Urban Acre Homestead

Urban farms provide a unique answer to the following question: “How do we move our food system beyond the practices of monoculture?”1 Benjamin and Virkler, the authors of Farm to Table: The Essential Guide to Sustainable Food Systems for Students, Professionals, and Consumers, assert, “Urban farms are versatile, using new techniques along with a variety of techniques from traditional farming methods . . . urban farms can improve food security and nutrition; provide economic savings; and offer social connections for many disenfranchised groups.”1

Genevieve Flanagan is the woman behind Urban Acre Homestead, a one-acre urban farm in Northeast Portland, smack-dab in the middle of suburban neighborhood developments from the early 1950’s.  On the Urban Acre Homestead website, Genevieve describes her vision for the farm as “a diverse food forest with orchard fruits, nuts and berries, in addition to perennial vegetables, medicinal and culinary herbs and a fledgling tea plantation.”2  Her fresh and delicious seasonal produce can found in the community at farmers markets like Lents International Farmers Market and Montavilla Farmers Market. 

Incredibly inspired by Genevieve’s gumption and visionary leadership, I reached out to see if she would be willing to let me interview her about Urban Acre Homestead and her life as an urban farmer.  Genevieve graciously obliged.  We sat together in her backyard one warm summer afternoon sipping mugs of cool water and chatted about everything from urban farming to fire-dependent ecologies.

Note: This interview has been edited for clarity.

Let’s start off with why you named your farm “Urban Acre Homestead” and why you chose Portland as the location for Urban Acre Homestead.

The name of the business really just stemmed from wanting to keep it simple.  So, it’s not quite as great of a backstory as some of the other farms that I’ve worked with or seen.  Some of them have really great quirky names.  Honestly, I just wanted to make it pretty obvious what I was doing.  The idea behind farming in this particular spot was that it was urban, it was within the city, and I was trying to get as close to the people I wanted to feed as possible.

The idea behind calling it a homestead versus just a farm was to let people know that I live here.  This isn’t just a space that I lease somewhere else and drive to.  It’s not a piece of land that I am just working until it can’t be worked, and then moving on.  This is really an effort to put down very serious roots and be here in the long run.  Whether that means I’m growing vegetables still – 10 years from now – or whether I shift into fruit or some other random thing, or even doing wholesale versus farmers markets – however the business evolves, I wanted it to still revolve around the idea that I am growing within the city.  I am on an acre.  I live here. There’s a sense of permanence  – intentional permanence – with what I’m doing here, and I am trying to keep that in mind with whatever I produce.

I also hoped that [Urban Acre Homestead] would feel and become more like a cottage farm or a cottage industry where I was producing lots of different items off the farm, not just produce.  I started to get into that a little bit by growing more medicinal plants either for order or in collaboration with people that make [medicinal plant-related products].  I wanted to leave that as an open-ended idea:  I could move into a lot of different ventures and still be the same business.  I wouldn’t have to change if I was a farm but was growing stuff that people weren’t expecting from a farm – or even producing items on the side that were value-added or still had their roots in the farm, but were crafts or something really unusual.

“Urban Acre Farm” is intended to kind of give people a very quick snapshot of what’s going on: Okay, you’re in the city, you’ve got one acre, and you live there. That’s probably the easiest explanation.

So, you’re not from Portland. You’re from Florida. And, you’ve lived in Arizona. These are completely different places: a desert versus a warm, subtropical climate! So, what brought you to Portland?

A lot of things.  I had known about Portland as a very vibrant and amazing city in college. That probably came from the fact that I was studying urban sociology.  I was in a very open-ended major.  I went to a liberal arts college.  I had the opportunity to really dip my toes into a lot of things and still be on the same academic track.  Around the same time that I was getting interested in food systems and farming, I was also studying urban sociology and urban planning.  The urban growth boundary of Portland came up a lot.  People referenced this city as being very progressive and almost European in its influence and planning systems.  I had heard a lot of good things, but what really what pulled the trigger was that my boyfriend-at-the-time and I were living in Arizona and it was 2008.  I was a recent graduate.  Luckily, I found a job pretty easily, but right around the time that that job ended – because it was a seasonal job – the crash happened.

