Jesse Frost: The Living Soil Handbook | The No-Till Market Garden Podcast

Posted on September 22, 2021September 22, 2021 by brianjpombo@hotmail.com

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Take both feet and jump right in!

It’s clear Jesse Frost is well informed on gardening and things he’s passionate about. But for he and his wife Hannah Crabtree to take that passion and turn it into not only a way of life but a way of making a living is truly impressive.

Join us for some fabulous insight, from getting a start in farming, to what it takes to get your book published.

Oh, and did we mention Jesse’s terrific No-Till Market Garden Podcast and the quality information you can get from listening…all for free!

Check out the links below for more info on Jesse and Hannah’s Rough Draft Farmstead, to No-Till Growers Podcasts and Jesse’s new book published with Chelsea Green Publishing called, The Living Soil Handbook.

The Living Soil Handbook – https://www.notillgrowers.com/livingsoilhandbook/d9z5gkf1bbnhu0w5xxb3trngiqhwgo

No-Till Growers Podcasts – https://www.notillgrowers.com/home

Podcast on Youtube Also – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLhu5JoRWPgEGDoUFfQHTPQ

Rough Draft Farmstead – https://roughdraftfarmstead.com/

Show Notes

From Wine to Farming: My Start in No-Till Farming with Bugtussle Farm to Starting Rough Draft Farmstead
Type of Vegetables We Grow at Rough Draft Farmstead
How We Found Our First Customers
Why Being Certified Organic Was A Big Move For Us
Keeping No-Till Growers Podcast Accessible For All
New Book: Living Soil Handbook with Chelsea Green Publishing
Positive Response Since The Books Been Launched
How We Started The No-Till Market Garden Podcast
How To Find No-Till Growers Podcast
Big Following on YouTube
Why We Choose the keyword “No-Till”
What I Like Best About Farming & Podcasting
Being Open to New Ideas In Farming & Media
Happy Life: Importance of Family and Relationships
My Advice to Farmers

Transcription

Brian: How did you start your podcast?

Jesse: Originally, I started on my cell phone with a call Recorder an app that journalists will be familiar with. And my audio wasn’t great.

I recorded it in our cooler for our vegetables, like our walking cooler. And also we had two young kids and it was the only place I could go to do it. And it kind of evolved from there.

You know, we’re going into our fourth season this fall, each season has gotten a little better and gotten a little bit better at interviews and more comfortable.

But the beauty of podcasting, like, I think that when you’re a curious person, it really fills that need for you to just dive into things.

Podcast Intro: If you’re someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family.

If you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing.

You may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman.

We are here to celebrate you whether you’re looking to improve your maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel.

From selling chicken eggs online, to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure, life off the grid.

Brian: Jesse Frost lives in central Kentucky, where he runs Rough Draft Farmstead with his wife Hannah Crabtree. Frost is also the host of the No-Till Market Garden Podcast and the author of, The Living Soil Handbook: The No-Till Growers Guide to Ecological Market Gardening.

Jesse frost, welcome to The Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast.

Jesse: Well, thank you so much for having me, Brian. I’m excited to be here.

Brian: This is real fun. So tell us a little bit about what it is that you do?

Jesse: Well, I do a lot of different things. But my primary vocation is farming.

As you said, a small-scale farm in central Kentucky with my wife, Hannah. We are three-quarters of an acre no-till vegetable production. And that is my full-time gig.

That’s what we do for a living.

But I also do a number of other things we run No-Till Growers with my partner Jackson Rolett, he co-founded it with me, we think of it as sort of an aggregate of information where we are trying to dig up as much growing information about no-till market gardening that exists and that we can sort of create ourselves and try and seek out.

We’ve created several different offshoot podcasts from you know, I host the No-Till Market Garden podcast, as you said, but we also have Collaborative Farming Podcast that’s hosted by Jackson.

We also have Winter Growers Podcast, that’s hosted by Clara Coleman, daughter of Eliot Coleman.

Jennie Love does the No-Till Flowers Podcast.

And then we do a weekly live show with Josh Satin, who some people may be familiar with his work through YouTube, but he posts an every other week live show on our YouTube channel.

So we do a lot of stuff. It’s a lot about just getting that information out there. We try and keep it free and we are kind of a different business model in that way.

But we try and make sure that anybody can access our information.

And yeah, it’s a number of different things that we do. But they’re all very exciting and very fun for me.

Brian: How did you end up at this point, where did this all start?

Jesse: So it all kind of started with my interest in farming and agriculture, which started probably about 12 or 13 years ago, when I was actually working in wine in New York City.

I worked in wine retail, and we specialized in really small scale really like unique wines, very niche stuff like it was kind of at the beginning. At that point, it was kind of in the middle of the natural wine craze. And I really loved those wines.

I really loved this really funky kind of, you know, sometimes effervescent, sometimes really cloudy wines that just tasted so vibrant and so alive to me.

I got obsessed with the people that made them and I kind of started studying viticulture, and I went in would visit winemakers in Europe and really enjoyed seeing their love of the land.

For a brief moment I kind of thought about being a winemaker. But I kind of knew just deep down that wasn’t really my thing. I knew that I would not really be that all that interested in, you know, making just one product.

So I moved that idea to just doing vegetable farming because I love vegetables I love you know cooking that’s kind of also in my background.

And so I moved from New York City back to my home state of Kentucky and found an apprenticeship here.

That’s where that started.

So the apprenticeship was a biodynamic farm called, Bugtussle Farm in southern Kentucky. I learned everything there like just all the different techniques for kind of minimal tillage and, you know, really responsible tillage with cover crops and those sorts of things.

We did rotational grazing, we did herbs, we did livestock, all sorts of different livestock. We did chickens and turkeys and everything.

So that was a really great immersion into agriculture because I didn’t have much of a background. I didn’t have any of a background in it. My family is not agricultural, at least not in any recent history.

So, from that I met my wife there, she was the other intern in my second year, Hannah, she and I, you know, decided after our first year interning together, or her first year, my second, that we would start a farm.

So we started a farm. And one of the things that we knew we wanted kind of from the beginning was to reduce our tillage and sort of figure out different techniques for how to manage, you know, crops without tillage to reduce our cultivation needs, and to increase our water holding capacity and have better performance with the crops, like all of the things that no-till purports to do.

So we started kind of investigating these ideas, and they’re just was not a lot of information out there about it. That was one thing that we really discovered was that there’s just this complete lack of information about the technical side of managing a small scale farm, you know, high production, small scale vegetable farm without tillage was like, there was just not much out there.

That’s where No-Till Growers kind of came into it is that I had this realization that like, I wasn’t gonna be able to find the information I needed, I was gonna kind of have to dig it up.

If I was going to do that, I was just going to call people and have conversations with people who I knew were doing very interesting things in the no-tillage world. Try and, you know, record those conversations and share them as a podcast.

So that’s where that was sort of born out of.

And then No-Till Growers kind of grew from that.

Brian: Well, that’s fabulous.

So what type of vegetables do you grow on your farm?

Jesse: We do mixed production, we focus a lot on a handful of crops, garlic, cherry, tomatoes, lettuce, green onions, beets, carrots, those are kind of our main products.

But we do you know, sweet potatoes, we do a little bit of, we always grow some things that we love for ourselves and for our family. So we’ll always grow a little bit of sweet corn, will always grow sweet potatoes, winter squashes, we do a big mix of stuff.

But really, what pays the bills is those first crops, those other crops are both sustenance, but also, you know, crops that we enjoy growing and gives us some good biodiversity in our soil and in our crop rotations.

And it’s fun to have a diversity of crops like it’s, you know, we don’t want to just be a lettuce farm, because that’s really easy. It’s easy for us to sell a lot of lettuce, it’s easier for us to grow a lot of lettuce.

But we want that diversity. It’s good for the soil, and it’s good just for ourselves and for our family.

Brian: Absolutely.

How did you find your first initial customers after, so you got your farm going, you started producing, where’d you find your first customers?

Jesse: So the first model, I think it’s important to start out there, the first model we used was the CSA, you know, for the listeners who most are probably familiar, but the community-supported agriculture, just being that subscription to farm subscriptions.

And so essentially, that’s where we started.

We started a lot with family and friends, which I think is pretty, you know, for small scale, farmers getting off on their own, especially who are doing in your home, they end up a lot of times with family and friends is their kind of for supporters.

That was great because they’re much more forgiving when you make mistakes. And you know, you’re going to, especially in your first years, and CSA is really complicated, like, it’s a very complicated style of growing, and marketing, it can be really great.

But you know, you need to, there’s a lot of different things to keep in mind for mitigating your risk. And the stress because there’s nothing I just I can I still feel in my stomach, when I think about what it feels like knowing that you’re coming up on a week or two or three weeks, where you just don’t have a lot in a row, like the gardens not bouncing back, you know, you’ve had a drought or you’ve had flooding or whatever it is.

You know that things are not going to be where you need them to be on time and that is so stressful. So mitigating that like is a really big part of it.

But yeah, in terms of our customers, that’s where we started, then we kind of moved on from that to we started sort of hitting the streets and just like passed out flyers, and did a lot of at the time we were doing, you know, we had like an Instagram account. I think we started that pretty early on and so that was helpful to get the word out.

This is probably 2012 that we really started reaching out beyond our or maybe 2013.

And when we started kind of reaching out beyond our just like friends groups.

Yeah, we just kind of would go to farmers markets and set up like if we had to produce early on in the spring or maybe late in the fall before the next year, we’d go and set up and just like do CSA fairs as well, like that’s the thing, where you go and try and meet customers.

So we would do as much as we could to just get the word out and meet people. And for the most part, we were able to hit our budget to an extent.

The difficulty for us really, in the beginning years, wasn’t so much getting the customers it was getting consistent crop production. But I don’t want to sort of just stumble by that because it can be really hard for some people, depending on where you live.

Rural areas tend to be really hard to get customers to buy, you know, especially for us like now we’re certified organic. We’ve always grown organically.

I think it can be really tough to get customers in rural areas, you know, to spend a little bit extra, although in some ways it’s getting easier. Some people are more aware of what they’re eating increasingly and wanting to know where their food comes from, but that, you know, can be a challenge.

Brian: Absolutely. Well, that makes sense.

So are you basically getting customers from the same places that you’ve already mentioned? Where’s the top place that people are finding you now?

Jesse: So I should describe it.

Okay, so basically, we went from the CSA model to a more farmer’s market-based model. Excluding last year, last year, we were going to stop the CSA, but with COVID, when that came into the picture, that obviously, we just restarted our CSA, and that was all of our customers for previous years, word of mouth is really effective with that, you know, when and if we wanted to grow our CSA.

We often just asked our current CSA members if they would spread the word and that was very helpful.

We stopped doing the kind of hitting the streets and asking everybody and it got it can be hard, though it can be hard to fill those CSA is that you once you have your CSA goal, and you really want to deliver on it.

But what happened now, like what’s happened since then, and why we kind of were at least going into 2020, expecting to drop our CSA and why we were able to drop it this year, in 2021, is that we, you know, essentially decided that the farmers market fills that need for us and we can use it in a diversity of ways.

In terms of finding customers, the biggest thing that we did was certified organic, nothing has gotten us an instant customer base, nearly as quickly as certified organic. Essentially, you know, you go to farmer’s markets, and I don’t know how common this is out in the west, but it’s certainly common here where you see growers who care and who, grow good food and don’t spray or don’t spray very often, or whatever it is.

But they don’t have any proof of that like there’s nothing about they can, they can write stuff on their signs and whatever. But if they that symbol, that certified organic symbol for all of its faults is a really effective marketing tool.

As soon as you put that certified organic sign up on your table, customers will come to your booth who maybe would have walked by before because they didn’t know who you were, it just eliminates that conversation of, do you spray what kind of you know because that’s a really awkward thing to put on the customer to ask.

And it’s often they just want to know that you’re taking care of your food and growing it in the right ways and not treating it with chemicals.

They’re not growing it with, you know, chemical fertilizers and all the things that they’re trying to avoid in their diets. So I think that putting that certified organic sign behind you really just answers those questions, and it takes all that stress off of them.

Brian: Oh, that’s great. That’s really good.

So you have the farm, you have this business that was growing, and then you started No-Till Growers. And that’s become a secondary community almost that you’ve had set up.

And you said that you attempt to offer as much available for free as possible. Why don’t you tell us a little more about that model and how you came about that?

Jesse: Yeah, it’s a very unique model.

It’s sort of something that we’re still trying to figure out exactly how it works. But it requires a diversity of revenue streams, to have a lot of creativity and a lot of sacrifices, in the beginning, to get it going.

But essentially, the idea is, is it’s somewhat of a nonprofit that it’s actually a for-profit that operates somewhat like a non-profit recently got a grant from Southern SARE.

We also do donations not only just general donations from the public, but we do a Patreon account, our Patreon account is the lifeblood of our operation.

It’s five or 600 people there right now who donate every month, and then $2 increments, $5 increments, we have a few that in that $10, $15, $20 range, but most the majority of them are that to $2 to $10. And that is huge.

I mean that that’s an enormous amount of income for us.

And then other things that we’ve done, we do fundraisers, like we’ll print hats, and sell those we do those you know, once a year we’ll do a big printing and sell those and that’s a revenue stream for us.

I’ve recently published, The Living Soil Handbook and we’ve been selling that so that’s published by a publisher that’s through Chelsea Green, but we’ve been you know in the author anytime you publish a book you have the option of selling it through your site and we chose to sell my book through No-Till Growers as a revenue stream for No-Till Growers.

So I still get a kickback royalty from the publisher but the majority of the profits it’s almost like a bookstore go to No-Till Growers, so that’s encouraged quite a few people to order it from No-Till Growers, instead of maybe Amazon. Where in a situation like No-Till Growers, you know, that that money is going towards building more content.

And so when I said giving it all away for free, we don’t keep anything behind a paywall.

I mean, the book is the closest thing to a paywall that we really have. We have had the Patreon account but we’re not putting up special information there.

People who are Patreon members know that they know that they’re not necessarily getting special treatment. They’re supporting us by giving it away for free so that anybody can access it.

Because there’s a lot of inaccessibility in terms of, you know, starting a farm is expensive in the early years, you don’t have hundreds of dollars to pour into your education or 1,000s of dollars. Sometimes depending on the resources, it can be very expensive.

So we try and just make it extremely accessible. Because we feel like that’s the fastest the most rapid way to get the information out. That’s the most rapid way to get it to the most amount of to disseminate it to the most amount of people and to just grow the movement faster and create healthier food and healthier environment and all the things that matter to us.

Brian: Oh, that’s great.

Tell me a little more about the book, who’s idea was it to write the book, how did you go about doing it? Tell me a little bit about that process?

Jesse: Yeah, I’ve been a writer for a long time and it’s something I’ve been passionate about. I’ve really spent a lot of time as a writer, studying the book industry, you kind of have to understand the publishing industry a little bit to be able to get your foot in the door to get somebody to want to publish you.

So I started a long time ago, assuming this was years and years and years ago that I started studying this stuff and looking at agents and all those things.

But as I got into agriculture, as you niche down, it gets a little easier in some ways.

So as I got agriculture and later on, like when I decided to write the book, because I felt like there was a need for it and use that I could feel, and I can talk about that in a second.

But basically, we go to the publishers who publish in your genre, and in our case, it would be agriculture. And there are several really good ones, and you kind of go through and you pick, the one that you feel like is most fits your personality or fits your goals the most.

And then you follow their guidelines case of Chelsea Green, I had to submit a query letter. Query letters are a very specific thing, when I talked about studying the industry, you kind of have to study the query letter, it’s very, it’s like the most important thing to get your foot in the door.

It’s the elevator pitch of writing. And so you really have to study that and figure out exactly how to do it, well have it edited in practice, right, a bunch of them every idea, you have just write it out like a query letter.

Once you get their interest, once you pique their interest there, if they want to, if they want to publish what you’re writing, then they asked for a proposal.

The proposal includes a bunch of information that they request specifically. And then beyond that, they asked for two chapters. So two already written chapters.

