AdAgrA Conference 2025: Growing Better

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Journeys in Agriculture

Ariella Andrade

Jasmine Andrade

Journeys in Agriculture Testimony Part 1

My name is Jasmine Andrade, and this is my daughter, Ariella Andrade.

Yeah, so we are going to be telling you about our single women journey.

And this is not just for single women, but it is our testimony.

So we hope everybody can get a blessing from it and an encouragement.

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for a wonderful day here at Agra.

Please help this testimony to be a blessing and encouragement to everyone listening.

And please help us the words to speak and to stand and pray.

Okay, I'm gonna start with a little background with me.

My family is from the Balkans, which would be Serbia, former Yugoslavia, some people know it that way.

My parents were Eastern Orthodox, which is similar to Greek Orthodox.

And so when a pharmacist who was Adventist had come to my dad's village, he had started preaching to him.

So that was a big deal to convert from Eastern Orthodox to Adventist.

So my parents decided to pick up and go to Austria because at the time Yugoslavia was communist.

So they would go to Austria, they got a job there, my brother was born there, and then the Yugoslavian 70 Adventist Church in Chicago brought them over to the States, including me.

So they had to have strong faith in God to be able to leave their country and go to a new place.

And you know, this was back in the 70s, so this was a big deal for them.

So those are just some pictures from Serbia.

As you see my grandparents there, that's how they would work.

They were tobacco farmers and my parents grew up as tobacco farmers.

You know, they sold eggs, tobacco, meat, whatever, chickens.

My brother and I would go for summers and go to the farms and help them out and need the tobacco.

It was a fun experience because I grew up in the city, so I got to do that for months and live there with an outhouse.

And So in the city in Chicago where I grew up, my parents always had a garden.

But the funny thing was, because I was spoiled living in the city, I was not interested.

So they would always have a huge garden in the middle of the city and there would be no lawn.

We have to be like others here, we need a lawn.

But no, my parents always had their garden.

I look back and it's sad that I didn't think more to learn more at that young age.

Wasn't that interested, but later on in life, I realized what a blessing it was to grow up with fresh vegetables and everything in your backyard and not eat junk food.

Even if you don't have a big piece of land, you can still grow food in your tiny backyard and have food for your family.

So, and they just filled, they had fruit trees in the front, they just filled it all up.

You know, the neighbors were like, what are you doing, you know?

So when they sold that house, the people who bought it took everything down.

And that's just city life for you, you know what I mean?

I became a realtor, and I also had a licensed practical nurse license.

So when she was born, we moved out on a small acre just outside of Chicago.

This was the beginning of moving to the country for us because we know as growing up in Venice that you've got to get to the country 1 day and God would open those doors.

It was new because even an acre felt so big.

Felt like there was so much responsibility in taking care of the property.

So as we did that, we weren't there very long.

She was little, we had well water, and it was a nice little rural town.

I was doing real estate and nursing, and then all of a sudden the market crashed in 2008.

So we had to sell our house, we had to do a short sale and move away.

Ari's dad at the time was called to do a job in Tennessee.

And God was leading us there for some reason, and we ended up in Tennessee.

The time has come when, as God opens the way, Families should move out of the cities.

The children should be taken to the country.

Though the dwelling may be small, yet there should be land in connection with it that may be cultivated.

It was a burden of mine that I really wanted to raise her.

So I was so happy that we were headed to a rural place in the country.

So the start of the journey in Tennessee.

We started out first with rentals because I wanted to learn the areas.

I didn't want to just jump into buying a house not knowing the location, the area.

As a realtor, you know, I like to do my research.

So we lived in rentals at first to learn the areas.

That's Ari and her cousin in a cotton field in Tennessee, which I thought was beautiful.

We started as she was little, and she didn't start homeschooling yet.

Pamela Dysinger

John Dysinger

Journeys in Agriculture Testimony Part 2

So this is a panel of illustrious young agrarians.

And I just want to start off with a few comments for full disclosure.

We are very well acquainted with all of these young people.

We struggled with who do we choose for the panel.

But we decided ultimately on this panel because number 1, we knew them and we knew the experience they had and the answers they could give, but we also tried to get a very diverse panel of experience and knowledge and what they're doing currently.

So just quickly, I want to say, Weston is the only 1 here that has not been an intern on our farm.

And I just want to make it clear, this is not an advertisement in any way for our internship, but Weston does live quite close to us, so we've known him for a number of years.

Weston has unique background in that he has a degree in horticulture, which I don't know very many Adventist young people that actually have a degree in horticulture.

The other thing that why we wanted Weston on the panel is because he grew up in an off-grid homestead, at least for the last number of years.

Chloe, Weston's currently living in Missouri, right?

So we wanted a nice diverse mix between married and unmarried.

Chloe lives in Idaho and she and her husband are homesteading off-grid and in the process of starting a market garden.

