Discovering the Organic Farm School on Whidbey Island Hands-On Farming Education for Non-Farmers with Judy Feldman

The Organic Farm School: A Natural Connection

During the episode, Judy Feldman shares her journey into the Organic Farm School. Originating from Green Bank Farm in Whidbey Island, Judy’s passion for agriculture stems from her family’s traditional involvement in farming. Although she didn’t grow up on a farm, her role at the Organic Farm School signifies her connection to a lifestyle deeply rooted in agriculture. Judy, a Texas transplant, is now flourishing in the vastly different climate and farming ecosystem of Washington State.

From CSA to Farm School

The transcript reveals that Judy became involved with the Organic Farm School in 2009 when it was a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. This initiative focused on teaching people how to start and maintain a CSA. Over time, Judy transitioned into Executive Director, guiding the program through several iterations. By 2016, the school had moved to the Maxwelton Valley, its current location, with a dedicated focus on training new farmers and educating communities about supporting local agriculture.

The Urgency of New Farmers

Judy emphasizes the pressing need for new generations of farmers, pointing out that only less than 2% of the American population is involved in farming. The Organic Farm School caters to around 0.25% of that farming demographic. She describes this year’s group of students, noting a diverse age range and a tendency for more women to enter the program. Interestingly, many students are career changers looking for a more tangible and impactful career.

Training for the Future

Scott and Judy delve into what a day at the Organic Farm School looks like. The program blends hands-on farming experience with classroom learning. Students spend the school year from April to October immersed in seeding, crop planning, and tending to the land. They learn the intricacies of producing local vegetables, the math of farm planning, and the art of communicating and managing farm operations.

Accessible and Sustainable Farming

A significant portion of the podcast discusses the challenges new farmers face in today’s food system. Judy acknowledges that the current farming model is not sustainable for those entering the field. The burden of labor-intensive work is often overwhelming, yet the school prepares students to be the changemakers needed for a more equitable food system. Engaging communities to support these fresh farmers is essential to the school’s mission.

Shortening the Food Chain

The podcast highlights the importance of connecting with local farms and understanding fresh, seasonal produce. Judy explains how their co-op system benefits new farmers by finding markets, allowing them to focus on farming without the added stress of immediate sales. Scott and Judy encourage listeners to ask questions about the origins of their food, even at restaurants, to promote local farming.

Organic Farming: A Big Picture Approach

Towards the end of the episode, organic farming takes center stage. While organic certification offers a means for chemical-free agriculture beneficial to workers’ health, the broader implications of freshness and ethical farming hold the most value. Judy advocates for a diverse food system that incorporates organic farming principles for the health of the environment and the community.

Organic Farm School Judy Feldman Episode Transcript

Scott Cowan [00:00:00]:

Well, Todd, my engineer, will be listening to this. And he threatens to publish these things. So just warning, he may he may just let me ramble here for a second and get going. But.

Welcome to the Exploring Washington State podcast. Here’s your host, Scott Cowan. All right. My guest today is Judy Feldman, who is the executive director of the Organic Farm School on Whidbey Island. So Judy, thank you for making some time to be on here. You were recommended to us by 1 of our listeners. So she put us in touch. You and I talked. And here we are talking and recording.

So I appreciate you making some time on a Monday to sit down and share with our audience more about the Organic Farm School. So they don’t want to hear me, they want to hear you. How did you, give me the backstory. How did you get started in the Organic Farm School? What’s your story? Lots of questions there. So let’s go. Lisa C. Davis, PhD, PhD Sure. Well, First of all, thank you for having me on your podcast.

Judy Feldman [00:01:19]:

I got started with the Organic Farm School when it was at Green Bank Farm, a little bit farther north here on Whidbey Island. My family has a long tradition, as many families do, of being somehow involved in agriculture or growing food. I’m the first member of my family to not grow up on a farm. And so in some ways, working with the farm school is my return back to a way of life that I didn’t have the privilege of experiencing directly.

Scott Cowan [00:01:47]:

Did you grow up on Whidbey? Let me interrupt you and ask you that. Did you grow up on Whidbey or are you a transplant?

Judy Feldman [00:01:52]:

I’m a transplant from Texas of all places. Oh, okay. Very different climate, very different growing protocols, very different crops. But very much that connection with land. So that’s the common denominator here.

Scott Cowan [00:02:09]:

Okay.

Judy Feldman [00:02:11]:

So I started with the Organic Farm School when it was technically called the, what was it at that point, the CSA program at Green Bank Farm. And that was in 2009. And I was on the advisory board for the program. At the time, I was working with WSU Extension for Island County. And that program, that part of our life, that first year of the program was an entirely different approach to training people in how to farm. It was focused almost entirely on how do you start a CSA or a community supported agriculture endeavor. How do you plan it? How do you grow enough? How do you find your customers, et cetera, et cetera. And then in 2011, I actually became the executive director for the nonprofit that was managing the totality of that farm. In 2016, we moved away from Green Bank to the Maxwelton Valley, here on the south end of the island, and now our program is dedicated entirely towards training new farmers and also educating communities in how to support farmers. So that’s a little bit of the backstory. My story is not as important as that of our farmers. So I’ll leave it there. Well, no,

Scott Cowan [00:03:30]:

I think there still needs to be a little bit more. 1 doesn’t just volunteer for something without an interest in it and some skills. So what, what motivated you to volunteer and, you know, invest your time and resources in, into a project like this? How, how does it speak to you?