Now, if you’re submitting fiction, for instance, it’s going to go totally different because they want a manuscript. But in the case of nonfiction, they actually want some control over the structure.

So submitting two chapters, you could submit a full manuscript if you had one, I suppose. But, you know, fully finished all the chapters, everything, but if you but generally, you’re going to submit you know, a partial, so two chapters minimum, if you have three, that’s great, too.

But you want to give two really nice chapters, plus all the other information that they request, the bio and, you know, possible sales outlets, and all the various things that they are going to request.

Because not only do they have to like the idea, but they have to know what’s marketable. So you go through that and that’s a big process.

Then you start sitting down with the editor, you get an editor, you get assigned an editor, you start sitting down with that person. And in my case, it was for and Marshall Bradley, she’s amazing.

She’s kind of a legend in the agricultural world. She was amazing. And she and I kind of designed the outline together, we came up with something that I was really excited about.

And we have hammered that out for I guess, it took about nine months of active writing, but it was with all the work that I was doing through No-Till Market Garden Podcast and stuff several years in the making, like just me, kind of thinking about how I wanted to do this book.

A lot of farming books are written from the perspective of a single farm. And I wanted something that was more of a choose your own adventure.

I say that I use that term loosely because choose your own adventure is very specific.

But the idea being that I wanted to say not this is how things happen on my farm. And this is how you know you can do it, I want to show this is how soil works. And this is how you can properly address its needs, no matter where you are.

So that was kind of the idea behind the book is that sort of I wanted it to not context-specific. I didn’t we have a lot of books with and I love them dearly from the north, for instance, from Maine through Canada. And those are great, but those aren’t super helpful always to me down here in Kentucky.

So I wanted something that would be helpful to anybody anywhere. So that’s what I was kind of striving for. And I think maybe that’s that niche that I chose that direction that I chose help to get it published helped get beat the publisher’s interest.

It also, I mean, part of that too, if you’re interested, I’m talking about this in a way for somebody who may be interested in writing a book that you know, you do want to spend a good amount of effort while you’re getting your idea together.

While you’re practicing your query letters and all of those things, you want to spend a good amount of time getting a base from which to work because the publisher needs to know that they can sell the book they need to know that people know who you are.

It is not as big of a deal in agriculture because a lot of the best minds in agriculture don’t have big social media followings or anything like that. But those aren’t bad. I mean, those will help.

Those are little things that may, you know, if you have a good social media following in our case, obviously the No-Till Market Garden Podcast, and our YouTube channel and all the things certainly helped for getting my foot in the door.

But you want those things you want to think about.

Like how can you grow your audience, it’s also good practice, use it, you know, if you’re a writer, right, you got to write all the time. You have to be able to show them that you can finish a book that’s important to a lot of people who want to write a book, but don’t spend a lot of time writing.

I’ve written every day for 17, 18 years. And that’s what I do. I get up every morning and I do it. And I’ve done it for years, and years and years.

That’s not a requisite like lots of people can just kind of start to slowly pick it up and do a decent job. But you’re gonna have to show that you can produce a book at the end of the day.

Brian: Absolutely. After you’ve gotten the book published, what effects have you seen come off of it for No-Till Growers?

For everything else that you’re doing, what are the benefits to having a book like this out there?

Jesse: Yeah, that’s a good question. I like these questions, Brian, this is fun talking about the specifics of the book writing.

So it’s only been out since July 20. So not that long that I think the effects that I’ve seen so far. So we’re recording this on August 9. And the effects that I’ve seen so far.

One, it’s sold really well, which is great. I mean, it shows that the support for what we’re doing is really big. And I think that people have really responded to like, the business model that I described earlier.

It’s genuine, it’s not us, you know, we’re farmers that we want that information, we want to share this information for free because we are seeking it out ourselves. It’s important to us, it affects our business.

I hope that is going to help people who don’t necessarily listen to podcasts or watch YouTube videos, or I think, for us having a diversity of mediums of media, for people who may be different kinds of learners have responded to things differently, or gravitate more towards one kind of medium than another.

This way, they have another option that isn’t just the podcast, because not everybody can listen to podcasts.

I know for one, moms have a hard time with podcasts a lot of times because they are taking care of their children and they’re busy and but maybe at the end of the day, they can sit down even while they’re nursing a baby and read a book. And I know that just from my wife’s experiences.

So maybe that’s an option for somebody like that.

Or somebody who yeah, doesn’t watch YouTube videos, there’s a lot of accessibility issues to with, you know, hearing impaired and those sorts of things who may not be able to listen to podcasts.

So I don’t know. I mean, it was just another option. I hope that it’s able to help people what the response has been and how it’s changed things so far as is maybe too early to say. But it’ll probably I mean, certainly, I will get to present at conferences that I maybe didn’t get to before because of a book.

And this is just speaking in generalities that anybody that produces a book can put the word author behind their name so they can have a wider reach.

Maybe be able to present to different audiences in different places and travel a little bit more if that’s what they’re interested in. That can be great depending on what your field is, and what kind of book you’re writing, and the kind of audiences that you want to reach.

But it’ll also give you an opportunity maybe to yeah, to travel and be able to meet people in person who’d be really interested in what you’re doing.

Brian: That’s really great.

It’s a lot of good background on both the process of getting things ready for the publisher and what a book can do for you. I really appreciate that.

On the same end, I’d like to ask you, how did you start your podcast originally?

Jesse: So I started my podcast, I read some blogs about how to how to do a podcast and they were not it turns out very informative. I didn’t choose wisely.

But I started on my cell phone with a call recorder and app that journalists will be familiar with. And it was not great. It dropped a few calls but I didn’t lose any the first year but it was the audio wasn’t great.

I recorded it in our cooler for our vegetables like our walking cooler, because the sound and also we have two young kids and it was the only place I could go to do it.

So it started really small and rough and rustic and it kind of evolved from there.

Each season, we’re going into our fourth season this fall, and each season has gotten a little better. I’ve gotten a little bit better at interviews and more comfortable.

But the beauty of podcasting like I think that when you’re a curious person, it really fills that need for you to just dive into things because I did journalism for a while, and I really liked journalism, I’ve always liked reading journalism.

And one of the things I loved is, I did a little bit of science journalism. And one of the things I really enjoyed was calling people who’ve spent their entire lives work like 40 years, just working on the one question you have to for like one sentence to be correct.

You know what I mean?

Like you get in, you meet people who’ve just dedicated their lives to like one small portion of what you need answered and it’s really amazing. Like, you just meet these incredible people, they’re so passionate.

They don’t all love talking to journalists, but it’s the ones that are nerdy and passionate and love spreading and sharing their information and are good at science communication, I had so much fun, that is what I wanted to bring in.

That’s what I got excited about when I was calling farmers because it was filled that sort of that love I had of talking to people who were just really into what they do. And it was fully fulfilled.

In the beginning, it was hard to figure out all the technical details, because I’m not particularly savvy when it comes to audio equipment and audio engineering or anything like that. I was definitely very, very low fi.

But it didn’t matter because the content was so good.

Like, the quality of the content is always going to trump… not always, but almost always trump the quality of the sound.

And so, for me, that was what I focused on. I was like, I’m not there yet. I’m not good at the sound part but I’m good at the content quality. So I focused on that.

Because it’s so niche and because it was such an interest in it. I was a little bit surprised, I thought nobody would listen to the podcast, but yeah, since it was such an interest in it, that it resonated. And that was exciting for me.

That kept me going and interviewing more people and improving my audio skills.

And you know, I think it’s okay to start in a rough spot, and not without the best equipment and not exactly know what you’re doing. And kind of you got to figure it, you got to start somewhere.

I think it’s good now, like in retrospect, now since I’ve been doing it, and since podcasting has become more popular, there’s so much more information out there to dig into. So that’s good.

I mean, that’s super, super helpful for, you know, anybody that’s interested, they can watch a lot more videos and read a lot more articles than I could at the time.

Commercial: Okay, let’s take a break from that conversation. I wanted to bring up a question for you, during these crazy times, do you feel like your business is indestructible? Most people don’t?

And if not, the real question is why?

And what can you do to make it as indestructible as possible?

Well, that’s the basis of my new book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

Let me talk about what we discussed in the third chapter.

The third way for you to Amazon proof your business, which is be different.

In the third chapter, I go into, really, how do you put yourself out there and be seen as unique, where you really don’t even have competition. And there’s ways of doing this. In fact, I talk about two specific books that you should go out and get.

And these are difficult books to read.

These are fun books, books that will inspire you and give you creative juices necessary to be able to really stand out and be different, you don’t have to be wacky, you don’t have to be outrageous, but you do have to appear different. And if you can appear different from everyone else out there, not only will you not have the competition of amazon.com, you won’t have any competition.

But I also have eight other ways to Amazon proof your business, basically the idea of making it competition proof to even someone as big as Amazon.com.

So if you’d like to get your hands on a free copy of my book, go to AmazonProofBook.com sign up and you will get a free copy and get the chance to purchase a physical copy of it for a special price. And now let’s get back to our show.

And now let’s get back to our show.

Brian: How are most people finding No-Till Growers, is it via the podcast or YouTube or what?

Jesse: Ah, that’s a good question. I mean, we have the biggest following it’s probably on YouTube at about I think we’re just under 60,000 subscribers as we record this.

Instagram has been helpful.

Honestly like, so the name of the book is, The Living Soil Handbook. We almost went with living soil growers as the name of our website. But the reason that we didn’t, the reason that we stuck with the word No-Till is controversial, and it’s kind of confusing as it can be, is because it’s a great keyword.

So a lot of people find us because we chose that word. And we knew that we did it intentionally. We knew that it would come with some amount of pushback because not a lot of people don’t like that term, it rubs people the wrong way sometimes.

A lot of work to try and quell the sort of dogma that can be associated with No-Tillage.

The people who think it’s all or nothing or that any sort of disturbance is bad disturbance and any of those things we’ve or that, you know, you just stop tilling. And that’s the only way to do it like you there’s no transition period, you just have to put down the cloud and move on.

And we’ve tried to sort of temper that idea, that dogma.

So I think that’s helped in the eyes of people who’ve been reluctant to embrace No-Till, as in, we’ve done that intentionally as well to kind of invite them into the fold and invite them to learn into the information that they weren’t gleaning from the world, and that they’re welcome to.

And it also No-Till is often associated with like big farms, like people in grain country think of is No-Till is, is a heavy dose of glyphosate to kill, you know, grass or cover crops and then planted into that, and it’s not necessarily more ecological.

So yeah, I mean, we did have a little bit of an upward battle but that that wording was really important.

Brian: That’s a really great point you make. And it’s one of those that most people don’t spend the time to talk about how the titles of their books or podcasts or the things that they have out there, how their brand name is attracting attention, and just the fact that you understand the nuances of that, I think that’s really important. Really good stuff.

I got another question for you.

What do you like best, what would you say about your business and your industry?

Jesse: On the farming side, or on the No-Till Growers side?

Brian: Pick one.

Jesse: Well, I can probably do both.

I mean, what I like best about farming as an industry is that it’s very open to sharing. And people are very, at least for the moment pretty open to sharing their techniques and their tricks and what they’re doing. And that is, I think a little bit unique to farming, and I see it in cooking too.

But it’s very, you know, in like restaurants, professional restaurants and that sort of thing.

But there’s less of a proprietary feel to it, when people are very open to share what they’re doing. And I think that’s been really helpful to get young growers who need that information and need and maybe don’t have access to the education or didn’t grow up in agriculture, to have access to that information.

So that’s one thing that I really like about the farming side.

And that same thing exists obviously, that’s what fuels the media side, the No-Till Growers side. But what do I like most about that, and that I think that insures industry is interesting because it’s ever-evolving, you know, we were seeing numbers in YouTube views across the board on everybody’s channel going down because tic tock is starting to take a big share. And so there’s this sort of feel and need to kind of always be adapting to that.

In one way, nobody really loves change that much who’s in a business. But in another way, I think it offers up the potential for more creativity.

Because we aren’t staked in one revenue stream like we’re not depending on solely our YouTube profits to get by, that we can be a little bit more flexible. So that’s kind of what I like about the way where we’ve settled ourselves in that industry.

We’re also with that, and this is maybe not necessarily on topic. But we’re also looking at the idea of turning our media company, which is not something I guess I’m just now referring it to it as a media company for you. But that’s really what it is, is his media company, we do a bunch of different podcasts and all the things.

So what we’re looking at, though, is turning it into something that’s more of a cooperative model, and where maybe more of like an owner cooperative, where multiple people have a stake in it so that, you know, the contributors for instance, so that when they’re contributing, they have more incentive to share it, but also that everybody is invested in it a little bit more.

Everybody can earn a little bit more from it from that work. So yeah, we’re looking at more cooperative models for our media company, which I don’t know how many media companies are. There are like that.

But I think it could fit well with what we’re doing with the sort of for-profit business acting like a nonprofit.

Brian: That’s great. That’s really interesting.

I’m interested to see where you end up going with that. If you can change one thing about both the farm and the media company, what would it be?

Jesse: We’ll stay with the business side.

I need to be better with numbers and keeping up with our profitability. I think that I do an okay job, but I do it on the back of a napkin and it’s not like I need better systems for that. So that’s one thing that I would change personally about that side of things.

At large, something that I think the industry needs, is definitely to continue on that path away from dogmatic thinking and to be open to new ideas, and to be to trial things on small, small scale.

I also think that there needs to be like I mentioned earlier, the collaborative farming podcast.

I’d like to see an emphasis on people starting farms together, especially while the land is so expensive. While it’s really hard to access, seeing more people going on farms together and find more models and more systems for that to work.

On the media side, I think that I would like to see people getting creative about reducing paywalls and getting that information out there a little bit better.

I don’t think I see the value of a paywall, and I see the need to some of the products that are behind paywalls are so good, they’re really high quality and obviously, cost money. But figuring out ways to make that more accessible.

I’d like to see more of that, personally. Yeah.

Brian: Oh, that’s great.

If we were to talk about a year from now, let’s say we got back together, and we had you back on the podcast, and we were to look back over the last 12 months.

What would you say would have had to have happen for you to feel happy with your progress, both professionally and personally?

Jesse: Well, everything for me comes down to my family and my relationships.

This is something I’ve emphasized quite a bit in my own work, but just the value of your relationships with people around you is paramount.

I’ve said this on other podcasts, but I think it bears repeating that you know, there are several studies but the biggest study, the Harvard study did this, you know an 80-year study, and it’s still ongoing of Harvard, sophomores and they’ve incorporated all sorts of other people into the fold.

And they’ve been doing this really long study to figure out what people value at the end of life.

What it always comes down to is relationships.

And that to me is something that I’m that I always have in the back of my mind is the value of your relationships throughout your life, not just at the end of your life, but throughout your life, determine your health, at the end of your life, determine, you know, have determined how your happiness, your levels of depression, all of these things.

So that matters as much when you’re in middle age too, as it does at the end of your life.

So that’s what I’m always focusing on thinking about how do I how am I managing those things? With all the other things that I’m doing? Are those things getting managed?

Because at the end of the day, and at the end of life, that’s what really matters.

Brian: Oh, that’s great. That’s good stuff.

What are the obstacles standing in your way of being able to both keep and grow those relationships?

Jesse: I think work is tough. I mean, I think you get, especially because I’m doing full time farming and the media company that you It takes a lot of time. And it takes time out of places where you don’t necessarily have time.

And I’ve asked a lot of my wife over the last few years to get all this up and running, and especially writing the book. And she contributed actually to the book.

She’s a great artist, and she did the illustrations. But it’s a lot to ask.

We have two children and it’s a lot of the workforce with the kids has fallen on her especially while also while we’re building the farm where I’m out doing a lot of the farming stuff.

And we just moved to a new property what I said building the farm, we just moved to a new property last year.

So we moved in December. We still have a lot of infrastructure work to do and it’s put a lot of work on her shoulders.

So being conscious of that is, you know, extremely important to me.

Brian: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

This is The Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast.

