AdAgrA 2015: Restoring the Waste Places

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Roundtable

Jerry Travers

Growing When You Can’t Buy or Sell

What we're proposing to do this afternoon is on this question, growing when you cannot buy or sell, is If someone has a question, please come up to the microphone because we want this to be recorded.

And the panel who will answer the discussion, who will answer these questions are you.

So if you have some answers for these questions, I'm gonna start out with some questions and basic thoughts on things, but if you have some answers, if they're short, you can probably just say them and then I can repeat them so it can be recorded, but the microphone here is for answers if you've thought these things out.

Well, I'd first like to begin with prayer.

Lord, you're the 1 who has told us how history is going to unfold, how there's going to become a time for your faithful people where they cannot buy and sell, a form of retaliation for them not giving in to the beast and his economy that he has set up.

So Lord, we ask now that you guide us and give us wisdom on how to prepare for this time, that as we follow your counsel, we can be blessed even through this trying time.

Now, as I thought about this question here, I thought of some problems that we would run into and this is, you know, how are you going to be growing things when you cannot buy or sell?

These are some of the problems we're going to face.

Okay, so that's something that needs to be considered.

What are you going to do when you cannot buy seed?

And What are you going to do when you aren't able to have access to fuel to irrigate?

Whether it's to pump your water up out of your well, or irrigation equipment parts you can't get.

And what are you going to do for tilling?

Now, how many have tilling equipment that requires fuel?

Now, for farmers, they need to really take this in hand, and that is, who's going to buy your food?

It's going to be illegal for you to sell anything.

So, you may have a farming operation, but you know, unless you want to be thrown in jail for selling, it's against the law for you to do so.

So basically, I see this here as a problem that's going to have to be dealt with by households.

Because most of us will know and have followed the council that we need to be out in the country and not living where prying eyes can see what you're doing.

A good example of this is if you ever read anything about communist China and how the people just spied on each other.

This is why we're giving counsel to be out in the country where there's not prying eyes to see what you're doing.

Okay, now I want to address answers to these questions first, okay?

Because they exist, but I would guess that most of you are very unfamiliar with the answers.

Who fertilized the prairies, the forests, the shrub land, when they supplied food for, say, the prairies, 120 million bison, great herds of antelope and elk, great colonies of prairie dogs?

Who provided for the passenger pigeons, the fruit and seeds that they eat when the flocks were so intense they would blot out the sun for a few days when they would fly and move across the United States.

So if they were well-fed, God has in place a system.

And so, let's consider who reseeded the prairies?

The nut trees, the fruit trees, that provided food for all these animals throughout North America.

We're here in North America, but anywhere on the earth.

And how were they successfully replanted?

So that they continued to feed these vast, vast herds and flocks.

And, well, You can see Texas right here where we are with the stunted trees.

How is it that they here in Texas had vast herds of animals well supported?

How did this irrigation system work that God had established and established well here?

Okay, so, And the, just to address that for a moment, the Oglala Sioux Reservoir, I guess it's Oglala, Oglala Sioux is the name of the Indian, but the Oglala Reservoir, which stretches through many of these states here, is an underground reservoir.

And when they first tapped into it, they're only pulling up water for irrigation from 200 feet.

I hear now it's down to like 600 feet, and it's almost not profitable to irrigate because the water is so far down.

What has been done to the soil surface that it doesn't catch the rain but instead it washes off and runs off in torrents carrying the topsoil with it?

Who tilled this land for these crops that were produced every year?

Okay, so this gives us some idea of the answers we're looking for.

If God has an agricultural program, and he does, and we appear to be very far from it, it's possible that the answers lie for this table here, this panel here, is right back learning his system.

Come on up here and here's the microphone.

I was just giving you a general idea of how I see things as a solution.

Well, the question I have for you, we're all concerned about the same thing, right?

What should be our top priority in preparing?

I would just like to say the first thing that crossed my mind was water.

I mean, forget about your crops and all that.

You're not going to last very long without water.

And, I can just share with you that, and I don't know, some of you may live by a lake or you may have a spring or something.

Most of us have wells, I think, that live in the country.

And some of us, the Lord blessed us with a shallow well.

So I can just share with you what we did.

We were able to find a pump that we plumbed, I re-plumbed it so that we could shut off our electric pump and we could pump into our pressure tank and still have pressurized water into our home so that, you know, you don't have to carry a bucket of water into your house to do.

Now that doesn't always work if you have a lot of wells are deeper than that.

You would need a more expensive different type of hand pump if you had a deep well.

And so many things to consider, but Water has to be 1 of the top priorities, if not the top, I would believe.

You know, I always thought dry land is dry land and it's going to be dry land.

And then I read this article about someone down in Texas here who made the springs start to flow again.

Darren Greenfield

Byron Smith

Successful Marketing, Planning for Profitability

And I think you came to a great place to learn about marketing, because a farmer has to be a built-in marketer, in my opinion.

