AdAgrA 2014 Conference

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Market Farming/Gardening

John Dysinger

James Tiffany

Lucia Tiffany

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

We ask that you will guide our thoughts and minds.

I pray that we can get the projector working, if it's your will, and that we can have a meaningful time here.

So 1 thing we realized right off the bat was that even 7 hours, 7 sessions, there's no way to give you all the information we'd like to give you on doing this for a living.

But 1 thing that I want to do is try to point you to resources.

When I first started farming in 1998, of course, that was before the internet really took off, but my biggest challenge was, where do I find this stuff?

You know, I wanted, I read in Elliot Coleman's book about this and this, but how do I get a hold of it?

I wonder if we can turn some lights off So since we've got this I'm gonna rush through this I've just got a few slides and I don't think I need to convince most of you.

And some of this has already been talked about.

You know, farming was God's original plan for man.

We're familiar, Genesis 2.15, and the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

And then I want to point out, even after sin, you know, some may say, well, yeah, but The world changed when sin came in yes, it did change it was going to be harder But even after sin Genesis 3 23 therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground From whence he was taken so he sent out to do the same thing he'd been doing in.

We know that in heaven, in the new earth, we're going to be building houses and inhabiting them, planting vineyards, and eating the fruit thereof.

I often wonder what we're going to do without weeds and pests and disease, but it sounds like I'd like to try, figure it out.

It's still the best plan in the meantime.

In God's plan for Israel, every family had a home on the land with sufficient ground for tilling, and that land thus was, provided both the means and the incentive for a useful, industrious, and self-supporting life.

And no devising of men has ever improved upon that plan.

When I read that I said, why would I settle for anything less?

If this is the best plan, that's what I want.

And that was the beginning of our journey.

And if that's not reason enough, we can talk about other things.

You know, modern life tears families apart.

Agrarian life brings them back together again.

You need the whole family to make it work.

There's something to do for every age, whether it's the grandparents, they can sit on the porch and shell peas, and whatever, you know.

Modern life is divided into many compartments.

You go to work, you go to school, you come home, you want to have some family time, then you've gotta figure out time for outreach, that's important, right?

And then you've gotta work in exercise, when are you gonna get your exercise?

And then you've gotta have your time with the Lord, that's important.

So you've got all these different directions life is trying to pull you, but the beauty of the agrarian life is it brings it all back together again.

You get paid to go to the city and share with people.

Your time with God, I'm not saying it should replace your quiet time, you know, with the Lord in the morning, but you can walk with God all day.

Oftentimes it's just you and He out there in the garden together.

It's the Adventist advantage in 1 neat package.

White emphasizes in her writings is tied up in this.

Country living, family emphasis, the health evangelism, outreach to the cities.

How many of you go to the cities twice a week to evangelize?

Of course, agriculture, you know, there's a lot of emphasis on that in her writings.

The 8 natural remedies, can anyone tell me another occupation which is so involved in all 8 natural remedies?

I challenge you, I haven't found any yet.

True education, we just heard about that.

It's so beautiful that just, and we didn't even understand this when we started.

We just figured, well, no devising of man has ever improved on it, so let's do it.

And again, much of this we've talked about, mental, physical, spiritual, emotional, moral.

You know, We don't like to talk about this too much for some reason, but men, and I would appeal to women, do you want your husbands to stay pure?

Everywhere, the workplace, the cities, wherever they go, the devil is trying to lure men.

And I'm not suggesting that you won't be tempted in the garden, but I am suggesting and I am telling you that I can't think of any place with less temptations.

You still have to deal with yourself and your mind, but you're surrounded by the things of God.

The social, you know, you're working together.

Something Joshua said, you know, the point that children realize this is valuable.

If we don't get the crops covered when the cold is coming, we may lose this crop, which means we're not gonna have money to pay the electric bill.

So they realize this is not just a chore mom and dad give me to keep me from being on the computer all the time, this is, I've got to do this or we're going to be in trouble.

The world is hungry for good food and real relationships.