So we look at the business side of very different type of businesses that are self reliance base. And so what from your perspective, would you have any advice for other business owners out there just blanket advice that we haven’t already covered?

Jesse: For this specific business, one thing I often recommend and one thing I regret about my own journey to having a sustainable business was that I didn’t spend enough time learning how to farm and I definitely didn’t spend any amount of time learning about the farm business.

I was really interested in the farm and then the homestead life style did not care enough about the business side. But also I didn’t spend enough time on enough farms like I didn’t learn enough techniques from in different styles and different growing methods.

And I think if I could do anything over again, about my journey here, it would be to probably spend another year or two working with another farm just a totally different farm from the farm that I apprenticed on because we basically went from the apprenticeship to our own farm.

And I kind of wish that we’d spent two years just working on somebody else’s farm somewhere in the region, right staying sort of where we want to grow because farming, you know, learning the weeds, learning the diseases, learning the pests, learning the climate, are all really important.

If you know where you want to end up, it’s good to go where you want to, you know, learn to grow where you want to end up.

And not that I didn’t have a great education but that diversity of education, I think would be really important and really valuable to me now.

Brian: Wow, that’s a very unique perspective. I haven’t heard that one before. That’s good.

What could listeners do who want to find out more about Rough Draft Farmstead or the No-Till Growers?

Jesse: Yeah, so NoTillGrowers.com is a great resource we you can find all of our podcasts and all of those things there.

You can obviously listen to those through your podcast apps but we you know, we have all the resources there for you to find individual podcasts that you may be interested in.

And then Rough Draft Farmstead, we do all the requisite social media and we’re on Instagram and we have a website we don’t update the website as much but we update our Instagram and those sorts of things.

Same with No-Till Growers you can find that on all the requisite social media as well. Try and keep it simple. Those are the easiest places to find us.

And then like I mentioned earlier, there’s the No-Till Growers YouTube channel if you just go to YouTube and look up No-Till Growers, you should find the videos that we put up weekly we put up a like I said. And twice a month we do the live show with hosted by Josh Satin. That’s every Tuesday at 8pm Eastern Standard Time.

Every other Tuesday rather and yeah, so those are the best places to find us I think.

Brian: Hey, Jesse Frost, thanks so much for being on, The Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast.

Jesse: Well, thank you so much for having me Brian, it’s been a blast.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: We first started going out and finding people to interview for Off-the-Grid Biz, close to three years ago. And in all that time, I’m always amazed by the different types of people we keep running into, and the types of interviews, and the directions that these interviews go.

And this one with Jesse was no different. It was no different from the fact that it was completely different from everything else we’ve ever done. And it was a lot of fun.

We got into a lot of different areas, and different concepts that you won’t hear on any of the previous episodes.

So a couple of these things that he brought up this idea of going against the concept of having a paywall, people needing to subscribe in order to get content.

Now, they are having ways to be able to make money but they’re not just holding all the content back, they’re trying to put as much of that content forward, which is a really neat way of looking at it.

But also he has built into his farming, business subscriptions, and other sorts of types of money-making activities that you wouldn’t normally see with that style of business.

So there’s so much ingenuity and so many different ways of thinking about the same issue that Jesse and his team are kidding here. It’s just really, really neat.

His conversation about how the No-Till concept, and how that term has been used through the years and misunderstood or misused and to the point to where just calling themselves the No-Till Growers for the podcast and so forth.

It paints them a certain way with some people, but on the same end, it gets them attention they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

So it starts that conversation even though it’s not necessarily the most perfect way to be able to start it. And that was a very interesting point of view that he had on that.

All in all, I love the conversation that we hit on with how to get a query letter to a publisher if you’re wanting a major publisher like Chelsea Green to be able to publish your books. That was really interesting.

We’ve never had anybody go into that type of depth into the process. So that’s one if you’re interested in that area, go back and listen to that.

Maybe even check out the transcription on our website at OffTheGridBiz.com.

I can’t wait to see how Jesse is doing in the future and where all this takes him no doubt in the next year or two. His business is going to look completely different than how it looks right now, if you just look at where he’s been up until now, so that’s going to be really exciting to see.

That’s BrianJPombo.com.

If you or someone you know would like to be a guest on The Off The Grid Biz Podcast, offthegridbiz.com/contact.

Those who appear on the show do not necessarily endorse my beliefs, suggestions, or advice or any of the services provided by our sponsor.

Our theme music is Cold Sun by Dell. Our executive producer and head researcher is Sean E Douglas.

I’m Brian Pombo and until next time, I wish you peace, freedom, and success.

Rick & Elara Bowman – Backyard Green Films: Part 2

Posted on October 24, 2019March 30, 2020 by brianjpombo@hotmail.com

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Episode 25.

This is “Part 2.” Be sure to listen to “Part 1” here: https://offthegridbiz.com/rick-elara-bowman-backyard-green-films-part-1

Do you use events (topic-based and trade shows) to grow your business and interact with customers? Is it worth the expense and time?

Rick Bowman is audio and video producer. Elara Bowman is a project manager and accountant. Together they have teamed up to travel country to record and promulgate the stories of incredible people and a monumental dilemma that everyone.

Here we continue the conversation we began on the last episode and dive deep into attending events and long-term goals.

Listen Now!

Find out more about Rick, Elara and Backyard Green Films: https://backyardgreenfilms.com/
Watch their videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnQm6NOFcMrvJQrv09Xzt6w

Find out the business events secrets for growing and strengthening ANY company: http://brianjpombo.com/secrets/

Full Transcript

Rick: First off, having the film out there is to me the biggest thing.

Elara: Yes, my big thing too.

Rick: Because I feel like that will open up our audience a little bit more towards maybe wanting to listen to our podcast as well going and maybe becoming more interested in heritage breeds and seeing some of our clips of interviews that we’ve put up on our YouTube channel. Hopefully what I’m thinking with the film is that it’ll be able to venture off and be able to make another film that continues the story of heritage breeds and of farmers.

Podcast Intro: If you’re someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family.

If you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing.

You may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman.

We are here to celebrate you whether you’re looking to improve your maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel.

From selling chicken eggs online, to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure, life off the grid.

Brian: Looking back on just what you’ve done up until now going to events like the Mother Earth News Fair, like the Heirloom Expo, would you recommend other people plug into the same type of events?

Elara: I think it’s very individual depending on the type of business they have. And here’s one of the problems that has occurred. I mean is anybody in business knows we are going through a fundamental shift in not only the way we do business, how we do business, how we finance, how we market, there’s a huge shift. And I would say businesses have to be really really agile in order to adapt quickly.

Because a lot of storefronts are going out of business because you know, people don’t come in the door anymore. You just order it online.

You know, you might have strategic partnerships between similar businesses are completely different businesses and you really have to stay up on that in order to be able to compete with people that can.

In a way, our experience has been very similar to the animals you have to adapt to survive, you have to and you won’t make it if you don’t.

But the ones that do have might have quite a bit to offer.

So we think that businesses now have to look at your model, look at at your market and then maybe it may or may not pencil on the momentary basis, but on the long run, it might bring more to you.

So you might be a business that’s a essential oil company. Do I need to go into a fair to show my product?

I would almost say you do because it’s a scent oriented thing.

And you will get people that need to do that experiential moment and smell and or maybe touch fabric product. You have to get it out there.

Either that are you going to ship it somewhere and have people rave about it.

And then you’re going to have to do this thing where you ship back and forth. So I think it really depends on the business model.

But I think you really, you have to be able to be agile to decide the short term goal and the long term goal and it is not a cheap thing to do to go to fairs and events and things like that.

But you have to be able to say, what will that add value to my company, my product, is it in your decision?

Rick: I think it’s good to go to the fairs whether that be the Mother Earth News Fair, the Heirloom Expo, the Weston A. Price convention, any of those because most of the people that are at the fair in the same boat we are at, they are looking for their core audience.

And so I think certain fares are that core audience for a few hundred bucks to rent a booth. It’s worth it because you’re going to have people coming by.

I will say from us on a filmmaking standpoint and a podcast standpoint, we had a lot of people stopping by asking what our podcast was about, us getting to discuss what our upcoming film was about.

And I take it from the approach of I don’t know if how many people out there are familiar with the film Endless Summer.

It was a documentary about two guys that filmmaker followed.

And they served the summer going. They traveled all around the world to keep surfing. I don’t know if you’re familiar with classic.

Brian: Yeah.

Rick: So Bruce Brown, who made that film, in a way did it is grassroots. He did the film. And then he took it to the audience. He rented theaters, and showed it for one night.

And that’s the way I kind of look at the documentary filmmaking and getting it to the audience that is going to be interested in this film.

Then when we’re done with that, we will probably try to do something similar where we take it out on the road, as well as hopefully did other distribution. But get it out there to bring it to our audience.

And instead of getting stuck in there with all the other films, the thousands of films and documentaries that come out every year, and people looking to flicks or somewhere streaming, I want to take it out there to them.

Elara: I would also say that, at least in my experience, it’s a networking experience as well.

So if you’re a business and you’re thinking about going to one of these fairs, I mean, we met so many people that are interested in same things we are and a good number of them have businesses, it’s not just the consumers going anymore.

It’s almost like a huge trade show in a way.

So used to be just homesteaders that would come to one of these or at the seed fair, maybe at the Heirloom Expo, it was just a seed people and people that want some, oh, I have an animal or two.

And to me, that’s a great value. That’s why we initially went the first place to, I think, is because we have chickens and but there’s a networking value because you’re meeting people with like ideals and with businesses that are in the similar vein.

You’re making connections in a way that you otherwise might not be able to make because there’s so much information out there on the internet and there’s so much visibility anybody can start an Instagram account.

Now, anybody can start a Facebook page. But the people that are actually willing to go to a fair and walk around and talk to people, that’s a very specific niche.

Brian: Absolutely. You brought up traveling so much. And I’m sure the two of you could probably write a book on travel tips, but could you give us some off the hand, logistics that perhaps someone could use if they’re going to be be traveling to events like this?

Elara: Events or interviews?

Brian: Either one, yeah.

Elara: It’s both for us.

Brian: Kind of time all together.

Rick: Like the person you’re traveling with?

Elara: Yes.

The first thing to do is to try it as far as I’m concerned, you have to yes, like the person you’re traveling with, and hope that your marriage is solid enough to cover being with them in a car for the next two weeks.

But I would say as much as you can put in a short period of time in terms of business, as you can, that’s a huge thing.

So for us, we went to the fair in Albany, we put a an interview on the day after we were at the fair we went to buy the wheat farm and book to the gal about the her Jacob Sheeps fantastic, great experience.

It’s a little exhausting because you do two days of a fair, you do a day of a setup beforehand day, the fair.

Second day, the fair and then an interview on the third day, the fair you get there on Friday night and you set up for the fair. We have a little teardrop trailer, which is where we could have sold that thing 50 times over at the fair cuz it’s a very cute little teardrop travel trailer. Little retro one.

But you know, you set that up, you put your booth together and it takes a couple hours with that.

Preparation is really really important before you get there.

So when you do come in on Friday night, you can just go boom, boom, boom and set it up. And then you two days of the fair and then Sunday night you break it down, same kind of thing.

Put it away, make sure your stuff is together, make sure you’re not leaving anything and then get up and go again.

So as many things as you can put into one trip, you’re much better off in terms of your cost savings,

Rick: We decided that we would drive up to Albany for the Mother Earth News Fair because in our booth, we do like to have our travel trailer there the little teardrop trailer as part of the display. Because for the most part, we do drive to a lot of the interviews.

But if it is something that’s on the East Coast, or Canada, and it might be a little too far for us to drive, we have flown and when we do go somewhere like Elara touched on, I would say the biggest point is trying to maximize your trip as much as possible.

As far as for us, it’s getting as many interviews that we can film and record while we’re there. And in the short amount of time.

Elara: Yeah, so that would be the first thing is logistics. So I guess to consolidate my long and involved get your logistics down upfront.

Rick does most of our printing reproduction, he gets the booth booth items ready before he goes and he starts a month out. So that would be the first thing I would do make sure that you’re planning logistics are taking care of advertising marketing calls. For us, we have to do production, we start what two months out with that?

Rick: Lots of times at least a month to two months to get prepped for the interviews.

And when we are traveling to a trade show, again, we try to just not be going to the trade show. So we set up those appointments, whether we’re driving or flying in. And we usually try to do one or two interviews before a fair and probably filling it and do another interview or two after the fair before we travel back, plus whatever interviews or talking points that we’re trying to do while we’re at the fair.

Elara: So we did two on Thursday, we did like to think we left on Tuesday it was….drove up?

Rick: Yes.

Elara: We did two interviews on Thursday in Southern Oergan. Our actually one on Thursday when I forgot, anyway.

We did two up there a Thursday and Friday. We set up the booth on Friday night did the show on Saturday, Sunday did another interview on a Monday and then we flew out to Seattle on Tuesday and we had a friend drive our trailer back down.

So in addition to forward thinking, logistics and prior planning, planning is going to save a lot of money.

So make sure all your printing is done at home, make sure your graphics are done at home, make sure anything you have to give away in the booth is done ahead of time.

So you don’t have to make 52 runs to Staples.

Rick: Not that I’m trying to promote but, Southwest has been pretty good for the fact that when I do or when we do have to fly since two bags fly for free. That helps a lot when I’m carrying equipment not having to pay extra to check in, some of my equipment bags.

Elara: He’s got a big Pelican kit and a drone case and you know, then we have to have the it’s any gear you have it really really saves otherwise it’s what $75 a bag?

Rick: It’s about $50 per bag.

Elara: Yeah each way.

So I would definitely say, as much of that type of thing as you can do, you wouldn’t think it would cost that much. But, you know, if we took a flight every month last year and took an extra bag and went two ways, that’s $150 per round trip. So things like that is really, really helpful to think ahead

Rick: And look for airfare sales.

Elara: Yeah.

The next thing I would say is if you’re going to stay in hotels and things like that start a month or two out because they get really get expensive as you go forward. You know, you can save sometimes $100 a night by going two months out. And some of them will let you cancel closer to the start the start date.

So I would definitely say you have something like Southwest that’ll let you swap your tickets.

If you have something like refundable hotels, start way in advance and that way at least you’ve got the option. Find out if there’s people that are going to the same places that you go again, this networking at the fair thing is a great thing, we had a friend that was taking a wanted to take a trip from Seattle and drive down the coast.

So we went one way in the truck in the trailer, and he went the other. So that saved us, and allow me to get back to work two days earlier.

So use your resource pools as much as you can. And that includes things like if you feel comfortable sharing a hotel room, you just cut your cost in half. So that kind of things really important.

Brian: Fabulous. Those are all great tips.

So we talked a little bit about the events. We spoke briefly about your podcast about social media, you guys do a fair amount on social media.

Where else do you find new audiences that are there any other mediums or is it mainly a one on one thing?

Elara: The grocery store, (laughs), no, we’re not really shy people in general.

And like I said, we find life is an interesting place. So it’s not like I run down and attack people but you know, just keep your eyes open because you never know who you’re going to meet.

People are just fascinating when you start to talk to them, they’ve got such, like I said, 400 something years worth of stories we could do, because people are just interesting.

You never know who might say, oh, I’ve always wanted to know about that. And you have a business card.

Rick has been really good about that. He has business cards for our podcasts, and for our film company, and we just hand them out and say, yeah, follow us. You can’t be shy about saying that.

Rick: Yeah, I would say as you mentioned, Brian, we do have our social media accounts that we promote the film, our filmmaking and the podcasting and those ventures.

A lot of it’s word of mouth, but also being on a show like yours, that’s going to reach another wider audience for us. Just trying to get out there more and more in that avenue, whether it be another podcast, whether it be an article in a magazine.

Elara: It’s not like it used to be I don’t think it is where it, you know, it just used to be something that was very narrow in terms of your field. If you have a fitness club, you’re only going to have people that are into fitness that listen to you.

But that’s not true.

You know, you might have everybody be interested in fitness because everybody wants to stay in shape.

So in one way, shape or form, almost everybody is going to be interested in your fitness club. The same thing follows with something like this. This is food that we’re talking about. It’s also animals, its farming, its life, its culture, its people, its society.

