When I tasted the food that I grew it tasted way better than the stuff in the grocery store.
So much of you what you get in the grocery store is hydroponic and it really doesn't
taste like that much. So real soil grown organic food tastes so good and I really
wanted to share that with people who didn't have the capacity like I did at the time. So I
started the CSA program because I thought it was super cool. I love the CSA concept.
People would just come to the farm with their bags and their kids and they would
pick up their box. Bryce: It's the best thing.
Emma: Yeah, it's so good.
Bryce: And it's turned into a viable business.
We have three delivery drivers, we have an office team that does sales and marketing
and customer service, then we have the pack team that's dealing with all of the produce
from this farm and our partner farms - custom making everyone's order and making sure it's
food safe and gets packed correctly and on time every single day - and then we have the production
team making veggies all the time. Those are the people you see in the fields and on tractors and
some of them are building their greenhouses right now. We actually transitioned our CSA
to have perennial shares. We have perennial CSA members and their shares never end, technically.
They come back year after year, week after week, and so they just end when the customer wants it to end.
That has really helped stabilize our business, our cash flow, our customer base. It's really
changed how a lot of people eat because they're constantly eating local and so they're getting
to be really really in-tune with what's ripe in the Mid-Atlantic at any time of year, and that's
that's really special. It's pushed people's culinary creativity. We are selling staple and
specialty food. You know we want people to get our orange carrots and gold potatoes
from us, and at the same time we want to keep life fun and interesting and new and fresh and special.
When I was pregnant with my firstborn I was really passionate about providing healthy produce for my
growing fetus. The 'What to Expect When You're Expecting' book said arugula was really good
for baby brain development because it has the DHA vitamins. And fish does too, but then
they're also like don't eat fish. So I started buying like tons of bags of arugula. And then
I blew my grocery budget. The seeds were only a couple dollars, so I built myself a salad table.
I screwed together this little raised beds on saw horses and stuck it on my apartment
balcony, and put arugula seeds in there and that was the beginning of my love for growing things.
I started in my parent's backyard in Baltimore County a half acre of you know essentially
bartered land. I didn't have any experience farming. I didn't have more than two hundred
dollars to invest in literal seed money. I had two kids under two.
Son: It's big! Emma: Ok, can you pull that one?
Oh what color is that one? Son: Purple!
Emma: Someone likes to pick her own strawberries!
I took a 12-member CSA program for about like a 20-week season, which was in 2012.
Since then, I've just grown the business slowly. I started bartering for more pieces of property. I had - ultimately - by 2019,
I had six pieces of borrowed land. I got them all certified organic, which was kind of crazy because each piece
had to have its own organic system plan. 15 acres is kind of a lot, especially because all of this equipment I was hauling
it around. It was was painfully inefficient and at the same time I didn't have a mortgage, it was all barter for veggies.
So I was able to grow my business pretty substantially without taking on a mortgage,
and I had the benefit of having experience at that point on six different parcels of land,
so I got a really good understanding of what I really needed before I made this giant investment of buying
land. So in late 2019 I purchased this land,
which is 25 acres in Frederick County. The benefit of having my own land was the ability to invest in
infrastructure. That's the one thing I wasn't able to do on barter land--I tried, I asked. We grow crops
in two different ways: we direct sow them into the ground and we transplant them. With transplants we
can really get a jump on the season, and the weeds, and disease as well, and pest pressure by
keeping them in a controlled environment before we put them in the ground. In the case of peppers, they
need a bunch of weeks in the greenhouse before we can take them outside for transplant. They're heat
loving crops and we can really get a jump-start on the harvest by starting them inside. So we
actually start all our seeds in here. We have a germination chamber that puts the seedlings at
the correct temperature so that we get really good germination. Aand then we grow them out in
here. These are all our Peppers we have a bunch of different kinds of herbs here. You can see
this fancy kind of Basil is that purple. We've got cilantro and lettuces and a bunch of brassicas. So
we're growing an array of specialty crops here. I like to say 'specialty is our specialty.' This
is our water wheel transplanter. These get filled with water and also some fertilizer. All of those
trays that you saw in the greenhouse sit here, and up here, and here. And then we have riders, so when
you're riding this you can take a transplant from here and put it directly into the ground because
those two wheels actually create dibbles, and the water and the fertilizer fills into that. And then
we put the seedlings directly in the ground. This is Slayer for slaying weeds. It's a really cool
tractor. It's fun to drive because it's light and fast. So the faster you go, the better it'll slay.
I used to do every job on the farm myself, and now I've developed a lot of systems,
and my staff is really capable to take them on. That's mushroom compost that we get from farms
in Pennsylvania. I don't know if you know that Pennsylvania is the mushroom capital of the world.