Even though it wasn’t this immediate shut down – we were living in Tempe, AZ, which was a college town, 1), and 2) a very tourist-dependent economy – they shut down.  At the time, there were development projects downtown that became abandoned, a ghost town.  There were whole neighborhoods that foreclosed.  You would drive down a neighborhood street and it was Foreclosed, Foreclosed, Foreclosed, Foreclosed.  So, of course, the businesses were not hiring.  It wasn’t just that the local population wasn’t enough to sustain the business economy, it was that people were suddenly not going to travel there. Or, people who were there visiting but didn’t need to be there were going to go home.

It has since rebounded, but, at the time, we considered that I was really interested in farming – I was actually working for a farm at the time.  My husband (then-boyfriend) was going to need work.  He had lived in Portland for about a year prior. He’s from Arizona.  We decided to move here because he had some contacts.  He knew he could get a job.  He was a bike mechanic.  So, for him, finding work here was going to be really easy.

By that time, I had worked in enough farming or horticultural-related businesses that I was able to find a job fairly quickly at a nursery here.  So, it was a lot of job prospects that brought us here, really.  I mean, you know, the romantic ideal was still there, but it was a very practical decision in the end to make a go of it because we knew we had the skills necessary to find work.  We did that back in August of 2009, and this is our 10th year here.  A decade!  Yeah!  It’s pretty great!

I’m assuming that the fact that you’re homesteading means that you’re stoked, happy, and feel at home here?

We do.  It’s always important to recognize that we’ve been well-received here; that we had an amazing opportunity to purchase land here.  All of these things have come through positive and very negative experiences, but we feel really hopeful about staying here and hopefully contributing.  For me, that’s really a big part of having a farm in the first place.  I believe there’s a real need for urban farms, even in Portland where it may seem saturated or competitive.  People still want to eat good food that’s grown locally and not brought in from really far away.  If I can contribute to that and also utilize it to make some of my living, then that is ideal for me.

How do you choose which farmers markets to sell at? Is it proximity to your place? Is it that these markets are close by or within your community?  Is that your deciding factor?

I would say that even if there was a market down the street – which there was at some point – there was a Parkrose Farmers Market that shut down a couple years ago – I would be selling there if they were still open.  So, yes, proximity is a huge one.  I like the idea of feeding my neighbors.  As the business grows, there may be an opportunity to sell at a bigger market.  If I got to a point where I could sell downtown at PSU, I might consider that, even though it’s far away.  But, I would probably still want to keep a market that was super close to home.  A big priority for me is to feel like I’m feeding my neighbors as much as possible.

There’s a critical conversation that happens every time somebody sees the farm name at the market and they go, “Oh, where are you?” And I tell them: “I’m on 132nd and Halsey.”  The closer I am to the farm, the more likely they are to recognize that.   I’ve had a lot of people find me at markets and go, “Oh my gosh, we’re neighbors! I drive by your house all the time!”  And, for them, that’s awesome.  They’re like, “Oh my gosh!   I know exactly where this food comes from.”  I don’ t know if its because they think, “Well, maybe I’ll drive by and if I see you spraying something weird, you’re accountable! I know where you live!”

It’s really just this idea of connecting.  There are so many things that people get every day that they have no idea where it comes from.  Finding out where it comes from is really difficult.  So, I think it provides a balance for some folks: if there are a lot of things in their lives that they have to be disconnected from, this is at least something where they’re making the effort to go to a market and support somebody.  They can get that connection as a part of that.  I think people really value that.  It’s really nice when I meet my neighbors at the market.  That’s always awesome.

That’s so cool.  What about values that drive your way of living, your way of working?  You’ve touched on some of them, but if you could highlight them, name any that are huge, and riff on them . . .

I’ll try not to get too esoteric.

You can! You can! [laughs]

I would say that self-sufficiency is a big one.  That accounts for trying to produce a lot of what I need for the farm on the farm.  It does account a lot for the rainwater harvesting.  If I’m going to say that I’m producing in the city so that I can be close to my market and reduce the amount of importing – and the carbon footprint that goes along with that – well then if I’m also operating on as tight as a self-sufficiency cycle, then that goes along with it.  And that helps me walk the walk. 

That means a lot of things are going to be easier over the long run: It might mean that, for now, I’m importing some compost, but, in the future, I won’t have to as much.  It might mean that I supply enough manure as a fertilizer source.  It might mean that I gradually get to a point where I don’t have to use any city water – which, yes, I get it here in the city, but it doesn’t come from the city.  So, I’m just trying to think about how to be a good neighbor and also be as sustainable as possible. 