I think I think they're already figuring that out large agribusiness companies can't satisfy that hunger but small diversified family farms can through nutrient-dense food for through real food and emotionally rich relationships, you know, I it's unbelievable the relationships that you develop with your customers.

Those of you who were here last night, I read that quote about how God has created us to bond with those who feed us.

It gets me choked up just thinking about it.

You know, the last CSA of the season, our customers are crying.

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.

We live in a very rocky part of Oklahoma, okay?

You don't have any idea, even the questions to ask when you get involved, okay?

You run into things that, so for instance, I bought some compost this year, Put it on my soil.

Part of the cucumber problem that I mentioned was it had over 1, 500 parts per million of soluble salts in it.

Well, if anyone knows about soluble salts at 35 pounds, tons per acre, it's very salty in a greenhouse.

And basically it was killing the plants, the salt in that compost.

I didn't even know what soluble salts were, okay?

I should have, I guess I should have known, but things like this that you just don't know to ask.

And this is a great reason why you want to start out small because you're going to make So many mistakes, so many mistakes, yeah.

A lot of mistakes that you really, you don't know them until you do it and then if you do it on a small scale it's not going to cost you a lot.

So on our operation we started getting a little bigger.

1 7th of an acre isn't huge in the big scheme of things.

OK, so anyways, we started off, what I want to say here, basically my own finances going into the farm.

Then this last year, dad actually invested in the farm about $20, 000 to get it up and going.

That's seed house, that's wash house, that's just basic equipment to become a little bit more efficient in what you're doing.

You want to keep some of the pictures going over here?

So, those are some of the greenhouses we did.

We use ridge vents on our greenhouses, which is very critical in Oklahoma when it goes over 100 degrees for a good portion of the season.

Really helps pull the air through the house.

But when you're, you know, I don't know, 1 of the biggest challenges that we've come up against even talking to other people starting in agriculture is how do you financially do it if you don't have someone like your dad backing you?

It's very difficult to do it if you're not doing it that way.

For those that don't, I'm still trying to figure it out because I have friends that don't have that.

And we're not even up to a size that we can financially live off of.

This one-seventh of an acre is just an experimental plot right now.

It's kind of like college for me in a way, but this year We on 1 7th of an acre we grossed 19, 300 off of 1 7th of an acre which comes out roughly to 3.6 3 dollars and 60 cents a square foot which is really on a small operation is really what you're looking at.

You're not working on acres, what I get per acre, you're really looking at what can I get from this crop per square foot because you're not growing a ton of it?

But we want to move over now on how we're currently starting to market our product because that is, you know, all of us here are talking about, you know, how we're doing our production, but I want to we want to move over right now into into the marketing side of things as far as because we where we live in Oklahoma is cattle country and oil country and people eat McDonald's and Taco Bell and all this type of stuff.

So we really have to build our market up from the ground up.

There are no farmer's markets where we are.

I mean, you sit at a farmer's market for 5 hours and you sell a few dollars and it's just not worth it.

So we've started doing an online marketing system and I'm going to have Aubrey talk about this for a bit here.

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.

Series

Market Farming/Gardening

6- What to Market and How

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Short Course: Beginning Market Farming

Beginning Market Farming- Part 4

1h

Starting a Market Garden

Tips and Techniques for Farmer’s Market

1h 4m

Advance Farmers

Taking Your Farm to the Next Level

45m

Short Course: Beginning Market Farming

Beginning Market Farming- Part 1

44m

Market Farming/Gardening

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

54m

Soil Fertility Advanced

Soil: Environmental Influences

57m

Turning Tomatoes into Profit

Turning Tomatoes Into Profit Part 1

59m

Basic Gardening

Help! How do I Start My First Garden?

1h 7m

Roundtable

Successful Marketing, Planning for Profitability

1h 43m

Market Gardening

Food Safety and the Basics of Post Harvest Handling

52m

Breakout Session 6

Growing Transplants

1h 16m

Market Gardening

5 Big Mistakes to Avoid When Starting a Market Garden

1h 12m

Sound Doctrine