Cultivate Conference

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Eastward Missions

Market Gardening

John Dysinger

Pamela Dysinger

A Perfect Fit: Why Adventists Should be Market Gardening

We named it before we read in the Spirit of Prophecy that trials are a blessing.

Then I thought, well, no wonder, bountiful blessings.

So we started as a strawberry production and God really led in that.

But then from there, because we almost lost everything, it just was not sustainable.

Then we started doing winter production, And we were doing winter production and spring production.

And then in 2011, we launched into summer production, which is where most people who are smart start because that's where it's easiest.

So now the farm runs year-round and John and I and what's left of our family and apprentices, we do an apprenticeship, run the summer.

And our son Joshua also works heavily with us.

He works at least part-time, half-time in the summer.

And then he manages the winter production.

I thought it would also be good to just get a knife and a fork.

I did ask already if there were any market gardeners.

But we didn't...just this lady back here, she kind of did the this.

But any people who are, you know, seriously moving in that direction, or you're here to be convinced.

Alright, so, I'm going to share with you, and I'm going to try to move away.

Why 12, whoops, I'm gonna be in your way.

12 reasons why we feel that Adventist families should consider market gardening as a life work.

If you all want to move too, if I'm in your way, please feel free.

Number 1, it was God's original plan, and we know that from Genesis.

The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed." So it's interesting that the first thing we hear about is that God planted it and he put the man there, but it wasn't enough to put him there.

Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend and to keep it.

So I mean that was just where God put us to begin with.

That's where I think he knew we would thrive.

The next thing was to keep the family together.

That starts, we believe, with the husband and wife.

And I don't know how it is here in Australia.

Well, I've gathered how it is here in Australia because some conversations that I've had already, it's not that different than the US.

Marriage is almost becoming a thing of the past.

And That is just, I mean, what do you say about that?

It makes me so sad because it's the thing that was to bring God's image in a visible way to the world.

And so John and I believe that part of that is that we need to be more together with our spouse and It gives us great joy.

We haven't done everything right our kids are not perfect But it gives us incredible joy to see our children taking hold of that Our oldest is married and her husband works for AWR Advent's World Radio.

But when they hired him, because it was a 1 position, he said, number 1, I'll not travel without Kirsten, because I can't do it without her.

And number 2, we're just committed to being together.

So 2 and a half years of marriage, they haven't been separated for 1 night.

They have chosen and continue to choose to be together.

So you have a lot better chances as a family and as a husband and wife if you are together.

And now shall teach them God's commandments diligently.

This is the 1 I just shared in the other 1.

There's a little bit of overlap here because There just is But this goes deeper.

Okay, the third reason is that on a farm There is meaningful.

Wow, those pictures do they look better to you than up here?

I'm going to tell you we had to have the help of our children.

And it's not just for us and our family, but guess what?

Any company that comes to see us, they can just enter in with us to our daily rounds of work.

You know sometimes when you visit people, you know, the dad's off to work and the mom's off to work and you spend time in the evenings, but the farm is a wonderful place to just be together.

That's Rod's youngest with my mother, who's 80, plenty capable to still work in the garden and wash veggies and whatever and so we had some fun in their garden helping them.

He died 2 and a half years ago, but he was a tremendous help to us.

And again, just to point out that the garden is a place where many people can come together, build memories, and work together no matter what age.

This is Caleb when he was younger and 2 of my niece's children, they live on the farm, they're not really a part of the farm but they do live there And 1 of the first jobs that you do on the farm when you're big enough to stand on a chair, so I mean, our kids were all doing it when they were 2.

So if you could see, they are covered with that brown peat moss.

This is packing CSA boxes, which we'll be talking a lot more about that in the marketing.

We have an apprentice family and they had 1 child and this is their their child and he's been he's been an apprentice as much as his parents.

If you came to the farm he could give you a tour of the farm and he could do it quite well at 5.

The agrarian life or market farming gives us so many practical skills.

So this on the forklift is our oldest boy and he's not farming with us anymore but he's making farming possible for many many small farms by developing tools and I believe no doubt He gained the skills for what he's doing today By growing up on a farm I'm odd at the things that he has taught himself to do.

