In this class, I will be sharing lessons and insights that the Lord has taught (or is still teaching me) over the last 20 years as we have walked and worked together in the garden.

AdAgrA 2020: A Living Parable

<p>In this class, I will be sharing lessons and insights that the Lord has taught (or is still teaching me) over the last 20 years as we have walked and worked together in the garden.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Market Farmers

John Dysinger

Growing Strawberries in the Southeast

So I just want to mention before we get into the way we do it, that in your brochure it said there's 2 different ways.

I hopefully will have a picture up here of it.

But so the way we grow strawberries is called the plastic culture method.

And we'll be talking much more about that through this hour.

The other way to grow them is the matted row method.

And you might call that the old fashioned method.

That's the way everybody used to grow strawberries.

In certain parts of the country, those of you who were here, great.

If you were here for the devotional this morning, Barry Mosier up in Minnesota was talking about his strawberry production.

This is the way they do it because plastic culture doesn't work up there.

You know, basically, this is a standard method.

You have 4 feet between the rows, and you just plant in the spring a bare root strawberry plant, like every 2 feet in the row.

Then what happens over the summer, those strawberries runner and they fill in, as you can see on the right there, they fill in and become literally a matted row of strawberries.

And then you don't get strawberries until the next spring.

In fact, the first spring, you will have plants flowering, and they encourage you to pick the flowers off, which is a huge job if you have very many of them.

So again, there are parts of the country, especially up north, where this is really the only way they can grow them.

Or on a home gardening scale, you may say, I don't wanna go the work of growing them the way I'm gonna be talking about today.

Now, 1 thing that I have heard people do, which I think is kind of cool with the matted row, is to alternate.

Because the reality with this system, they usually keep the strawberries for 2 or 3 years and then they till them under.

So each year they're planting more for the following year.

But I have heard of people on a home scale who let the runners go into your pathways.

So you work up the pathway after the season's over, let the runners go in and root on your pathway and then till up your beds.

And the reality is your first year plants are the most productive.

So that's a way to keep your first year planting going and that's something I would encourage you if you're doing it on a home scale or you don't want to go to the work of the plastic culture method as an option.

Okay let's see I think they're going to have to advance.

So before we go any further, I want you to really say, do you really want to grow strawberries?

There's, strawberries are a wonderful crop to have, wonderful crop to eat, but there are a lot of pros and cons.

And Also because they're an early spring crop, they really bring people to your stand, if you're selling at a farmer's market or something, before there's much else available.

And once you get people to your stand, you can often keep them for the whole season if they like the produce, they like the quality and everything.

Again, yeah, great draw to your market stand.

So the beauty of strawberries, they're easy to freeze.

If you've got more than you can sell in the spring, freeze them.

And it can be healthier jam than they would buy anywhere else, you know, whatever.

Lot of ways that you can use strawberries for value added.

And it does have good money making potential.

And I've tried to be kind of conservative with these numbers, but, you know, I mean, we sell our strawberries for $4 a pint.

And at the beginning and end of the season, we can sell them for 5 dollars a pint.

And an acre, you usually have 15 to 17, 000 plants in an acre.

We're still working on our fertility, but I know conventional growers that average.

Well, in fact, most conventional growers in this part of the country average a quart per plant.

So you just run those numbers and there's money to be made in strawberries.

But of course your costs can be high too.

Cons, and this is a big con, it's a real weather crop.

Frost, rain, and heat are not good for strawberries.

So the weather can, I mean you can do everything right for the first 7 months and a few days of rain and your crop is mush?

It's very labor-intensive at the busiest time of the year.

That's why I've kind of figured out usually strawberry growers don't try to grow a lot of other things in the spring because I mean that's when everything else needs to be done on the farm and you're pretty much full out trying to pick strawberries and sell them so it really comes at a hard time of year to be so flat-out busy.

They're disease-prone, and that's why Strawberries, if you've seen the environmental working groups list, the Dirty Dozen list, strawberries are almost always at number 1.