Judy Feldman [00:03:49]:

Okay, you’re not gonna let me off the hook. Okay. My interest pretty much throughout my life has been that of a generalist. And generalists tend to look at life as a system, right? All of the moving, fascinating, bright and shiny parts of life. We get distracted here and there, but at the end of the day, we always come back to the big picture. So, I’ve always been fascinated by natural history, by human history, by organizational systems as well as these more earth-bound systems. So when I had the opportunity to work, first of all, with WSU Extension, when I finally finished my 20-year degree program through University of Washington. I worked with Extension, and I was able to work with Master Gardeners. I was able to work with Beach Watchers. I was able to work with 4-H kids and their parents. I was able to work with Livestock Advisors. All of these programs that dealt with how do we as humans interact with this world in which we live in a way that’s educated, responsive, responsible, and is trying to make things a little bit better. Things a little bit better. So, through that lens of working with Extension, this opportunity to work with the farm school, with the training program for farmers, was incredibly meaningful to me because of that family history I mentioned, having grown up with farmers. I knew that they were not what many people assume. Farmers are not dullards. They’re not doing it because they can’t do anything else. They’re doing it because they love working in concert with the land and because they are, for whatever reason, able to juggle this vast diversity of skill sets, incredible diversity of challenges, not on a daily basis, but on an hourly basis. And that fascinated me. That made me want to be a part of a system that not only trains new farmers but supports them as they go out into this world of trying to grow food for us. So I’m not a farmer myself, I’m very much a generalist, but I am totally enamored by the complexity of how we eat, how we grow for what we eat, and how the world is changing so fast and how that’s really pulling farmers into these tighter and tighter loops of change.

Scott Cowan [00:06:29]:

You asked for it. Tim Draper No, that was absolutely wonderful, actually. So that gives a lot of depth to the whole thing. So I appreciate you going there. Sure. So the new location. How large is this? Let’s help establish some things here. So, you know, how many acres is this new the new location and

Judy Feldman [00:06:50]:

yeah we’ll go from there. Okay so when we were at Green Bank Farm which is a publicly owned farm in Green Bank Washington here on Whidbey Island we were farming on about 10 acres that the Port of Coupeville, who owns that farm, set aside for us. When we moved to Maxwellton Valley to a property owned by Ron and Ava Scher, interestingly enough, the space that they opened up to us first was inside what used to be a racetrack, a training track for racehorses. You can see it from Google Maps. And it’s almost exactly the same footprint that we had at Green Bank Farm, just a little bit under 10 acres. Now, Ron and Ava own over 300 acres. We’re kind of situated in the middle of it, but that 10 acres does have meaning. We are training farmers to operate a financially viable livelihood on 10 acres. Therefore we’re showing them what the workload feels like. Now they’re not going to be ready for that their first year out, but while they’re with us they get to experience what farming 10 acres feels like physically, intellectually, spiritually, what it feels like to take care of all of the tasks, how to manage the site, not just the vegetables. So long answer to a very simple question, we’re farming on just a little under 10 acres in a beautiful valley on Whidbey Island that was heavily impacted by glaciers. So our soils are very sandy. And it all leads down to Maxwellton Beach.

Scott Cowan [00:08:31]:

Well, OK, so that’s very interesting because my idea of farming is going to the produce section at Safeway. I mean that I kind of joke, but I don’t, um, I grew up in a, an area of Puget sound. My neighbors had 5 acres. I mean, that was the parcels around us, but we were on like a third of an acre. So I grew up not knowing a whole lot about farming. But you said something to me I think is very interesting is 10 acres, which is a, doesn’t sound. So living here in Wenatchee where I’ve got apple orchards, just, you know, 10 miles away, if you will, and they’ve got hundreds of acres. Different, I get it, it’s different, but you kind of think, or at least I do, that farming is, you know, the more acreage, the better, if you will. And, but you just, just said you’ve got 10 acres, your, your, your students spend time learning how to handle that. I’ll call it holistically. And they couldn’t start with 10 acres and probably succeed. And that’s interesting to me because I would have thought, well, and I did think, differently. So you have a 10 acre farm, and currently how many students are at the school?

Judy Feldman [00:09:51]:

This year we have 11 students. We have 2 full-time staff that work with them both in the classroom and in the field and then 2 part-time field assistants that work alongside them teaching them what they learned at the year before to get all the production in. And when our students graduate, we encourage them if they have the opportunity to take on what’s called a farm incubator. And we offer connections through our community opportunities where they can take on a quarter of an acre or a half an acre and use the business plan that they develop with us on that quarter of an acre or half acre to get a sense of, okay, you had 10 other people working with you while you were a student. Now you’re on your own. Let’s get a sense of what it feels like just you and your crop plan. And even that can be overwhelming. When you’re growing annual vegetable crops, now if you’re growing fruit trees in Wenatchee, I’m not meaning to make it sound simple because it’s not, but they’re growing maybe 5 varieties of trees. They’re all planted in similar fashion. Once they’re planted, they’re planted, and then it’s irrigating, watching for pests, watching for fertility. Very complex systems. But we’re training people to grow those vegetables you see in Safeway. The carrots, the radishes, the turnips, the lettuce, the chard, the spinach, all of those. It’s a wide variety of crops. And so knowing how much to plant for how many people on what schedule so that they get them all season, when to plant them, when to pull them, when to shift, when to rotate. That’s really a lot of moving parts. It’s a lot of decisions. It’s a lot of decisions that a new farmer has to make on an hourly basis. So we don’t encourage them to jump right out of the program and go to a 10-acre farm.

Scott Cowan [00:11:54]:

Or larger even. Okay. So let me ask you this question. So currently this year, what crops is the farm growing?

Judy Feldman [00:12:00]:

We grow about 40 different crops, about 120 different varieties. And those crops are, again, what you see at Safeway or Albertsons or Walmart or any other grocery store. Spinach, carrots, onions, leeks, lettuce, lots of varieties of lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, basil, oregano, all sorts of those vegetables that we hope you see on your plate. Now, we do not encourage our students to grow 40 crops and 120 different varieties. We do that so that they learn what are they like to grow, what takes a lot of time, what doesn’t take a lot of time, what’s easiest to take to market, what do customers like best. If you want carrots at the market with tops on them, that’s a different variety than if you want carrots just in bags that you take to the grocery store. So we’re just trying to expose them to the greatest amount of diversity we can without driving them completely over the edge of sanity.

