AdAgrA 2018: Something Better

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Intensive- Market Gardening: A Lifestyle and a Lesson Book

Larry Lesher

Michelle Lesher

1. Market Gardening: Why are We Here? True Education!

Heavenly Father, Lord, this is not about making money.

It's about being prepared for the eternal kingdom that's set before us.

Father, as we contemplate the ministry that You set before us, as we contemplate what it looks like, how to do it, how to be efficient at it, how to be able to meet the demands and the needs of the physical realities, I pray that we not lose the purpose, the purpose that we come into the garden, we see the object lessons, we garden with angels, that we meet with you, we walk with you, and that we ultimately are conformed by what we view, that we behold you and become changed into your image, that we go into the cities and we have this outreach that people don't see us but they see you.

Father as we enter into this I pray You would guide and direct, that You would speak in us and through us, that as people are here, that they would be able to hear Your Spirit speaking to them.

Those things that I may have a faulty understanding, those things that I might be failing at in my own life, I pray You cover.

I pray that they would hear what You have from them and that we would be hid behind Your cross, I pray in Jesus' name, for His sake we pray, Amen.

So, I understand fundamentally that the practical is of dire necessity, but if we get lost in the practical and the practical and the practical we will not find ourselves in a good place, I don't think.

And so this presentation, don't be dissuaded, there will be tons of practical.

We're gonna get to the practical stuff, but this is really what the practical is pointing you to.

The system of education instituted at the beginning of the world was to be the model for man throughout all afterlife.

As an illustration of its principles, a model school was established in Eden, The home of our first parents, the garden, the home of our first parents.

The Garden of Eden was the classroom, nature was the lesson book, the creator himself was the instructor and the parents of the human family were the students.

How many people here have read the book Education?

That is fundamental and this might sound crazy but that is a fundamental book for agriculture in my mind.

In my mind to understand agriculture that is an excellent book to start with.

If I had come to farming through a business model, like if my approach to farming had been economics or any idea surrounding that, whatever that might mean to you.

I definitely would not have lasted 1 season.

And when I say that I'm making reference to my farm.

When I entered into this I wasn't a Seventh-day Adventist.

When I entered into this I was a Sunday-keeping Christian.

I probably had ideas about it when I was not even a Christian.

And when I entered in, it was a very lucrative, which sounds a little counterintuitive to most people's experience, but I was in Seattle, Washington.

Like you just plant things and they grow.

Your biggest issue is keeping the weed pressure down and letting the plants do what they want to do.

If you're willing to work hard, you will have a ton of food, and you can take it into Seattle, and they will buy every bit of it at a very high dollar, and we were very successful.

In that process, we became Seventh-Day Adventists.

Went to the Black Hills Health and Education Center, worked there for 4 seasons and the trials were insurmountable, I'll say it that way.

We had hell 3 out of 4 years that just devastated, destroyed everything.

Never missed a CSA, we had a 50 person CSA.

We would get hell storms the size of tennis balls, some as big as softballs, I mean crazy.

Wipe out everything, the Lord still provided through the whole thing.

It was an amazing experience but economically it was just devastating.

And So we did that for 4 years, really felt compelled and led as I said before to expand that or I say expand it, in my mind it was expanding.

We wanted to build an ark as I said, we're all told we should be building arks, we need to have these places outside of cities where we're ministering in the cities, right?

And so, when we came to our farm, I had started brassicas, all the spring crops, all these things, we were putting them out in the field, I planted them all out in the field like I always do, they turned purple and didn't grow another leaf.

And I thought, oh, geez, that's a terrible thing to say.

I was praying to the Lord What do I do now?

If my model had been economics Every person and I'm not kidding you almost every person I talked to said, you need to find another piece of property.

And I kept praying about it, and I knew the Lord had led us.

When we bought this place, we didn't have the money for the down payment.

The money came, we didn't have a tractor, we didn't have irrigation, we didn't have seeds, we had nothing.

We had $8, 000, and that all went to the down payment.

I don't even know how we were gonna make payments on the house We knew nothing about how we were gonna succeed at this and so economics was quite important But in my mind, I knew the Lord had opened all those doors, or else we couldn't have been there.

I mean, I won't say that I didn't have times when I was in prayers crying on the field saying, Lord, what in the world am I supposed to do with this?