You know, all of these things reflect who we are. And this happens to be a topic that everybody can relate to, if they eat, everybody can relate to, if they you know, if they came from other countries, you know, think about the demographic diversity that’s represented in a cow that comes from Spain.

That’s now American, the most American animal that many people think is an American Mustang. Well, that’s a Spanish horse.

That’s a mix of many different things.

So our relatable audience is extremely broad, but you have to be willing to find the things that relate in almost every single person. And it’s not this thing where it’s very, very, very narrow. So they’re finding that cross promotion among businesses is really important now, in ways that it did not used to be, you can find different areas that would not seem to relate previously, but are very definitely connected.

At the time I’m recording this, we have learned so much about how to take advantage of events and I want you to be able to use this information in your own business.

Go to BrianJPombo.com/secrets.

We are going to be putting out helpful materials on how you can use events to grow your business.

When you go to this page, you will either see our latest programs or if you make it there early enough, you will see an email address, capture page, put in your email address and we will be sure and update you. As soon as we get these out there, you’re not going to want to miss this.

If you get in early enough, you can get a special deal. These are principles that never go away. These programs will be based on the experience of people who have written books, spoken at the events or exhibited.

They’re talking about how to use events, books, and speaking all to build your business.

That’s BrianJPombo.com/secrets.

BrianJPombo.com/secrets and now back to the conversation.

Brian: Makes a lot of sense. So if we were to talk again, let’s say a year from now, we had you back on the podcast, what would have had to have happened over the last 12 months for you to feel happy with your progress concerning your organization?

Elara: Again, you’re asking a marital question.

Rick: First off, having the film out there is to me, the biggest thing,

Elara: Yes, my big thing too.

Rick: Because I feel like that will open up our audience a little bit more towards maybe wanting to listen to our podcast as well, going in maybe becoming more interested in heritage breeds and seeing some of our clips of interviews that we’ve put up on our YouTube channel.

And hopefully what I’m thinking with the film is that it’ll be able to venture off and be able to make another film that is continues the story of heritage breeds and of farmers in that vein, and that’s that’s to me what I hope to be coming back to you 12 months to tell you.

Elara: I think that my opinion was to be to get the film in the can and get it distributed.

I hope it comes together like we had hoped it would. My hope is also to, I gotta be honest, I really want to launch a series on this, I really would like to do it.

We have video footage, we have audio footage, we were not scared to talk to people. So we have all this great information. And the American farmer is in crisis right now.

So I would love to be able to get a wider audience and do segments of this that are not necessarily going to make it into the film where we talk about farming, we talk about food, we talk about people, we talk about diversity, we’re all kind of an amalgam of different cultures and different aspects.

And that I think there’s a broader picture right now in this country that’s being discussed about diversity.

I think the animals are a piece of it that really, really illustrates beautifully the strengths that can be brought to the fore by saying, Hey, what do each one of our individual strengths have to bring to us as a whole?

As a culture, my personal preference would be able to have something out there that does a series on this that talks about the different strengths of these animals, and why we’d have a stronger agricultural production system because of it. And why the people that farm it are stronger because of it.

For the average farmer. They’re just feisty, gritty people. They are wonderful people that they have backbones, and they are not scared of hard work.

I find it fascinating, the process by which they got there. And so it’s kind of a mirror of our animals and our migration. So I would say that and then my third thing, I love the podcast, I hope the podcast is successful.

Rick: 25.

So we’ve put out how many episodes now honey?

Elara: 25. So in a year, we hopefully would have how many more in the can we put them up every week.

52 (laughs), So yeah, I hope in a year we’d also have another 75 in the library.

Brian: So what are the obstacles standing in your way of getting all those things?

Rick: Well, besides finishing the film, and that’s not an obstacle, I mean, that’s just us getting the editing done, which we’re in post production on it right now.

I would say the obstacle is like with any artist or going back to farmer, being able to get your product out there, but get it to the people to the biggest obstacle is finding the audience.

Elara: Yeah, I think for me, just to get personal, that one of the big obstacles for me is maintaining the energy and the passion that you feel.

It’s, you know, it’s the same, but you’re in a business podcast. That’s one of the big difficulties with business as well. Maintaining the energy that you feel the excitement that you feel when you know something can be really, really great and Yet you have to deal with the everyday grind the everyday, you know, things that come up in business, the challenges.

So for instance, I love traveling with my husband.

I have a friend that laughed at us say, how can you stand being in a car with him for eight hours?

What is there to talk about?

And you know, sometimes we go across the country, and we don’t even turn on the radio because we’re busy looking at things and looking up things and talking and but sometimes when you travel, when you start to travel quite a bit, you get tired. I mean, it’s an exhausting thing.

People that have trade shows deal with the same kind of thing. So one of the big challenges for me is maintaining that excitement that I get every time I learned something new.

And every time I look at the film, and Rick has put together a trailer for me, he’s got two of them he’s we’ve got one for the film that’s a little more serious one.

And then he’s got one that he mixed for me that’s sort of like a I think it was at the time when when the little Lord of the Rings was coming out or something I said, make me an exciting trailer.

It’s got the globe spinning. And it just it’s just kind of a fun one that he put together. And every time I watch that, I just could jump. I’m so happy, I just get that excitement back.

So finding that way to maintain that excitement is it has not been a difficult thing. But I can see 20 years from now you still want to get that urge to jump. But when you find a concept that’s exciting. I hope we maintain that I think we have so far.

Brian: What question Did I not ask that you’d like to answer?

Rick: I know Elara has a lot to talk about.

Elara: Oh, I always do this not never a problem for me.

Okay, well, so, I would like to ask you do a business podcast, correct?

Brian: Yes.

Elara: So if you had to describe your podcast, how would you describe it?

Brian: Our podcast is mainly for business owners and executives and the self reliance field meaning that they have products, services, or a story behind them that promote self reliance and others. And our conversations are all to promote both business owners, people that run organizations and experts in the field of self reliance to help encourage, give practical tips and so forth all regarding business.

Elara: Okay, so that fits beautifully with the topics that we’ve been discussing over the last three years that people that we’ve been interviewing. We’ve been to the far east of the United States.

We’ve been to the west, we’ve been to the north and the south. We’ve been to British Columbia Islands in salt spring Island. We have been to the middle of the country. We’ve been to all spots.

We talked to scientists, we’ve talked to farmers, we talked to marketing people, your podcast has people that are dealing with the same issues.

I think it’s really important for everybody that’s listening to know that they are not alone.

That business and self reliance is a new frontier. Farming is an old frontier, but it is might as well be new. You know, I mean, there are so many changes.

There’s people doing farming with drones. Now there are people farming with satellites, now. It’s a whole different world. And I’m sure it gets extremely frustrating to some people to say, How do I keep up?

But I think that I would want to say that I hope they know they’re not alone. Everybody’s going through this. And that’s the one thing that we’ve learned from all the people we’ve spoken with.

They are not alone. And so in that they are part of a group. They’re there together, they’re greater than the sum of their parts.

Rick: This doesn’t pertain so much to our business.

But I would say with most of the people we’ve interviewed for them social media has been a big thing, because it has been able to I know a lot of people, not social media, but in the realm of farmers, and people that are way out in areas where there’s not a lot of population.

It has brought them closer together, and they are able to connect with people that are doing some of the similar things that they’re doing on their farm. And they get to ask them questions.

Hey, have you ever ran into this when you’ve been raising Jacob sheep, it’s a resource, it’s become a resource.

So I don’t know if this is out of left field. Maybe it is a little bit but I would say that I would like to bring up that not all social media is negative. It gets a lot of negative press.

But it can be a great, helpful communication tool and resource for people and most of the farmers that we’ve gone out there and interviewed love that fact because it allows them to stay connected to people doing the similar thing, that they are doing.

Elara: That’s one thing that Rick is really taught me that some of these things are necessary whether you’re comfortable with them or not, whether you say, Well, I was never on social media, any kind of social media, and now I am on the podcast is the host and I have pictures of myself on our Instagram accounts, our Facebook and all of that kind of thing.

But I think that in today’s age, it is absolutely necessary to have a social media presence.

And if you’re not comfortable doing it yourself, see if you can get help doing it. It’s like anything else.

You don’t necessarily feel comfortable doing your whole tax return yourself. So you find a CPA, that’ll do it. It’s the same thing with social media. We have a great gal that does a lot of posting for us.

And Rick does a lot of posting for us, but our social media gal helps us in this. It’s a resource.

It’s really, really important. And frankly, you know, Rick is got about four hats he’s wearing and I’ve got about four Hats I’m wearing and we’re doing travel planning and logistics and scheduling and interviewing and research all of this, you can’t do everything.

If you can get help, and you can swing it, put it in the budget as a line item, because it’s really, really important in today’s market to have a social media presence, and it can be helpful.

It really, really can be a good resource.

Brian: Wow, those are really great points. Really appreciate the time you guys have spent with us.

What could a listener do?

Who’s interested in finding out more about backyard green films about the agriculture podcast and everything else that you guys are doing? Where would you direct them?

Rick: Well, I would direct them to our website, backyardgreenfilms.com on there. It has a link to our agriculture podcast has the trailer up there for our upcoming film tells us a little bit about what Elara and I are doing.

I would also tell people if they want to see some of our video clips little pieces that we’ve put together to go to our YouTube channel, which is also Backyard Green Films. And those are the two biggest places that you can find us. And then of course on Instagram, and Facebook, we’re there under Backyard Green Films as well.

Elara: Yeah, if you’d like to see pictures, it’s really nice. Because podcasting has become a big focus for us, as we talked about the heritage breed animals and yet these animals are really really different looking sometimes that the YouTube channel is kind of a neat thing because because Rick’s put some of our more interesting animals up there and you can see them visually.

You look at a Jacob sheep, for example, it looks like something off of the San Diego Wild Animal Park the planes out there. It’s got four horns and spots. It’s crazy looking animal. But it’s really neat.

We’ve lost that ability to look at some of these things and say, Wow, that’s a different looking animal. So yeah, I would send people to the YouTube channel for some, some visuals because some of these animals are just really interesting looking at.

Brian: Well that’s fabulous. Thank you so much. This has been an absolute delight and so much depth into what you’re talking about. We’ll definitely have you guys come back again, and be able to delve in a little deeper on some of these subjects because there’s so much meat there on the bone.

Rick and Elara Bowman thanks so much for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Rick and Elara: Brian, thank you for having us. And I’m really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Okay, so that was part of our two part series, all about Backyard Green Films. Second part, they’re dealing a lot with the fundamental shift in the ways that we’re doing business now as opposed to the old days.

I think that’s really great stuff.

I fact that you really have to be flexible and agile for success, and be willing to move where you need to move to do what you need to do. I mean, their life is a perfect example of that.

In this part of the conversation, they’ve spent more time talking about going to expos going to events.

What are your short term goals?

So a lot of their short term goals are meeting people and having conversations that they can add on to their projects, but also their long term goals, the relationships they’re looking to make over the long term.

Rick’s point, again, is on finding that core audience, really finding the people that are going to fit most with the material that he’s coming out with. Also, they’re bringing up that practical end of really keeping things organized, having really forward thinking logistics, and planning things out as best as possible. You keep from getting caught into a trap, either financially or otherwise.

And that’s really important that they mentioned how Southwest Airlines has been really helpful for traveling with their equipment that type of practical advice and ways of thinking about how to get from one place to another is really important.

Another thing they brought up is the concept of maintaining your energy for your business and keeping the passion going for what you’re doing that’s very, very important of watching out for those things that are going to drain you of your time and your energy, great points about networking.

Rick talking about social media was really important and how it’s this communication tool. And this ability to network with others that allow the small guys to be able to do things that the big guys can’t do.

That’s a very common theme that we found with a lot of the people that we talked to from the other news fairs, is finding a way to go beyond where the big guys are going. I think that type of positive attitude is the reason why have been so successful and while they’ll continue to be successful, and finally, I love when

They mentioned about getting the help you need to get your business to function in the areas that you just don’t want to do or you’re not good at. That’s so important.

And something that gets ignored so often or put off for too long is the necessity of delegating your weaknesses. It doesn’t mean hiring somebody necessarily. It doesn’t necessarily mean having somebody that’s an employee, it could be paying someone to do something short term sometimes it can be bartering, service for service or product or service or what have you.

These are all really important points and so many other great things that they brought up during this whole conversation. Like I said, this was part two, be sure and listen to part one.

Outro: Join us again on the next Off The Grid Biz Podcast brought to you by the team at BrianJPombo.com, helping successful but overworked entrepreneurs, transform their companies into dream assets.

That’s BrianJPombo.com.

If you or someone you know would like to be a guest on The Off The Grid Biz Podcast, offthegridbiz.com/contact. Those who appear on the show do not necessarily endorse my beliefs, suggestions, or advice or any of the services provided by our sponsor.

Our theme music is Cold Sun by Dell. Our executive producer and head researcher is Sean E Douglas.

I’m Brian Pombo and until next time, I wish you peace, freedom, and success.

Rick & Elara Bowman – Backyard Green Films: Part 1

Posted on October 24, 2019March 30, 2020 by brianjpombo@hotmail.com

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Episode 24.

How do you define happiness? Is it a dollar amount? Is your “cause” bigger than your “bottom line?

Rick and Elara Bowman have diverse backgrounds, but have uncovered a common passion for telling stories through modern media. Filmmaking, podcasting and social media have allowed them to explore issues and topics that engage them personally. They interview people “who love farming, science, ranching, getting their hands dirty – or are just plain interesting.”

They have been traveling the country in their teardrop trailer, while grabbing footage, researching and now editing their upcoming film, “The Holstein Dilemma: Heritage Breeds and the Need for Biodiversity. “

What does it take to create a documentary from scratch, self-fund it on a budget, (while still keeping your day-job) AND cover an incredible worldwide puzzle that very few people even know exists?

Listen Now!

This is “Part 1.” When done listening to this, check out “Part 2” here: https://offthegridbiz.com/rick-elara-bowman-backyard-green-films-part-2

Find out more about Rick, Elara and Backyard Green Films: https://backyardgreenfilms.com/
Watch their videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnQm6NOFcMrvJQrv09Xzt6w

Find out the business events secrets for growing and strengthening ANY company: http://brianjpombo.com/secrets/

Full Transcripts

Elara: Life is a trade off.

Do you work more for the things that make you happy? Or do you take a little less and be happy just through the things that you are not buying but your producing?

Podcast Intro: If you’re someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family. If you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing.

You may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman.
We are here to celebrate you whether you’re looking to improve your maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel.

From selling chicken eggs online, to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.

This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure, life off the grid.

Brian: An experienced and innovative filmmaker, Backyard Green Films owner and Director Producer Rick Bowman has cataloged over 25 years of broadcast commercial and corporate video experience.

Rick combines skillful expertise and artistic vision to create top quality projects for clients, and has learned by experience that each project requires a special approach and solution to meet its goals.

Backyard Green Films received an indie fest award in 2012 for their documentary Hillsville 1912, A shooting in the court. As well as winning Best Documentary award at the minefield Film Festival in Los Angeles for their film, Banjos, Bluegrass and Squirrel Barker’s.

Currently, they’re in post production on their latest film The Holstein Dilemma, heritage breeds and the need for biodiversity.

A farmer at heart, Elara lives on a mini farm with her husband Rick in an Urban Oasis located in the middle of San Diego where she tends to 8 chickens, to worm bins and fruit trees galore.

She transferred this passion and life experience to backyard green films, where she is helping to produce innovative films and media for future generations. Armed with a BS in business from University of Redlands, and an impressive resume and voiceover production, project management and accounting.

Elara brings a wealth of knowledge to the production team. In her role as executive producer, she could be found diving deep into the data stream rabbit hole at late and early hours researching endless questions, new topics and new people to interview in her role as the host of the agri-Culture podcast.

Rick and Elara travel around the country in their teardrop trailer nicknamed Maggie finding interesting people to talk to and new things to see. They actually enjoy being in the car together for hours on end and put together they have clocked at least 150,000 miles in almost all 50 states.