Scott Cowan [00:13:08]:

So part of the plan then isn’t that they’re saying we’d like to grow oregano, basil and time. You’re, you’re already giving them the crops, exposing them to a palette, I guess, of different, well, everything grows a little differently, and even in my limited knowledge, I mean,

Judy Feldman [00:13:30]:

so, okay. Right, and 1 of the questions students will ask us as well, but I’m from Minnesota. My climate is really different than the climate of Whidbey Island or Seattle. And that’s true. But when you go shopping in Minnesota, you’re still going to see carrots, spinach, onions, leeks. They’re just going to be different varieties. And as a farmer, hopefully, if you graduate from our program or any of the other programs across the country, you’re going to know how to look at pest pressures and when they arise, you’re going to know what to look at as your peak heat and when the greatest pressure on your irrigation system is. But through all of that, you’re going to know how to grow carrots, you’re going to know how to grow broccoli, et cetera.

Scott Cowan [00:14:19]:

Okay, so this is gonna be a lot more complicated. So what I warned you is that, you know, the questions all of a sudden, I’m like, okay, now I can go down a lot of different, you know, garden paths.

Judy Feldman [00:14:29]:

I’ll go right there with you. Yeah, so

Scott Cowan [00:14:32]:

let’s come back to the students. So how, how do you find your students? How do they find you? What’s it? What does the student avatar look like? Let’s call it that. What’s, what’s the avatar of a, of a, of a organic farm school student.

Judy Feldman [00:14:50]:

So I’m going to start by reminding everybody that less than 2% of the American population have anything to do with farming. So out of the entire United States, We’re trying to reach out to, you know, 0.25 of that 2% of people interested in this type of profession. So in terms of the avatar, It changes every year. This year it so happens that most of our students are between the ages of about 24 to 45. We’ve had years where they range from 19 to 53. We’ve had years where there are 20 to 28. So much of who is interested in becoming a farmer is really impacted by the economy, the current events, what’s on in the movie theaters. 2 years ago, we saw The Biggest Little Farm, and everybody all of a sudden was really interested in how to become a small-scale farmer. So, this is our biggest class ever. This next year could be a little smaller, but we’re still hoping for the same size. So, as our country shifts, so does the avatar for our program. I will say that almost every year, more women than men.

Scott Cowan [00:16:20]:

Oh.

Judy Feldman [00:16:23]:

And we’re beginning to see more career change students, people who have been involved in finance or technology or interestingly enough, the medical field, deciding that they want to have a profession that is, it has more relevance to their day-to-day life, where they can see it make a difference. And in terms of the medical professionals, they wanna feed people to avoid disease rather than treat people for chronic disease.

Scott Cowan [00:16:57]:

Okay. Is Most of your students, okay, so you said 24, so I’m gonna post-college years. Are they coming to the school after, say, a four-year education, a four-year college education? Or? I would

Judy Feldman [00:17:12]:

say about A third to a half of our students have a college degree. But the others have decided very intentionally that college is not for them, that they want to farm and that when you go to a farmer’s market, nobody asks to see your diploma. They want to look at your vegetables and they want to know that you’re growing healthy vegetables and that they don’t want to spend all of that money and time on theory. They want their hands in the dirt, in the soil, hopefully.

Scott Cowan [00:17:45]:

I’m laughing because I’m thinking if I went to my Wenatchee farmers market and saw somebody’s Harvard diploma behind them and I, and I saw the cares where I’m making up, you know, 9 95 a pound. I’m like, okay, how much of that’s going to student debt? Um, actually though, that’s actually a very interesting, um, that you’re absolutely correct. I’ve never once given any thought to the farmer, the people I talked to at a farmer’s market, their backstory, and in other words, did you go to school? It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just, it’s not relevant.

Judy Feldman [00:18:17]:

No, it’s not relevant. And and at the same time, I think I mentioned this when you and I spoke earlier, farming is an honorable profession. And we actually need the some of the best and the brightest to be involved in it because the world is changing so fast. And interestingly enough, we have had students from Yale and Harvard come to the program because they get through academia and they go, well, what can I do that’s, not that that degree is not real, but they’re looking for something more relevant to the changes that they’re seeing happening in real time?

Scott Cowan [00:18:58]:

Okay. When I was looking online, it says that the program is 7 months. How about we go down that path? Let’s talk about that. So when does school start? Imagine I was, I’ve applied, you accepted me for that. I’m truly sorry. I’m inept. But so when would school start?

Judy Feldman [00:19:22]:

So with the pandemic, we’re always crossing our fingers. But last this year, we started in April. We anticipate starting in April next year. So if you anticipate an April start, it’s the beginning of April to the end of October. We do that… Beautiful time to be up in… Beautiful time. And it’s so that you can get to the farm in early spring and actually start in the start house, seeding crops, starting in the field, doing the bed prep, opening up the beds, putting down amendments, learning how to use the equipment right from the beginning of the season. So You start quite literally with your hands in potting soil and in the dirt doing things. And throughout the course of the program, you continue to do that. We’ll plant, I think, with lettuce successions. It’s 38 to 40 successions of lettuce. So you’ll be planting lettuce throughout the season. You’ll be planting spinach throughout the season. You’ll be planting some crops maybe only once or twice. Summer squash, winter squash, you plant it once and then you’re done. So they start by learning how to propagate, how to prepare the beds, then they move into how to cultivate, how to weed, how to add amendments mid-season as they’re warranted, how to watch for pests, They’re learning basic plant science. While they’re doing all that, though, they’re also learning crop planning, which is a lot of math. OK, if I want to feed 50 families over the course of 6 months, and they each want 1 bunch of radishes every week, how many radishes do I plant, and how frequently do I plant them, how much of whatever soil amendments I need do I apply, when do I apply them, how much water am I going to need for those plants, how many twist ties am I going to need, how many bags am I going to need, all of those things, all of the quantification of crops. They’re learning how to do that. They’re also learning how to talk to each other. It’s going to be a while before most of our farmers, once they launch and they get their own farm, it’ll be a year or 2 before they hire help, but at some point, they will hire help. So knowing how to communicate, how do you problem solve, how do you plan together, how do you delegate tasks, how do you supervise kindly, compassionately. While they’re doing that, they’re beginning to work on their own personal business plan. And their first step with us is to think about who they are as a person and what is their own personal mission statement. Because if they just build a business plan based on the bottom line, it’s a very good chance that once they actually do it, they’re going to realize, I hate this. I can’t take my vacation. I can’t buy a new car. I don’t want to work 8 and a half days a week, 30 hours a day. What am I doing? How did I build this? So, we start by getting them to really reflect on who they are and what’s important to them and what are their personal goals and interpersonal goals. And then from there, they start building their actual business plan, the crop plan to support that plan, the marketing plan to support that, et cetera, et cetera. And then by October, they have those plans at least for their first draft done. And they’re looking at what their next steps are. So in 7 months we’re trying to fill the gap that most people past my generation have missed. They haven’t had a grandparent to go home to after school that had them do chores out in the garden or the farm. If they’re like you or like me, I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. I couldn’t even tell you where the nearest farm was when I was growing up. So we’re trying to fill that gap in a very short amount of time. We’re busy.

