Flower pricing can be tricky with so many factors affecting value, between different crops, different markets and varying types of arrangements. You want to make sure you’re putting the price of your flowers high enough so you’re making a profit, but not so high that you price yourself out of the market

One of the best ways to find out what is working on actual farms is with a survey- in 2024 Vern and his team did a survey of 48 tunnel tomato growers (heated and unheated) that included growing practices and yields, in order to correlate the best practices to the best yields.

We get together with Nella Mae Parks and Maud Powell this week to discuss the challenges of farming in arid environments, and a new network they are forming for growers in those climates! Nella Mae and Maud are from dry parts of Oregon, and they are starting the Western Arid Growers Network (WAGN) to facilitate farmer-to-farmer learning for arid growers.

Sarah Gretsinger worked for other farms for over a decade before starting her urban farm, The Kale Next Door, on the land around her house in Akron, Ohio. Hear how she scaled down techniques she had practiced on larger farms in order to grow intensively on a small land base.

Whether buying or making your own, how do you tell if compost is any good? We go deep on this question with Jason Gearheart of Integrated Elements Compost in Columbus, Indiana in this week’s podcast interview.

Sarah and her family run Scott Farm & Flower and Allegiant Tax & Accounting Services, so she understands both the accounting world and how farm businesses operate. In this episode, we make sure your accounting software subscription is paying for itself by discussing how to get the most out of the records you’re already keeping, so they’re not just for tax compliance but also help you make better farm decisions.

After retiring from more than 30 years of farming, much of it at Potomac Vegetable Farms in Virginia, Ellen Polishuk started Plant to Profit to keep teaching the next generation of growers.

Learn about the origins of Turtle Tree Seeds, and why co-founder Beth Everett returned to her family’s fourth-generation farm in this week’s podcast with host April Parms Jones. Founded in 1994, Turtle Tree Seed grows and sells exclusively biodynamically certified seed. Beth has continued to grow and sell seed from her family’s farm in Nebraska, called Meadowlark Hearth.

After starting the farm over 20 years ago, Chris Jagger and his family scaled Blue Fox Farm from very small up to about 45 acres, including a lot of wholesaling. When the wholesale market changed, they scaled back down. Learn why Chris says his current farm size puts him in a farm “economic dead zone,” so you can consider farming on either side of it.

Wild East Farm was one of many in North Carolina that suffered from catastrophic flooding during Hurricane Helene in September 2024. Parts of the state received 15-30 inches of rain during the storm, resulting in flash flooding and extensive tree blowdown. Almost a year after the storm, we caught up with Noah Poulos to talk about the lead-up to the storm, how they tried to save their animals and crops, and the aftermath.

With over 20 years of farming experience, hear how Laura Llewellyn grew Chimalow Produce to maximize soil and veg quality, based on the idea that healthy soil will lead to better vegetables.

Scaling up means different things for different farms; hear from Grace Lam how Fivefork Farms has scaled up to the point where they are growing 60,000 dahlias both for flower and tuber sales and over 700 dahlia share members.

Discover how farmers and researchers are collaborating to develop seed varieties tailored to farmers' needs with Michael Lordon of the Organic Seed Alliance. Since vegetable and flower varieties are not one-size-fits-all farms, Michael tells us how the OSA is working to breed varieties that will thrive on farms without synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

“Get your fresh local insects, and frass too!” If Pat Crowley had his way, insects and their byproducts (most notably frass used as fertilizer) would take their place alongside vegetables and flowers as profitable enterprises for local farms. And the best part is, they are fed on a widely-available byproduct: some of the 100 million tons of food waste that is currently going into landfills in the United States.

Over more than 30 years, Featherstone Farm has grown their CSA and wholesaling to the point where they are now growing on 135 acres and have scaled up some of their major crops- for one example, they are storing 120 tons or more of carrots every year. These are distributed through their CSA and wholesaling. Though Featherstone has gotten a lot bigger over the years, they have remained committed to high agricultural standards with a Real Organic Project certification and high standards for the nearly 50 farm workers that they employ.

Anne Massie and Virginia Pleasant share how they’ve grown Region Roots Local Farm and Food Hub to increase opportunities for famers to feed their regional communities. “The Region” is how the area of Northwest Indiana where they are based is known locally. Both co-executive directors of the NWI (Northwest Indiana) Food Council, they tell us how they’ve rapidly grown their grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to creating a just and regenerative food system.

Tilth Soil composts millions of pounds of food waste every year, and we’ve got their soil guy Josh Kruszynski on the pod this week to talk about how to build soil including not just compost, but also microbes, micronutrients, Ph and everything else we’re learning about how to encourage healthy soil.

Growing up in Brooklyn with a career as an attorney, Diane Aboushi of Halal Pastures farm did not follow the most traditional path to becoming a farmer. However, researching how to provide the healthiest food for their kids prompted Diane and her family to start a meat business that eventually led to moving out of the city and adding vegetable farming to the mix.

Though their family has been farming in Ontario for over 200 years, success looks different in the 2020s than it did in the early 19th century! Hear how the Coopers changed their family farm in order to steward it into the future by becoming early adopters of the CSA model.

On this week’s podcast Megan Ayers shares what she learned as she built Unvarnished Farm from a series of urban gardens into the farm in southeastern Indiana that it is today. A first-generation farmer, Megan focused on regenerative practices and soil health as she scaled her farm.