And last year my wife quit her job because the farm supports us now.

But what I'm saying, what I'm trying to convey is that I was called to something higher than a business model.

And I am a, I come from a background where I'm, you can pull yourself up from your bootstraps, you know, that self-confidence, you can get it done.

I come from a place where I was a professional skateboarder, I was, I succeeded at things, I didn't fail at things.

The first year I had to call our CSA and say, I have to cancel the CSA because I don't have any food.

Like the humility, the humble, talk about being humbled and embarrassed and humiliated.

You know, you have all these years, and you're so confident that you can do this thing, and then you have to turn around and tell everybody you can't do this thing.

And it really taught me that you have to trust God.

In spite of what seems like failure, he knows what I need.

And so whatever the trial is, we can rest in that trial knowing that this isn't a plan to make money, this isn't a plan to be successful in the world's eyes, this is a plan for me to be fit for a heavenly kingdom, for me to be a proper representation of my heavenly father so that when I go into the city and I'm at the farmer's market, they don't see me, but they see a reflection in me of something much greater.

So that being said, we'll move on to our next slide.

Our idea of education take too narrow and too low a range.

If you don't, you're here to get education, right?

As soon as you move into the field and you're there for 14 years let's say, I've been there 12 years, you're still in education.

Your education is not going to end if you're in the garden.

And so, it's fundamentally grounded and based in education.

And so the quotes on education, that's why this book is so fundamental to you, because this is where God met with Adam to Teach Him.

And you will be tested to your very limits.

But God will not give you more than you can bear.

And with every temptation there is a way of escape.

We have to experience this thing because our experience is what we will pull from when the crisis truly comes.

And if we keep insulating ourselves from the deprivation and that hardship, We will not understand that hardship when it truly arrives.

And I'm not, I promise you we'll get to the practical, although the practical I promise you is not the point.

The practical is only a picture of the spiritual.

All right, our idea of education takes too narrow and too low a range.

There is a need of a broader scope, a higher aim.

The education means more than a pursual of a certain course of study.

It means more than the preparation for the life that now is.

It has to do with the whole being and with the whole period of existence possible to man.

It is the harmonious development of the physical, the mental, and the spiritual powers.

It prepares the students for the joy of service in this world and the higher joy and of wider service in the world to come.

When we go to the farmers market you are in service and everybody recognizes that service, Yeah?

2. Market Gardening: How Do I Market my Produce?

Heavenly Father, we just come before you again, Lord, asking that we be your servants, that we would be a blessing to this crowd, that you would labor through us, that it not be our ideas and our own thinking, that we would glorify you in what we say and do, that you would be able to speak to each individual here for what they need.

I pray you give them ears to hear, but more than just hearing, that they would put their hand to the plow, they would put these things into action, that they would lean on you and trust you that you are going to guide them into all truth.

We thank you for the opportunity now to teach and learn.

Bless us to this end that we might glorify thee as our prayer.

In Jesus' name and for His sake we pray, Amen.

Alright, so we thought we would approach this a little bit backwards.

So we're going to approach it from the idea of, well, Alan and I were going to talk about, they started a farm this year, so they've had a farm, but they've moved to a new place, and so they did a lot of searching for land.

They've done a lot of, once they found the land, the development of the land, and all these things just this last year, and so They're going to cover some of those details.

So what we're going to do is we're going to start at marketing, which to me seems a little bit backwards from where you would necessarily start.

You would think about talking about how you grow stuff.

But we're going to talk about marketing because a lot of times what you grow is dependent upon your market.

And so we're going to start a little bit what I would consider from the back end of this and work towards the, okay, how do we do it?

And if you don't think marketing is important or that it's some sort of boring component of this, it won't do you really much good to grow a bunch of produce and not have anywhere to sell it, it turns into compost.

Not anything wrong with compost but you don't want it to be what you grow.

So, the first question that I think of when I think of marketing is that I need somewhere to let it be sold and usually a large metropolitan area, whatever closest city.

It's not mandatory, but it is a good question to ask yourself what is the largest metropolitan area?

Because these all become very pertinent when you start driving there on a regular basis.

Another question is how educated is that community about this type of thing you want to do.