Those are all sort of big ideas, but when it comes to the ground level, a lot of what I’m thinking is, “How do I make this so that I’m not constantly bringing in everything I need to make widgets A, B, and C and then exporting widgets A, B, and C?”  You know? So, trying to keep it all as close as possible is a big driving factor.

The other thing that plays into the whole regenerative agriculture idea . . . It’s funny because these different terminologies have looked like a lot of different things over the periods time where people are basically rediscovering indigenous farming practices, but then giving them shiny new titles. 

Thank you so much for saying that.

So, it’s looked like regenerative agriculture. It’s looked like permaculture. It’s looked like organic farming. It’s looked like no-till farming. You know and there are a lot of ways to say, basically, “I’m just going to run animals on the land and then after they come through, I’m going to try to exclude certain plants that I want to grow.” There have been so many ways that people have been doing that for millennia. Whether it’s burning undergrowth to open up areas for planting or to activate certain seeds that require heat.

I had no idea that certain seeds require heat!

Actually, certain conifer varieties do! The seeds will not germinate unless they’re exposed to high temperatures.  So, the whole idea of a fire ecology is that the fire creates carbon by burning plant material and leaving ash and charcoal behind.  It clears a lot of what they call “fuel loads” – dead organic matter, which allows more light in the canopy, and allows young saplings to come up and not have to compete with a lot of the underbrush.  And, then it also activates certain seeds and lays down a layer of ash and organic material that creates a good seed germination bed for them.  All of these different things!  You can get really scientific about it, or you can just ask people that have just been doing that because that’s what they know.

So, people are lighting these fires intentionally? Or is this a lightning strike thing? 

I don’t know. I know a little bit about North American indigenous land management strategies, but that’s a rabbit hole that I haven’t gone down into yet.  I think the idea is that some of the fires could have been sparked from human fires, and some of them could have been natural, and that in some cases people would sort of work with whatever situation they would come across.

It’s so fascinating!

Yeah! Apparently it was very common in California up through the Pacific Northwest and across through the Great Plains, and then even south into the Louisiana, Missouri upper marshland where it starts to evolve into prairie.

Interesting! That’s so fascinating to me! Especially thinking of these huge, devastating wild fires.

I think part of the impression that people have gotten is that actually excluding fires has really been the big problem.  When an area that has been dependent on fires is then excluded from them, the fuel load that I was talking about – all that burnable material – if it’s not getting burned – it’s building up.  And then what happens is you actually start reaching these critical mass fuel loads, which then creates the fire tornadoes that you hear about and these huge temperature rises which would not be common with a natural wildfire, but happen in these particular situations.  That’s where you actually see whole hillsides that have been totally devastated.  It can be difficult for people to think “How can fire be good, if that’s what happens?”  Well, that happens when these particular situations build up that would not normally happen if these areas were allowed to burn more frequently.

So fascinating!

That was something I did learn a little bit about in college because when I was doing some ecology work and study, we did get to see some areas of Florida where they do prescribe burns. And they will come through underneath the cabbage palms and the long needle pines and they will set fires, and they will dig lines, and they will let these areas burn.  The cabbage palms get all charred and they look real sad, but then a couple months later after a couple good thunderstorms come through, they just burst back into life.

This is amazing!

It’s really cool. It’s super cool.

I’m seeing a lot of resonance with health in our culture’s obsession with cleanliness and eliminating every threat. There’s this feeling of, “This is all bad. We must get antibiotics. We must keep every ‘bad’ thing at bay.” And then you have an overgrowth or undergrowth or things are out of balance. We can be so white and black about things. We think we must be completely clean. Yet, we are sicker if we’re too clean. Maybe we need some of what we’ve been thinking of as “bad.” You know?

I think that just comes back to that disconnect. You know? I had to do a lot of learning about things that people have known about for a long time.  Because I’ve been disconnected from all that knowledge, it seems brand new to me.  But, there are people who have known about this for a long time and have wanted to continue it and they haven’t been able to. You get this mishmash of competing ideas because people don’t always want to admit that what they’ve been taught isn’t really what is going to work for them. 

So, it’s tough when people think, Fires are bad. Destruction is bad.  You have to come in and say, “Well, there’s a gray area here that is the elephant in the room. And it’s going to take some time to wrap your head around the different concepts and what’s going on here.” We’ve excluded people from being able to manage this land the way that they were – and doing it successfully – and it’s going to take a lot more than just steps 1, 2, and 3 to restore that balance. So, yeah, you’re right.  Sometimes if it’s not black or white, people don’t want to talk about it.  There are gray areas. 

