AdAgrA 2014 Conference

Market Farming/Gardening

Brad Johnson

Byron Smith

Janice Smith

AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

4- Wooley Farms & Sunizona Family Farms

Our first presenter this afternoon is Brad Johnson from California, Woolly Farms.

I have never met Brad before until this conference.

We've talked on the phone, but Darren Greenfield, 1 of the board members, knew Brad from out there and recommended him as a speaker.

And so we thank Brad and his wife for coming all this way.

It's a big sacrifice to come from California.

But from our point of view, Brad is a big time farmer.

He says he's just a small farmer from a California point of view, and I'm sure that's true but Brad has been doing it for many years and I'm anxious to see what he has to say.

Brad's daughter is in Clarksville here so that gave them a little more pull to come back this way because they could see their daughter.

Glad she's been able to come to the conference too.

And then after Brad, we will go straight into Byron and Janice and they've been introduced already.

When I look at dirt, I start to think about growing stuff.

My answer, As a farmer, we turn sunshine, water, dirt, and the grace of God into something good to eat.

As a salesman, we grow produce and sell romance.

I will try to give you a taste and a flavor of our farming experience.

In more ways than 1, I'm not just talking about Judy and me, but the satisfaction and the struggles.

To put it lightly, what keeps us sane and insane.

I'm picking a few features to share with you, some of our farming roots.

After this, if I have some time, I'll have some more pictures of our farm, etc.

And answer questions depending on what kind of time we have.

So, I'm guessing most here involved in farming or gardening in some fashion, organic, conventional, or a combination of the 2.

My personal land is in organics and that is my primary emphasis, but I have some involvement in the conventional side as well.

I think both have something to offer our economic and learning experience.

I'm wondering, how many in this room farm for your primary source of living.

You know that may be, we may be under the national average here.

And if you're organic it's real small and If you're my age your average age 58 somewhere in there So How many of you garden?

Well, how many of you know what you're doing?

Well, my presentation is part information, part inspiration, part our journey, a little romance, and part what was that?

So, but I think it speaks more to the human side of our farm.

A point I'd like to make is, you can make it in farming, but I wouldn't be where I am now without all the help along the way.

From acquiring land, support from family, neighbors and friends, generous with their equipment, land and time, great marketers, research people, and the people who want what we grow.

Every human being created in the image of God is endowed with a power akin to that of the creator.

And this, of course I'm bending this to the farming side and dirt.

A verse says, God placed man in this special garden called the Garden of Eden to tend and keep it beautiful.

And another, God arranged a special garden for man to live in, which was located in an area called Eden.

This is the place where the first man made his home.

In this garden, God not only placed trees for food, but also ornamental trees, most beautiful to look at.

So I picture a garden as the origin of my first home and a place of pleasure to work.

The depth of a few words can still be probed.

We have made a day of rest a priority, taking Saturday as a day of rest.

Many associated with us wonder at times why.

And I as well at times find it difficult to make the discipline.

The biology of the work calls and many needs do not stop.

The plants need water, the cows need milking, etc.

Though the human side of our farm stops to rest, to look, enjoy, learn without the driving force of business.

We love the visit or not and enjoy the quietness and beauty of life.

Now 1 of my main features and a favorite quote of mine.

In the cultivation of the soil, the thoughtful worker will find that treasures little dreamed of are opening up before him.

No 1 can succeed in agriculture or gardening without attention to the laws involved.

There are some good things that have developed for me over the years.

When developing orchard crops with a no-till system, I was wondering how to get the trees a better benefit of green manure and soil-applied organic matter.

Here is 1 way that has opened up with few downsides.

Everyone in organic farming has worms, but these are my worms.

In the dog world, my dog is better than your dog.

Many of you know these are huge topside night feeders with very deep holes.

I have dug at least 2 to 3 feet deep following the holes to see where they went.

All the organic matter, compost, manures, leaves, produce, leftovers get eaten, taken down and reduced to worm castings with tremendous soil aeration.

At times, I will walk the gardens in the middle and walk the orchards in the middle of the night to watch them.

My daughter and I did an experiment to see what their favorite food was.

I picked these up in just a very short time walking around my orchard.

If you stomp your feet, you can hear them moving back into the ground.

They have a large expanded tail much like a cobra head, which keeps them anchored in the soil as they feed out in a 10 to 16 inch diameter around their hole.