Rick has one more to go. Rick and Elara Bowman, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Rick & Elara: Brian, thank you. We’re glad to be here. Thank you so much.

Brian: So besides what we heard in your bio is tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Elara: Where do we start with that?

Rick: I don’t know. I’ll let you go first. How’s that?

Elara: Okay, I am a currently a bookkeeper and tax preparer at a small CPA firm in San Diego, California. And that’s my, I guess my first job you would say, or my second or my third I don’t know where how are we planning those these days, babe?

Rick: Well, I don’t know if we stay on the road a fair amount of the time. And my background is in audio originally, and then I moved over into filmmaking a few years ago. With that first film, you mentioned Hillsville 1912, A Shooting In The Court.

Which started out just as a passion project for me and as time went on Elara, and I founded Backyard Green Films.

From that, we made a couple other documentaries. And now we’re working on a project that started as a Elaras passion project, but it has become mine as well.

We found out a few years ago at a Mother Earth News Fair in Albany, Oregon, about heritage breed animals. And we dove down that rabbit hole. And we’ve been going around the last about three years interviewing farmers and scientists and people that raise these breeds and know about these breeds.

That’s how the film started. And from that we started the agri-Cultural podcast a few months ago.

Elara: But we are people that find a great number of things interesting and multiple fields. And so we keep finding things that we don’t know if other people know about and we would like to share them.

So we’ve been running around the country for three years on this particular documentary. We probably have a good what 450 years of material that we’d like to cover.

Rick: Yeah, there’s an endless amount of material out there, that’s for sure.

Brian: It’s awesome that you’ve adapted such a really cool skill as creating documentary films that you can plug in whatever you want into that media source. So that’s really neat to be able to see and how did you go into that?

You said you were originally with coming at it from an audio perspective. So what led you into filmmaking?

Rick: Well, I always had an interest but you were correct to go back, I came in at from an audio perspective. I had been in the Navy, and when I got out of the Navy, I was stationed up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I went to school up there for audio recording.

And originally my passion was to go in and work in a recording studio working with bands and that kind of fell through but I did stay with audio working with them. I got a job at an audio and video production company here in San Diego, not long after I graduated from school.

That opened my eyes up to the visual aspect of it. While I worked there as an audio recording engineer and I started noodling around with doing little videos on my own, and 25 years later, that’s what I’m trying to do now, we’ve been making documentary films, and this is our fourth film that we’re working on now.

Elara: Teeny bit more equipment than when you first started, isn’t it?

Rick: That’s true. That’s true.

Elara: He’s a music buff and a film buff. So when you are into things in those realms, there are a great number of topics that come up. So he definitely has, you’ve expanded your repertoire and your interest level, but most of them are around film and what film can bring to popular culture and how they can open new worlds for people. I think, at least I’ve found you’re very interested in that.

Rick: Yes, and I think Elara touched on it earlier. We just we both find life interesting and stories interesting tonight, on the film that we’re working on right now. One of the big things to me, besides learning about the heritage breed animals is the personal stories. People are phenomenal.

Elara: That’s kind of how Rick got started. And I have I don’t know if I’ve been carried along or I drag you into new topics?

Rick: I kind of grabbed her by the hand and say, come on, let’s do this.

Elara: We both like to travel though. And so we keep finding new things that we would like to discuss with people. But I do, like I said, bookkeeping and tax prep, but my father was a doctor that was really by nature, a farmer or a rancher.

I think genetically I love to go tromping around fields of cattle and manure, growing things and dirt. And so it’s this film is definitely seem to be a natural progression toward that. And I really love research.

I don’t know if that’s the tax and the accounting thing. I’m a detailed girl so I can get lost for hours and hours, just finding interesting things, topics that I find interesting.

Brian: That’s really Great, that’s very, very cool. There are so many levels to what you guys do. I’m trying to figure out where to go first here.

And what I want to do is kind of start out at the beginning of my journey and finding you so I got to meet you at the Mother Earth News Fair that just happened over in Albany, Oregon for 2019.

You guys had a booth set up there. How did that all set up?

Rick: We’ll I’ll jump in on this Mother Earth News Fair contacted us we had gone the last two years to the Mother Earth News Fair. We had a booth last year at the Albany Fair, and then also at the Mother Earth News Fair in Kansas. And they reached out to us this year and asked us if we would like to come back and be a media partner with them.

And we said yes, and in doing that we set up a booth with them again. Plus, we were going around and filming some little short interviews for Mother Earth News Fair to put up on our YouTube channel and kind of give people out in the digital realm that don’t make it, and the internet world that don’t make it to the Mother Earth News Fair, kind of give them a inside peek of what the fairs are about.

Elara: As you know, they’re great number of different types of people that come to the fairs.

We met there. And so to us, it was a great thing to help to introduce new people to the topic, but also so many of the different aspects that are incorporated in farming come sort of come to the middle there homesteading and farming.

That was a natural, natural meeting place for us.

Is there one main goal that you were hoping to achieve by having a booth there or multiple goals that you’re hoping to get to just as far as your organization is concerned?

Well, it’s again, it’s been a progression for us. It’s kind of interesting.

We definitely would love to get more people aware of the topics. See in in filmmaking, it’s not always going to be something unless you do Spider Man two or three or a big sequel. You know, your funding is not there like it is with other things.

One of the things that we’ve been doing is we’ve been doing podcasting, and we’ve been doing segments, and we would, you know, we’re thinking, Oh, hey, you know, getting people aware of this. Is one of the ways that you can monetize your projects.

So it’s sort of a labor of love in many ways. We really feel it’s important for people to learn about these topics. And so we have been over the last couple of years, finding ways that we can maybe find a way to make this thing cost effective to where we could keep doing it.

Again, this is one of those things that many of the people that come to fairs like this or that do podcasting. They say you we don’t have to make a fortune, but we just have to be able to fund it so we can keep doing it.

And so we thought, you know what, let’s go to the Mother Earth News Fairs. Let’s go to, we’ve been to Santa Rosa and the Heirloom Expo. We’ve been to a couple of these different events and we found that people are really really interested in the topic, but they don’t find out about unless you get the news out. So that’s one of the big purposes that we’ve been doing is trying to raise awareness.

And if I may add, Brian, to answer your question a little further is, we felt like the Mother Earth News Fair and the Heirloom Festival would be reaching our audience that would be interested in our documentary and our podcast.

And we felt like those would be the people coming in and might be interested in seeing the film hearing a podcast. That would be a good grassroots way to get the word out.

Brian: If you had to describe that ideal person, your ideal audience or eventual customer who that person be?

Rick: Boy that’s kind of throwing a dart because going around the United States and up to Canada, the last three years, we have met so many people that come from all different backgrounds that are farmers.

Elara: But also don’t you think it’s something that not everybody knows about because everybody has such label shock. They’ve got label fatigue, the consumer, the average consumer knows about organic and free range and pasture based and, you know, natural, although these labels, they get put on food, but they don’t have any idea of all of the rest of the variables that go into the mix.

So, you know, people don’t really understand that it takes different resource requirements for different foods, it takes different resource requirements to raise animals in different ways.

And it’s not all going to be a label related thing. And since small farmers are having such a really hard time now, and a lot of them are getting to retirement age, I think the average farmer still what 58.

So, yeah, so it’s really important for people to understand the components that go into their food.

It’s kind of been something where this applies to everybody. And we may start out with a target thing, but for instance, at the last Mother Earth News Fair, we met as many people as we wanted to interview as we did that we wanted to tell about our podcast.

So for us it is, the sky’s the limit with the people that we want to talk to and that we want to learn from. And it’s all avenues, all walks of life because we all eat, and we all consume so it probably doesn’t answer your question what your target audiences.

But I think I would have to say if I had to pin it down, people are interested in where their food comes from more and more these days. So I would say that would be our target audience, people that are, that want to know how this animal is raised?

Or where it came from?

Or where their vegetables are grown out?

And so I would say that would probably be the closest thing I could say to our target audience.

Brian: Absolutely.

Commercial Break: Okay, we’re going to pause the conversation right there. What you’re listening to right now is a special edition podcast. These episodes all have to do with the Mother Earth News Fair in Albany, Oregon of 2019 at the time I’m recording this, we have learned so much about how to take advantage of events and I want you to be able to use this information in your own business. Go to BrianJPombo.com/secrets.

Brian: And going off of that point, you know, we’ve been talking around it a little bit, but why don’t you tell us a little bit more about what the concept is of heritage breeds and biodiversity and what the topic that you guys are going into with the Holstein Dilemma?

Elara: Well, there are many, many breeds out there that are not utilized commonly in agriculture. We’re not saying that one breed is better than the other, but most people don’t know that.

Our agriculture has become very much a monoculture. You know, if you have a beef cow, it’s probably an Angus, if you have a dairy cows at 85% of them are Holstein. If you have a meat chicken, it’s a Cornish cross.

And most people don’t know that our production has become really, really narrow in terms of the animals that we use.

So heritage breed animals are for the most part breeds, that a lot of them have history to them. A lot of them have, you know, thousands of years of history that are a part of what has gone into making these animals.

A lot of them are have different characteristics than the average agricultural animals. So they might have pest resistance that’s been developed over time in a certain place.

For instance, the Texas Longhorn is an animal that is sort of an amalgamation of different influences.

But it came over from the Spanish I believe, did not, yes, the Spanish cattle, so they came to Florida, and then they dispersed from there some went, they were doing beef production and Hispaniola big economic influence of the time.

But then because there were no fences a lot of these animals either get loose or they’re taking place to place and they adapt over time to the conditions of the location. So as you can imagine, the Longhorn would be very different when it arrived as a type of Spanish cow a certain type of breed with certain characteristics.

When it gets to Florida, either the strong ones make it or don’t, from the ones that have a heat tolerance or pest resistance that got past the size of Volkswagen bugs in Florida. So as that cow moves to a different location like Texas that’s very dry and has brush and sagebrush and has different maybe different tix and different different things that impact its ability to survive. It evolves.

When you put a couple hundred years into this….couple hundred years later, you have a very different cow in Florida than you would have in Texas.

And they look different and they react different.

They have different heat tolerances, they have different food requirements, and different productions.

This is something that we are starting to lose because now we are expecting animals to do the same thing or to produce at a very high level, but they’re only going to produce under certain conditions for the most part.

Or they’re going to maximize production under certain conditions. So our heritage breed animals are not necessarily ones that are used in the main production lines that we use now. But they have characteristics that are developed in certain places in certain locations that are really helpful to us.

And so if they want to be able to use the heat tolerance of a Longhorn, they have to have a Longhorn that will allow for that it has to still exist. If we don’t have an economic viability component to them, we’re not going to have Longhorns in 100 years because all we’ll have is a Holstein or an Angus.

Anyway, this applies to all the different if it’s a chicken or cow or pig. There are animals that had developed over thousands of years that are going extinct because they’re not commonly used in production.

Rick: Just to add to that, I don’t think a lot of people realize that even just are the world 8,000 livestock breeds that we have out there 21% of that are in danger of extinction. And every time we lose one of those animals gone, and we’ve lost that biodiversity, the best I could sum it up is maybe, like what’s happening right now.

In the Amazon, you know, they say that is the lungs of the world. And if it’s burning up, are we going to be able to breed there might be something one of these animals can contribute, that we don’t know right now that we might need in the future.

Elara: Yeah, it’s in our self interest to keep these things alive. Because we’re in such a rapidly changing climate and economic climate as well, that you never know, you can’t really predict which kind of components are going to be necessary in the future.

But you do know that if you at least save the pieces, you have the ability to put them together in a different way in the future.

If you put them all on the same cake, then you only have the same kind of cake from here out. I think many people don’t know that many parts of our history are really closely tied with agriculture.

If you think about the milking Devon. That’s a really interesting cow. It came over in gosh, one of the farmers we interviewed, his family came over and brought the Devon’s over 1630 I think?

Rick: 1635.

Elara: 1635 little red cow it’s a good milker good for it’s a good oxen. Animal pulls a plow a really good clip, try purpose or quad purpose animal actually, milk, beef, oxen and gosh, what’s the other one? I forget.

There’s another component there besides the fertilizer that they produce. But there’s only 1,200 of them, I think left overall.

Rick: And they came over from Devon, England. And there’s no more milking Devon’s in England.

Elara: They’re gone.

Rick: They’re gone. Now, they’re called the American milking Devon because they don’t have them anymore over there. And there’s only about 12 or 1,300 here in North America.

Elara: But why would you have a Devin when you can have a Holstein that produces, you know, two or three, four times the milk and that’s the problem that’s occurred is, that the other animals are just not having an economically viable path for the future.

Rick: And from what I heard to in our studies our research, a lot of these animals fell out of favor after World War Two. And understandably, we have to feed the planet.

But what we’re trying to say, and we’re not trying to say we don’t need large ag, we do to feed the world.

But we don’t want to give up on these animals as well, because we need the biodiversity. They are important too.

And so for small farmer, they are great.

They got a lot to offer.

Brian: It’s such a very interesting topic, and then you could take it in so many different ways. I’m sure the editing process is going to be difficult with all the interviews and so forth that you guys have gone through.

I can only imagine you could probably make five movies out of the same topic.

Elara: Yes, we have. You’re hitting a marital topic here.

We keep finding things that we think are fascinating and I keep saying honey, honey were imposed, that means we’re supposed to start cutting now.

Rick: If you’re not careful, you end up with a four hour movie, which I don’t think most people want to sit down and watch 4 hour movies. But, as you yourself know, editing is an important process.

Brian: Yes, that’s right. And taking it back knowing kind of the background of this topic, knowing your customer and everything, and you were discussing monetizing the whole project.

I saw that you sell DVDs. Is that your main source of monetizing for this or is there are there other forms that you’re using?

Rick: Your thing for when we finish this film?

Brian: Yeah. How are you making this lifestyle possible for yourself?

Elara: Well, okay, so here’s the accountant speaking. Yeah. I don’t know if this makes me a bad account. We have self funded this.

Brian: Yes.

Elara: Because we think it’s an important topic. So the decision that we made was based on informing as many people as we could, we would love to continue to do this.

I work for person that’s really understanding about bigger picture ideas and about a triple bottom line and how you might want to leave the world a better place than you found it.

We don’t just have a fiscal bottom line, we have a quality of life decision that we’ve made, that we’re going to make this film and hopefully continue to do it. That said, we would like to figure out how to be able to continue to do this in the future.

And to bring this to a larger audience, because we think it’s a really important topic, and we think they’re a great story.

So that’s sort of where the monetizing comes in, is that we’d like to continue after this to be able to continue the process and to keep bringing stories to to light because the world’s a really fascinating place.

But we have the ability because Rick has his own business and he has a video business that the equipment portion of this is something that we’ve been able to handle.

He already has the equipment for his production company. And so we’re able to do it in a way that’s more cost effective.

But you know, as you as I’m sure you know, and the long run, that’s not the easiest thing to maintain, because you have to keep buying equipment. So that’s sort of the thing…

Rick: But I will jump in as the non-accountant, filmmaker.

Brian: Yes.

Rick: And I will say that I want everyone to see all my films, and I want to monetize them.

And by doing so, I do have a contract with a distribution company for our last film we did in that are ready to distribute this one as well for us MPD out of Philadelphia. And also, we are hoping to talk with some different broadcasters in the future to see if we can sell this film to them, that way to have it shown, whether that be a cable channel or a network channel of some sort.

Elara: Yes.

Brian: Excellent. Well, that’s great news and it’s really cool that you’ve been able to stretch things out, look at the big picture and see things beyond just the bottom line and also be able to fit it in with your current lifestyle and be able to work it through that, that’s really great.

Elara: You know, it’s sort of an interesting thing that people that we speak with the interviews we’ve done, we have probably went at about 80 interviews that we’ve done over the last three years.

It’s not an uncommon thing now for people to want meaning in life. And this is one of the decisions that many of the farmers have made.

Most all of them have full time jobs, they have other jobs to be able to support their ability to do what they do, because many of the heritage breed animals aren’t going to make money in the same way that a large scale production facility is.