You know, if you're going to eat anything organic, start with strawberries because they're super highly sprayed with fungicides.

If you don't have a way to keep deer out, you're not going to have strawberries, assuming there's deer around.

They have to be harvested quickly and timely.

You know, there are some things that can wait a day or 2, but strawberries can't wait.

You know, we harvest 3 times, Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday.

And then, you know, we trust that the Lord will keep them good till Sunday again.

And it can be very expensive to establish.

And again, here we're talking about the plastic culture system.

And back to the money making, it sounds like really good money, But the reality is for market gardeners, there are other crops that can make more money per acre, like lettuce and some of these.

So, you know, so basically what's happened with us, We started with an acre of strawberries and got up to an acre and a half, and now we're down to...

Well, so we started with like 17, 000 plants, we got up to 24, 000.

Because we can't handle more with everything else.

We're much more diversified than we were when we first started.

So, the plastic culture system, I think you assumed, hopefully, that that means you're using plastic.

I don't want to use plastic, but I can tell you, I've tried it every other way, and I can't make money at it any other way.

We started doing it just bare ground, mulching with straw.

You know, and if you're organic, you're not spraying any kind of herbicides or anything.

I don't know how you can make money organically without using plastic.

Now Bob Gregory's in the back here, and he has a lot more experience than I do.

So Bob, if you have thoughts on any of these things that you want to chime in on, I'm happy for that.

The reality is things grow better on plastic.

I don't like to say that and I really try not to use plastic more than I absolutely have to.

But for us, we found we couldn't make it work without using plastic.

They can either buy local, organic strawberries from us grown on plastic, or they're going to be buying California or Florida berries, probably conventional and also grown on plastic.

So I think it's still a move in the right direction.

Gabriel McClover

God’s Plan in Marketing

Father in heaven, we thank you so much for this opportunity to come together to learn about marketing, but not just marketing in a worldly perspective, but in a biblical perspective.

So we pray that your Holy Spirit be with us.

Open our eyes that we may learn something new.

So a little bit of back, for guys that didn't read our bio, my name is Gabriel McClover, my wife Vonnell, and I, we own and operate a restaurant in Somerville, Georgia, called the Vineyard Vegetarian Cafe and Juice Bar.

But prior to that, I spent almost 10 years in the corporate world.

I was in various sales and marketing positions.

I worked for 3 Fortune 500 companies, doing various sales in a lot of different positions, marketing, different with CRM packaging, which is customer relationship management.

So I got a good experience on working territories, developing marketing strategies and how to penetrate.

So, and I think what makes me to qualify me to teach a class like this is the 4 years that I've, were running the restaurant, because I was able to take principles from corporate America and then mingle them and mix them with doing medical missionary work and doing God's work.

So I want to share these things for you as we go along.

I like telling stories, so you're going to hear a lot of testimonies of what we do in the restaurant.

But I know most of the people who come, they want to, if you're a market gardener or you're somebody who's interested, an entrepreneur interested in marketing their business, these are some of the goals that I would think.

You know, grow my business, gain more customers, expand new markets, add new product offering.

Is that, you think that, is that pretty consistent with everybody in here?

So, when I think of marketing and marketing my business, these are the first things that came to my mind when I opened the restaurant, right?

So all these questions started coming in my mind and the Lord reminded me of a text and we all know that text.

It's found in Matthew chapter 19, 28 verse 19 and 20.

Go ye therefore and teach all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the name of the Son and the name of the Holy Spirit teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I've commanded you and lo I am with you always even until the end of the world so this is known as the Great Commission so we said I think a lot of people said this class marketing class I want to grow my business the main thing that popped in our mind was what grow my business gain more customers spend new markets add new product offering but nobody said anything about the Great Commission so the question is and you know how the devil likes that we like to like to rationalize things you know well you know maybe this is only for ministers or disciple you know ministers you know and and Bible workers and and those type of people those type of people does the work I need to run my business business is business and it's separate right I thought the same thing And so are we to separate business and ministry?