On Your Mark, Get Set, Go! - Resources to Get You Out of the Starting Blocks

Our dear heavenly father as we continue this this morning, we just want to continue to ask that You will be the center and the focus and that We will not get sidetracked with financial issues or looking at the seeming impossibilities, but when we trust in you, we pray.

So like I just said, for this hour we are going to be going over some resources and information that I feel, as I was telling Rod the other day, I feel like the session you just heard about why we should be doing this, and this 1 are the most important ones you can get.

Because honestly, in the next 9 or 10 hours, you know, we're going to be touching the surface of a lot of things, but here you have resources that can take you deeper.

And so we're going to go into this in depth, and then in the next however many hours we have, you're going to hear me referring to some of the people I'm going to introduce you to right now, and it will make more sense if we have the resources handed out at the beginning.

So I thought we could start with a little history, modern history of market gardening.

And It's a little hard to know where to start, but in our country, back in the 30s and 40s, there was a couple called Scott and Helen Nearing.

Have Any of you heard of Scott and Helen Nearing?

They were both, I think, university professors who got tired of the modern American life.

Of course, this was many years ago, but still at that time they they said, you know, this is where we want something different And they moved up to Vermont and homesteaded.

You know what I mean when I say homesteaded?

You know, basically we're trying to be self-sufficient.

1 was called, well, the 1 that I'm familiar with is called The Good Life.

And it's actually quite fascinating because although their spiritual outlook was very different than ours, they had some amazing truths.

They were vegans back before, I think the term was invented.

They were vegans, they were tea tolers, no alcohol, no cigarettes, none of that.

And, I think maybe most importantly, they believed in the dignity of manual labor and really the dignity of manual labor and then they valued a simple life and it's really quite convicting to read some of their works and say, wow, we've missed something here Because they actually had quite a following that would come up to their place.

They were in Vermont and they did a maple syrup operation.

That was the way they earned their, what they call bread money.

You know, anything that they couldn't grow themselves, they earned money from maple syrup to provide.

Well, a big ski resort bought up the mountain behind them, and they said, okay, that does it.

They moved to the coast of Maine, and there they started a blueberry patch, and that was the way they earned their bread money.

I don't wanna get too sidetracked on this, but the point is that their experience that they wrote about attracted a young man named Elliot Coleman.

And Elliot Coleman grew up in a very affluent family in New Jersey, but As many young people who grow up in a fluent life, they realize, you know, there's gotta be something more to life than this.

Elliot Coleman read the Neering's book and he went up to visit them and he was fascinated and fell in love with the agrarian life.

He told me he got a master's in Spanish literature, not because he wanted, he had that much interest in Spanish literature, but it was because he wanted to be able to Spend the winter in Chile or Argentina I forget which 1 it was so he could ski year-round He was big into skiing snow skiing.

So anyway When he when he got turned on to agriculture, he said, you know, this is the greatest adventure sport ever because it's the mountain that you never summit.

Can you imagine being into adventure sports?

He was into rock climbing and skiing and kayaking, whitewater kayaking, and here he finds this challenge that he can never conquer.

And so that was I think he was in his late 20s and he's now I think in his mid-70s still trying to summit the mountain.

And that gives you an idea of agriculture.

Every year you say, this is the year, we've learned all the mistakes, Now we're going to summit this mountain.

And every year nature throws you a curveball and you never quite summit.

Now just interesting side like he, the Neerings were so impressed with him that they offered to sell him some of their land.

They had bought it at, this is the coast of Maine, I don't know if any of you have been there, beautiful, they had bought it like $50 an acre.

And so 20 years later when Elliot Coleman came along they sold it to him for $50 an acre.

Because their view, even though they weren't Christian, was that we want to pass this on, pass the blessing on to somebody else.

Elliot Coleman has since sold a number of pieces of his land and he always sells it at $50 an acre, even though it's probably worth At least $50, 000 an acre.

Neat man, but Elliot Coleman learned from the Nehrens and then he's got the kind of mind he's always thinking, you know, how can I do this better?

So he decided to go to Europe, which has more of a tradition of small-scale agriculture, and learn from, well, particularly learn from the French, who were doing these intensive market gardens around France.

This was back, you know, in the 50s, 60s, 70s.

So he went there and learned and came back to Maine and started applying it and eventually wrote this book, The New Organic Grower.

And this is the first 1 on your resource list, so I'm not getting off too far.

This is the book that I like to say there are 2 things that got me into agriculture.