As it was said, treasures little dreamed of are opening up.

And you thought I was growing worms for the soil.

This photo says a lot to me because I know some of the history and it encourages me.

It tells me a lot about my grandma and grandpa Swank, my mom's parents.

They homesteaded here in the 1920s or so in the northeast corner of Montana and built this over the years.

John Dysinger

Bob Gregory

3- Berea Gardens & Bountiful Blessings Farm

Father in heaven, we thank you so much for this opportunity to come together with our brothers and sisters that have a desire to know more about you and your book of nature.

I pray that as we go through the course of these meetings and particularly this 1 that you'll clear our minds and open our hearts to the message that you would have us receive and that you might use me as a vessel to that end.

I want to just take a moment to thank the Dysinger family for doing such a marvelous job of helping to organize this series of meetings here and to locate a facility and a venue that can accommodate all of us in relative comfort in this in this rather brisk weather.

It's wonderful to see so many people here and I am grateful beyond what I can express for the interest that's being shown in this topic of agriculture.

It's my conviction That agriculture was the first industry ordained for mankind, that when he placed Adam in the garden, his instruction to him to dress it and to keep it was not because a perfect garden needed a gardener, but that we needed the influence of that garden in our lives.

And we heard and will hear more evidence of that during the course of this time.

I kind of came to the Adventist message and to the point of agriculture that I'm doing now kind of through the looking glass.

I worked in large scale agriculture in the western states.

I worked with some organic farmers, including the Lundberg rice family.

But my primary role was basically doing assessments for growers on how they could grow the most, the cheapest, the fastest.

And that involved using a lot of chemistries and a lot of methods that I no longer subscribe to.

I've gone from actually making cultural decisions on over 60, 000 acres a year down to farming my own land now in West Virginia where we farm approximately 3 acres a year.

And I can tell you that my quality of life is better than it ever has been.

And I am so very, very thankful that we have the opportunity still here in this country to kind of reverse the direction that we've been going in for the past 2 or 3 generations and that there is an entirely new generation of young people that have recognized that there is real opportunity in agriculture today.

I spent the last 3 days up in Louisville And I don't get on the road very much because farming is a very demanding lifestyle.

But I was compelled to go to the Slow Money Conference that was recently just concluded yesterday actually in Louisville.

And that conference essentially was an assemblage of about 1, 200 investors, about 100 farmers, and a couple of hundred people that were involved in various stages of marketing and how to aggregate and distribute local farm produce.

And the biggest problem that exists today in this country when it comes to high quality nutritious food is that the market so far exceeds the production.

There is a tremendous demand right now for small-scale, high-quality, nutritious, agricultural food.

And I want to encourage those of you that are here seriously considering this as an opportunity to support yourself and your family, that it is an opportunity like I have never seen in my life.

The markets are crying for product right now and I'll give you a few examples.

We'll be talking about some of this a little bit later on this week.

1 of the aspects of growing crops is that it is just as difficult if not more so sometimes to get that crop sold and distributed as it is to produce it.

So growing food and sustaining yourself with a market farm is not just about how to produce a good quality product.

A few years ago my wife and I decided that we wanted to establish our own farm.

For many many years I worked in consulting, I worked in large-scale farm management, I taught the agriculture courses over at Heartland for a period of years but we were ready to settle down, establish our own small family scale market enterprise and we also wanted to provide some training opportunities.

Now the Lord knew what we needed long before we did because after we purchased the farm that we decided we wanted, a school building adjacent to the farm became available to us and that's what you see in this picture here is a about a 24, 000 square foot area of school building that we now live in and make as the source for our housing for students that come and spend time with us too, but we were able to purchase this for $50, 000.

And the spirit of prophecy has instructed us that if we're faithful and if we're seeking to accomplish the Lord's will, we're going to find opportunities like this.

So I know that in today's economy with so many of us having to work so hard just to make ends meet, that the prospect of buying land for a lot of people is really quite a challenge.

That was 1 of the topics that was addressed at this conference that I just attended.

But know in your heart, and I can tell you with confidence because it has been true for me, that if you are faithful to the Lord in every way, he will be faithful to you as well, and he will make a way possible.

We were fleeing from an institution when we went to find our small farm.

The last thing in the world I wanted was another large structure, a large building.

But it has become invaluable to us in what we do today.

So we took the playgrounds around that building.