Scott Cowan [00:23:25]:

So at the time of recording we’re in early September. Put you on the spot. What would a day look like for your students this in early September? What are they doing right now?

Judy Feldman [00:23:36]:

Well, today’s a holiday. So they’re very happy to actually be taking the first holiday. They’ve been able to take off this year. They’re taking off today and it’s appropriate. It’s Labor Day, right?

Scott Cowan [00:23:46]:

Right,

Judy Feldman [00:23:49]:

But starting tomorrow, they’ll be back out. They’re still doing late transplants for fall crops. This is about the last week. Maybe next week, we’ll still be able to get transplants in the ground. So they’re still doing some transplanting. They’re starting to put in cover crops. So any big blocks of vegetables that we’re taking out because we’re done with harvest, they’re now planting. They’re learning how to use the cedar behind the tractor to get in those cover crops while the soil is still warm enough for germination.

Scott Cowan [00:24:20]:

And what is an example of a cover crop for those of us that are city people? Sure, a cover crop does just that. It covers the soil.

Judy Feldman [00:24:28]:

But while it’s covering the soil, as much as it’s growing up, the roots are growing down. And as it photosynthesizes throughout the winter, it’s taking all of the sugars that it creates and it’s pushing them down into the soil. That means it’s feeding that multitude of life, the soil biome we call it, that actually is what provides fertility for the plants. So when we take the, we call it residue, the plants that we’ve already harvested, when we take them off, we’ve taken a lot of nutrition out of the soil by selling it to you or to our local grocery stores or to farmers markets. We’ve taken a lot out. Cover crops help us start to put it back in. So it can be rye, it can be winter wheat, it can be vetch, it can be triticale, it can be clover, it can be any number of things that are intended not to provide us food, but to provide soil with food. So that’s part of what they’re doing a lot of in September is actually getting that into the ground while the soil is still warm enough to get it a head start. They’re starting to harvest fall crops, winter squashes, the last of the tomatoes, more carrots, more turnips, more parsnips, more beets, those things that we can store and then sell over the course of the fall on into the early winter. They are doing a lot of cleanup because on a farm, Especially if you’re going to be storing a lot of crops, you want your farm to be not white glove clean, but you want it to be cleared of stuff so that you leave less places for pests to live. Because As much as we want to share our vegetables with our community, and we know that that community involves mice and rats and other things, we would prefer to share it with you and your family, not with them. So the cleaner the farm, the more we can control those things. And then they’re starting to think about, well, if they were to stay at the farm, what would next year’s crop plan look like? So as they’re closing down this year, they’re thinking about what they would like to do next year, whether it’s with us or on their own.

Scott Cowan [00:26:45]:

How many hours a day are they in school? And that may be a wide variety. I mean, it might differ. As we go through the season, but what are we, what are we, what is like tomorrow? Let’s go to tomorrow. How many hours will they be in school tomorrow? In September,

Judy Feldman [00:27:07]:

they’re in school, which means either in an actual class or learning in a class in the field or doing the work in the field. In September, that’s about an 8 hour day. In August, that could be a 10 hour day. In July, that could be a 9 hour day. And that’s 1 of the things that’s often the hardest for those who have not farmed before to come to terms with. We try to prepare people. We say this is not an 8 to 5 job. Just because it’s raining and 48 degrees outside doesn’t mean that there’s not stuff to get done out there. Just because it’s the Fourth of July doesn’t mean you get to go watch the fireworks. You got a lot of tomatoes to tell us. So part of the training is actually coming to grips with what our current food system demands of farmers, which is your life focuses on the life of your farm and you try to put yours in alongside it.

Scott Cowan [00:28:11]:

So from April to October, they’re working 8 to 9, 10 hours a day. Is that A5I mean, cause farms, you know, mine, that’s not 7 days a week, is it? Are they, are they, I mean, can it, I mean. So you’re getting at the, you’re

Judy Feldman [00:28:33]:

getting at the tough part, right? We tell our students that the 7 months they spend with us will likely be the hardest they’ve ever worked, but the easiest farming they’ll ever do. Simply because they’ve got a group of people doing it with them. Farming especially in your first 3 to 5 years when you’re building your business and you don’t have a lot of capital, you don’t have a lot of money sitting in the bank. So you can’t hire a lot of people. You’re likely to be working largely on your own with family or friends or volunteers. And then as you’re able, you might hire a halftime harvest helper, etc. So during that timeframe, you’re probably working 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, hoping to take off a seventh so that you can remind yourself of what it is to be human and to keep going another week. It’s intense, but that intensity is based on the fact that just because you’re tired doesn’t mean that your tomato plants are tired. Doesn’t mean that you can’t, you know, that in the peak of August that you can forget to water for 2 days. If you’re growing for seed, which is also part of our program, Learning How to Grow for Seed, that you think September is going to be a time to relax, But just as your seed crops need to be drying out, our weather starts to get damp and wet. So you have to always be watching and be ready to run to the farm and cover them up or pull them into the barn. So It’s a lot like saying is parenting an 8 to 5 job. You’re kind of parenting a food system.

Scott Cowan [00:30:24]:

Well, and I don’t think anybody that gets into farming is looking for that part-time easy money, you know, internet marketing, you know, but the question, the question is, so when they’re, when they’re on, I’ll call it campus, when they’re on the farm, I mean, really a farm will need some form of attention 7 days a week, in my opinion, whether it’s just to be doing sure that the irrigation is working properly on a Saturday or a Sunday. Are your students, do the students stay on the farm when they’re, So there are, are they commuting or?