Maybe I should have called my farm that ­– “Gray Area Farm” – and just have difficult conversations everyday at the market. [Laughs] But, maybe I’m not qualified to do that. [Laughs]

But, that’s some of the meta that happens here on the farm: this idea of trying to respect some of the processes that have happened on the land here.  I would like to leave it better than I found it.  I’m still learning a lot about how to pay homage to what this area looked like, who lived here, and also what is going to be appropriate for me to do on this land.  It’s a big process.  I do a lot of sitting and thinking, as much as I am pulling weeds and planting and doing all of the normal farming stuff.

I respect that. I respect reflection. Personally, I think that’s been what’s helped me get a footing in my own health. Not being like, I want all of the things: Gimme the fertility treatments. Do it to me now. Get me 12 eggs, and then give me the babies! Instead of choosing to go going that route, I was like, “Let’s look at me. What do I need?” Pause. Pause. Think. Think. Months. Months. Instead of just racing towards “We gotta be productive! ASAP!” and then worry about being completely depleted. And, then what?  It’s a different approach. But I feel like I’m more connected in the approach that I am taking toward myself.  And I hear that again resonating with you and the approach you take with the land, the people, the crops, the farm.  It’s important. If connection is important to you, and relationship is important to you, then, I think a slower cadence or rhythm – a more natural one, if you will, than the human-invented, machine, industrial rhythm – is better.

That’s a big reason that in the last article from 2015 that I reference on my website, I was like: Well, this is all the stuff that I want to do, and I’m really honored to be in this interview, but . . . You know, there wasn’t much for her to take pictures of when she was here.  I was still doing a lot of thinking and observing and slowly laying the foundations.  The progress is still happening, just at a slow pace.

A lot of farming starts in your mind.

Yeah! I would say a large part of my farming, especially because I worked for other people. A lot of the farmers I worked for were kind enough to share with me their regrets and their successes. Really, with all of those, the big takeaway was to take your time. It’s not always possible. Some people get on a piece of land and they need to sustain that business right away. And, that’s totally fine! That is a big reason why I’m not here full-time. I would love to be, but it would put such a huge financial pressure on me to sustain myself and also contribute. I just knew that I didn’t want to have to do that. I’m lucky enough to have a part-time job that’s really flexible, and I can just work around the weather and how my body is feeling. It’s a 60/40 split. Actually, more of a 70/30.

Let’s talk about ducks.  I’m really interested in the interaction between plants and animals.  I think a lot of people skip over that, especially with the plant-based movement.  Many people want to keep it just plants and don’t want to think about all the animals or other things that may die in order to make the plant healthy.  That’s a conversation that I think a lot of people don’t even want to entertain.

I was going to say!  Because, it’s kind of tricky when I get into why I’m not a vegan farm.  That is a thing (a vegan farm), and I totally respect people that are making every effort!  But, part of having an ecology education is acknowledging that the way we view land – whether it’s as a wilderness or an urban landscape or a farm, all these different terminologies that we have for land – they all revolve around the intersection of all of these different families, which aren’t just plant families but mammal families, fungi families. There are so many different types of genera and species that are having their way with any particular piece of land, or water.  Part of acknowledging that is thinking about, Well, okay, if I’m trying to restore what I think is a healthy balance to a piece of land, what does that look like? 

My background in ecology has told me that it looks like animals being on the land.  It looks like trying to find a balance between systems that will still allow you to produce a product to sustain the business and also, on the other end, not create a lot of compaction and/or other issues that happen when you have a high concentration of animals on a piece of land.  Part of thinking about that was thinking about how I could incorporate animals that would sustain themselves. 

Ducks produce a product that I can sell.  The other thing I thought was, How can I have animals that will have some kind of mutually beneficial relationship with what I’m growing?  In this case, the ducks eat a lot of the greens that I grow.  They can sustain themselves largely on a lot of the vegetation and bugs and slugs and volunteer grain that grow here.  I also thought about what other products they produce and how am I could incorporate those.  The fact that they produce manure, which is a fertilizer that I can use and incorporate back into the farm, helps to create this self-sustaining cycle, which was what I was going for! 