All of our equipment is set up for this bed system. So all the tractors have the same tire
width, so that they fit on either side of this bed. Which means that we can not only prep the
soil, and put the compost, put the nutrients, create a bed, transplant, but then we can also cultivate.
Bryce: Are you able to reuse a lot of this plastic? Emma: No.
Bryce: That's frustrating. Emma: It is. So we have drip irrigation underneath these and it's
a way for us to conserve water, because otherwise we're overhead watering.
That's subject to evaporation, especially on a really windy day this top layer of soil is going to
evaporate really quickly. And you'll just have to keep watering and watering, but here if we water
with drip irrigation - which is buried underneath the soil and then protected by this plastic - even if
you give it a little bit of water, it stays really moist in there. Imagine a wet paper towel in a
plastic bag. It would stay wet for a while. Even though I don't love plastic - it's not my favorite thing
at all, it makes economical sense and in some ways environmental sense.
Both conventional and organic vegetable operations use plastic mulch. Some don't use any, of course, it really
depends on the scale and the microclimate. Right now the national organic program does not allow
biodegradable plastics to be used on an organic operation. So we do have to remove them each year and
throw them away in order to keep our organic certification.
Bryce: because who knows what other additives might be in... Emma: What might be breaking down over time, yeah.
We have an apiary here.
They are fantastic. They pollinate our crops and so they help us get better yields because more of the
flowers are pollinated. It is owned and operated by Chesapeake Queen company. They've been working day
and night on creating new boxes, and making splits, and they're also catching swarms in the area.
Emma: Bryan's all 'I'm gonna suit up,' and then he's like, 'nah I've got Grant, I'm gonna show off.'
Bryan: Yeah. Grant: I know, I see him flexing.
Swarms are really really docile so even though there's bees all over you you can
just walk right into them and they're not going to sting you because bees only sting to protect
their house, but when they're swarming they're looking for a new home.
That is a purple martin house. Purple martins are beneficial birds for us because they eat a ton of insects, it's so fun. I
love these birds. We actually have three Purple Martin houses on the property. We also have some
bat houses and some of those native bee homes as well. We don't only want our pollinators to be our
honeybees, even though we love them, we do want to create a habitat for our local pollinators as well.
I have a multi-prong plan for climate resilience. One of the reasons that I collaborate with other
farmers is to develop resilience. By banding together we can have more bounty available in
the winter which will keep our customers. I started selling to restaurants in 2013, which was the year
after I started the CSA program, and I realized pretty quickly that customer retention was going
to be really hard with chefs if I stopped selling to them in the winter. It felt like a real problem,
and it was much harder to get those customers back when I re-announced myself every May, like 'hey
here I am, come you know buy my stuff.' And they're like, 'oh we've been using produce all winter.' Even
though I could grow a lot of turnips and storage radishes it's only so interesting week after week.
But if I could pair that with maitake mushrooms and candy carrots, then it really rounded
it out, and we really helped each other out. A lot of those farms that I aggregate from are market
farmers and if they have a bad week or if their market is seasonal, it's really helpful for them
to have year-round sales. The other thing for me is that, as a business owner, I really wanted an income
year round. But it was also my employees and if I don't have income in the winter I can't
keep them on. And that means it's not only customer acquisition that I'm struggling with in the winter,
but it's also employee retention. And then training them at the time of year like this is really stressful.
We also invest in our soil, that's a really big one. By treating our soil like it is the key to human
survival, which it very much is. And that does require a long-term approach. We're able to weather
harsher conditions by investing in organic matter and all of the different nutrients that the soil
needs to really increase its ability to hold and drain water. It's one of the most important things
I feel like I'm doing taking conventional land and regeneratively farming it and nurturing it back
organically is not easy, and that's the situation this planet is in. Somebody's gotta roll up the
sleeves and do the hard work and that is farmers. Creating a really resilient food system based on
our local economy is how we're gonna thrive in a time of climate change. I just don't see global
pandemics, and supplies chain disruptions, and wars or political strife putting us in the situation
where we should be continually relying on international or across-the-nation food
for our daily subsistence. Now that we're several seasons in and actually acquiring more land.
So we're on 25 acres, but this year we're actually going to be on 40 acres, and next year we're going
to be on 70. It's been really great to employ people and farm alongside of other people. It's
a really hard job and so it's nice to share your successes and challenges with others.
So this is French sorrel, it tastes like a green apple.
Bryce: Oh wow!
Emma: Very sour.
Bryce: No it's really good. Wow that's amazing.