We used the classrooms for instructions for some of our training programs.

We hold farmers markets in some of these classrooms in the winter months.

We've been able to do a variety of things that we otherwise would not have been able to do without this facility.

These are just some shots of the building to give you size.

But we essentially pulled out all the footings for the playground equipment that used to be there and surrounded this building with plants.

That did something really startling too that we never anticipated.

And what it did was it opened up doors for us with the community that we never imagined that we could open.

We live in a very rural area in West Virginia, where 1 of the few counties left in the country that has no stoplight no four-lane highways No fast-food chains.

So the people that are there are close to each other in fact the root of about 90% of the people in the county that I live in come from just 4 families.

And when a stranger moves in, you're a stranger.

And in a place like that, you can be a stranger for life very easily.

But because they saw what we did with their school building, this building was built in 1950 and virtually all of our neighbors that have become friends, and other people that we know through the farmer's market have been through school in this building.

So, they see what we're doing with it and guess what?

It's not just another eyesore on the landscape.

It's not, you know, it hasn't been turned into low income housing and they're thankful that we're growing food, cuz hey, that's a pretty neat thing to do.

So it's opened up a lot of avenues for outreach and evangelism into the community too.

And you cannot do agriculture in any way without affecting the people around you.

Larry Lesher was speaking this morning about the intimate relationships that are developed when you're selling food to someone, that's a very significant exchange because there's an exchange of trust that goes on there that you don't have when you're buying a new car or a lawnmower or a chainsaw.

So people are open and willing to get to know you as a person and it gives us an opportunity like no other I can think of to be a true living witness.

It is part of the medical missionary work just as those of us that are engaged in serving the needs of others with their physical ailments, we're serving the needs of others by preventing those physical ailments and they understand that and know that and it's an extremely easy extension of that to engage in dialogue and to begin to talking with them about it.

Now since I'm basically coming from a world where I was trained in large-scale industrial agriculture, I particularly appreciate this statement from, This is from selected testimonies in August of 1896.

And Ellen White wrote that agriculture should be advanced by scientific knowledge.

And unfortunately today, because the last 2 generations particularly have been quite abruptly divorced from a connection to the soil, there are all kinds of winds of doctrine blowing in terms of how to conduct agriculture.

This is 1 of the reasons why this conference is so very important, because we must recognize the connection between that book of nature and the Bible and the only way that we can express that connection in a viable way with agriculture is if we do have an understanding that there are fundamental truths that must be abided by.

And these fundamental truths must be based on scientific knowledge, not simple anecdotal evidence, not a simple opinion of 1 grower over another grower.

If we're going to get to the core of truth about agriculture, as our pioneers got to the core of truth about the 3 angels' messages, we have to recognize that it has to be legitimately scientifically established.

Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of that, and that's 1 of the reasons why it's important to come together here and to share information and to hold fast that which is good.

We need to be Bereans when it comes to our study of agriculture, just as we do in the study of God's work.

In our program we have chosen to specifically provide practices and to demonstrate how we go about doing things that fulfill a few primary principles.

These principles are that A, it has to be scientifically valid.

Now, that's not to say that we don't do some experimenting, but we don't share our experiments until they're proven.

What that means is that what you apply, when you apply these principles, they work 100% of the time, not 99.9% but 100% of the time.

If I take my mouse here and drop it on the floor, what's gonna happen?

The other is that we want to conduct our agriculture in a way that is the safest and most healthful for me and my family, for my crops, for my environment, and for the long term security of my land for my children and my grandchildren.

So we are environmental stewards in that regard and it's not a light responsibility to be a good environmental steward in today's world but that is what we're called to.

That means that when I grow my crops at the end of the year, what I want is a soil that is better conditioned to grow the next season crops than it was the year that I planted the crop that I just harvested.

Now, I want to talk to you for a moment too about scale.

Scale is very important economically and in agriculture and our scale can vary depending on what our perspective is.

This is a view here of a 1, 400-acre rose field that I used to manage.

Now, that's a beautiful picture, isn't it?

And we used to have people that would come out for Sunday drives and take pictures of our fields, and we worked very hard out there and sprayed a lot of toxic chemicals and other things out there that I would no longer want to admit to but if we scale this down it's still kind of pretty isn't it because each of those plants on it has an individual rose Each of those roses has a petal.