Judy Feldman [00:31:05]:

1 of the things we very early on realized is you can’t commute to this program. We’ve had people who say, well, I live in Everett. Can I just take the ferry over? It’s like, No, you can’t. It’s you need to be close enough to the farm that it doesn’t take you a half an hour to get there. If you get a text from a neighbor saying the sheep are out or I just see a fountain in your field, is your irrigation OK? You need to be able to get there pretty quickly, right? So we do have housing opportunities in proximity to the farm. It shares a boundary line with us. So it’s a 2 minute walk from back door to the field. And then the other students find housing. Not everybody, remember our students can be anywhere from 19 to 54, so and beyond. Some people are not into the whole group living arrangement thing. They’re done with that. They don’t need it. Other people are more introverted and after being shoulder to shoulder with somebody for 10 hours a day, the last thing they want to do is to go home and sit across a dinner table with them. So, we do have places for them to live. But your questions are getting to something that we are increasingly struggling with. We’ve always been aware of it, but we’re increasingly struggling with, which is we are training these new farmers to go out into a food system that is not equitable, that is not healthy for the people doing the work, that is not a sustainable lifestyle for the people who are doing the work And yet that work is so important. We all eat. I don’t know about you, but I like to eat at least once a day, if not 2 or 3 times a day. Can you see me? I don’t miss meals. I don’t either. And if we don’t want to miss meals, we need farmers. But the current food system that we are training people to enter requires them to give it everything. And yet, at the same time, we’re telling them, okay, once you’re in it, We want you to be able to survive for a couple of years so you can begin to change it. That’s a huge load to put on the shoulders of these typically younger people going into farming. And so that’s why at the farm school we are realizing more and more that we have a huge responsibility to be teaching communities how to have the back of these new farmers. The average age of the American farmer is 58, and it’s getting older and older. I’m about to turn 60. I cannot imagine doing what these people are doing out in the field. My back, my hips, my shoulders, my arms would not… They would not do well with it. But the average age of our farmers is 58 and getting older. So if we want a new generation of people going into this labor-intensive, rapidly-changing, highly-complex profession, We as communities need to better understand what they’re facing to do what we’re asking them to do, which is to feed us. So that’s become a huge part of what we do at the Organic Farm School.

Scott Cowan [00:34:30]:

Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, we, you know, society where I was talking to somebody about, we’ve gotten so spoiled by Amazon and 2 day delivery that, you know, it’s hard to support a smaller company if, if the price is still the same, but the delivery is, and that’s our problem with Explorers. We have, we have some products for sale and I feel bad having to charge for shipping, but because I mean, I become Amazon, I, you know, Amazon is just, and I don’t mean anything disrespectful towards Amazon, but it’s this ginormous corporation that is massively impacting the way we think about things. And I think our grocery stores are the same thing. And that you go into your local. I’m not trying to call out anybody, so I don’t, you know, you go into your local grocery chain and you make a determination whether to buy this produce or that produce based on price, not on quality. Right. You go to local farmers market and you wonder why a bunch of carrots is X and I can get carrots, aren’t they? At local grocery chain for X minus 30%, whatever. And it’s hard because you, as somebody who wants to do a good thing. We have to vote with our financial resources, which are limited. But yet, like you’re saying, is we’re asking the farmer to work 12, 16 hours a day, 7, 8 months straight. And then they can go just to part-time of 8 hours a day. And there is this disconnect. And I think Educating the community is a very important thing. So how are you guys, what’s that outreach looking like for you at the school? How are you able to help educate us? Sure.

Judy Feldman [00:36:27]:

The pandemic has not helped because our ability to gather people has been severely curtailed. But we do things like we have a, we just finished our regularly scheduled Friday gatherings around the pizza oven, where we take whatever’s growing out in the field and those are the toppings for our pizza for the week. And that opens up conversations for anybody who comes about A, what is seasonal? What does seasonal food look like? Oh, and by the way, the tomato sauce in May, it wasn’t our tomato sauce. Why wasn’t it our tomato sauce? Well, because we didn’t have tomatoes. It gives us a chance to talk about how the farmers, I know you want to talk to them tonight, but they’ve been working 10 hours already. They probably have gone home because they’re exhausted, which opens up the conversation about the workload. So just by gathering at the farm, it’s allowed us to have those types of discussions. We’ve also, not so much this year, post-pandemic, but we did a series and can hardly wait to go back to it called Dishing Up the Dirt, which is conversations typically over a lunch, a salad lunch, where you’ll have on 1 side of the table eaters and on the other side of the table farmers. And we’ll talk about topics like what does it mean when you hear cheap food? Who’s working to make that food cheap? And what does it really mean in terms of environmental costs in terms of the invisible costs that we don’t see. What is, quote, an ethical plate? Is it the paleo diet? Is it a vegan diet? Is it a vegetarian diet? Is it an omnivores diet? What does an ethical plate look like? Climate impacts. What’s happening to farms across the world, heck, across the state because of climate impacts? And this year, students talked a lot. We had fires. Even though we didn’t have fires on the island, there were a couple of days students couldn’t work in the field because the smoke was too thick. Let me tell you, folks, that bothers the plants, too, not just the people working on farms. We saw in Tennessee, massive amounts of rainfall in 3 to 4 hours. We saw hurricanes. We saw, you know, all of these things begin to make you ask questions like, wow, if that’s happening in Iowa, what’s happening to the bread basket? If that’s happening in the Central Valley of California, what’s happening to our lettuce bowl? So those types of conversations have really gone a long way towards engaging our community in the reality that farmers are living in. And I just want to bring up something that I noticed this past year. You talked about Amazon being so quick, right? You can order something, it gets delivered to your door. I order from Amazon. I’m not an anti-Amazon person, but it is that phenomenon of how it’s shifting our purchasing, right? So I was shopping in December at 1 of our local grocery stores and I picked up a bag of certified organic romaine lettuce that had been packaged 2 months before I was buying it. Right? So just because we get it quickly doesn’t mean that the food got to us quickly. It just means that when we ordered it, it came to us. So many vegetables, when you buy them in a package, it will tell you when it was harvested or when it was packaged. So if we all just paid a little bit more attention to that and started noticing, maybe it’s not so quick.