You know, I probably could fit a couple cattle back here, if I really wanted to.  People are always asking me if I’m going to have goats.  But, really just thinking about the other stuff that I was doing, and what existed back here, ducks became a great solution for me.  They tolerate the wet climate really well.  They don’t mind the cold.  They’re very adaptable. They love eating slugs, and I have a plethora of slugs.  They don’t compact the land.  They’re obviously very small in the first place, but even their webbed feet are more liable to just trample stuff down than they are to scratch it away into nothing.

Which a chicken would.

Which chickens do.  They still work great in certain systems, as well.  But, I was hoping to keep a lot of this property somewhat shaded and have a lot of greens available, and I was thinking about what animals really benefit from that.  Also, on a small space that is urban, not generating a lot of smell from animals that are in a confined space or generating a lot of manure.  Also, they aren’t very loud.  Geese were something I had considered raising because I love French geese, the Toulouse geese, but they’re very loud.  I want to be a good neighbor and not constantly get cited from the city.  There are a lot of practical thoughts that went into it, some of it was just looking at what I had, what kind of environment I wanted to create, and what animals I thought would be happy in that environment.

How long have the ducks been here now?

This flock is new to me, but I’ve had ducks for 3 years now on the property.  It has been a really great learning experience for me: Learning exactly what they need, how often I need to rotate them, and also the way that they can change the landscape by what they eat and don’t eat, what they compact and how they move through a landscape.  The ducks are actually starting to manipulate the environment here, which is also a really cool thing that you don’t see on other farms that don’t have animals! 

 If you let them, the animals actually can influence the environment to their own benefit.  It’s really kind of neat seeing them spill their feed, and their that feed germinates and you get rye and sunflowers – stuff that they then come back through again on another rotation and eat!  Seeing that cycle is really cool.  As is seeing the grass grow back even more lush after they’ve trampled stuff down.  With cattle people talk about how they eat down the grass and then the grass gets that hormonal signal to regenerate.  So, the idea is that as long as the cattle aren’t trampling and eating from the same grass too often, you can actually move a herd of cattle through it, and given enough time, that field will be super lush afterwards. So, it’s a balance.

I try to follow and observe other ranches that do a lot of livestock and do it well. Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms is somebody that people reference a lot because he’s been a big promoter of open pasture and rotational grazing and allowing even different animals to follow each other on the same piece of land that will eat stuff down that the animal before it didn’t.  Or, it might sound gross, but one of his big things is to let cattle through and then the chickens through.  The chickens will actually eat maggot larva that will nest in the cow patties.  So, then the chickens get this excellent protein source, and this reduces the fly populations.  They also scratch up and eat a lot of what the cow has left behind in terms of forage.  There are people out there reeducating people about systems that are working really well for them and have the potential to house a lot of different types of livestock, but in way that doesn’t degrade the land.

Wow! That’s so cool!

There’s so much for me to learn about, really!  I mean, I still feel like I’m scratching the surface a lot of times.  It keeps me on my toes.

We’ve covered a lot, but I want to ask you about how you decide what to grow.  Is some of it grown for creative experimentation, or for a certain population that has expressed a need at the market?  How do you decide?  Why these crops?  Why herbs?

Well, I think you kind of nailed it. Some of it is demand and some of it is personal interest.  Early on, I did decide, based on my small size, that greens and salad mixes and culinary herbs seemed to work well for other farms that are about my size.  That’s partially because they don’t take a lot of room to grow.  Whereas, things like tomatoes, especially squash – winter squash – need a lot of space.  Then, also the price that they fetch per pound tends to work more economically once you get to a certain acreage.  I was thinking about where my niche in the market was going to be, and also the things that I enjoy growing, and the way that I was going to grow them. Some crops are more easily managed by tractors.  That’s not always the case, but to do some of them more efficiently and economically, a tractor is going to make more sense.  Even growing on plastic, which is really popular for a lot of squash, is something that is going to be harder for me to do.

I kind of self-selected into the category of greens and herbs – things that can grow right next to each other in close quarters.  I can get several crops out of the same bed, which allows me to grow lettuce in a 3-week-window. Then, I harvest it, and then the next one goes in.  That still creates a goal of making sure I’m not depleting the soil with that many crop rotations, but at the same time it does allow me to grow a lot more profit off of a smaller space.  As a small farm, to even make the business viable in the first place, I had to consider things I can do that with.

