AdAgrA 2022: Sharing the Blessings

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Advance Farmers

Judy Johnson

Bringing Credibility Back to Certified Organic

I'm glad you've all had a safe trip and nice to be able to come here and relax a little bit and do some learning and we'll just see where it goes.

Dear Father, I want to thank you so much for your love and for this beautiful setting where we're at to do learning.

And I just ask that you will be with us, that You will guide our words here as we do this presentation, that it will fit the needs, and that you will be with us during this meeting.

OK, so My name is Judy Johnson, and I grew up in Los Angeles.

And I just had always had this dream to marry a farmer, but I never thought that would really ever come to fruition because I lived in a city.

So I've been married to Brad for 40 years, and he's been farming a little longer than that, but I've been involved in the farm for 40 years, and Brad has always farmed organically.

So to preface this, I would just like to say that when Brad started farming organically, he just went and told his marketers, this is what I do.

So you know how my food is grown and they buy his product and maybe maybe you'd like to just give a preface of How how that worked for you?

I'm kind of a newcomer here in terms of presentation so she said why don't you help me stand in here a little bit to help you know talk about some of the what she's doing to kind of add to it so that's why I'm kind of standing up here too but so yeah that you wanted me to kind of talk a little bit more well just just preface this with how you started and then it went to the just going each grower to grower and then how it went.

So we, in the 70s, when I first started organics, that's how I started farming.

That was 75 when I grew my first crop of tomatoes.

And We just wrote up a little sheet that said, this is what we're doing.

And we went direct to our people to buy from us.

Here's how we grow our growing practices and what we do.

And it's actually still good enough, in my opinion.

But since then, we went to grower to grower certification because we need some verification of how things were done, integrity in the business, that kind of thing.

I don't want to do all this stuff, you know, because I'm happy where I am.

But then we had to get into, we went grower, so we were grower certified.

We wouldn't certify somebody who had a conflicting crop so if somebody grew prune we wouldn't certify them because then we were conflicting with their practices or whatever in terms of knowing what they were doing but then we welcome welcome so then then we we went to that from that to forming in California, CCOF, which is California Survivor of Arrogant Farmers.

And there's other agencies, Multitudes, I don't know who they are anymore So so there's a whole bunch of slew of things now, we're see so if we've been there since what Number 10 on the books that they've got or something for certifying with them.

But that was kind of a, and then we you know, then we went that, then the state got involved.

So the state got into it, California, we had the CDFA number we had to put on our label and then pretty soon we got the federal we went to the federal government and the federal USDA is involved so USDA is then 1 further step beyond that and of course international certification agencies and all that so it's gone from you know 40 50 years ago to Simple things and now it's bigger and more involved so that's kind of what we're doing Yeah, so so I thought that might be kind of an interesting preface Now if as I'm presenting what's involved today to be able to claim that your product is certified organic as you're selling your product?

So, what does it need to be certified organic?

So, as you can see here, organic certification requires that farmers and handlers document their processes and get inspected every year.

Organic on-site inspections account for every component of your operation and that's including but not limited to your seed sources, your soil conditions, crop health, weed and pest management, water systems, inputs, contamination, and commingling risks and prevention, record-keeping, tracing the organic products from start to finish is a part of the USDA organic promise.

So that's what you're promising when you sell your product.

It's basically you're documenting how you're farming is what you're doing.

And this is a copy of our recertification as of October of 2021 and it's good till next October of 2021.

And a lot of times you'll find it, I mean 2022.

If you're selling to markets and it's expired, you'll probably get an email, hey, I need an updated certification.

They cannot buy your product if you claim to sell that way without your certification physically with them also.

We also get other agencies asking for our certification if they're buying our products or processing our products or something.

Yeah, like for instance, you know, we grow prunes and we have to take them to a dehydrator and they are also certified as processing the prunes organically and so then we have to give them a copy of our certification as well.

So it runs through the whole system of however your product whatever it is involved in they they need a copy of your certification verification.

Crop help that involves you know how are you taking care of your growing practices you know what your soil likes that will produce crops that are healthy you know what is your pest management?

Brad do you want to expand on that a little bit?

I am gonna go a little bit into these are kind of at you know as I'll be reading there's 5 steps and it's basically taking care you know of your soils your water runoff your you know the big word now biodiversity is kind of what it's all entailing.

Okay so organic foods are grown and processed by federal guidelines so that's where we've come from his hey this is how I grow my stuff, to now we have all these guidelines that we have to follow if we want to claim this.

And they address your soil quality, animal raising practices, pest and weed control, the use of additives or any applications, and certified producers use natural substances for all their farming methods so if you're thinking okay I want to grow organically and I've just got this piece of ground To be able to certify your ground you have you have to prove and not have anything on it for 3 years that would not be approved for organic growing.