Scott Cowan [00:40:22]:

All right.

Judy Feldman [00:40:24]:

I just made you speechless.

Scott Cowan [00:40:26]:

Words hard. I think of lettuce is having a really short shelf life. How on earth was that lettuce not a slimy,

Judy Feldman [00:40:37]:

horrible mess after? Well, to be honest, it was not in great shape, but let us, if you harvest it and then keep it really chilled and it’s really clean, In other words, it’s been dunked in a bath to keep it really clean and you’ve taken most of the plant off. When you buy romaines, it’s usually romaine hearts. They’re going to last longer. Doesn’t mean that they’re highly nutritious at that point. Doesn’t mean that it’s going to taste like it did when it came out of the field. It’ll probably be kind of bitter, but it’ll crunch. And in December, that’s what we’re looking for, right? We want that crunch. And again, please don’t think that I am anti-industrial ag either, because we asked agriculture to become that, and there’s an economy of scale that you get from that, but we have become so separate from it that we don’t see these unintended consequences that are happening. And again, that’s why we think it’s so important to get the community engaged in these conversations, to bring food not only to the plate, but to the mind. How is it getting to me? Is it going to be there next year? Is it going to be there for my kids?

Scott Cowan [00:42:00]:

I’m still hung up on the two-month-old remain. Yeah. September is local farm

Judy Feldman [00:42:06]:

month. At least for us here it is, yes.

Scott Cowan [00:42:10]:

What are you guys doing to… Are you participating in this? We participate… Yeah. Yeah. Sorry to interrupt. We

Judy Feldman [00:42:18]:

participate lightly and I’ll be blunt, it’s because at this time of year we’re heading into the peak of training our students with their business plans, their crop plans. I mean, it’s an intense time for us, But we do participate. We’re a member of our local food growers co-op, Whidbey Island Grown. And they’re putting out a big effort to remind people of all the great food that’s available in restaurants, at grocery stores, at farmers markets, and how to include it in your diet. But I would just encourage people regardless of when you’re listening to this podcast, always consider it local farm month and realize that there are local growers, even if you can’t see them, they’re there. And maybe they don’t want you traipsing across their front gate, but they want you to know that they’re there. So do a little research just in your 100 mile range. You can Google it, farms near me, and see who’s out there.

Scott Cowan [00:43:18]:

So a question I have, you’re training people to open a farm, small farms, starting off, you know, not 100 acres and all that. And we’ve talked about that from April to October, at least in the would be area. Other locations may be, you know, May to October, you know, whatever. And they’re working, you know, 9, 10 hours a day in the fields at that, you know, depending on the time of the season and all that. When harvest comes though, 1 of the things we haven’t talked about, we’ve talked about them harvesting, but how are they getting? Are you guys training them on how to find a market for it?

Judy Feldman [00:43:58]:

We how?

Scott Cowan [00:44:00]:

I mean, obviously, the short answer for me is, you know, we think of farmers markets. But my reaction to that is after you’ve just explained to me that the farmers, do they have time to go and man the stand at the farmers? I mean, how are we asking them to be marketers now too? And is that a fair burden?

Judy Feldman [00:44:27]:

I laugh because I don’t know what else to do. Is it a fair burden? It’s hard to say. If you are, this is showing my age because nobody opens shoe stores anymore. But if you were to be an entrepreneur that wanted to open a shoe store, that was your idea for a new business, You’d be working 10 to 12 hour days. You’d be working at it 6 to 7 days a week. You wouldn’t have holidays. You would constantly be thinking about it, finding your markets, doing your bookkeeping, all of those things. Being a new farmer is not that different. It’s just that it is physically hard. It is physically taxing. But any small business, any business that doesn’t have the economies of scale like a Microsoft or an Amazon or a Safeway or whatever, you’re just going to be all of those people. You’re going to be the, the seed propagators and the cleaners and the harvesters and the marketers and the PR and the bookkeeper. Cause that’s what small business owners do, right? Until they make enough money to hire people to do those jobs.

Scott Cowan [00:45:35]:

Well, using your analogy of a shoe store in the comparison, I’ll give you is to me. It seems like we’re asking the farmer to leave their shoe store open while going to the farmers market with some shoes to sell. The crops are still needing attention. I mean, if we owned a shoe store, we could at least lock the door and say, we’re down at the local farmer’s market. Come by your shoes there. And the shoes aren’t. Well, hopefully they’re not. Yeah. Store. So it just seems like

Judy Feldman [00:46:09]:

We’re asking these young people to do everything. You know, I, as another symptom or sign of just how disconnected we are from what it takes to grow food. About 5 years ago, I had a conversation with a grocery store manager, and we were trying to persuade him to work with our local farmers. And he said a couple of things that were really shocking to me. 1 is, we had some farmers come to that meeting and when they left, he goes, those weren’t farmers. Those were business people. They were talking about invoices and profit margins. Those weren’t farmers. It was like, well, of course, they’re business people. So that was 1 thing. The other thing was he was pitching an idea to them saying, you know, farmers markets, they’re just so fun. Wouldn’t you like to just come bring your stuff to the front of my grocery store and set it up like a farmer’s market? It’d be so much fun for you and it would attract so many new customers to his store. And after everybody left, I said, do you realize that a farmer’s market for a beginning farmer, truly like a first year farmer, is just this side of a lost leader. In other words, when you factor in the number of hours they stand at a place not on their farm, the number of hours they spent harvesting the day before to get it ready to bring to the market, the amount of food they’re going to take back because it didn’t get purchased because it was a rainy day, or it was a holiday, or there was something else going on, that they’re not going to be able to sell 3 days later because it’s been out all day long. They’re not really making that much money. They’re drawing attention to what they’re doing, and they’re trying to move some of their product. Now, don’t get me wrong, we have graduates of the program that in their second, third, fourth, fifth year, they’re making a huge percentage of their income from those markets, but they built their business plan to hire somebody to come in and help them at the farmer’s market or to help them with their harvest. So you’re absolutely right. A lot of these markets that we think are so innovative and cute and colorful and have all of that rural character to them are very expensive to the farmer. So what