That makes sense.  You work with some herbalists?  Did they come find you? Was this through social media or market contact? Maybe you can speak to how social media plays a role, or doesn’t, in your business.

Sure. The decision to grow herbal plants was something I started on my own because I had met and knew of farms that were growing almost strictly herbal or medicinal plants. One is Oshala Farm, which is a really cool place in Southern Oregon.  They do a lot of contract medicinal plant growing where Mountain Rose Herbs, for example, might say, “We know we’re going to need 50 pounds of calendula for our online market this year.” And Oshala Farm will say, “Okay. We’ll take that contract and we’ll grow that for you.

 I had also talked to somebody else while I was farming down there who had considered doing that and was sharing some of the ins and outs of that business.  Growing herbs was something I actually considered as a focus for the farm before really settling on produce, because I had a lot of interest in it, even though I don’t have any natural medicine training and am not an herbalist.  It was just something that I felt that there was a need for – people growing those things, making them available locally, people growing them with a good intention, providing high quality herbs either fresh or dried.  So, I still kept that dream alive a little bit when I came here, and at some point because a lot of medicinal herbs and culinary herbs intersect, I was growing some of those things. Things like calendula are often planted on farms just to attract pollinators.  So, I was already growing some of those things to try to provide good habitat.

I think the first real connection I made was with Wild Roots Apothecary.  We’ve co-produced a couple products.  She’s a neighbor of mine.  We found each other on Next Door and started talking.  She had chickens at the time, and we talked about local feed sources.  She was making soaps and advertising on Next Door.  She makes a lot of different products, but we got the ball rolling on that.  She grows some of the stuff that she uses and also wild-harvests, but she was really interested in buying some stuff from me and supporting somebody local. 

And then, at that point, I just started bringing it up more and posting about it, once I did get on Instagram.  I reached out to a couple people and that’s really how I found Gather Wise.  Kaya Karmaceudicals was a vendor at Lents Farmers Market with me.  She produces some really great CBD products, but she was starting to blend in medicinal plants with some of her roll-on oils and tea blends that had CBD flower, hemp flower, but also lavender or tulsi.  So, she was buying from me. She’s great!

I’m going to check these out, after this, just so you know. It sounds amazing!

I recommend her!  So, some of the connections I’ve made have been really casual, and then others I’ve formally reached out to on behalf of the business.  It’s been like a slow snowballing effect because I’m not growing as much as some of the other farms or companies around her that are in a position to supply a lot of people with what they need.  With me, it just sort of like this casual thing that’s happening. 

It would be great if it morphed into a whole other enterprise on the farm, but it gets tricky.  Some of the downsides that I learned from this other person were that when you get into certain accounts, they want everything to be tested.  Mountain Rose Herbs actually has their own lab, and they test for the active compounds in each of the products that they receive, which is great because it lends a lot of medicinal legitimacy to what they provide.  

For a farm like me, I cannot pay for that testing, so I would never say I would love to sell to Mountain Rose Herbs.  I might also not be able to sell to somebody who is expecting that kind of verification.  So, I don’t really suspect that it will go beyond people reaching out to me and saying, “Hey, I like making salve for myself and I just didn’t quite grow enough calendula this year, or I’m looking for a local source.  Do you have a couple pounds you can spare?”  I’m never really going to get into that 50 pounds of calendula, where I’ve got to build a huge barn just for drying.   

The other thing is that even farms that grow that, a lot of them actually do produce and dry the herbs and make products in addition to wholesaling.  That’s not an avenue I want to pursue.  That’s a limit I know I have.  I don’t want to get into the realm of having to dry down even 10 pounds of something in the height of July.  The produce side of my business keeps me too busy.  If I can cut and bag stuff for people, perfect.  But, if I have to get into tincturing or drying, stuff like that, that’s a realm that I would rather leave to people that are more experienced.  That’s partly why I’ve co-created some products with Wild Roots Apothecary.  She has some of those processes nailed down.  It works pretty well, at least for now.

It’s neat to see the products that you put together. 

Your other question was about social media.  It’s tricky, right?  I have a website.  It’s really a blog that masquerades as a website.  And, I don’t really have much else except Instagram at this point.  I listened to a lot of “How to Market Your Farm”–type podcasts and webinars when I started my farm.  People would talk a lot about the importance of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.  They would talk about getting people signed up for newsletters.   They would talk about the importance of a good website.  And, I think, depending on the kind of business you’re running, all of those tools or some of those tools are going to be critical.  Part of being at a market, a big benefit of that, is that a lot of my marketing is direct.  I’m there.  I set up a display, and people can engage with me.  And that’s really my advertising.  That visual aesthetic.  This is the produce.  This is the product.  You can see it.  You can see the quality. And then, you can ask me about it.