Like you know it could even be unfortunately runoff of contaminated water.

It could be someone next to you that sprayed and the chemicals have blown over on the property.

You know it all those things have to be taken into consideration and we'll go into more a little bit later of things you can do to prevent those kinds of things from happening so okay another thing that's required is, now this is interesting to me, it's not 100%, but it's 95% like if you're processing what's involved, but it's, you know, the things that the other 5% is not necessarily your product as much as if you're processing something you've got cornstarch in it or you know something like that but it also does have to be approved there's a list you at the NLP there's a list of everything that is approved that you can or cannot use to put with your product.

So here, like I was talking about, to be organically certified it's a five-step process.

So this this is you know I wish you could see this better.

It's not very big, and I kind of need to see it myself.

Because now I've got this setup mode that I can't even really see it but but basically when you're going to have an inspection yeah basically when you're going to have an inspection now it's all more emails You're not going to get physical letters like this.

But this is a letter and this is, they're going to send this out a little bit before you're going to have an inspection.

And this is basically, they're telling you everything here that you need to have ready and be able that you've had document that you have ready available in the inspection process for to be approved to be certified so I wish I could see some of them I did so so first you have to have an OSP plan and I think we Might go into that a little bit later So basically what that was is like where Brad was talking about He just told people you know how he farmed and everything Basically you're documenting how you're farming and and as we talked about there's 5 steps Here and I've got them listed somewhere, but right here, but you're addressing your soils you're addressing you know everything that you're doing and so your OSB plan is now documenting that you know I used this For my pest control you know I brought in You know insects that feed on the bad insects and all of that kind of thing has to be documented you Documented how you ordered your seed you know did you look for organic seed or is it non-gmo and is that documented you talked about you know how you're going to prevent contamination from other farmers or water sources and things like that So that's what your OSP basically is, is how are you running your farm and you're needing to document that.

And it has to be done in a way that will meet the certifier's requirements.

Yeah, in fact, in CCUF, they have a label that we have for it, and we can help you with that.

Yeah, so you've gone through your OSP plan, okay, and then you have your, an appointment with an inspector and they come and they visit your farm.

And not only does it entail how you're farming outside, it entails all your record keeping.

So they're going to want to look at your financials.

They want to know yields off of your crops because they want to make sure you're not buying non-organic product and including it with yours and selling it so everything has to tie together Your money you know how much would a crop like that you know how much should you earn for that?

By for how much you're growing all those kinds of things so so your inspector comes And then so you kind of have an office inspection of all that In our case, sometimes you're educating the inspector.

They don't always know what a crop will produce, and so they're not fully educated in all these aspects either.

So you have to be aware that we're dealing with both sides of this thing and sometimes even how to grow organic.

So then you're you're actually educating them in a lot of cases.

Let's see and so then you know you kind of do your in-house inspection and then you go outside and they're gonna look at all these different things, you know, what's your ground look like and they'll, you know, if there's any changes.

Now I think you can have an inspector, the same inspector, for 3 years.

After you're the third year they send in a different inspector because you don't want to get the buddy thing going and they're just going to pass your stuff on kind of thing.

They're kind of trying to keep that from happening.

So It's kind of easier after the first year because you're not educating them really so much about what you're really doing.

They kind of already know, so it'll go a lot faster.

And that's another thing, the more ready you are, because not only do you pay for your certification, but you pay for the inspector to come certify you.

So if you're not very ready and there's 6 hours that's 6 hours of a lot of money.

So so so going outside Brad help me out there when when they inspect outside what it what they're basically looking at your farming practices yeah it's not just a inspection it doesn't entail just the paperwork but we do a farm tour so we'll just go and we'll take a look at all our borders and in that opportunity we have an opportunity they'll check for how we're controlling our weeds and we can talk about different things that are going on on the farm.

That just gives them a general idea of not just the paperwork but how things are looking you know because if you're putting down a pre-emergent herbicide and everything just...

Now my, here's the interesting thing, my inspector, because I do a really good job on weed control in some cases, she, I had to really emphasize and show her what I was doing because we have some clean ground in some cases.

And it looks in some cases that we're using a pre-emergent or herbicide of some kind, but it isn't.

We use a flamer and we use it at certain times and it can clean the weeds.

And so those are things we have to kind of work with the inspector on.

So we just do a border check and that in that process we have an opportunity to talk to them about some of our processes and stuff like that.

So that's important because you want to have build that rapport you know and you want to have an inspector that's willing to kind of consider where you are.

Sometimes they might come in and they're...

Tell my story about the inspector wearing a badge.

So, yeah, so, anyway, I won't maybe get into that later.

But so anyway, that's just part of the process, doing the fields check too.