So you've got a whole panel of experts here, experts in their field.

And so I think this should be a time of learning and sharing ideas of how the Lord has blessed each of these farmers on their journey to making what God has given them available to other people.

And that's really, really what our purpose is, whether we're as Christians in our Christian walk or in our vocation of farming, we have to find ways in this competitive age of sharing what we have well with the people in our communities that we're trying to reach.

And I think it would be the best thing that we could do right now is if we would ask the Lord's blessing on this time of discussion.

And so I would like to ask David Obermiller if he would have the blessing.

Father in heaven, we sit up here but we sit here because you've shared with us.

And everything that we've learned, as David said, we have because you've given it us.

So Lord, it is our privilege to be able to share.

I pray that you would help us to share that which is useful and that which glorifies you and moves everybody forward in a direction that takes your cause further in the earth.

So what I thought that, and by the way I'm not Byron Smith, my name is Janice Smith, my husband is behind me, and at the last minute we did a little swap.

She's better looking and better at this anyway.

So what I thought is that I think many of you already know many of these farmers, but You might not know all of them and you might not know some of the things that they have to share.

So I thought that we could start at the end and we'll start with John.

And each farmer, I would like you each to give a very brief description of your farm, what it is that you're growing, and what types of markets that you service, and how many years you've been doing this.

And that'll kind of give us an overview to start with.

Okay, my name is John Dysinger and we are from Bountiful Blessings Farm in Middle Tennessee.

I'm not going to remember all those questions, but we've been doing it.

We just planted our 18th strawberry crop.

I figure it's about 3 and a half acres under cultivation, some which is in cover crops at any 1 time.

But we do go year-round and we have a summer CSA and a winter CSA.

And then we also do farmers markets in the summer.

And a little bit of wholesale to a food hub in Nashville.

I assume you might grow more than strawberries.

Well we actually started just with strawberries and soon learned that that's not a good idea.

So we now do pretty much, I mean, small fruits and all the vegetables that most people know how to pronounce.

And Just while someone is thinking of the question, why did you decide strawberries weren't a good idea in 1 second?

Well, strawberries are a good idea, but when you just do strawberries, we had a disastrous spring in 2003 where it rained basically for a month.

That's what I was hoping you were saying.

I'm Jim Tiffany from Paradise Acres Farm up in Kingsley, Michigan.

And sitting next to these folks, I'm a little hesitant to call myself a farmer.

We're small-scale, if you could call us a farm.

Our growing area is, our whole production area is 8 by 20 in our garage, so We're very small, but it's something that we're producing that's very health-promoting.

We sell to restaurants and grocery stores in our local area and It's something that's very good for someone.

It's been something that my wife could do while taking care of my mother, who was needing a lot of care.

In an 8x20 space, you can grow a lot of stuff when it's microgreens.

We have North Columbia Farms in Kettle Falls, Washington.

We grow strawberries and blueberries, raspberries, blackberries.

I still consider myself pretty much a neophyte.

We have a quarter acre of strawberries and 3 quarters of an acre of blueberries and then some of the other stuff I don't know exactly.

Probably total about 2, but we're kind of expanding.

Jim, you're year-round with your microgreens.

So we're seeing a diversity here of the growing seasons.

I've been in Colorado for the last 20 years, 20 plus years.

We grow about everything you can imagine as far as vegetables go, like John said, that people can pronounce and maybe a few that they can't pronounce.

We grow small fruits, the berries, and we do it both outdoors and in different levels of climate control, so high tunnels, floating row cover, controlled greenhouses.

We've had as much as 45, 000 square feet.

I'm actually, we've grown on more acreage in the past, but I've actually been trending down because I think a smaller area, better managed, is a lot better way to go, and my objective is to encourage a lot more people to do the same thing, to have more people out there.

So right now, we're still trying to figure out how much acreage, but we're thinking we're gonna be 5 acres or less with what we're gonna be growing.

It's probably gonna be more like half of that.

I grow everything intensively on a highly managed system that's high fertility, and so we can get a lot out of a little bit of space.

Different places, certain things appeal to you.

I discovered after we moved to Kentucky, the potatoes, which is a commodity crop, might actually be a pretty profitable crop.

So we try to feel out what the need is and what the interest is actually in the marketplace.

The biggest thing, and we prefer to sell directly to the customers, so off-farm or at farmers markets.

It's an evangelistic effort for us, not just a means of the livelihood.

And so we've continued to do it that way.

I can't tell you exactly what we'll be growing and all of that now, because we just moved here.

I've been working on infrastructure for the last 2 years, and so we're not quite up and going again yet.

We're about an hour east of Lexington, Kentucky.

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Roundtable

Successful Marketing, Planning for Profitability

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Parts

Growing When You Can’t Buy or Sell

1h 23m

Successful Marketing, Planning for Profitability

1h 43m

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