Yeah, because the title of the class is God's plan in marketing, so obviously there is some co-mingling that's going to be taking place.

But when we think about marketing, we think about marketing business these things don't the goal of the soul never comes up we think about growing our business how do I get more get more customers how do I gain how do I gain how do I gain so here's a here's a quote so it should be a business and ministry be separated I'd like to give some backup this is from review and herald february 21st 1893 paragraph 5 God has given to every man a work to do in connection with his kingdom.

Each 1 professing the name of Christ is to be an interested worker, ready to defend the principles of righteousness the work of the gospel is not to depend solely upon the ministers every soul should take an active part in advancing the cause of God just talked about that but instead of this how many in our large churches and small churches come and go like a door upon its hinges feeling no responsibility for the progress of the work no interest in the salvation of soon souls for whom Christ died they do not dream of weaving their religion into their business They say religion is religion and business is business.

They believe each has a proper sphere but let them be separated.

But in whatever calling the Christian is found, he has his work to do for the Lord and representing Christ to the world.

So as we're in this class we may have a business, we may look into open a business, but we need to make sure that we are incorporating what the Lord has told us to do in our Great Commission.

So this is going to be kind of thing in the class I wish I had a dry erase board because this is going to be that what I got highlighted this is what we're going to be I'm going to be highlighting this throughout the lecture.

So but whatever calling the Christian is found he has work to do in the Lord, representing Christ to the world.

Whatever may be your occupation, we are to be missionaries, having our chief aim the winning of souls to Christ.

So when you think of chief aim, is that number 1, number 2, number 3?

So as I'm figuring out ways to grow my business, Am I figuring out ways, ideas, maybe to start a business?

My chief goal is for the salvation of souls.

So if this is not our interest, what do we do?

We rob God of influence, of time, of money, and effort.

And with holding our heart service from the Lord, we fail to benefit our fellow man, and thus rob God of the glory that will flow to him through the conversion of others this is from Review and Herald February 21st 1893 paragraph 5 so we robbing God so God has given you hey you know this is even folks in the corporate world even for me and when I was in a corporate world God didn't place me there and give me that job, open so many doors for me to sit at a corporate table, go to a luncheon, just sit there and just eat all the food that they eat and do what they do.

No, God has placed you there to be a light unto the world.

So our businesses, our market gardeners, or whatever we may do, it needs to have our chief aim is for the salvation of souls.

And obviously we got to be very practical with this, right?

You're not going to go there and start passing out Ministry of Healings every time somebody comes to the restaurant.

You know, it was funny because we started off and we were so gung-ho.

You know, we're like, yeah, everybody come in here, they get in the ministry of healing.

And what we found that people, people probably didn't just wanted a sandwich, they didn't want, they didn't want, they don't want religion right now, just want a sandwich, you know.

So we had to scale back and I had to, and I said, you Lord, you know, what am I doing wrong?

Christ's method alone will give true success and reason to people.

The Savior mingled with men as 1 who desired the good.

He showed his sympathy for them, ministered to their needs, won their confidence, then he bade them follow me.

So I said, okay, Lord, how can I mingle with somebody if I'm throwing a book at their face and telling them to read it and it just wasn't the right time I'm going straight I'm skipping all these steps and say, hey man, you need to follow Christ?

I remember my pastor, he was preaching a sermon, he used this quote, and he says there's a difference between true success and perceived success.

So we may look at it and say, wow, look how many people have been baptized, wow, look at that, and it looks on the outside as perceived success, but is it really true success?

Because when they come next year, most all those people got baptized are not even in a church so is it really true success so the Savior mingled with men as 1 desire to good and we're going to talk about that as we go along because this is how I were able to market our business in our community.

Now I said sympathy, what does that mean?

Because a lot of times we kind of skip over this.

You hear the sermon, they say we ministered to their needs, we showed his sympathy, and then we bid them to follow me, won their confidence, and we move on." I'm like, what does sympathy mean?

So I started doing some research, and this is what I found.