And you’re the one that picked it!

Right! And I can tell them how I grow it. I can tell them where it comes from.  I can give them cooking suggestions.  I really get through a lot of the nitty gritty just by doing that and being there.  But, if I wasn’t that kind of farm, I’d probably would have to use a lot of these other avenues.  Farms that do CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture), where they sell the subscription at the beginning of the year, for them, sometimes websites are critical.  People are shopping online for what they’re hoping will be a year or season’s worth of quality and value and also connection to that farm.  Farms that do a lot of wholesale, their fresh sheet that goes out, or their way of communicating with grocery stores or other bulk buyers, that avenue may be critical for them. 

I think partially not really being into a lot of that stuff and then also trying to see what I can get away with, I settled on Instagram as being one social media platform that, at the very least, I could just take a picture, post it, not even post a caption, not even worry about hashtags, and people would think Oh, I recognize that as being a tomato. I like tomatoes.  They could even send me a message and say, How do I get that tomato?  I obviously do more than that and try to make it easier for people to find me, but that is really where that all came from– thinking “How do I pick something that is going to be fairly easy for me to maintain, really direct?”

I will have to do more.  Part of courting restaurants for sales is going to be having a fresh sheet that is going to go out every week with prices and availability.  I’m still working on that.

Is that the next move?  Courting restaurants?

Well, yeah, I have some restaurant sales right now, and catering businesses that buy from me on occasion.  That’s something that I’m looking to help support the business in addition to market sales.  And, that’s something I’ll have to get better at doing.  At least for now, Instagram seems to be working.  It’s kind of surprising how many chefs reach out to me on Instagram.  I was surprised because I grew up writing letters with formal letterheads, and they’re just like, Hey! Can I get a pound of that to pick up this week?  And I’m like, Okay!  You know?  I can have that conversation very casually.

The visual element for me, I think for what you’re doing, it comes through. When you take photos of your stuff on your farm or what you have at the market, or a video – that translates, and it’s clear.  It’s almost like I’m there at the market.  You know what I mean?  And that’s the key.  That’s what’s going to make me buy it.  Getting to see it.

If I had smellavision, if I could give people an idea of what things smell like, that would be rad!  The visual seems to work really well.  And, who knows, there may be something better than Instagram eventually, and I may move on to that.  Or, I may even get to the point where I have a really excellent customer base and loyal buyers – either restaurant or wholesale – and I don’t even need social media!  That would be awesome!  So, I feel like it’s helped me a lot, and I also feel like I have to still be real with myself about the time that it takes to maintain that because I find myself slipping into it.  Just like TV, it can be addicting. 

It’s been great, not only for advertising, but for connecting with other farms.  Seeing what they’re doing.  Asking questions.  Even just seeing what they’re charging to kind of keep us all in the same level.  It helps keep prices competitive.  But, oddly enough, I often raise my prices based on what I’m seeing other farms charging.  I’m like, Good for you! We should be charging more for our produce!  Sometimes it gives me the courage I need to ask for more because I know that it costs at least that to produce it.  Depending on where you’re at or what your market is, sometimes it’s a race to the bottom.  It can be hard to say, You know what? Really, that cucumber’s worth a dollar. It’s not worth 50 cents.  It’s not wrapped in plastic.  It didn’t travel 1000 miles to get her today.  That’s going to be reflected in the quality and people supporting more than just a truck driver.  But, it’s tough.

Social media is actually really great.  A lot of farms connect with each other and support each other like, Aw yeah, I had a really bad year, or This pest’s been really difficult for me, how are you managing it?  So there’s been a real networking aspect to that that I didn’t necessarily expect, but has been excellent.

And people are on it!

They’re there! Use that knowledge base!

Do you have any resources of inspiration that you would recommend about farming or about health or whatever you’re into? Documentaries? Podcasts? Any sources of inspiration.