Scott Cowan [00:48:41]:

I’ll put I’ll phrase the question like I like you have all the answers I don’t which I don’t more answers but you have more more than I do. So what do you guys recommending a first year farmer do with the crops that they’re growing? What is a good way for that bootstrapped, exhausted farmer, because those crops… Well, although you just told me you bought two-month-old lettuce, but these crops are not something you can, for the most part, tomatoes don’t just sit around waiting to be sold when somebody wants a tomato in December. What’s a good strategy for a

Judy Feldman [00:49:21]:

bootstrapping farmer? Right. Well, the first thing is to not try to do everything, not try to be everything to everyone, not try to hit every market. Draw up a crop plan that you think you can sell through 1 or 2 market outlets. Here on Whidbey, again getting back to that community importance, we have an increasingly wonderful and powerful farmers co-op, Whidbey Island Grown. And this is great for new farmers because each week they can look at what they have, they send an email to the co-op and they say I’ve got this much broccoli, this much lettuce, this many carrots, it’s sold online. All the farmer does is they take boxes of whatever they have to the co-op, and then the co-op takes orders for 30 different farms and fills them. So it’s the co-op. The farmer is paying a percentage, but they’re not having to do all that work. And they don’t have to have enough food for a hundred people. They can have enough food for 20 people so they can get started. They can see some income. So growers co-ops are fabulous. The other is if you have compassionate and curious grocery stores that are willing to open up like a local section of their produce, knowing they’re going to have to talk to a few more farmers, that still allows the farmer to make 1 delivery rather than having and know that it’s going to get sold rather than to do all that work to take it to an unknown number of people at the farmer’s market. And then a lot of new farmers are finding in communities that support it well, which tends to be more rural or rural slash suburban communities, farm stands, where they can put things out almost in an honesty fashion and people can come by and pick it up. But ultimately, that’s another 1 of those decisions a new farmer has to make is how do I best reach the people that are looking to me for food? That’s 1 of the big business decisions that they have to make.

Scott Cowan [00:51:32]:

Yeah, I just, I’m not, I’m not opposed to hard work. I was almost gonna say I’m not in favor of hard work and that’s the exact opposite of what I meant. I am not opposed to hard work. I’m not opposed to, you know, being committed to the business. I just don’t know how you manage as a new farmer. It’s taking 6, 8 hours out on a Saturday to go down to a farmer’s market that’s miles away from where you are. Right.

Judy Feldman [00:52:03]:

You know, unless that is unless that’s your primary way of reaching it. You know, that’s your big expenditure of time for the week is going to that market and you build your plan accordingly.

Scott Cowan [00:52:15]:

Right. This is interesting.

Judy Feldman [00:52:18]:

But again, so what I I’m sorry, but I just really want people to hear that there’s nothing intentionally wrong with economies of scale and larger scale agriculture. It’s that they have developed over time a suite of unintended consequences. And during the pandemic, We saw a lot of breaks in supply chains. We saw a lot of breaks in access to labor. Increasingly, we’re seeing huge hurdles for people accessing land on which to farm. You can’t find hundred acre parcels anymore in Western Washington.

Scott Cowan [00:53:03]:

Or if you can, you’re not buying it as an individual. Right. Probably. Right.

Judy Feldman [00:53:09]:

Right. So I’m not saying that industrial ag is intentionally bad or that we don’t need it. We do still need it. But I think because we are seeing the chinks in its armor to have a parallel system of these regional or local farms to provide directly to communities, especially in moments when the chinks in that big system start to get bigger. The goal here is to have parallel systems, not to replace 1 with the other, and to have communities that support these smaller scale farmers in a way that kind of equalizes that economy of scale that the big industrial grocery store owned farms have because of their bigness, right? So to have communities in some way bolster support for the small guys.

Scott Cowan [00:54:06]:

Sure. No, I mean, and also I look at it as a way for diversity and on our plate. You’re not going to if you go to local chain grocery store, you’re not going to probably find a, you’re going to find the products that sell very well. I mean, cause they’re, and they should be, they’re going to, they’re going to buy what sells. They’re going to buy russet potatoes. They’re not necessarily going to buy an heirloom. Or they’re going to see, you’re just going to see greenhouse red tomatoes, but not necessarily an heirloom tomato. And so I see the smaller farmers as being able to provide, you know, accent color, if you will, to the commercial landscape of farming.

Judy Feldman [00:54:54]:

You know, there’s another thing that community-scale farmers do, and I don’t think they get enough credit for it. Getting back to the concept that industrial ag is not intentionally bad, everybody deserves to eat, in my opinion. Everybody deserves to have access to food and sometimes smaller scale certified organic farms. The price point is just more than a lot of people can afford. But a lot of local community scale farms give generously to their local food banks. They have days where at the market they’re taking SNAP benefits so that people can access those heirloom tomatoes that are $6 each for a tomato. So it’s the beauty of the relationship between the small scale, the medium scale, the big scale, the diversity that we can realize because of those varieties of scale, the power that we have to combat these rapid global changes by having this diversity of scale, diversity of crops. And that means we have to have farmers at each of those scales, which is why you see land-grant universities training up industrial-scale farmers, and you see programs like ours training up the community and regional-scale farmers.

Scott Cowan [00:56:15]:

Wonderful. So I’m going to start putting you on the spot. These are tough questions. This is the hard hitting journalism part of the program. Go for it. Your favorite crop that’s being grown on the farm. Mine is Brussels sprouts.

Judy Feldman [00:56:34]:

Okay.

Scott Cowan [00:56:36]:

Your least favorite lettuce. Really?

Judy Feldman [00:56:42]:

Lettuce to me is something that You have to chase with the fork. You can’t really stab it. And the flavor is primarily the salad dressing you put on it. So it’s not my favorite, but it’s very important for farmers.