If we love Jesus, we shall love to live for him, to present our thanks offerings to him, to labor for him, the very labor will be light.

For his sake we shall covet what what we don't Christians that we don't want pain 7 that we don't want no pain covet you know what covet means covet pain and toil and sacrifice Most folks don't want to sacrifice nothing.

I'll be talking about that tomorrow, tomorrow morning about hard work and overwork.

We shall sympathize with his longing for the salvation of men.

We shall feel the same tender craving for souls that he has felt.

So as we go to Christ's method alone and we see, okay, we're mingling with 1 who's desired a good, that sympathy is as I'm talking to them, as I'm mingling, it's saying, how can I connect this soul to Christ?

Is there something that I can do for this soul to be in the kingdom?

So with that in mind, that in line, as we're moving along in this discussion and as we're thinking about growing our business, as we're thinking about doing market gardening, all these different things, If we don't have this, we need to ask the Lord for this every single day.

Right, 1 of my prayers, I said, Lord, you know, when I'm talking to somebody, because 1 thing we do at our restaurant, and we go a little bit, we do what we call a 10-day health challenge.

We call it Let the Healing Begin 10-day health challenge.

And we work with about 500 something people, just me and my wife and 1 employee.

I probably did 500, 600 health consultations.

And as I sit now with somebody, and I'm saying, how do I connect them to Christ?

Bob Gregory

Cycling Your Crops for More Yield

Father in heaven, we come together today with a desire to learn more about the potentials that you provide to us to fulfill your will and in our gardens and I pray today that you'll be both with me and and with the hearers that we might glean some understanding of things that you would have us know.

Please abide with us now I ask in Jesus name, amen.

I'm going to talk a little bit about season extension.

As I told you we cycle crops both indoors and outdoors and we could do some things that are that are pretty interesting even in in the middle of West Virginia.

And the first thing that I want to point out as far as ways to increase your productivity is to throw away your planting calendars.

You know and in our state in West Virginia the extension service puts out a beautiful annual calendar every year and on the days that you're supposed to, you know, turn your soil and the days that you're supposed to plant beets and the days that you can plant broccoli, all those things are laid out on the calendar to help encourage home gardeners.

And on many of the seed catalogs, you also have a list of planting dates for different parts of the country sometimes.

And if you try to follow those guidelines, you can indeed produce a good crop, but the likelihood of you being successful as a market farmer is pretty slim, because the reality is that our calendar dates for planting crops are far broader and far wider than what those calendar dates give you.

An important, really important aspect of the cycling I'm going to talk about is that you always start and use transplants wherever possible.

We pre-start all of our plants, except those things that are not practical to transplant.

If you're seeding carrots or if you're seeding a cornfield or a bean field, then you're going to want a direct seed, but anything that can be transplanted successfully should be.

And this is important because while 1 crop is finishing off, I have another crop ready to put back in its place immediately after I remove the first crop.

I have plants that are 5 to 7 weeks old already going into the ground when I make my crop cycle and that's really important and what that does is it allows us to get at least 3 crop cycles outdoors in West Virginia and that's like, you know, if I have an acre of crop that's turning that 1 acre into 3 acres worth of production with a lot less infrastructure than 3 acres of production requires.

Inside of our high tunnels we can get as many as 5 cycles per year And 1 of the considerations is you want to make your your selections understanding your the length of your season and also using the days to maturity of the particular crops that you select to help you in that process.

Obviously if we want to get 3 crop cycles I look dominantly for varieties that have a shorter period of maturation.

And I'm talking again here about looking for varieties for market farming more so perhaps than home gardeners.

We all have our preferences for crops that we grow in our home gardens and some of them may you know be a longer season crop.

I do that too but in terms of generating income I want to get as much productivity out of that ground as possible.

I'm gonna talk a little bit about using season extension in the way of low tunnels and high tunnels.

For those of you that question whether it's worth the investment for a high tunnel or not, my unequivocal answer is absolutely yes.