Brad Johnson

Taking Your Farm to the Next Level

I'm Judy Johnson, and this is my husband Brad Johnson.

And I've been farming with him for 40 years now.

And he has farmed all these years organically.

And we run a, we farm about 120 acres, approximately.

So, we have some other family members of 80 acres and then we have 60 of our own.

Actually first I'd just like to start with a little word of prayer.

Father thank you so much for another day of life and all the gifts and blessings that we're enjoying that you are giving to us And we just ask that you'll bless this presentation and that it will speak to those here and that you will give me the words and wisdom and knowing how to present this in a way that will be helpful.

All right, so the reason I kind of started was saying that we farm for 40 years is there's many ways to diversify a farm.

Some of that is just processes over time that kind of lead to something else, but there's other areas that that I'll be bringing through in this presentation in ways of diversifying.

I kind of was just brought in to kind of help.

She said would you help me kind of talk about some of the stuff.

So I'm kind of a secondary here but I'm gonna chip in on this.

Yeah in the farming practices of course I've been on this journey along with Brad but I've been more management, business, you know, inventory, predicting what, how much we're gonna pack in a box in a day, all that kind of stuff versus the actual growing and then I'm just gonna just let you know that Yeah, he's just, he has a lot more in his head on all of this because he's the 1 who's actually kind of, I mean I've had my hands in the dirt with him too, a lot too, but he's the mind behind it all.

Okay, so here's a long time ago in the beginning.

There's Brad when he's first starting his little farming venture.

Right here you can see, What do you call that you're using?

That was actually a high-pressure water injector.

We high pressure with CO2 and I was just transplanting vegetables in the field with a little water drill.

It didn't work out very well but that was a very stage in front of transplant.

There's no plastic for weed control or you know much of anything.

It's just kind of work ground and here they go and they're sticking the plants in the field.

Okay, so I'm kind of coming from the premise that I think if you're here you're supposedly already growing something but it doesn't really matter but you know decisions to kind of think about if you really are thinking about farming or even if you are farming now and you're wanting to diversify where do you want to start Are you wanting to start with a Product you want to grow or are you wanting to think?

You know am I going to have a market for this product?

Yeah, I'm open to questions, because I don't have that many slides.

Where they are in their process of farming and diversifying.

Is, are most of you here garden level, or interested in diversifying any kind of farming or you're interested in oh okay well good we're glad you're here okay well there are things to consider you know and and are you gonna have a market for what you're growing?

Is there a need, a demand for, you know, for what you're wanting to do?

Because you want to be able to sell your product or it's not going to be a good thing to grow it.

So here's just a picture of Brad starting out.

This is kind of how he started his marketing.

He kind of loaded his stuff in his truck and he just went down the roads and stopped at markets and roadsides and...

Yeah, because 1 of the things, and maybe in your case, I don't know if that's true or not, you want to grow stuff.

And you like the produce and you like the beauty and you want to sell it too.

I started with a dream and said hey I'm gonna grow stuff but then of course eventually you can't keep doing that without running out of money and energy.

So we would go, I'd go, I just sometimes take my pickup and I take an umbrella and some signs.

I just park along some place I knew people were driving by and try to sell stuff.

That's, that's 1 diversity, you know, and then eventually it generates into other things.

But that's just this, in this case, I was taking this to San Francisco.

This is a three-quarter ton truck it had about 5, 000 pounds on it.

We already had this sold so I drove it in.

I'm telling you more now than I probably need to, but we found that our local markets at that stage didn't want, wouldn't pay very much for organic food.

They did, so the organic food movement was in the wholesale in the cities.

They were willing to pay more money for an organic product.

Our local guys, they wanted a cheap melon or whatever it was we couldn't afford to grow organically and sell.

So we could sell wholesale better than we could sell retail at our farm.

That's how we got started doing the wholesale business.

Okay, so, so if you're just kind of starting and thinking this is something that you want to do, Brad was able to use a piece of ground from his dad where a young orchard was started.

And he actually, it wasn't all open ground.

His dad already had put young prune trees on there.

And so in this picture, you can see he's planting his produce in between the little prune trees that his dad started.

So that's another way of diversifying is is you know thinking of creative ways of where you can plant your product.

Okay, so, so once you've had your dream and you are growing, if you're going that way, you know, and as Brad was saying, you need to be able to sell your product, to support yourself.

And I just put this picture up here because it kind of all coincided when Brad started his produce business.

And they were just starting a distribution business, these 3 ladies, years ago in San Francisco.

And so he he built a relationship with them.

They actually got their own first truck and they would drive around and pick up produce from farmers and then they would take it back, buy it from you, and sell it to the markets in San Francisco.

And so they, I think, occasionally would spend the night on our farm.

1 of them actually helped plant tomatoes 1 day.

Anyway, and as I go through some of these slides with that, here's now.