Keith has a very, well I would just say he's 1 of the most knowledgeable young people I know in the area of agriculture Nathan Has his own farm, which is pretty unique for a person who's 21, right?

21 years old, owns his own farm, and that's a story in itself.

He's unmarried, but not for too much longer.

We wanted Dulce to be on our panel because she has a burden for agriculture.

She is a single woman and she has found her place in an institution.

And when she was with us on the farm, we really felt like she wanted to do agriculture, but we couldn't encourage her to do that, just go out on your own.

And so she's at Eden Valley, and that has been a wonderful community for her, where she can be involved in agriculture.

So she represents a demographic of being a single woman, but having a burden for agriculture.

And we really were trying not to have any of our own children on the panel just because that seemed a little bit Funny, but anyway The the point is we thought it would be nice to have somebody who actually Farming is the only life they've ever known unfortunately that That's rare in Adventism today, but I think Joshua you have no memories before the farm, do you?

And Joshua and his wife, Kelly, and their little 1, Amber, So now we're seeing the next generation come up.

I mean, Joshua's been farming full-time since he was 18.

So he's, there's not a lot of young people out there who've actually really earning their livelihood from agriculture.

So we think you all are going to be a great panel and we're excited.

So just want to share that we, this is not a kind of panel like you might think of.

We're going to throw out questions and they're going to have to think about it.

Because we have a lot we really wanna cover, we ask them to answer the questions, to be thoughtful about things beforehand, so that we can really move through as much information as possible.

So take out your pen and paper and jot some notes and we know that God is going to bless and bring things to your mind to share.

So The first thing we want you to answer and to share is to just briefly give what you're currently doing.

Well, John already kind of said what you're currently doing, but just describe your journey into agriculture.

Okay, so I'm figuring out how long I'm going to make this.

My parents, as I was growing up, they were getting into agriculture more and more.

Looking back, it wasn't that big, but to my little eyes, it was huge.

And I began to talk about, oh maybe I could do something for a living with plants.

Some of my friends would kind of question me as to whether I could make that viable, whether there was a, like a market, whether there was a financial viability there.

And at the time, I did not really have good answers for that But the Lord opened the doors and I ended up taking a degree, got a degree from UMass.

Actually it was online, so I never went to UMass.

But I did some practicums in different parts of the country, different parts of the world, and ended up graduating from UMass.

So long story short, I finished my practicums.

My last practicum was in Washington State and then from there I spent a year in Arkansas.

I was doing tropical, it was a tropical plant dealer where I was working at.

And while I was there, I applied for a job at Baker Creek.

And the Lord opened that door, That's a seed company, Baker Creek is a seed company in Southern Missouri.

So seeds that you can save, you can go to your home garden and save the seed yourself.

And I've been there since the fall of 2022.

Hi, so my name is Chloe as Uncle John introduced me earlier.

And I just to kind of start towards the beginning, I was born and raised in the city, more or less.

My family lived in a mobile home park, and so we didn't obviously have much to grow on.

But I've always had an interest in growing things, what I could in flowers, or carrots, or whatever, houseplants, and just in homesteading and being a homemaker, Though that dream and what I wanted to do kind of seemed distant.

So I kind of leaned more towards medical field.

I also had an interest in the medical field.

And so then all growing up, my goal was kind of just to go that route.

Well, fast forward to when I turned around when I was 18, my family made an acquaintance with some people and they gave us a book, the Dysoner's book, Ara Ben Ezer, and we read through it as a family, and it was very inspiring for me, right at that pivotal age of when you're trying to decide how you're going to make the next step in life.

You're 18, graduating high school, What are you going to do next?

And I had already signed up for a college course in pursuing the nursing.

But I felt like God was telling me I needed to do something else, and that I needed to pursue more of the homesteading, agriculture side of things.

And at that same time, we were reading that book and towards the end of the book, it talks about how they have an internship.

And I looked into that internship and the doors just opened and I ended up going to the farm.

And after going to the farm I was really inspired by the agricultural lifestyle and I really wanted to implement that in my life and live in the country even more than ever.

Because I saw just the blessings in that even though it is a hard life and then but I came back home and just moved forward and took things as God gave them to me and Simultaneously, I actually happened to be in a relationship with a young man and it wasn't too much longer and he asked me to marry him and join him on his family-owned property off-grid to live in the country.

And shortly after we were married he had a health issue that came up.

And it was kind of an intense health issue.

And we found that the diagnosis meant that basically an agrarian life and agriculture was something that would be the most beneficial for his health condition.

And so it was just another thing of God saying, this is what I want for you to do.

And so we were like, okay, Lord, we'll do our best to go that route and last year was our first year growing to sell and we sold at some farmers markets And this year we plan to try to grow that and do more of a market garden.

And we're just continuing to learn from there.