And I'll talk a little bit at the end of the program this morning about ways that you can actually get 1 of those and maybe even get paid to build your own high tunnel.

I'm going to talk about laying out our beds in an efficient manner that also has some influence on our crop cycling and how to be efficient with our management of space in the garden and that includes talking about the spacing of our plants and using what I call a block planting design.

In fact, I have 1 high tunnel that I have a small heater in, and this is where we start all of our transplants.

And that facility looks just like this right now.

I've got brassicas started in there that we'll be planting into the high tunnels probably in early March.

I have quite a few onions that I'm germinating right now for spring planting.

And what I wanna emphasize about this in terms of transplanting is you can grow a lot of plants in a very small space.

This bench here is about 8 feet long, and as you can see, it's 2 trays wide.

When that bench is completely full with those plug trays, those are 288 cell plug trays, I've got over almost 6, 000 plants on that bench.

They stay in these plug trays this time of year for about 2 to 3 weeks and then they get shifted to 6 packs and there we go They get shifted to 6 packs and I grow them on for another few weeks.

And bear in mind, the only heat I have in here just keeps this greenhouse above freezing.

I'm not trying to heat this because frankly it's expensive to heat a greenhouse.

So we do have, I have a hot water heater that circulates hot water under the bench on the left, the plug tray bench, and that runs overnight.

That's on a timer that runs during the hours when the sunlight is not on the greenhouse, it goes off in the morning, and the intention here isn't to keep ideal growing temperatures.

If you can afford to do that, that's fine.

I haven't found that to be cost-effective in our climate because we have lots of periods of time when the temperatures are in the low teens or single digits.

And for every degree of temperature rise in a greenhouse, the energy input goes up exponentially.

So to go from, I try to hold mine at 40 degrees or so, and if I wanted to move that to 50 degrees, it would cost me 3 times as much energy to do that.

To go from 50 degrees to 60 degrees costs almost 10 times as much energy.

So the curve as far as your energy input goes up very dramatically with each degree of temperature rise.

And at those lower temperatures things germinate more slowly, but in terms of, you know, my scheduling my plants, I just start germinating earlier.

Typically in the spring with my brassica crop, it can take 2 weeks to 17 days to germinate broccoli, for example.

In the fall, when I'm doing my fall crop, it takes about 2 and a half or 3 days to germinate that same seed.

If I were applying heat I could still do that in that short period of time but this allows me to to save the energy cost just by using using a longer period of time.

After they are well rooted in the plug tray, we transfer them to the 6 packs that you see here.

There's a number of different methods for doing this.

What I found to be more efficient for me, since I'm a one-man operation growing on almost 2 acres.

I use reusable 6 packs and I simply transfer from the plug trays to the 6 packs using a commercial potting mix.

I use Faffered number 2 mix that works both well for the plugs and for the the seedling trays.

At this stage when they're in the seedling trays I'll start irrigating them with the compost tea as well as water and allow these to grow on for a few weeks before planting.

The nice thing about the spring planting season is temperatures are cool, these things grow slowly and that means that I have quite a window of opportunity to be able to hold them in the greenhouse before they get too big and setting them outside.

Series

Market Farmers

Cycling Your Crops for More Yield

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Starting a Market Garden

Growing Healthy Transplants for Efficiency and Profitability

1h 2m

Breakout Session 6

Growing Transplants

1h 16m

Home Gardening

The Original Garden “Tool”: Seeds - Their Significance, GMO/Hybrid/Heirloom/Open Pollinated?

1h 9m

Home Gardening

3- Seeds, Starts, and Bed Preparation

52m

Home Gardening

You Can Grow Healthy Transplants!

51m

Track 4 Seminars

Home Grown Nutrition, Part 2

1h 21m

Starting a Market Garden

A Bird’s-Eye View of Market Gardening

1h 3m

Intensive: Gardening 101

2. Gardening 101: Growing Transplants

48m

Home Gardening

Getting Your Garden in the Ground

59m

Market Gardening

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

53m

Sound Doctrine