And so, you know, we have a large metropolitan area where we're at, Louisville, Kentucky.

Not too far from there we have Bloomington.

If we really get adventurous we can go to Indianapolis.

You know, none of these things are as far away.

And so we have very large metropolitan areas, but they're maybe not as educated as say, when we were in Washington State and we were going into Seattle.

If I asked, last night John asked, did anybody know what escarole was?

Most of our population base knew to riso radicchio, escarole.

And most of our population base, And I would say maybe not most but a large portion of our population base there knew what those foods were I didn't have to educate them If I said this is kohlrabi they were asking me for kohlrabi.

I wouldn't have to tell them what kohlrabi is and so Knowing the education base of your population will help you tremendously as well.

We do 2 different farmers markets in Louisville.

1 is in the parking lot of a health food store.

And we sell totally different produce at 1 than we do the other.

And we do different kinds of education than we do at 1 and the other.

And so you can pick and choose different markets, different clientele, what you feel like your mission is and where you want to serve.

You can be in more lucrative neighborhoods and Diversify and go to lower income areas as well yeah, so part of Intentionally we chose to go into the low.

We used to live in the area that was Would be considered low income And so for me it was very exciting to be able to go back down there and bring this, you know, I learned, when I went to Seattle I went to the farm and he says go harvest the radicchio over there and I was like oh dear, what in the world is radicchio?

Like my palate choice had obviously been like Kroger was my palate choice and so all of a sudden my whole world just was Expanded on what food was and I remember the first time I ate fresh broccoli I was sort of I didn't even wreck, you know it was like some other food, and so I was excited to come back and it's actually a food desert There's not a grocery store in this area, and so it was a real blessing for us to go into that market and then What do people want?

Because if you're growing a bunch of stuff that people don't want, it's not really economically viable either.

And so that's not the, I don't think that that's all you got to do.

In fact, I would encourage you not to just do that, but it is definitely a question you want to have an answer to.

The other thing that's hidden in this question is what do you want to grow?

The other question is what is the market demand?

These are just the things that come to my mind when I think about this.

So maybe everybody loves, I don't know, what do people love?

But if you show up like if you go to the market and everybody has the same cucumbers, you're just somebody else with the same cucumbers.

Like yeah, there's a demand for it, but the demand is met, maybe.

So what's the demand and what's being met of that demand?

And so maybe finding niche markets might be beneficial.

For this next 1, record keeping, kind of like what Alan and Aubrey touched on you know there's a lot of ways to do market gardening and our way is not the only way and not just the right way.

So we've worked in on several different farms and it's amazing how different every farmer is and how they do things.

So this isn't the end only way but our Larry and I both come from the same kind of background that we really don't like the computer work very much.

So you can be like really into record keeping and keep a lot of really good records and it can really help your farm at being organized and efficient.

We tend to do the least amount of that as possible and we just are in the field more often.

So we'll give you a little bit of our model.

Alan and them do it quite different than we do and that's why we wanted to share this presentation so that you could see that there's different ways to do things.

So record keeping is important but how technical you want to be is really just based on, you know, your own personality.

I kind of envy Alan's ability to organize, I'll tell you.

I wish that we had, it's a wonderful asset.

And so then you kind of, you grab all this information from your community and then you have to make a decision about what you think is going to be the best outlets, what you're going to grow and sort of how you're going to manage that.

And there's some real, you know, I think in a general sense common sense questions you should ask yourself like, okay.

I think the next slide actually, selling what you grow, probably will answer some of this.

Real quick, I just wanted to add, that was a picture of our farm.

That is a picture of our farm, just so you can get an idea.

We're on 16 and a half acres, but we cultivate about 2 and a half acres of what we have.

This is kind of a summary slide of what we're going to talk about for the rest of the presentation.

So farmers market, restaurants, wholesale, CSA, farm dinners, and online store.

Are you guys going to be able to do the online store part?

The saying, location, location, location, it's said that way because it's true.

Finding the right location for what you're doing.

If you're growing a bunch of, I don't know, we have like a large Korean, they have a large Korean-based community.

You can do niche things for that, but let's say you are growing a bunch of those things and you don't have a large Korean-based community, You're in the wrong location.

You're growing the wrong food for the people that you're servicing and so it doesn't really work.