That’s a great question. It’s not very sexy, but reading Michael Pollan in college got me thinking – especially because he’s someone that I can relate to who was in an educational setting in Berkeley, lived in a suburban house, talks about growing pot on his property and trying to hide it with the tomatoes.  That was very relatable to me.  I was like, I’m a white suburban outsider, too. And, I have an interest in food and where it’s coming from and what it’s doing to American culture.  So, just being able to relate to him was important to me at the time. 

Since then, I’ve read, honestly, a lot of nonfiction.  I have picked up a lot of books that were science-based.  There was a seminal work that was a two-book series on forest ecology – Forest Ecology 1 and 2.  It talks a lot about ecology successions: what happens when you start out with a piece of land that’s been disturbed by fire or clear-cutting or even just storm damage where a bunch of trees are blown over. Then, it takes you through, based on the science at the time, what happens there: what’s happening at the soil level, what’s happening at the nutrient level, the light.  It talks about how, especially systems in North America, these forests move through different successions of starting over and going through this cycle and advancing to the 4th or 5th stage where you have old growth stand of forest. 

That really gave me a lot of knowledge and courage to think about farming as an ecological timestamp in a succession.  Because, when you’re plowing a field in an open area, you’re really setting a piece of land back to stage 1.  And, when those plants start to grow, and especially if you’re planting any perennials or fruit trees, then you’re starting to look into the 2nd stages.  Thinking about whether you are constantly resetting this land back to stage 1, whether you should be incorporating different stages – that book gave a lot of food forest farms a lot of fodder for thinking about alternative types of agriculture that weren’t just open rows of vegetables, but actually looking at having orchards where you have different perennial food crops at every height and level.  They talk a lot about that, too: ground covers versus shrubs versus trees and what’s happening at all these different layers – how they are interacting and depending on each other.  Again, that still barely scratches the surface, but that was something that really got me thinking about land as this ever-evolving “being” rather than just a static state you’re constantly trying to keep it at.  So, that was really informative.

There’s probably been a huge stack of books.  I read a lot of urban planning books that actually still make me think about the importance of urban food systems and providing locally-grown produce to people in the city, and trying to eradicate food deserts and the social inequalities of food access – all those things that, as a farmer, I sort of touch on with my business, but maybe not as much as other organizations that target that.  It made me think, Well, if I’m going to go the route of a farm, how can I still address these things?

Do people ever come on foot to your place to get stuff from the neighborhood? Or, do they mostly travel to the market to meet you there with everything ready?

When I first started, I had a couple farm stands here at the end of the driveway. Sometimes in the off-season I’ll have a sign out that says I have duck eggs.  I have a group of duck egg customers that will sometimes still call or text. Even through Next Door, for a while, I was advertising certain things being available.  I’ve tried to keep that connection going, but I would say that the majority of people are now finding me either at the market or instigating some kind of sale through Instagram.

Well, I feel like you covered everything and more!

Oh, really? Oh, good!

I do! If you want to share about Zenger and your internship there, that was the first farm we visited with our Farm-to-Table class. If you want to touch on that at all, that’d be great!

Yeah! I love that place. I found that place when Joe and I first moved here.  We lived on 50th and Division and at some point drove down Foster, drove by there.  I saw it was a farm and I wanted to see that place.  And then I ended up applying to their apprenticeship and actually did my apprenticeship with Brian who is now the farm manager at Zenger.  He ended up staying on as an employee after that first season.  We talk about how we’re the first alumni of the apprenticeship program, and he’s still there, which is great.  They are a super cool farm!  That experience was the first formal apprenticeship I ever did with a farm, so I have fond memories of really learning more of the ins and outs of a farm business, and then just really appreciating that they were also an urban farm on a small piece of land, relatively.  Their mission was tied in with the fact that they had that conservation easement. They had land that was never going to be in production that they needed to honor and respect and not impact too heavily.  Also, they were growing a lot of different types of things there, trying to support lots of different systems.  They also rotate the chickens around when they can and they have the orchard and the honeybees. So, even just seeing all that on that small of a scale – all these different systems in place – gave me a lot of courage to do this.  I still feel a lot or respect and fondness for them.  It was a great year!

Awesome. That covers it! Thank you! Now, I can go and take photos.

You can!

References

1.        Benjamin D, Virkler L. Farm to Table: The Essential Guide to Sustainable Food Systems for Students, Professionals, and Consumers. White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing; 2016.

2.        Flanagan G. The Urban Acre Homestead. https://theurbanacrehomestead.wordpress.com. Published 2019. Accessed August 21, 2019.