Typically everybody said that people around here didn't like produce, well of
course you don't like produce if it's coming from Idaho a couple months ago
and it's taste like eh... you don't like it. But if you were to taste the stuff
grown here in this icy cold virgin soil you'd definitely have a different
opinion on that. So I think we have a real plus that the stuff we're selling
is very good tasting.
We're the only commercial farm, well I would think west of the Alaska Range but
maybe there's some in Dillingham but no one's doing anything near the quantities
that we're growing. So this high tunnel was tomatoes and cucumbers the
next one was all zucchini. We did about 4,000 pounds of zucchini this year and
the last one was all strawberries.
produce in the bush has not really ever been available and especially Alaskan
grown produce has not been available at all. We could really make this available
to everybody. I'm not shy to say that we could be feeding everybody off the road
system in this part of the state. You know every gardening book you'll read
tells you not to harvest your brussels sprouts and cabbage till after you had a
few good frosts because the frost, the cold turns the starches into sugars and
everything tastes better after a few frosts, and there's ice under my plants
about a foot and a half, two feet down it's frozen ground, permafrost, and that
icy cold ground, that's why they're so sweet. Yeah, yeah we eat a lot of it. A lot
of it. I can't compare it with anything cause we don't go buying cabbage and carrots from anybody.
I came to Alaska in July of 1976. I came up as a commercial pilot, came up to
Bethel and was flying airplanes for about 10 years and got into construction
and built a lot of homes for the next ten years, and started farming.
Bethel, there's six thousand people. We can grow way more than what we can sell
in Bethel. So we're faced with every year trying to figure out how to grow less
and I don't like figuring out how to grow less. I want to kind of grow more
and never expected it to take off like it did but here we are today.
Someone commented on the cabbage box. We have a website. You go on there, we have about
four boxes now, different boxes. So a typical box that we're shipping out
right now with Alaskan growing stuff is a head of cabbage, a couple, possibly three
pounds of carrots, several pounds of potatoes, some turnips, and typically a nice onion. I make the
box I take it to the airport, ship the box. Thanks a lot! You bet. This twenty
pound box of produce in the hands of all the people in the villages and with the
birds and the fish and the moose that are available to them and now this
healthy staple, you're gonna feed your family
very good tasting healthy food for a week. So if you were to get this twice a
month it would eventually have a huge effect on your health eating this versus
Twinkies and pop. We grew enough food this year for about 3,000 boxes of
produce like this. It would not be hard to grow twice as much as we are growing
right now.
Well it's supposedly not good growing here is from what I've heard before I
got started I would hope to think that people are changing their minds because
of what we're doing, but I basically look at we have this Kuskokwim River here
that we've had millions of tons of salmon going up every year for the last
million years; and the Yukon River is just about 50, 60 miles north of here
same situation; and we're in this huge delta where all those fish have died and
washed back out to the ocean throughout this Delta, it sure seems to be a good
place to grow. I mean it isn't difficult to get stuff to grow here.
So we're in this remote region the size of Texas, that has 53 villages scattered around it
and everything goes from the hub, which we are, onto small airplanes and flown
out to these villages on a daily basis. Hard for anybody driving around the
country to imagine that, but that's, I think, a very good way to describe how
remote we are. There's nothing here for agriculture whatsoever in town. So can't
go down the road and buy anything there is no road and there's nothing here for
agriculture. Can't even buy a wagon. Nothing. So we ended up really making a
lot of our stuff in the beginning. Used it for years and still using some of it.
Well I turn the vacuum on and I got these holes drilled in there so the
vacuum makes one seed stick in every hole and then I dump the extras off.
I fill these with dirt and pack them down a little bit so they're down about
a quarter, half-inch. Set that in there and you turn this flat upside down and shut
the vacuum off and one seed will fall in every cell; and then I put a little more
dirt on top and level it off, water it, and we're good to go.
That's it. Lots of innovations I like that part of
it. So I don't know what's next, but I think this one's gonna take me to the end.