And so they kind of keep this alive by working somewhere else. We sort of feel a little bit of a kinship to the farmers that we speak with.

But we also understand that if you can make the the process the project, the animal whatever economically viable and self sufficient on its own, it’s better for the longevity in the long run.

You can always make it because you’re not always having to putting money into something and not get it out.

Rick: I’ll just throw in there.

One of our interviews is with the actress Isabella Rossellini. I don’t know if you’re familiar.

Brian: Oh, yeah, sure.

Rick: But she has a 28 acre farm in Long Island, New York, and has really gotten into the heritage breeds she raises heritage fried chickens and turkeys, and a pig as well.

And she told us when we interviewed her that farmers are like her as their artist. And all they want to do is be able to, they’re willing to give up certain things to live the lifestyle that they want to live.

Just like an actor, a singer, a painter, farmers are the same way on your life decision.

Brian: That’s very insightful, if you don’t hear it described that way very often. But I grew up working on the family cattle ranch. I totally understand that concept. And it’s not just true of people from an agricultural background.

But so often we’ll take artists and put them off to the side and say, well, they’re doing it out of a passion but really many people in many walks of life are doing it out of a passion and finding a way to make money along the way.

But it’s part of that lifestyle.

It’s part of discovering the life that you want a life with meaning a life with a cause, and being able to weave that in with with reality. And that’s great.

Rick: Yeah, I agree with you. 100%. And I think most people, if they’re doing something they like, they don’t care if they don’t have a million dollars in the bank and live in a big house.

They’re living their life, and they have a passion for what they’re doing. And that’s all that matters.

Elara: And there’s something to be said for that. The trade off, you know, you go to work and some people might work 10 hours a day to earn enough money to buy the things they want.

So they can take two or three weeks off a year and do the thing they want for two or three weeks a year.

I am of at least for me personally, I would rather make a little less money in life and have the quality of life on the longer term and on a daily basis.

So I know that I come home and I look at my chickens and I dig in the garden and I do all of those things.

That’s worth taking an extra half an hour a day and having that just the moment of Zen, I guess it’s called, because it’s it life is a trade off.

Do you work more for the things that make you happy?

Or do you take a little less and be happy?

Just through the things that you are not buying, but you’re getting, but you’re producing?

Rick: And I would say, if you looked at most farmers out here, I don’t really see any monetarily rich farmers.

Elara: Oh, no.

Rick: But I see them rich in their life of what they’re doing.

Elara: Do you have a garden? a vegetable garden or trees or anything?

Brian: Yes, yes.

Elara: Okay. So you know that joy that you get when you go out to the plum tree and you stand there underneath it and you pick a ripe plum, and you you take a bite out of it and it’s dripping down your chin is the best thing you’ve ever tasted.

And you say, I made that.

Well, you didn’t make it but you know, you grew it. You helped it along it tastes better somehow.

I don’t know how that is, but it is.

And there’s, it’s absolutely one of the best decisions you can ever make.

Brian: Really great points, really good.

This conversation we’re having as part of a mini series, all regarding people, both previous to the Mother Earth News Fair in Albany, and afterwards talking to people that we met there.

And so just to wrap up that idea of the situation with you being there, you were in Albany, and then were you also going to be in Kansas this year. Also, we’re not for sure if we’re going to make it to Kansas this year or not.

We haven’t got that on the calendar yet.

Elara: We’re in the post production phase. And my husband tells me that’s the that the filming has been the easy part. So yeah, so the next month or two or three, we really tried to focus on making sure that you know, we have the animation in place when we have a lot of the music composition, writing and music.

So there’s a lot of things that have to happen in the next couple months to get it to come together.

And I have learned from him it is the really tough part of the process. So we did quite a bit of travel. I mean, last last year we traveled every month, I think.

Rick: Yes, more every month.

Elara: Some months, a couple places, and sometimes it’s on the road.

And sometimes it’s in the air we have we had companion status last year, which saved us with the Southwest, but really does take a toll and catching up when you come back is a really hard thing to do.

So we sort of made a decision that in the post production period, we’ve got to focus on it.

So where we think we might minimize some of our travel this fall just to get going in the can.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts from Part 1, with Rick and Elara Bowman: We’ve broken this conversation with Rick and Elara into two parts. This is only part one.

I want to talk a little bit about what they said here, but be sure and listen to part two.

We met them at the Mother Earth Mews Fair. I really like how they’re discussing how you’ve got to find an expo that meets with your ideal audience for your message, your offer your service, you’ve got to find the ones that really fit in, right.

And they had attended and they had picked out the Mother Earth News Fair specifically, for that reason.

That’s something to keep in mind yourself when you start looking for any form of event to plug into make sure that truly fits into what you’re looking to get out of it. One thing that’s really clear here is their amount of passion for what they’re doing.

They found something they enjoy doing, they’re passionate about, and they’ve been able to build a business around it, and at the same time, be able to continue making a living on the side. So this is only part of their life, but they’ve been able to build into their life without giving up anything else. I think that’s really cool.

And that whole concept of balancing things out and timing things just right how they talked about their travel plans and fitting in all the other objectives that they’re looking to get while they’re traveling.

That’s great.

It fits in with a lot of the other conversations that we had the one with Scott Smith, the one with Uncle Mud.

Lots of the people we talked to talk about how they’ve turned their business into a lifestyle and they’ve built it around their ideal lifestyle.

That’s something you always have to keep in mind. It’s not just about a number at the end of the day on how much you’re looking to make. It really needs to fit in across the board.

Like I said, there’s so much more conversation coming up.

Be sure and listen to part two, and I’ll see you over there on the next Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

I’m Brian Pombo and until next time, I wish you peace, freedom, and success.

Michael Foley – Farming for the Long Haul

Posted on August 1, 2019March 30, 2020 by brianjpombo@hotmail.com

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Episode 018.

How close in proximity do you get to your customer base? What would you do if the world economy went bust? Are you connected with a local customer base, and can you survive independently?

Michael Foley is a farmer, local food activist, and writer. He is the author of Farming for the Long Haul: Resilience and the Lost Art of Agricultural Inventiveness. He takes a historic look at farming, (with a global perspective) and discusses what he considers “good economics” especially regarding small farming.

Are you a homesteader? Do you take it seriously, or is it just a fun hobby? Michael may give you a new perspective of what it means to be self-sustaining.

Are you doing what you love in your business? Do you feel guilty for how EASY it is for you? I think you’ll relate with Michael’s story regarding writing and teaching. Listen now!

Find out more about Michael: https://www.anothermadfarmer.org/
Find out more about Green Uprising Farms: https://greenuprisingfresh.wordpress.com/
Find out more about the School of Adaptive Agriculture: https://www.school-of-adaptive-agriculture.org/

Find out the business events secrets for growing and strengthening ANY company: http://brianjpombo.com/secrets/

Full Transcript

Michael: That’s something that I’ve emphasized. I work with a lot of young farmers both through the school and through farmers market and through something we created called, the Farmers Guild, that direct sales are really what you’ve got to do at least as part of your market, if your going to make it.

Podcast Intro: If you’re someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family.

If you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing.

You may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman.

We are here to celebrate you whether you’re looking to improve your maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel.

From selling chicken eggs online, to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.

This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure, life off the grid.

Brian: Michael Foley is a farmer, local food activist and writer. Formerly a political scientist, he now runs Green Uprising Farms in Willets, California with his wife and oldest daughter. He is also a co founder of the School of Adaptive Agriculture, a farmer training program and Willits.

He is the author of Farming For the Long Haul – Resilience and the Lost Art of Agricultural Inventiveness.

Michael, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Michael: Thanks, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian: Yeah. Besides what we read out on your bio, what else can you tell us about yourself and let people know a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Michael: I actually just stepped down as manager of the Willets Farmers Market, which I did for nine years. And that put me in touch with lots of local produce vendors and a few, a few meat producers and I to know the sort of alternative agricultural community.

That doesn’t mean bunch of hippies and liberals by any means, though.

There are some people in this community who think of the farmers market that that way. But in fact, a lot of the people producing out there are second, third generation residents of this place and old school in a lot of respects, they just understand the worth of direct sales.

That’s something that I’ve emphasized. I work with a lot of young farmers, both through the school and through farmers market and through something we created called Farmers Guild. And that’s something that I emphasize with them that direct sales are really what you’ve got to do, at least as part of your market. If you’re going make it.

Brian: Oh, that’s great advice. What else can you tell us about the Farmers Guild?

Michael: Well, the Farmers Guild, it started out as a pretty much a social organization among young farmers. So some of us old folks played a role in it, and it’s gone back to being pretty much a social organization.

But for a while it was an organization where all of us traded ideas and learn from one another and sometimes we had worked parties on weekends to help one another on one another’s farms. So it was good source of solidarity for people who were doing, especially market gardening, but also, you know, the kind of farmers market sales.

Brian: I mean, I read that you had just written, Farming For The Long Haul.

Can you tell us a little bit about that book?

Michael: Okay, well, that book grew out of, I don’t know, 50 years of interest in farming and reading about agriculture, reading anthropology and history. And the book is kind of unusual in that respect among farming books, because it really goes back into a lot of that history and anthropology, but the reason it does so is to think about what farming in the future is going to look like.

Our industrial scale farming is just a blip on the screen. Though there been other experiments in large scale farming.

Roman senators, for example, had huge, huge latifundia, that were farmed by slaves, and it destroyed Roman soil, just like we’re destroying American soil with our industrial scale farming.

Our farming systems not gonna last, it’s not gonna last through the end of petroleum. And we’ve got to look for something else.

And so the book explores what we can do to make ourselves more resilient now, while still making a living farming. What we would look like in the future, what we would look like in the future, from my point of view looks a lot like what we looked like in the past.

And I spent a lot of time emphasizing that a lot of farming cultures for successful for hundreds, even thousands of years.

By and large people were prosperous, and they didn’t have all the gadgets we have, but they were prosperous, they ate well, and they lived well, most of the time, all those years.

So that’s an important point. I am underlined in the book, but I look at all kinds of innovations. I mean, after all, traditional farmers without any scientific training came up with all the cultivated crops we have today. All of them, and multiple variations on them.

That’s where the embeddedness comes in, you know, they, you didn’t need a plant breeder, trained at a university. And you didn’t need a plant breeder employed by Monsanto. You did it yourself. And some farmers are still doing it themselves, especially in poor parts of the world, but also increasingly here in this country.

Brian: So what led you to write the book to begin with?

Michael: Two things. One of them was frustration at the business advice young farmers for getting it was scale up, scale up, borrow. If you have to borrow be because you’re scaling up just go full tilt.

And I knew from my reading of the recent…that is the last 50 years of American farming. That’s a recipe for disaster.

That’s how millions of American farmers lost their farms.

So I was upset with that.

And I wanted to present an alternative point of view. A lot of the book is actually about the economics of farming or what should be the good economics of small farming. And then the other thing is, like I said, I’ve been looking at and thinking about and reading about and as a political scientists actually doing some research about farming around the world for 50 years.

I started teaching a class on the history of agriculture with, at the School of Adaptive Agriculture. And realized I had all this knowledge, some of it tucked away in notebooks that I’d forgotten about. I really want to share it. So those are the two impulses for the book.

Brian: Very cool. And I saw that it’s published by Chelsea Green Publishing. Did you reach out to them? Did they reach out to you? How did that work?

Michael: Yeah, I was unknown, in the farming literature world. You know, I did academic publications that nobody’s interested in. And so I got this thing started in summer of 2017. And I got far enough that my wife said, you know, you got to put this out.

Chelsea Green Publishing was my first choice of publisher, I looked up what they required a prospectus with two or three finished chapters and an outline and various things. And so I put that together and set it off. And they said, Yes, we talked a little about the timeline. How long was going to take me and I, of course, committed to a quick a timeline. Though I’ve met it, and we went from there.

Brian: Did you enjoy that whole process? Would you do it again?

Michael: Yeah, I enjoyed it.

I’m one of these people who find it easy to write. And I’m sort of embarrassed about that because so many people find it so hard, but it’s satisfying to me the way cooking is satisfying to me.

There’s some similarities. Yeah, I enjoyed the process and I enjoyed digging out stuff that I once knew and didn’t know quite and learning a lot of new stuff and I always like doing that.

Commercial Break: Okay, we’re going to pause the conversation right there. What you’re listening to right now is a special edition podcast. These episodes all have to do with the Mother Earth News fair in Albany, Oregon of 2019 at the time I’m recording this, we have learned so much about how to take advantage of events and I want you to be able to use this information in your own business.

Go to BrianJPombo.com/secrets.

These programs will be based on the experience of people who have written books, spoken at the events or exhibited.

They’re talking about how to use events, books, and speaking all to build your business.

That’s BrianJPombo.com/secrets.

BrianJPombo.com/secrets and now back to the conversation.

Brian: So you’re slated to present at Mother Earth News Fair in Albany, Oregon, right? What will you be covering?

Michael: Well, the first talk is called the future of farming is homesteading. And it emphasizes one of the points of the book and that is that if we want to survive economically, our farming ought to feed ourselves, at least to some large extent, like it used to.

As recently, as you know, the 1950s American farmers were feeding themselves.

So that in hard times, you got something to fall back on. Wendell Berry tells a story about Kentucky in the 30s when the population actually grew, because people who were out of work went back to the farm because they knew that there was food there, at least then they could help out and make more food.

And he wonders what would happen today?

I think this was 2008. So the you know that prices of 2000 what would happen today because most of those farms don’t exist anymore, and they don’t produce for themselves.

So that’s why I say the future of farming is homesteading, not in the sense that we won’t be producing for the market. But in the sense that yeah, we’re going to have to learn to produce for ourselves and most homesteaders, my senses don’t produce enough for themselves.

It’s an ideal but none of us do. That’s a threat. And the second one is about the real economics of farming, and makes that point. And also the point that, you know, we have to sustain our land if we’re going to sustain ourselves economically, we have to start learning to farm from the resources available to us, instead of buying in all these external inputs and fancy tools, and that are all the rage, even among very small market gardeners today, because we’re not going to have the income to do that sort of thing.

And we have to meet a bottom line right now, we have to meet a bottom line. So the more we can minimize our expenses, the better off we’re going to be.

Brian: What do you hope people will walk away with after watching either of these presentations?

Michael: I hope they’ll be inspired to find new ways to make what they’re doing more satisfying, both personally and economically to themselves. Yeah, you know, they’ll either find new value in what they’re already doing, or they’ll do more of it and build more resilient farms and homesteads and gardens out of what they’re but they’re doing.

Brian: Well, that’s great. And what do you hope to get out of this?

Michael: Again, I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but I I like to teach I, I just do. I like to. I like to talk to people.

My style tends to be a lot of talk, but also a lot of interaction. I like to try to draw people out and get to know people and hear from them. That’s always something I get out of these things.

Brian: Have you done this before at the Mother Earth News Fair?

Or is the first time?

Michael: No this is my first time.

Brian: Oh, great.

Michael: Yeah.

Brian: Have you done it at any other expos or anything of that sort like this?

Michael: The only thing that I’ve done so far is we launched the book at EcoFarm, the EcoFarm Conference in California, which is, you know, the major sustainable farming conference that was in January.

And so I did a round table kind of thing there where I sort of laid out the basic argument and then opened it up to discussion. We had a great time.

Brian: Who are you most hoping to reach? Like if there was an ideal person that you think you can touch either through your speaking? Or one on one? Who would that be?

Michael: I think my target audience. So people I was thinking about as I was writing, where these young farmers and aspiring farmers that I know, and that I work with, in some cases taught but also just worked with on some local projects.

Brian: Very good. Very good. So we have a lot of business owners, executives who listen to the show, do you think it’d be worthwhile for them to plug into events like this?

Michael: Well, I think it depends a lot on the business. I mean, you have you have featured some businesses where yeah, it clearly makes sense. But yeah, it definitely depends on the business. everybody’s gotta, you know, judge their market find their audience.

