AdAgrA 2022: Sharing the Blessings

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Evening Plenaries

Allen Lloyd

Optimizing Your Brain Through Agriculture

Christina Ford

Angela Ford

Our Little Roadside Farm

Dwayne Lemon

Lessons from the Soil

Roger Chene

Yasmine Chene

Country Living a Step in Faith

As Paul said, I'm Christina, and this is my mom, Angela.

And let's just start with a quick word of prayer before we get started.

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this opportunity to be here and to share how you've led in our lives.

I pray that it will be an encouragement to someone here tonight in how you're leading in their lives as well.

And I just pray that you will be with us now in Jesus' name, amen.

Okay, by way of introduction, I am going to share a little video with you of an introduction to our family.

And as my mom says, hold on to your seats a little bit because we do a lot of cheats.

Okay, take the mic and go down to the projector.

I thought it was a fine time to meet your farmers.

I'm Christina, also known as Stinky, but I'm certainly not the only farmer.

He's a nurse most days, but on his days off, he helps us with the hard stuff, like plowing and irrigation.

My mom, Angela, helps me with everything from planting seeds to making bouquets.

My older sister Vanessa is the chief cook and bottle washer.

Her husband, Sean, well, he can fix all kinds of problems.

My sister, Brianna, is an expert in graphic design and media, and brother James, he loves to drive a tractor.

We hope you'll enjoy sharing our fun this summer as we share the journey of the planting seed that will end up on your table in big, beautiful bouquets.

OK, so that's just a little bit about our family.

We are just a small representation here and we wanted you to realize that this is a lot bigger than just the 2 of us.

So let's start with our story back in 1997.

I was born in Southern California where my dad was going to school at Loma Linda University.

My parents had their hearts set on moving out of the city.

And my sisters had their hearts set on moving to a little farm.

And each day they would go into the closet and pray, dear Jesus, please help us to find a house with a little red barn and no pigs.

So fast forward to 2000, and we relocated to the Wenatchee Valley in Washington state.

And we lived temporarily in a couple different trailers and even then I remember that my parents were very intentional about planting a garden and having us kids involved in that.

Eventually they did find a house on the outskirts of a little town called Kashmir.

And there was a house that needed a lot of fixing up.

And there was a bright little red barn and A pig pen, but no pigs.

It was Friday afternoon when we found this farm, farm, homestead.

And the realtor wanted us to go to the office right away and write up a proposal.

Sabbath comes at 04:00 up there in the north.

She's like, There's so many people putting in their offers on the house.

We said, the house is what we're looking for.

Obviously, it's an answer to our kids' prayers.

But if it's meant to be, it'll still be there on Monday.

Sunday morning, bright and early, she calls us and said, let's do this now.

So we had our little miracle and the place was ours.

So right away we started a little garden there and we started filling up the little red barn with all sorts of critters.

We had a little pony and bunnies and chickens And I have to say that it really was a dream come true for us kids.

We're a second generation of homeschoolers.

Every year I went through the book Education.

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

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

True education means more than a pursuit of a certain course of study.

It means more than a 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, the spiritual powers.

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

As we tried to align the education and training of our girls as closely as we could to the plan laid out in that book And by the Bible, we understood that character training is far more important than workbook learning.

The love for God, obedience, service, practical skills, and a strong work ethic were at the top of our list for the most necessary developments.

And I believe that the best place to teach your children these things is in the garden.

Teach them how to make a garden, how to prepare the soil for seed, and the importance of keeping all the weeds pulled out.

Teach them also how important it is to keep the unsightly injurious practices out of the life.

Teach them to keep down wrong habits as they keep down the weeds in their gardens.

It'll take time to teach these lessons, but it will pay, greatly pay.

So my dad has always worked a full-time job at the hospital.

He usually had 1 or 2 days in a week dedicated to helping out with various things, the hard stuff as our video said, and encouraging our endeavors.

But the vision and most of the groundwork has always come from my mom.

She's the 1 that's actually had us out in the garden and doing stuff.

Most of you, or a lot of you know my parents, Frank and Janet Fournier.

And so we were in agriculture in most of the places I lived.

And I longed to give my children the experience of more land, better soil, and more opportunities in agriculture in a big way.

And I remember clearly God speaking to my heart 1 day, and he just asked me, what is in your hand?

And then I looked out the window, and I knew I had to learn to be content with what I had and make the most of all that God had given us.

He had given us 2 and a half acres of mountainside, and there actually were an abundance of opportunities to be discovered right there.

So 1 day I said, let's plant a whole section of tomatoes and we'll see if the kids can sell them.

We started the seedlings in the house under lights, but we soon outgrew the laundry room.

My husband built us a series of greenhouses over the years, each 1 a bit bigger than the last, and after planting our very first big tomato patch we had leftover plants.

Trying to make the most of what we had, we offered those plants for a donation towards the girls' different mission trips that they were saving for.

While We did sell tomatoes and tried out farmers markets and sold to fruit stands and all of that.

The tomato plant soon became our specialty.

First, an organic feed store owner asked us to grow all his plants.

Then, market gardeners had us start their plants because they didn't have a greenhouse.

Then other various opportunities came to share our seedlings.

I loved connecting with the community and having people come out to our place to pick out their plants.

Series

Evening Plenaries

Our Little Roadside Farm

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Plenary

Final Charge

38m

Plenary

Our Ebenezer

50m

Gardening, Mission, and the End

Gardening, Mission, and the End- Part 2

54m

How to Evangelize Using Agriculture

How to Evangelize Using Agriculture- Part 3

52m

Market Farming/Gardening

7- How to Make it Work for You- Q&A

1h

Morning Devotional

Devotional

34m

Market Farming/Gardening

3- Berea Gardens & Bountiful Blessings Farm

1h

Market Farming/Gardening

5- The Big 3 Challenges: Weeds, Pests, and Disease

1h

Plenary

Tens of Thousands

1h

Plenary

The Power of Greens

57m

Plenary

True Success

38m

Roundtable

Successful Marketing, Planning for Profitability

1h 43m

Sound Doctrine