1 was specifically the quote my wife read, that no devising of man has ever improved upon this plant.

I bought this book before we ever started market gardening.

We were living in the country and wanting to have a garden and this book was so good as I read it I said, you know, I think I could enjoy this.

This book, it says it's revised and expanded, second edition, but it's still getting rather dated.

It was it was published in 1995, the updated edition.

If you could see how dog-eared and dirty it is.

And it's literally falling apart because this was my constant companion in the garden.

He's just so practical, you know, showing you how to hold the tools and how to, I mean, just a lot of really really good information.

So in my opinion, this is the place to start on your journey to market gardening.

Now I will say on this list if you've looked through it at all I realize it's very American and and I I you know almost took off the seed suppliers and stuff because I'm thinking well this isn't going to be relevant to you but I left them on just because you can go on the websites you can look at stuff and give you ideas.

And you know, it's not impossible to get seeds from the states.

Rod Bailey, I think, is learning through trial and error how to get them from the states, you know, because there are varieties that may not be available here.

So anyway, I left all that information on there realizing that it may not be really relevant to you, but maybe you can, you can, some of the websites are very educational.

Johnny's website, Johnny's Selected Seeds, has a lot of good information on it.

So, you'll hear me talk about Elliot Coleman.

I considered him my mentor and it was a very...

I don't want to get too sidetracked with stories.

Well Let's get through this and if there's time I can tell you.

Well, no, I'll just tell you quickly because this was not only really pivotal for us, but also for my son, who I'll tell you more about later.

I always wanted to meet Elliot Coleman, and he was coming to Nashville, which is the closest city to where we live, Nashville, Tennessee, but he was doing a seminar on Sabbath, and you know, we've chosen not to do those things on Sabbath so I was kind of feeling a little bummed that that wasn't going to happen and my daughter who I think was about 16 at the time, got it in her head that she was going to write Elliot Coleman.

So she wrote him and she just explained how her father had patterned his farm after Elliot's farm and that we weren't coming to the conference because it was on Sabbath and Would there be a possibility of any other time when he could meet me and we could talk?

And this was all without my knowing So she sent the letter and he responded and he said, I'd love to meet your father.

And so she had great joy and I still have it in my Elliot Coleman book, an invitation she wrote up for a breakfast with Elliot Coleman.

That was a special, special thing for me.

So she came and along with my brother and I, we had a wonderful visit.

And he invited us up to his farm to spend some time.

And that was where my son got inspired to start making tools for small farms and maybe we can talk more about that later on but just a neat example of how standing for something for principle opened up doors that probably never would have opened otherwise.

And you know now my son is not only being blessed by earning a good income from making tools, but literally, and I don't say this because he's my son, but this tool right here, which we'll talk about later, has revolutionized the market gardening world.

So this text was kind of it in the market gardening world for many years.

Market Gardening ABC’s: Looking at the Basic Building Blocks of the Market Garden

So, as I mentioned in our last session, what I want to try to do is convince you of the benefits of small market gardens.

And I want to make sure you understand that I'm not against large farms.

If you feel called to that and you have the money and you have the land, then wonderful.

You know, there's still a place for large farms growing things like wheat and beans and things that are hard to do efficiently on a small scale.

I don't want anyone to think I'm against large farms but I have a passion for small farms because and I'll just start because I don't know what's going on here but I believe many many more Adventists should be doing this but if you're like me you don't have the money to buy a large farm.

You know when you think about the land and then you think about the equipment.

You know, these tractors, $100, 000 or more for this equipment that, You know, so either you're going, either you're independently wealthy or you're going way into debt or I don't know what else.

But I want to find something that can be done by almost anybody.

How many of you have an acre or 2 of land or could afford that?

And if you didn't have to spend hundreds of thousands, if you just had to spend a few thousand dollars on tools and equipment, could you do that?

I would not want to do farming or any kind of market farming today without water.

But you know, it doesn't take a lot of water to do a small acreage.

If you're trying to irrigate tens or hundreds of acres, you're talking about a huge amount of water.

When it comes to equipment, everything is simpler on a smaller scale.

So let's start with what is a market garden?

Let me just turn this off so it's not a distraction.

So there's loosely defined terms, but I would say it's less than 3 acres of cultivated land, and most are an acre and a half or less.