Brian: Yeah. Good point. So how did you end up becoming speaker here was that set up through your publisher did you reach out to them, did they reach out to you?

Michael: Yeah, Chelsea Green Publishing presented it as an opportunity to me. So I went through the application process with Mother Earth News. And then I think Chelsea Green gave them a little nudge to and then they put me on the program.

Brian: Well, fabulous. But is there anything I haven’t asked you that you think you’d like to say?

Michael: Oh, boy, um, I guess there’s two things.

One of them that I spent some time on is being aware of what I call the whole farm, or what I’m beginning to call more and more the skin of the farm.

And there were a lot of uses that underpin the economy of the farm that need to be revived.

I ran into some biodynamic farmers who described the wild outer edges of their farmers skin. And I like that concept, because it’s porous and it lets good things in and protects the farm, but it’s also a resource and traditional farmers used the water wild edges of the farm, and a lot of them had woodlands or wood lots.

Some practices that we don’t know much about it all in the United States like coppicing, cutting trees down to their base, letting them grow up long straight poles, or ones that can be used for basket weaving or for pole construction or anyway. Just various practices of managing the wild that can be useful economically.

And good for the wild and good for the farm.

So that’s one piece.

The other pieces that I really emphasized the importance of community.

I think community is kind of the social skin of the farm, that the people in your community are your natural customers. And increasingly, as the crises of the century unfold, they’re going to be our principal customers, they are not just our customers, but our support.

I mean, I can’t tell you how many times people have said, keep the change, you work so hard at farmer’s market. Or given me exorbitant fees for, you know, for something simple, or people come out to help raise money.

The local community helped us raise money for drilling a well.

And that and then our farmers helping one another. Some friends, homemade hoop house, huge thing blew up in a storm, they were ready to quit farming and a bunch of local farmers came out, help them rebuild it.

One of the guys who’s an engineer or former engineer and a volunteer at the school, helped them redesign it so it wouldn’t blow up again.

Brian: Wow.

Michael: That kind of, you know, that kind of helping one another mutual aid some people call it which is common among the Amish and used to be common and American farmer, kind of country.

Yeah, that’s really important. And it’s important to the bottom line, I keep emphasizing, you know, it’s not just good feeling, which is important.

We don’t want to be depressed. But it’s also good for our bottom line. It’s supporting us.

Brian: Those are great points. Really good.

So, what could a listener do? Who want to find out more about you maybe get their hands on your book? Where’s the best place for them to go?

Michael: Okay, for the book, I would say, go to your local bookstore. Free Shipping, just like Amazon.

Avoid the giants if you can.

You can also go to Chelsea Green Publlishing.

I have a website called AnotherMadFarmer.org. And that’s where I rant and carry on and give information about where I’m speaking and post some reviews.

Brian: Yeah.

Michael: And so they can go there that comes from a poem by Wendell Berry’s that I like the, Mad Farmer Liberation Front. Then this the website for the farm itself Green Uprising, just look up Green Uprising Farm, to find it.

Brian: We’ll put the link in the description for it.

Michael: Okay. Yeah, good.

And then there’s then there’s the School-Of-Adaptive-Agriculture.org. Those are words separated by hyphens, or you could just type adaptive agriculture.org and get the website and see all the things we’re doing.

We’re doing a wonderful workshop series right now. That’s been really fun to see develop.

Brian: Fabulous. Well, that’s great. Hey, thanks for spending time with us, Michael.

I know you’ve had a busy week. And we’d love to have you back on the show.

Thank you for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Michael: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me, Brian. It’s been delightful.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Good conversation with Michael.

He’s a very interesting person, has a lot of great insights. Afterwards, it kind of hit me he’s really in the field of economic emergency preparedness, if you think about it.

And I relate with that, because my original interest in homesteading kind of came from a similar background. He has deeper thoughts about homesteading.

And he’s kind of a historian in that field, type of person we really haven’t spoken to up until now, I wanted to point out some of the ideas that he put out there.

The first one was, what brought him into writing a book to begin with, and that’s that his wife pointed out is that he’s got all this knowledge, he learned all this stuff, he might as well put it out there for other people to be able to consume. And that’s a great point.

I think a lot of people, they learn how to do things, they get out there and do them and they don’t take that extra step to teach it to pass it along.

And Michael already has a background as a teacher.

So writing a book really was a natural step for him.

Made a lot of sense, especially since he already found it. So easy to write. I mean, he said he’s embarrassed that he finds it so easy to write that he finds it so satisfying, and that he likes teaching. He likes to teach people he likes to talk to people. I think this is very, very common.

You’ll hear the same thing said in a lot of our other interviews that we’ve had with speakers from the Mother Earth News Fair, especially the part about being embarrassed about it.

I think that’s pretty common. If I were to guess where that comes from, I know for myself, I’ve always seen those speakers, teachers that are out there that enjoy the sound of their own voice, you know, they’re really into it, they really enjoy it, and it kind of leaves you feeling a little icky afterwards.

I don’t think any of us want to be that person. And so when we say that we enjoy talking to people, and we enjoy speaking in front of people and writing and all the rest.

We don’t want to sound egotistical, I think as long as you’re careful. Not to enjoy things too much not to get too much into it, you should be able to have a good time.

Enjoy yourself be happy that you have the inclination to be able to talk to large amounts of people to be able to express your thoughts in words, either physically or on paper.

That’s a great thing because it allows you the chance to be able to live beyond yourself and really pass your ideas on to the next person, something real magical about that we’ve been talking about learn, do teach from all the speakers because they’ve all gone through a similar process.

And that kind of brings me to the idea of publishing a book.

I like hearing his process of how he went about doing it. He wanted to get the book out there, he found a publisher that he thought matched him and that’s really important to do.

Chelsea green Publishing is one of the big ones in this space. Everyone I know that it’s been publishing with them seems to have good things to say about them, but it’s important They’re a match for you, you look at the other things that they have published, talk to maybe other authors that have published with them and whether they appreciate the services.

Then go through the process that it takes to get published. Michael’s willing to do that.

So he ended up with Chelsea Green. They in turn, linked him up with speaking opportunities, including the Mother Earth News Fair, and the rest is history. Everything works.

Well, when you’re working with people that are on your side.

The last thing I wanted to point out about what Michael said was his big point at the end about community and about community customers, it ties again, some of the first things he was talking about in regards to the farmers market.

And that direct sales, one on one relationship with people.

It’s like he says, not just for good feelings good for the bottom line. It’s a practical thing.

So whether you’re talking economic or ecological apocalypse, obviously in those situations, it’s good to have some self sufficiency with a homestead or something similar.

And it’s good to have that reliability of personal relationships, personalized customers that you can work with.

Everything online is an echo of physical reality. And a lot of times, people get caught up with the online world as if it’s more real than the real world.

When in reality, everything starts at the real world. And if you get in with a real relationship with your customers, one on one, even at a distance over the telephone is a good start.

But in person, maybe at events like the Mother Earth News Fair, maybe locally at a farmers market or what have you, you’re really hitting on that advantage that the big guys can do.

This is what the Amazon.com’s of the world cannot produce.

They cannot have that one on one relationship, use that advantage.

Use it, because it’s always good insurance in the long run, regardless of what happens on a global scale.

Even if you’re having a bad year as a business, if something bad happened within your business that’s lowering things, having that security to depend on those one on one relationships.

Those are the things that never go away. As long as you don’t burn those bridges.

You’re always going to have those connections out there, don’t take them for granted. And I really do thank Michael for coming on the show.

I hope to find out more about his ideas and concepts and theories as we go ahead in the future.

I’m Brian Pombo and until next time, I wish you peace, freedom, and success.

Andy Brennan – Aaron Burr Cider

Posted on July 27, 2019March 30, 2020 by brianjpombo@hotmail.com

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Episode 011.

Do you truly love what you do as a business? Is your passion so clear to others that it’s undeniable?

Andy Brennan is truly passionate about his craft and trade. Andy is the founder and owner of Aaron Burr Cider and author of Uncultivated: Wild Apples, Real Cider, and the Complicated Art of Making a Living.

A life-long artist, Andy did not set out to be a wild apple cidermaker (though always intrigued by the fruit), a writer nor a speaker. His publisher, Chelsea Green Publishing, were able to seduce him to attend and speak at the Mother Earth News Fair being held in Albany, Oregon. Due to his interest in visiting Oregon, (he admits a desire to interview some Pacific coast trees) he unknowingly was set on a direct course to be interviewed by Brian J. Pombo for the Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast.

How does a struggling artist end up becoming an apple farmer? How does he stand out in the growing and crowded cider market?

The way Andy mixes his business with his philosophy, while continuing an uncompromising life is instructive and liberating to any searching or struggling entrepreneur. Listen now!

Find out more about Andy Brennan: http://aaronburrcider.com/

Find out the business events secrets for growing and strengthening ANY company: http://brianjpombo.com/secrets/

Full Transcript

Brian: Have you found any way around that yourself?

Andy: For sure. The best solution is always to build intimate relationships with customers which ask questions and you know, certainly large companies, they don’t have the time or the inclination to have one on one relationships with their customers.

Even though I said I’m an introvert, I can’t hide from the fact that bonding with my customers is the only thing that that’s going to save, I think people like me from actually becoming road kill to bigger, faster and cheaper.

We are here to celebrate you whether you’re looking to improve your Maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel.

Brian: A homestead farmer who began making cider in 2007 from wild apples. After rising to national prominence with his cider company, Aaron Burr Cider. He wrote a book Uncultivated, which just came out.

Andy Brennan, welcome to The Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Andy: Thank you. It’s great to be talking to you, it’s an honor.

Brian: Yeah. So, who are you, and just let us know a little about what you do?

Andy: My name is Andy Brennan and I am a homestead farmer, Apple farmer and cider maker. The town of Wurtsboro, New York, which is 75 miles North and West of New York city.

It’s in the foothills, the first few mountains as you’re approaching the Catskill mountains and we’re very close to the Hudson Valley. But in terms of a cultural region, we’re more associated with the Catskills.

Brian: So how did you end up here? What’s your life story up to this point?

Andy: Well, I was an artist first. That’s what brought me to New York city from originally I’m from the Washington D C area. And after art school, I ended up in New York.

Like a lot of people ended up living on couches for 10 years, trying to be the, you know, famous artists or whatever.

Eventually I got jobs working in architecture that at least pays little or as the art wasn’t working out.

After finding a sort of a love for Apple trees, I then looked for land near New York City where I can, grow apples.

Brian: Very cool. So what form of art were you interested in?

Andy: Well, I’m a painter and ever since I was a kid, I excelled, I guess in art, but also perhaps at the expense of being extremely bad at all the other subjects. It was kind of the one field in which I showed any talent for.

I’ve always been encouraged, I suppose, on that level to draw and paint. That’s how I ended up in art school.

But, uh, I’d say I’m not, I’m currently innovative paint as an artist. I’m inspired by people like Sazon who just looked at his work and say it’s just about the act of seeing transcribing, um, that act of seen on a painting or on a canvas.

So it’s not, I guess you would say I am. I worked from life and it’s somewhat realistic.

Brian: Very cool. You’ve written a new book, like we mentioned the full title Uncultivated: wild apples, real cider and the complicated art of making a living. So tell us about that.

Andy: Uncultivated is my original title was a book in which I wanted to describe my, methodology as an Apple grower and why I feel like that’s important to cider making.

The subtitle is – wild apples, real cider, which is an ancient drink, to distinguish it from the modern sort of a hard cider that most people are familiar with and the complicated art of making a living.

It’s a reference to what it’s like to be an Apple grower and cider maker at a small homestead farm level.

I should mention that subtitle was proposed and we loved it by a man by the name of Ben Watson, who’s not just my editor. He’s also the publisher of one of the most popular cider books out there.

But he’s also the guy who organized the Cider Days, which is the nation’s largest cider event. I worked very close with him on the book and I owe him a great deal of gratitude because I’m not a writer, I’m a farmer.

Brian: So what led you to write the book in the first place?

Andy: Well, originally I wanted to explain sort of the 101’s to people. I get at the farmer’s market all the time, People asking like, how do you make cider?

Or what makes these apples different than conventional apples?

And I wanted to explain that or give it the full space to thrive. What makes it different and what is cider and all those things.

But, there’s another reason and I think this is really what I ultimately was fueled by when I wrote book. Well, I want to show people what to look at, what to see when they see cider, what types of businesses and farms are growing apples.

In keeping with the ancient tradition of cider and, a world that modernity has really overlooked. I find it stunningly beautiful.

The cider world, the Apple world, these old homestead farms. And I wanted to paint that picture for people so that they know what they’re looking at when they approach cider.

Brian: Excellent. So did you enjoy the process of writing a book and getting it published?

Andy: I really did. It was…I’ve been writing blog journals now for 10 years, which is just more like a diary that I would publish. And I think there’s like two readers. I’ve been doing that for a long time.

When approached by my editor about writing a book, my original thought was that I would take all these blog posts, many of which weren’t even published. They’re just on my computer and I would sort of create a narrative which tied them together.

But it morphed into something different as I was writing it and it was just absolutely obsessed writing for on average, 12 hours a day for every day, for, for a year.

Brian: Wow.

Andy: I never got tired. I woke up and I just couldn’t wait to get writing again. So yeah, I really enjoyed it.

I should also say the last year when I did write, it was an off year for Apple, so there was literally nothing to do on the farm, so I really lucked out that way.

Brian: Yeah, that’s useful. Do you see yourself writing another one in the future?

Andy: Maybe.

Right now I don’t. It feels good to be a done with that project and I’m just in love with being out in the orchard right now. The same sort of passion I had for writing last year is right now, it’s just applied to my orchard and not excited about making cider this fall.

I just want to spend every moment working with the trees. And, um, so that’s where my energy is now, although I do have ideas that are brewing so it might happen.

Brian: Yeah. You’re slated to present at the Mother Earth News. Fair. One of the main reasons how we found you. What are you planning to be covering? Especially in, I guess you’re going to be in Albany, Oregon, which is the one that I’m going to.

Andy: The thing I’m most known for is wild apples because it’s 75% of all the cider I make is from wild Apple.

So they’re not even on my farm. And I wanted to discuss wild apples and what makes them different, which is such an enormous topic.

Again, I kind of want to introduce people, wild apples to tell them about what makes them so special. So it’s going to hinge on that. And I’ll talk about what they mean to cider, what they mean to a homestead farmer, what they mean to businesses even.

Which are, like I said, it’s all that’s all tied to the book, but an introduction to wild apples and what makes them so important. Because they are to a human.

So that’s one topic and the other I’ve just been asked to do another talk the following day on cider, which really does need its own full focus.

The second day I’ll be talking about, making cider and the 101’s and the history of it and that stuff.

Brian: Have you been to any of these before? These Mother Earth News Fairs, and have you presented on them?

Andy: I’ve never been to the Mother Earth News Fairs. In the Northeast here we have these organizations called Maca and, and Nopa and these are statewide and Northeast organic conferences.

And there’s one in Maine called the Common Ground Fair, which is I think very, very similar to the Mother Earth News Fair, which is largely small scale farmers and homesteaders.

Involves everything from, you know, seminars on solar energy and siphon by hand. Same sort of demographic and these are my people.

We just don’t have a Mother Earth News Fair in our area.

I’ve been excited to be a part of it. And I’ve read that magazine since I was in my twenties, long ago.

So yeah, it’s right up my alley.

Brian: What do you hope people are going to get from watching your presentations?

Andy: I hope they’re inspired to make cider and, if not cider, wine or whatever fruit grows in their area. I really don’t want to live in a world where it’s just specialists to do one thing that’s part of living on a homestead farm.

You don’t just tap your maple trees or grow vegetables and sell eggs and have honey. You do all those things, rather than just one.

I’m hoping to inspire people to embrace what is, I guess, my specialty in cider.

I’m not fond of calling myself a cider maker.

That’s just one of many things that I do, but I want people to realize just how simple and natural it is and hopefully they’ll making it and become part of this, tradition themselves.