The different farmers markets are going to have different types of vendors.

So we found, you know, a larger farmer market, farmers market you're generally going to do better in your sales.

They like to be able to have different things to shop for.

It becomes like their Sunday thing that they do or their Tuesday thing that they do.

3. Market Gardening: How to Meet Your Market Demand

So we talked about the marketing side of it, going to farmer's market, having a CSA, selling to restaurants or wholesale.

Great, so now we know how to sell it, but now we need to know how to grow it, right, which is the tricky part.

Maybe not tricky, but by God's grace, he shows us all these things.

Larry Lesher is going to talk to you about that.

And the reason I chose to sort of frame it that way, I wasn't sure if I wanted to say it that way but I did.

What you put out there is a reflection of who you are.

And if you're a follower of Christ, it should look like that.

But in my mind, if 1 of them has to go, it's quantity.

The quantity's going to come if you do the right thing.

The Lord has promised He would restore this.

He would work through us to heal the lands.

And so if I do what I'm called to do, I will accept that as fact.

And so what I'm concerned with is the quality that leaves the farm because what the quality is is a picture, a reflection of who I am and I should be reflecting Christ.

Does everybody understand what I mean by that?

And so there's some basic principles that you want to ask yourself about how you're going to achieve quantity and that is how much land do you have so that can determine how you work that land.

For me, 1 of the questions that was fundamental for me because she was at work, I was the farm.

And I did have help, but I was there every day a lot by myself.

So we have to look at our limiting factors and be realistic.

I had a good friend when I started farming, I actually started farming as a partnership with him and another young lady.

He says, it is so easy to plant a lot of food and you have this huge garden.

It is so much work to harvest all that food.

So you can create a whole lot of work if you don't understand every 1 of those seeds is going to turn into something that has to be managed.

So we got to think about our ability to meet that the end of the process not just the planting part of the process.

Yeah, and I just wanted to reiterate that when I was able to quit my job in June it just changed the whole dynamic of the farm.

So being able to do it with your wife or husband or your children, it's just, it's huge.

And you see the joy on our faces in this picture?

We had planted onions for 4 seasons and failed every single season.

I mean they're very hard to seed, they're hard to plant, they're tiny and they're close together and You would do it 1 year, they failed.

And year 4, I'm like, honey, can we just stop planting onions?

And he said, well, we'll never know if they're gonna grow if we stop planting them.

I can guarantee you they fail if we don't plant them.

I was ready to quit Well last year we had onions.

This is like the highlight of our season last year and it just goes to show if you don't give up just keep planting things.

I mean you want to be wise about it but it was through years of building the soil and really tending to it properly that we finally got an onion harvest out of it.

That's a really key question because what you plant is going to require a lot of that manpower down the road.

So keep that in mind with what you decide scale wise.

If you've grown stuff before and you're not new to growing things, then you have a reflection you can look back on, you can look at your past and say, okay, have I successfully done That before and what does it entail and you base what you're gonna do on that obviously Economic viability so we've had to take I like to grow a lot of things I like to experiment with things I like new foods and so for me 1 of the most difficult things was cutting things out of the farm.

So this year I told you we went and cut a third of the farm out and so we had to take a really hard look at okay we grow 6 different kinds of cucumbers that might not really be we put lemon cucumbers on the table every year and we come home with lemon cucumbers often.

But see, I really like them, so we kept growing them, but I think we've decided to not grow them this year because really nobody buys them, and I could live with all the other kinds of cucumbers.

And so, like really narrowing down, Even if you cut a lot of stuff out, there's thousands of options.

And so getting that down to a practical, viable, economically viable solution can be very difficult because for me, I also don't wanna just grow 12 things.

That is not a viable option for me either.

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Series

Intensive- Market Gardening: A Lifestyle and a Lesson Book

6. Market Gardening: Finding the Perfect Farm

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

1. Market Gardening: Why are We Here? True Education!

56m

2. Market Gardening: How Do I Market my Produce?

1h

3. Market Gardening: How to Meet Your Market Demand

1h 26m

4. Market Gardening: Appropriate Infrastructure

52m

5. Market Gardening: Small Farm Irrigation

1h 6m

6. Market Gardening: Finding the Perfect Farm

43m

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