Laughter Okay, so I was born and raised in Houston, Texas, not too far from here and I don't know when I was like 15, 16, my moral support is right there in the third row for my, okay.

My parents decided they wanted to move us out to the country to get us away from the city influence and homeschool us.

And so then my older sister had a grand idea of starting a garden and so she wanted to learn more about it and she found this documentary called Back to Eden.

Maybe some of you have seen Back to Eden.

Joy Kauffman

Eric Zaddock

Althea Zaddock

Journeys in Agriculture Testimony Part 3

If you, who was at the conference last year?

So last year we had, we said we had this desire.

We had this, we presented last year that we wanted to launch out into regional meetings.

And we said, by faith, we're going to launch out and see if it can happen.

And by God's grace, we descended on Wildwood, and we had an amazing time.

I'm going to let them introduce themselves.

And what I want you to describe is, is this your first time out at AGRA?

Tell me your experience with at AGRA and what led you to want to get involved with the Growing Together Conference?

I've been, this is my seventh, and the experience that I've had with the National Conference at Agra has been really positive because of all the connections I've made here.

A lot of my friends, a lot of the people we know, we've met at Agra, and the little business my sister and I run started here in this building at Agra.

And we just really value all the connections that we've made here.

And so out of all that that was given to us through the whole team putting it together, I was very happy to volunteer and help put on a regional conference that maybe others can get connected.

Rob, go ahead and tell us your experience with Ad Agra.

And my first ad agra was also in 2015 at that point I was fresh out of the city I had gone from wanting to go to Harvard to moving out to Eden Valley working on the farm there and Going to ad agra Just totally blew my mind My world was changed To think that I could actually support myself as a farmer was amazing to me or just through another practical trade and so I was very encouraged.

The connections that I made you know still have those friendships to this day.

So you guys were involved with not only planning it, but they actually taught some classes.

We taught a hands-on demonstration of how to make your own soap.

Now, so tell us a little bit about that class.

What was the feedback from the people who attended?

The people who attended were really happy to see it done because sometimes it's a mystery to like how the whole chemical process of soap is done and so just to see it there, to smell it, to feel it, some got to stir it, some got to help with it.

It just kind of removed that curtain on the whole soap making process.

Tell us this chainsaw class that you did.

Well it was a little more hands on than a picture.

I think our youngest there was maybe 8 and you know oldest maybe in their 70s or so and everyone that was at the class got to use a chainsaw and we went through safety of course heavily.

But the goal was to have something for everyone.

Something for somebody that never used a chainsaw before, maybe even seen 1, to the person that is pretty comfortable cutting firewood, cutting down trees, but maybe they don't know how to deal with a tree that is leaning heavily towards a structure or building.

So there at Wildwood, we took down for the more advanced folks, we took down a tree that was heavily leaning over a playground the other way.

So we tried to make something available for everyone at each stage of growth.

Yeah, and so Rob has a tree cutting business.

And so people really appreciated the fact that, you know, I could tell you the story when I first, you know, I first moved out into the country.

Maybe some of you guys can relate to this.

Before that, I played football in college.

So I got a chainsaw, and I went there, and I cut down this little tree.

And I'm standing there, and the tree came, and it just hit me on the head.

And I took a step back, and I'm like, am I doing something wrong?

And so I looked at a video, like how to cut down a tree, right?

And then when the tree started cracking, he took off running.

And so my kids, they had, I was cutting some trees down, so they had their seats out.

And they hear the cracking, and here I come running out of the woods.

So I wish I had his class prior to me going out into my country living experience because I bought a chainsaw, but I didn't know how to, you know, I put straight gas in the chainsaw too.

I took it back to him, I said, you sold me a lemon.

And he poured, you put straight gas in here.

And so that's why I really appreciate the chainsaw class.

And Man, it was a tremendous, tremendous blessing.

So tell us, what have you heard from the people who attended the conference?

What have you heard from the people who attended?

And maybe you can share for people who may be interested in coming to 1 of these, going to the other conferences, what they can expect.

Yes, the people said that they really enjoyed it for the hands-on aspect.

We did as much as we could hands-on, whether it was construction or gardening or soap making or tincture, cooking.

We did so many different things and it was all hands-on.

Another aspect is everything we did, we pretty much did together.

So we really built a network and a family there.

We ate together, we sang together, we worked together, and we all had fun together.

And so just building that community, and because everyone was from that area, we could stay in touch more.

We could get together between conferences.

It was really good for that networking and hands-on aspect.

I would just say that the vast majority of the people there had never attended a national Ad Agra, which was fascinating to me.

And so just hearing their comments of people that haven't been exposed to the world yet was wonderful.

And so what we did also, so during our conferences, we was like how can we make an impact in our local community?

Series

Journeys in Agriculture

Journeys in Agriculture Testimony Part 3

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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