Commercial Break: Okay, we’re going to pause the conversation right there. What you’re listening to right now is a special edition podcast. These episodes all have to do with the Mother Earth News fair in Albany, Oregon of 2019 at the time I’m recording this, we have learned so much about how to take advantage of events and I want you to be able to use this information in your own business.

Go to BrianJPombo.com/secrets. We are going to be putting out helpful materials on how you can use events to grow your business. When you go to this page, you will either see our latest programs or if you make it there early enough, you will see an email address, capture page, put in your email address and we will be sure and update you.

As soon as we get these out there, you’re not going to want to miss this. If you get in early enough, you can get a special deal. These are principles that never go away.

That’s BrianJPombo.com/secrets. BrianJPombo.com/secrets and now back to the conversation.

Brian: So why are you doing this? Why are you coming out to present?

You’re going all the way across country and everything else. What do you hope to get out of it personally?

Andy: Well, there’s a lot of reasons why I wanted to go to Oregon.

One is I have a great number of my cider customers are in Oregon and I think the demographic of that state is sympathetic to what it is I’m doing. So they’ve always been interested in my cider and sold around the state.

I have like minded people and so on the cider front, I’ve wanted to do that. And my publisher also, has asked me to promote the book and I….selling stuff is not my specialty and I feel it makes me nervous but I’ve agreed at least to do, four or five events to promote the book.

This is really an opportunity to accomplish many things or let’s use a phrase, to shoot you birds with one stone.

But this is more like five birds, a lot of things that are all coming together for this.

Brian: Very cool.

Are you going to have some time to check out the rest of Oregon while you’re out here?

Andy: Yes.

I have a couple of days. My distributor who’s a company I should mention as console on, they mostly distribute line, Ian is his name.

He’s lined up some accounts that I should visit and I think we’re going to do a couple of tastings at the swine or restaurants and he’s going to show me what I should be looking at and people were going to be able to try your cider, that are already out there now with that distributor.

And I’m toying with the idea of bringing some very, very odd ciders, although it’s going to be hard to bring them while traveling.

But yeah, they’ll be able to drink that at the fair.

Also there’s a couple of wines stores that are doing pourings where I’ll be talking as well. I know I’ll be in Portland, and a couple of other towns up there. I’m drawing a blank on where they are, but certainly the fair and then a couple of places around Portland and perhaps further.

If anyone listening is interested, my website probably says that, which is AaronBurrCider.com, and there’s an events page.

Brian: We’ll link to it in the description too. Tell us about that name Aaron Burr Cider, how’d you come up with that?

Andy: Do you know Aaron Burr?

Brian: Yeah, I’m a history buff so. Lol!

Andy: Oh wow. My wife and I are real history buffs too. And we moved to this farm, which was bought by William Brown and 1817.

The Browns had it in their family as the homestead farm for 150 years. As we were researching the deed, when we took it over, we were intrigued by the lawyer who wrote the deed and that was Aaron Burr.

And this was 1817.

And we we’re thinking, you know, could this be the actual, Aaron Burr, who shot Hamilton?

And sure enough, as we did the research, his political career was over at the time and he returned to law and that’s what he did for the next 30 years.

He, mostly sold property deeds. Back in 1817, there were huge properties that were getting divided and sold to homestead farmers. It was a lot of need for that type of a paternity.

Brian: Wow! That is…that’s quite a cool story to go along with the product. That’s great.

Andy: If I could also say we wanted a local name who represented the area, which we very much believed is the prime time or the peak of cider production, not just in America but in the world, which was just after the revolutionary war in the early 18 hundreds.

Cider production in America was just…..the only thing I could think of it as an analogy would be, like 15th century Florence, when there were artists in every loft.

I mean, every town had a cider maker and the Apple cultivation, was just at its peak then.

Brian: Have you got the travel module promoting the book you’re putting on presentations?

Have you got to travel a whole lot, I imagine Oregon’s probably the farthest you’ve traveled, right?

Andy: Yeah. Short of resisting traveling, promoting because after writing the book, like I mentioned, I’m really just in love with farming again and I want to get into the groove and give the trees the attention that they might not have had last year.

So I’ve been resisting it and I only have maybe four or five events lined up before the big harvest this September.

Brian: Well that’s great.

I think what you’re saying is pretty common, especially in this industry and in this niche. A lot of people, they have their own place and traveling is kind of outside of their realm, having to travel a whole lot, especially if they’re interested in what’s going on at home.

You have any logistical tips, anything that for people to keep in mind while they’re traveling, especially if they’re resistant to it?

Andy: I need a lot of alone time. That’s the plight of the introvert.

I just, I love engaging with people and telling people about wild apples and cider if they’re interested in that. And, I didn’t really love it, but my interaction with people…I’m sort of like a cell phone battery.

I go out and then after maybe about two hours or three hours, I just crash and I need to be alone and recharge.

So, you know, that I think is a textbook definition of an introvert and that I need that. And if I have that then, I like to travel.

I’m really excited to see just how apple’s also are adjusting to the soil out there compared to, you know, I know it’s a very different climate, but a different soil structure and I’m used to the Northeast apples so I want to interview some trees while I’m out there.

Brian: Yeah, I think that’s really good tip, especially for people who are more introverted to be able to have that set on their schedule ahead of time. So it’s not completely miserable the entire trip. I really appreciate your time with us.

Could you tell us if a listener is interested in finding out more about you, your book, about Aaron Burr Cider, where’s the best place for them to go?

Andy: Well, our home page, Aaron Burr Cider is really a directory to all the different projects, which includes the book and the cider.

I want to say that it’s not just us. I mean there’s so many other great cider producers out there and small farmers.

I was really, really lucky to have a lot of attention thrust on me, early on as cider was sort of taking off.

In some ways. It’s not fair.

My trees are my trees and somebody else has their trees and the way we all have a relationship to the land. And, I appreciate the focus and the interest from customers.

But, I would say any local, Apple farmer is deserving of that attention.

And, um, I think it’s a local drink.

I appreciate customers far and wide interested in our cider, but, ultimately I think it’s about people bonding to their region, their land.

So, I encourage people to really dig, because the small producers are out there. They just haven’t been as lucky as I am in terms of reaching the people.

Ultimately, I hope that’s what brings them back to apples.

Because you know, the nation, we were all Apple growers and we need to be, we need to be again, so many great lessons there.

Brian: Absolutely. And are you still doing your blog journal? Are you keeping up on that?

Andy: Yeah, I still do about a post every two months or so. And that was always my case.

I keep a lot to myself because I feel like sometimes I’m just a curmudgeon, just jaded and depressed by what’s happening in the modern world. And so I often, I’ll write something, I’ll give it about a week before and if I think there’s something positive, I’ll publish it. But a great number of my rants don’t go unpublished.

Brian: Can people reach that from the Aaron Burr Cider website?

Andy: That’s also linked to the website.

We have all these weird projects because like I mentioned, I’ve got an art background.

I have something known as The Aaron Burrlesque, which is supposed to be the antidote to Hamilton, the play, which any anti-federalist knows to be federalist propaganda.

So, The Aaron Burrlesque is the additional anecdote to…I think his name is Lin-Manuel Miranda, his famous Hamilton play.

That’s a photo series, that’s on the website.

The blog is attached to the website.

We have a whole line of underwear, which is a really long story. People wanted us to advertise our logo on shirts or something like that because we have a neat logo. Has the old gun, the duel gun. And I’m opposed to the sort of corporate advertisement in public.

So we came up with the underwear and I said, well, if you’re going to wear our logo, nobody’s going to be able to see it.

So we have that because they’re all just art projects, really.

Brian: It’s great that you allow yourself to be so expressive and to find new ways to be able to put things out there and just kind of follow passions the way you do, it’s really refreshing.

What makes wild apples and wild Apple cider, so uniquely different that comes straight from a domestic orchard?

Andy: This is a long story, but I’m going to try to say as fast and I’ll say with each sentence it can unfold into a huge topic on its own.

But my interest in wild apples as a farmer is that they exist unsprayed and apples are the most sprayed crop in America. And there one of the most in the world.

They’re extremely manipulated and they have to be because about 150 years ago, we’ve kind of stopped the evolution of the Apple.

Meanwhile, every other disease and insect has been keeping pace. And, now these trees are sitting ducks.

So that sort of describes your conventional orchard, um, monocrop environments, which is what is now a sitting duck for diseases and insects, which can destroy your crop and literally kill the tree.

A wild Apple is an Apple tree, which has figured out how to acclimate to the environment. And it’s a very diverse environment.

Here in the Northeast, they’re everywhere.

They’re along the roads and old pastures and they don’t get any of that attention and yet they still survive.

So that’s one way to describe a wild apple, but just even genetically, it’s very different than a farmed apple.

This is fascinating. And um, and every single Apple are five seeds in every single seed, it’s going to become genetically its own variety.

So whereas in your grocery store, you have five varieties that we all know, golden, delicious and red delicious and McIntosh apple. In every single Apple, are five new varieties that this world has never seen.

And then on just one tree alone, there is, on a good year, there might be a thousand Apples.

So that’s 5,000 varieties that this world has never seen.

And the point of that is to put as much heat out in the world and see what survives and what type of genetics are needed for that, for where that seed just happens to end up.

That’s not done on farms.

What happens on a farm is they fall in a particular variety, let’s say a Granny Smith and they’ll take a piece of wood from the original Granny Smith, which is a variety and they just graph that onto the root system of hundreds and thousands and now hundreds of thousands if not millions of trees.

So that what grows above that graft union is just one variety, Granny Smith. And every single wild apple tree, if it’s a from seed, it’s going to be its own variety.

Brian: Wow!

Andy: I should also mention that genetically they are infinitely more diverse than humans and humans have not cloned or at least to say that we’ve never had two humans exactly the same on the planet.

So I find that, alarming that something that as sophisticated as an apple tree is not able to given the green light to express itself genetically.

Nor is it allowed to defend itself or acclimate to various environments.

I’m telling you about apple trees and sadly as is true of pretty much everything, from farmed animals to farm crops. Apple trees are particularly diverse and I believe they might be the most genetically diverse plant in the plant kingdom.

Brian: That is really interesting. You know, I’ve heard it expressed on occasion some pieces of that, but I’ve never heard it said quite that way. That’s really interesting.

Is there anything else that you want to cover?

Andy: We’d like to say something about, I don’t know how to do this and even after writing the book, I still don’t know how to do this, how to really say what I find is important about running a business in the modern world because we have the economy is constantly going up.

Costs of living are constantly going up.

And as a business owner, usually it’s just assumed you’re going to be larger next year than you are this year.

But that doesn’t really apply to a farmer. You can’t enlarge your farm.

You have a relationship with the land and a limited amount of acreage or so or a limited amount of trees.

And there’s an economy to be worked out on every homestead farm on how to survive and how to maximize what you wait and get from your farm. But in the end, that’s not the larger economy just demand so much more.

So there’s a real disconnect between farming sustainably and that includes cider that includes, fur sure, apples and particularly the old versions…or I should say the real versions of the apple seedling tree.

All these things are in direct competition or I should say out there that they’re so easily or antiquated by a world where everything is a cheap and expanding and homogenizing and it’s really, we live in a world where efficiency is King and expansion is King.

Those are not applicable principles for what I feel like is real cider and real apple growing in the end.

Agriculture is about a relationship and I think that I tried to cover that in the book. I don’t know exactly how to do it, how to give that limited scale business, just deserts.

So what I did, at least in the book is I really tried to focus on the people and the culture around me in the farm and hopefully the reader empathizes and will understand just what’s at risk or what sort of just overrun by the modern expanding economy.

Brian: Do you have any clue as to what possible solutions might be to some of that? Have you found any way around that yourself?

Andy: For sure, the best solution is always to build intimate relationships with customers.

Which ask questions, and you know, certainly large companies, they don’t have the time or the inclination to have one-on-one relationships with their customers.

So yeah, even though I said, I’m an introvert, I can’t hide from the fact that that’s bonding with my customers is the only thing that that’s going to save, I think people like me from essentially becoming roadkill to a bigger and bigger and faster and cheaper.

Brian: Wow!

That is a very, very, very important point there that you just made. I hope everybody that’s listening catches that because it’s such a simple concept, but that one thing, like you said, it’s the thing that the big guys can’t do, even if they have an inclination too.

They’re not able to do what the smaller operation can do in terms of having that one-on-one relationship.

So that’s really important. That’s a really great point.

And your book plays into that too because you’re helping to educate and like you mentioned, kind of answer the questions that people already had about the process.

Have you found that to be true?

Have you gotten feedback as far as that from your customers or future customers?

Andy: Yeah, I can’t believe how much people seem to like the book.

You know, I’ve even been mistaken as a professional writer.

So yeah, I’ve been fortunate that way that I think the book was a success. And, every year I make cider and some years it’s fantastic.

But I don’t know how I did it and it just happened that way and I could never repeat it. And that’s really how writing the book was. I think it is good, but I have no idea how I could ever do it again.

Brian: Well that’s great. I mean, if you’ve been able to achieve that much with one book, that’s a huge deal that so many people go through their lives, including business owners and homesteaders that never get to do anything like that.

So that’s fabulous that you’ve been able to reach out like that and been able to make a difference.

Andy: I want to share that attention with all small apple farmers and cider makers and encourage everybody to dig deep and find those local resources.

Because like I said, I’m just one of literally thousands around the country.

Brian: Absolutely. Well, fabulous.

Hey, thanks so much for being on the show, Andy.

This is a lot to chew on and you’ve got so much information and such a depth of thought put into everything that you do that we’d love to have you on the show in the future sometime. And in the meantime, look forward to meeting you out at The Mother Earth News Fair In Albany Oregon.

Thanks again for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Andy: Well thank you. Thank you for your podcast. I’m looking forward to meeting you.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Andy’s a really sweet, really smart guy. Lots of fun to talk to. A lot of this conversation went back in my mind to the importance of understanding your own nature.

If you happen to be a nonconformist, if you happen to be an introvert and allowing room to continue being who you are, just like he talked about, allowing time to just be alone while he’s out and traveling, it really comes down to know thyself.

I think it’s cool how he has this history, this background story to the name of his cider, Aaron Burr Cider.

It’s great to have those types of things. I know he didn’t do it on purpose, but the fact that it came about and he’s taken advantage of that, that shows a lot of ingenuity along with all the different ways that he’s able to be artistic and be himself and be able to express himself even in ironic ways when it came to putting his brand out there on underwear and everything else. It’s just very funny. Very cool.

Right toward the end, the point he made about relationships, about really having that one-on-one with your customers and how the larger corporations and brands, they can’t compete with that.

You could bring something completely different and be able to have that one on one relationship and be able to be an actual person to your customers.

Not just a personality, but be a real person, someone they can talk to on the phone or communicate via email.

I think that’s important and it ties in so great with his book because his book puts himself out there.

It’s him spending hours and hours and hours putting this book together. I mean that talk about blood, sweat and tears.

I can’t wait to get into that book.

It his passion for a worthwhile cause. He has this concept of the way that it was the way we should be paying attention to our agriculture and our plants.

It’s important to have that. It’s important to be able to voice that and have that be tied to your brand also so that people who either already have that cause in mind can be connected with you and your brand and also it brings other people who have liked your cider.

Now they can come in and learn this story.

That’s something they would not have known otherwise and you can bring new people into the cause. Overall, I expect really big things from Andy Brennan in the future and can’t wait to try his cider at The Mother Earth News Fair.

Outro: Join us again on the next off the grid is podcast brought to you by the team at BrianJPombo.com, helping successful but overworked entrepreneurs, transform their companies into dream assets.

That’s BrianJPombo.com.

If you or someone you know would like to be a guest on The Off The Grid Biz Podcast, offthegridbiz.com/contact. Those who appear on the show do not necessarily endorse my beliefs, suggestions, or advice or any of the services provided by our sponsor.

Our theme music is Cold Sun by Dell. Our executive producer and head researcher is Sean E Douglas.

I’m Brian Pombo and until next time, I wish you peace, freedom, and success.

Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast

Stories for the Self-Reliant!

Tag: farming

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Andy Brennan – Aaron Burr Cider