talks speaker series, and more about his work as an underrepresented minoritized farmer in West Virginia.

Hear about how Dr. Öztan went from receiving a PhD in civil engineering to starting Two Seeds in a Pod heirloom seed company with his wife, Dr. Amy Thompson, all because he wanted to recreate the flavors he remembered from his childhood in Turkey. He shares the challenges of tracking down seeds and histories of vegetable and herb varieties whose stories are largely passed down by oral tradition. 

Listen—with horror—to Dr. Öztan’s story about that time he got a call that a cow was loose in his garden on leased land and appreciate other complexities of growing and maintaining rare and culturally significant seeds. Get Dr. Öztan’s advice for selecting the plants from which you want to save seeds and understand what it takes to get a variety ready for commercial availability.

Go behind the scenes in the seed industry, from Dr. Öztan’s take on how your seed purchases shape the seed industry to navigating seed importation and accessing USDA germplasm seed banks, plus the problematic nature of seed expeditions. 

Finally hear about the Seedy Talks seed-justice conversation series that Dr. Öztan hosts as part of his work at West Virginia University.

• Two Seeds in a Pod online
• Email Dr. Öztan
• Two Seeds in a Pod on Facebook
• Two Seeds in a Pod on Instagram
• Seedy Talks at West Virginia University
• Dr. Amy Thompson on Instagram
• The Collards edition of Crop Stories, with an article by Dr. Öztan

Master Composter Reingard Rieger, Ph.D., breaks down composting, urban gardening and Seattle’s Master Composter Sustainability Steward program in this episode of Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good. 

Learn about Tilth Alliance’s Master Composter Sustainability Steward program, which trains 30 to 35 volunteers each year to go into the community and educate others about composting, soil health, recycling, stormwater management and more. From mandatory food-waste composting to mandatory recycling, Seattle’s sustainability programs have had a big payoff: From 2004-2019, the tonnage of compostable material going to the landfill was reduced by 40 percent, even while the city’s population grew by 30 percent. 

Get Reingard’s professional advice to start or improve your own composting or, as she says, “farming the microbes.” Hear about vermiculture (worm composting) basics, worms’ preferred vegan diet and the science behind how we get worm castings. And learn about food-digester worm bins, which are easy to build and use in your own garden.

Reingard shares her experience in building a 10,000-square-foot backyard garden and a front-yard rain garden in Seattle and talks about her family’s farming background in Austria, too. 

• Tilth Alliance
• Master Composter Sustainability Steward Program
• Tilth Alliance’s composting resources
• Seattle Public Utilities food and yard waste resources

New Jersey farmer Jeff Tober talks farming for ecological and community health, pasture-raised pigs, farm planning, and more with host Lisa Munniksma in this episode of Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good.

Hear about how a potato growing in a compost pile in the Philadelphia suburbs sparked a curiosity in Jeff as a young person that put him on a winding path to farming and eventually to the Pinelands Preservation Alliance’s Rancocas Creek Farm. Learn about the Pinelands Preservation Alliance’s work to preserve the 1.1-million-acre, ecologically important Pinelands National Reserve, including how they came into the 72 acres that is now their Rancocas Creek Farm. 

Jeff talks about developing this farm from essentially a blank slate into a thriving natural space in a way that is chemical-free, involves diverse communities, restores soil health, mitigates stormwater flow, supports pollinators and wildlife, is economically sustainable, and brings in constituents new to PPA. Learn about getting federal Natural Resources Conservation Service and New Jersey’s State Agriculture Development Committee funds for your farm projects and other ideas to “chase every dollar,” as farmers often have to do.

Have your pastured-pig curiosity piqued and consider the ways they can fit into farm ecosystems. Dive deeper into farm planning, from observation to implementation. Get a great idea for engaging the community and getting more organic material for your farm with Rancocas Creek Farm’s Project Pizza Box. Hear also about the New Jersey Agricultural Society, the Farmers Against Hunger program (and how to get your farm involved), and the role of County Agricultural Development Boards in New Jersey. 

Pinelands Preservation Alliance

PPA on Instagram

PPA on Facebook

Rancocas Creek Farm

Rancocas Creek Farm on Instagram

Email Jeff Tober

New Jersey Agricultural Society

New Jersey Farmers Against Hunger

Kentucky farmer and community organizer Tiffany Bellfield covers family land and legacies, pollinator habitats, Community Farm Alliance, and more on this episode of Hobby Farms Presents: Growing Good.

Hear about the deep history of Ballew Estates, the land that Tiffany’s great-grandfather, Atrus Ballew, who was born an enslaved person, eventually bought and Tiffany now stewards with her cousin, Jim Embry. Learn about how you can build up a natural pollinator habitat on your own farm.

Tiffany talks about being an herbalist and a doula and how opening her farm to women in the community is an act of holistic care. For anyone who’s visited the iconic Alfalfa Restaurant in Lexington, Kentucky, Tiffany gets personal about what the restaurant’s transition into catering and food truck has looked like and how that ties in with her struggle with heir’s property rights.

Get to know the work of Community Farm Alliance in Kentucky, including the equity work this organization has committed to, which resulted in the Kentucky Black Farmer Fund. Also hear about why you should be paying attention to the Farm Bill and how the Inflation Reduction Act is and is not helping farmers—in particular BIPOC farmers.

Ballew Estates

Ballew Estates on Instagram

Ballew Estates on Facebook

Community Farm Alliance

CFA on YouTube

CFA on Facebook

Email CFA

Email Tiffany

Kentucky Black Farmer Fund

Episode 34: Meighen Lovelace on the Farm Bill

National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition Farm Bill info

This episode features Arwen Donahue, her life on a Kentucky farm and her new book, Landings: A Crooked Creek Farm Year.

Arwen tells us about her and her husband, David Wagoner’s, Three Springs Farm. You’ll hear about how they searched for their niche and revived themselves from burnout in small-scale farming, from 18 years of having a vegetable CSA to growing food for a local restaurant group. Learn about some of the foragable goodies on Arwen’s farm and how you can incorporate foraged items into a CSA.

Arwen discloses the struggles of writing and illustrating a book while farming and also the beauty in combining a farming life and a creative life. Listen to her read a page from Landings and explain how this book depicting drawings and daily journal entries of the farm came into being.

Arwen Donahue’s website

Find Landings at Hub City Press and on Bookshop.org

Holly Hill & Co.

Listen in on this conversation with land steward, Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance Executive Director and Hopi Tribe member Lilian Hill as she talks about dryland farming, traditional foodways, farming systems and more. 

Hear about Lilian’s family and community heritage and how she connects with traditional agriculture methods, foodways and food sovereignty work. She tells us about her and her husband’s founding of the Hopi Tutskwa Permaculture Institute—which provides outlets to explore areas of food production, energy, water and small-scale food cooperatives—plus the 15-acre area of farmland her grandparents once farmed and another 2-acre permaculture demonstration site that she and her family continue to steward. Learn, too, about the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance’s work in restoring food systems that support tribal self-determination and community wellness.  

Lilian shares an indigenous point of view—and is real about the difficulty of accessing and sharing this knowledge—on the major weather issues we’re seeing right now and how we can work to restore a balance in nature. Take note of Lilian’s dryland farming advice, from seed selection to soil conditions to water retention and conservation. Stay tuned to the end to hear about what Lilian finds inspiring in the food system today.

Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance

NAFSA on Facebook

NAFSA on Instagram

Hopi Tutskwa Permaculture Institute