And those petals, if you look at them through an electron microscope, have individual cells that are also quite pretty.

So the point I want to emphasize here is that you can do a lot even on a small scale.

Now, our farm in West Virginia is 120 acres, it's 124 acres actually with the school buildings included, but my wife, my daughter, and I basically only grow crops on about 3 of those acres And that's what you see in this photograph here.

The woods surrounding this are primarily still in their natural state.

We don't have a lot of space that we're farming.

And we do work that soil very hard so that essentially what we do by crop rotations and cycling our crops through the season is that we end up turning that 3 acres into about 15 acres of actual production.

And even on that 3 acres, last year we were able to generate an income of $67, 000 from 3 acres with 3 of us working on it.

And actually my daughter and I dominantly do most of the farm work.

Larry Lesher

Alan Seiler

2- Better Together Farms & Eastward Gardens

Okay, we're gonna get right on to our next 2 farms.

We're gonna move up in scale a little bit to a seventh of an acre.

Alan Seiler is gonna share and then Larry Lesher.

So let's go ahead and start with a word of prayer for the second part, and then we'll start talking about some farming, some more about farming.

Dear Father in heaven, we just want to thank you for this day, for this time that we get to be here.

We just pray that we'll be able to learn much and be able to apply it, not just hear about it, in our own experience.

So 1 of the things that you're going to hear us talk about over the course of this presentation is small, simple, small, simple, small, and simple.

Basically, that is a main part of our operation right now.

So I'm currently 20 now, and I started my love for agriculture when I was 14 years old, so around 2008 time frame, and found a Black and Decker gardening book in my grandma's garage.

I'd done a little gardening before, but looked at this book and it starts talking about, oh, you're actually supposed to fertilize your soil?

Plants actually take things out of the soil.

Anyways, so next off, we went to a family camp together with Dysingers, and I met John Dysinger's brother, Uncle Edwin.

I call him Uncle Edwin, Uncle John, because, anyways, so I started asking him a lot of questions.

And he's like, no, don't ask me all these questions.

And another book called The 4 Seasons Harvest, written by the same author.

Great for small growers wanting to get into it, but when I started out, I really enjoyed his 4 Seasons Tarbets book more than his other book.

But it's amazing, I was a really poor reader, and my sister used to read me books and stuff, and that was great because I loved listening.

But no 1 wanted- I didn't want to read agriculture books to him.

No 1 wanted to read anything on agronomy, you know?

So I had to read, and I learned how to read.

I did know how to read, but not very well.

Anyways, so read those books, applied it, and then when I turned 18, I went to Dysinger's six-month internship in Tennessee, which is very close to here, which hopefully they're gonna start it up here again soon sometime, I think that's a part of the plan.

But anyways, Dad and Mom are like, well if you're gonna wanna do this for an occupation in the future, you better go and see if you wanna do something like this.

So we had a very fiery trial when we first got there.

It was 114 degrees in the middle of July.

And I remember wheel-hoeing in the sweet potato field and taking my shirt off.

And it's just like, you know, maybe, maybe.

He was a video person at Weimar working on a computer.

And I felt really bad for him coming to the farm the first week and working outside in 114.

I think we both sat down and cried after that week.

Anyways, so after Disingers, came back home and our land, we never purchased it for agriculture.

So it was very rocky, very rocky soil, and not a lot of area to grow.

But we worked on getting rocks out, and still are.

But That acreage, kind of like what I said in my devotional, was a great place to start because it forced us to be small.

You couldn't just plow up a half an acre and say, we're going to plant.

It's like, you've got to get the rocks out of it before you can plant in it kind of thing.

Yeah, and that's not like a rock that I'm digging around to pop it out of the soil.

That probably goes 2 miles down into the ground.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

4- Wooley Farms & Sunizona Family Farms

57m

3- Berea Gardens & Bountiful Blessings Farm

1h

2- Better Together Farms & Eastward Gardens

59m

1- Why Farm for a Living? & Paradise Acres Farm

54m

5. Proverbs: The Blessings of the Righteous

34m

Why Are We Doing This?

1h 15m

Following Your Roots

1h

Agriculture As Evangelism

1h 20m

History of Agriculture in Adventism- Part 3

1h

History of Agriculture in Adventism- Part 2

1h 48m

History of Agriculture in Adventism- Part 1

1h 24m

Youth Panel

47m

Sound Doctrine