Now, I realize, as I understand it, acres are kind of on the way out here you use square meters or hectares.

It's characterized by intensive production and multiple crops per bed per year.

So this is not something where you just plant a crop in the spring and harvest it in the fall and you're done.

This is talking about, in fact, Connor Crickmore, he doesn't ever leave a bed empty for more than a few hours.

As soon as something comes out, it's planted the same day.

That's intensive and that's what it takes in order to get the kind of returns he's getting from small acreage.

Takes advantage of season extension and often goes year-round.

And I do need to point that out, you know, I threw around some numbers with some of these different people.

Jean Mertin went 150, 000, that's for 6 months.

And I would encourage you, it's market gardening is intensive enough that if you try to do it year-round, non-stop, you'll burn out.

You need to decide how much you can handle and what can work really nicely is if you can get together with some other like-minded person and divide the year.

You know, we that's kind of what we've done on our farm.

My brother who's here, Edwin, they were doing the winter for quite a while while we did the We do spring summer, they did fall winter.

They have gotten out of it for various reasons, and now my son is doing fall winter, and we do spring summer.

6 months of marketing, by the end you're pretty worn out.

But, you know, like Curtis Stone and Connor Crickmore, those numbers I was giving you there, that's for year-round, okay?

We learned that early on with the strawberries.

We had a disastrous spring and lost three-quarters of our crop.

And that was almost the end of our farming experience.

The Lord is good and he got us out of that but yeah it's good to be diversified.

Now you know every year we'll have some crops that don't do well, but we've got enough other crops that do do well that it all averages out.

Okay, so I wish you could see this, I apologize.

Less equipment needed, less stress needed.

You know, it's overwhelming to go out and look at 5 acres that need weeding.

I don't know, maybe I should turn this around and at least a lot of you could see a little bit.

This is an aerial view of the main part of our farm.

Might need to squeeze together, but you can probably see it fairly well.

Is it okay if you just tilt that screen just a fraction forward?

So now these plots here, we've got 10 of those.

Again, I 100 feet by 40 feet are you familiar with okay again I didn't take the time to do all the metric conversions but so 4000 square feet so that's roughly a tenth of an acre each of those plots we have 10 of those and then these are movable greenhouses that have 3 stations each And we can talk more about that later.

More people can make a living off the land.

You know, if you have a 10 acre farm, market farm making $500, 000, you know, why not have 5, 2 acre market farms, each making 100, 000?

You know, that's enough to support a family, at least where we live.

And, you know, I'll say we don't, we don't have any debt, which is a big help.

But we didn't always start out that I mean, we didn't start out that way.

The Lord, that's all in our book, but he has many ways to deal with our financial situations.

But we'd love to see many, many more families making a living.

Keys to success, intensive production, multiple crops per year.

So I'm just going to quickly go through, and again this is an overview, a lot of these things we're going to come back to in the next few hours and talk about in a little more depth.

So that means tight spacings, your plant spacings, beds rather than rows.

Notice these are our 30 inch wide beds and you have multiple rows in a bed.

It's just a much more efficient use of space, less bare ground to cultivate, to keep the weeds out, and so on.

We'll talk a little bit more about that in the weeding part.

There are very, very few small farms that grow corn, sweet corn.

Because although sweet corn is easy to sell, everybody loves it, at least in the States, but your dollars per acre are very low comparatively.

You need to grow crops that can earn $100, 000 an acre.

Maybe 20, 000 if you have a really good market and good corn.

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Series

Market Gardening

On Your Mark, Get Set, Go! - Resources to Get You Out of the Starting Blocks

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

A Perfect Fit: Why Adventists Should be Market Gardening

54m

On Your Mark, Get Set, Go! - Resources to Get You Out of the Starting Blocks

48m

Market Gardening ABC’s: Looking at the Basic Building Blocks of the Market Garden

53m

A(rtichokes) to Z(ucchini): The Most Profitable Crops for Market Gardeners

1h 3m

What Do I Do With All This Produce?: Finding Good Homes for all Your veggies

40m

Tools of the Trade: Tools and Equipment to Increase Ease and Efficiency

1h 19m

Pardon Me, Your Weeds are Showing!: 12 Tips to Avoid Embarrassment

35m

Sweet What? Potato and Basil!

55m

Sound Doctrine