They have a lot of trucks, and they've been very successful too.

And like now, we've just acquired another market in San Francisco and we'd like them to do our trucking for us.

Hey we want to help you, you know, we want to make, you know, make a good price for you.

So the more you can kind of get on a, you know, not a buddy best friend level or anything like that, But if you can have a rapport with some of your marketers, it immensely will help in your sales.

They don't all take us up on it, but sometimes they do.

And actually this was a group on the higher end of Whole Foods that came and we took them on a farm tour and and we made them lunch with all of our produce at the time.

And you know, it just made a, I'm trying to think of the word I'm trying to think where they're gonna you're kind of gonna be a priority they're gonna want to buy your product they're gonna want to support you so when we talk about diversifying, as I'm going through my slides, there's going to be different ways.

And once you've established your commodities and markets, you know, you might want to think of adding something, something different.

And reasons you might want to do that is it can increase profit on small farms.

It reduces economic risk with weather or damage to a crop.

So, you know, like for instance, we farm orchard and we farm produce.

Well, say the weather conditions, something happened, it just rained during our prune blossom time and we have no prunes.

Well if we only grew prunes, then we'd be sunk that year.

You know, we would have put all of our money into growing those and we would have gotten no profit out of them.

Provides greater stability and it helps develop new skills.

There's also different ways of diversifying in besides what you're growing and and that is where you're growing your your food.

There's the option of leasing land if you're wanting to start but you don't feel like you can afford to buy the land and try to start up a business and farm from your land.

If you are needing a piece of equipment and it doesn't even have to be custom harvesting, It can be custom plowing someone else's farmer's field that doesn't have a tractor or you know finding people in the area that that need your piece of equipment.

You know there's times that you know we we don't have huge tractors that we might need some work done on a piece of ground.

And so there's that's ways a different way of diversifying.

And then your seasonal crops, you know, not just growing summer produce, but you can grow winter produce.

Michael Trevizo

Integrative Pest Management Part 1

I'm from Arizona originally and now I'm back in Arizona, which is great.

What I'm doing, I was asked to do integrative pest management.

Yes, I'm doing integrative pest management.

I got this hour and I got the next hour So this class is largely focused on those who are actually looking to purchase Biologicals to put into your garden your farm Greenhouses, whatever you're in.

All right So that's not something you're interested in doing, I'd encourage you to maybe pick a second class.

But if you want to learn how that works, some of the tricks of the trade, that's what I'd like to talk about.

All right, so let's start off with some prayer.

I still got a couple people trickling in here.

Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for the opportunity to be here at this conference.

We pray that you would please be here with us, that you give us your spirit.

We pray giving you thanks for being in such a beautiful location this morning.

We thank you for the weather and the sunshine we enjoyed yesterday.

And we ask that you would please be with me now as I get ready to present and that you would give me your words and your spirit, Father.

And we pray asking all these wonderful things in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, Well, I guess without any further ado, let's get started.

I'm going to probably move over here so I don't keep getting in front of the screen.

And if anybody has any problems seeing it, I do apologize.

This is just what I was given to work with okay so IPM what is IPM integrative pest management anybody here have any experience with that?

Nobody Did a little bit so you guys are really green okay?

All right, so integrative pest management's essentially using insects to kill insects.

Now, I think anybody that's grown anything in here, and I'm sure several of you have at least tried to grow something and have had some kind of insect come and consume your crop, right?

So we're gonna, so IPM is about using insects to control your insect problems, alright?

So we're looking for predators and preys.

So we got predators, which are prey on our insect pests and we got parasites and parasitoids so I'm gonna talk about some of these things but I don't think it's right to get into IPM without getting it a little bit into the scriptures it's just you know in the secular world they don't do it, but we're not secular here so I'm going to have to talk a little bit about the word, preach at you a little bit.

So some of the biblical texts that I find are very impressive because when I read the scriptures, especially, you know, when they were written in those days, were very agrarian lifestyles.

Everybody depended on something growing where they lived, or somebody that they were directly related to, or worked for them directly, for their substance.

There was no Walmart, there was no Amazon market, there was none of the stuff we have today, right?

So, God brought in several different, and throughout the Bible there's several different texts and this is 1 of Psalms 105 3.

He says, He spake to the locusts and the caterpillars.

It says, He spake and the locusts came and the caterpillars, and that without number, and did eat up all the herbs in the land, and devoured the fruit of the ground.

This is 1 text where we see this was obviously a problem back then.

So 1 of the important things I want to talk here about in some of these scriptures is, I hope you will catch, is who is actually getting credit for some of these pests arriving to consume this crop.

Here's another 1, 2nd Chronicles 7 14 says, If I shut up heaven that there be no rain or if I command the locusts to devour the land, who commanded?

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