AdAgrA 2021: Hidden Treasure

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Alan Seiler

Aubrey Seiler

Ricky Seiler

04 Meet the Farmer: Alan & Aubrey Seiler, Better Together

As you can tell, they are dressed alike today, sort of.

I happen to know them pretty well because I, for some reason I think I'm their father.

But we're going to talk a little bit about our farm, Better Together Farm.

But before we do, let's just open with prayer.

Father God, once again, we are here to hopefully expand our understanding and to just see all the many ways that we can go about being involved in the garden and in the farm and most importantly, Lord, drawing closer to you through that entire experience.

And so today I just ask a special blessing on Aubrey and Alan as they present this information.

And hopefully it comes through understandable and clear so that it can help others Who are interested in this journey as well, and we pray in Jesus name amen All righty, so a little bit about better together better together farm How did you decide you wanted to consider getting into market gardening?

You have any background you could take your mask off if you want.

So, when I was around 13, 14 years old, I found a Black and Decker gardening book in my grandma's garage.

I never really read a gardening book before and it had a lot of great pictures in it.

We had tried to have gardens before I found this book, but it talked about things that you could do to the soil to make things grow better and some principles and it's like, oh wow, there's actually some rationale behind how this system could work.

So I took it home and I did the first garden and I really enjoyed it.

And then the year after that, we actually met the Dysinger family at a family camp that we go to, and mom's like, there's a family here from Tennessee that does farming, you should get to know them.

And so I sat down with Edwin Dysinger during 1 of the mealtimes, and I just started hammering him with questions.

And he got a little overwhelmed I guess with all the questions and he said, here, here's 3 books and they were all Coleman books.

He's like, if you read these 3 books and you have more questions, you can get in touch with me, but I think you should read these before you ask me any more questions.

And so we bought them and I read them all and it was the New Organic Grower by Eliot Coleman that he really started laying out in a small degree some of the business principles and like I just wanted to know how to grow food better.

But reading that book, it's like, actually, I really enjoy this.

And it could potentially become an occupation at some point.

And so I knew there was a long ways to go.

And I think we were driving in the car somewhere.

And I was reading dad parts of it and stuff.

And he's like, yeah, maybe we could do something.

So that's kind of, that's probably I'd say how that kind of all happened.

Tell them about the first garden you had before you saw the Black and Decker book.

Yeah, so basically it was a failure, completely.

What else do you want me to say about it?

We had a couple of raised beds that we, you know, because raised beds for some reason, oh raised beds, raised beds.

We were actually extremely talented in the area of killing plants.

So share with us a little bit about where the farm's located.

So the farm currently right now is located in Murray County, which is in south central Oklahoma, about an hour and a half south of Oklahoma City, about 2 and a half hours north, 2 hours north of Dallas-Fort Worth area on the I-35 corridor.

So we're kind of in the bottom of the pot as far as Oklahoma, if you think of the pan handle as a you know Right and I guess not a pot.

It's shaped more like a pot than a pan though Anyways, how did you decide on the location?

That's where mom and dad lived and we were born to them so we didn't I mean they chose to move there because of They were involved with the organization called Lifestyle Center of America and we bought some property and built a house well moved a house in and redid it there.

And we never bought the land thinking that we were going to grow on it.

It's kind of a, there's a little slight rock formation in that part of the country called the Arbuckle Mountains, which are not really mountains, but there's a lot of rocks.

They didn't have the rocks to constitute them as mountains.

So it wasn't necessarily the best land for growing on initially.

But we've moved since then to some bottom land along the Ouachita River.

I mean, you have what, What do you have picture-wise for us there?

So this is the first location, and that was the first kind of garden after the Black and Decker Garden book, 2014.

As you can see, there's raised beds and plastic culture.

So as you can see the raised beds are completely gone.

It's all in ground and things are a little bit Oh wait go back.

You see this or rocks we pulled out so the rocks are in the ground.

Yeah, so Then that's the year after that so expanded a little bit Dad's getting really happy at this point because there's less yard for him to mow.

Then we got a hoop house in 2012, like a bigger 1.

We actually, those others like skinny ones back there, those were low hoops suspended on top of T-post to make those 2 tunnels.

It had 2 beds in them and they actually weren't too terrible.

They weren't too great, but anyway, so we got a little hoop house like there.

Yeah, had different tunnels and some ridge vents and had expanded over to the other side just trying to find where all the rocks weren't as many and Then in 2016 we bought this land about 5 miles away as far as the crow flies There's a there's a river that runs near us called the Ouachita.

And this is kind of alluvial soils basically brought in.

And so it's not really a rock on the property, which is really a blessing.

And then that's our center set up in 2017.

So this is our first year there actually trying to grow.

And we grew 3 fields, had some hoop houses.

And this is 2019, which does not look much different than 2020.

So That's kind of how the farm looks like right now, and then this is a Yeah, yeah, go ahead Just the idea of how did you think through walk through the idea of how you thought through how you're gonna lay the farm out?

I mean, where did you get some ideas from somewhere, or what happened?

Yeah, so we went to several farms in 2014, was it?

It was the first Ag conference that happened under the Adventist Agricultural Association in Tennessee, but we left like 2 weeks early and actually hit 5 or 6 farms, went up into Ontario and Quebec, and then came back down.

Martin's farm in Quebec, and it was just really eye-opening because his production was pulled so closely.

And all the other farms that we had gone to were so scattered, hither and yon.

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04 Meet the Farmer: Alan & Aubrey Seiler, Better Together

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