Scott Cowan [00:56:55]:

There’s a net Netflix food show. It’s about fried foods. And have you seen that show? The host is this very large person. So it’s a very big man. And he calls lettuce crispy water and tomatoes are red rings of death because he, you know, it’s just, there’s just, there’s no place for vegetables in his diet. It’s pretty funny. So I was, you know, the lettuce, the crispy water thing, It’s just stuck with me as being cute. It’s an important part of our diet. It’s a very important part of a farmer’s income. So please everybody continue to buy lettuce. It’s a great vessel vehicle for salad dressing. So I mean, I’m totally with you on that. Are you a coffee fan? I love coffee. Because I don’t think you could farm without coffee. I just, you know, anyway, any recommendations on would be for a good cup of coffee, Muckle Tio coffee, Muckle Tio coffee roasters do a phenomenal

Judy Feldman [00:57:59]:

job. And my favorite is Happy Hippie.

Scott Cowan [00:58:03]:

Happy Hippie, I like that name. That’s actually kind of cool. So put you on the spot, what is Happy Hippie? I mean, besides coffee, do you know what it consists? Is it Ethiopian, is it Colombian? Do you know? Do you care? You’re

Judy Feldman [00:58:16]:

stumping me on that 1. It’s not a terribly dark roast. It’s kind of mild in flavor, but it’s got a kick to it. It wakes you up. It keeps all of us hippies at the farm quite happy.

Scott Cowan [00:58:30]:

If he’s at the farm quite happy. Does the farm sell any of its produce to local restaurants?

Judy Feldman [00:58:37]:

We do a bit. You have to realize that after the pandemic, they’re struggling. That’s true. They’re really struggling too. But yeah, we have several restaurants on the island that buy from us. And what I’d recommend for people across the country, across the state, whenever you’re listening to this, remember the power of the question. When you go out to eat, ask your server, what on this menu is local? Do you know the names of the farmers that grew this? They’re not gonna know, but every time we ask them, it just drives the point home a little farther.

Scott Cowan [00:59:11]:

I really wonder if you could do that with a straight face at McDonald’s.

Judy Feldman [00:59:16]:

Go for it, try.

Scott Cowan [00:59:17]:

I know, I told the guy. Anyway, well, on a personal note, so you were raised in Texas and you moved up here. What brought you up to Washington?

Judy Feldman [00:59:34]:

That’s the trickiest question you’ve asked me so far. Oh, so I’m going to go back and talk about what’s in the coffee. No, it’s okay. I’ll answer the question, but I’ll give you a preface because I don’t want people jumping to horrible conclusions about me. I love the state in which I grew up. I think the diversity of that state is off the charts, and I love the people of the state of Texas. However, as a woman who is more of an independent thinker, in my 30s, I had been called honey, darling, sugar, sweet thing just 1 too many times. And I wanted to go to a place that was as different from Texas as possible. And so, I landed in Seattle. I still go back to Texas. I still go back to Texas once or twice a year. My folks still live there. My brother and sister-in-law and his family live there. I love Texas. But for me, Seattle and Whidbey Island are now home. Okay.

Scott Cowan [01:00:34]:

Well, let me I’m going to put you on that. We’re all about Washington State, but I’m going to spend this question to Texas from a food standpoint. What do you miss most about Texas

Judy Feldman [01:00:44]:

from a food perspective? Yeah, really, really ripe tomatoes, right? Watermelon and peaches that aren’t hard. You know, peaches shouldn’t hurt if you get hit in the head with 1. And good iced tea.

Scott Cowan [01:01:05]:

Okay. The flip side of that question is what do you what do you enjoy about Washington

Judy Feldman [01:01:11]:

that was lacking maybe down in Texas? That you can, we are still growing fresh vegetables in September on Whidbey Island. My dad’s garden was put to bed in July because of the heat. So our growing season is much longer. There starts earlier, but because it starts earlier, Texas gets hit with late frost, big rains, tornadoes, hail. Texas is a dramatic state, right? Whereas western Washington is a pretty mellow kind of flat line environment. So our growing environment is a little bit more moderate.

Scott Cowan [01:01:49]:

Except for this year, because you guys got the heat wave that we got in Central Washington. I mean, it was hot, ridiculous.

Judy Feldman [01:01:56]:

Our sugar snap peas did not like it. We did. I think we got maybe one-tenth of our harvest before they just fell over. But our tomatoes loved it.

Scott Cowan [01:02:06]:

But it’s hard to predict what this is going to be the year that we’re going to set record heat to her and do a lot of tomatoes or welcome to the future. Right. Right. So somebody wanted to be a student at the school. So we’ve had this conversation. They’ve researched you online because we’re going to put links in the show notes below and all that, too. So people can find out more about the school online, but. Walk us through what the application process is and where can they go and what do they need to do? What does a potential student have to do to go through the process? Sure.

Judy Feldman [01:02:44]:

So, First of all, anybody who’s even slightly thinking about it, thank you. We as eaters in this country need people to think about being farmers. So thank you for even thinking about it. We know we’re not the only training option out there. So we encourage you to look at our website, look at what we’re about, what our schedule is like, what our tuition is like, what that workload is like. Because our program is very intentionally designed to train community scale production farmers. Not gardeners, not permaculturalists, not school garden managers, but community-scale production farming. So if after looking at that, that’s what you’re really wanting to learn, We have a short list of questions and we ask you to send us the answers to them. And then we interview every year, either late September, early October, we set up interviews and actually spend about an hour on the phone with you. You don’t have to have a special degree. We do encourage some farm experience, even if that’s a week working on a farm. At least a week so that you know what it’s like to work hard more than 1 day. You know what that feels like. But most importantly, that you really understand the importance of farmers in our food system and that you want to be a part of that profession and that you see it that seriously. That’s what we’re looking for. So the application is relatively short, but we do want you to think about it. Send that to us. We schedule an interview. And then from there, it’s just a matter of getting you engaged. I want to give a Shout out to other programs across the country though. I don’t think we can have enough training programs across the country. We need more than 2% of our population knowing what it takes to grow food. So there are university-based programs, there are internships on farms, There are opportunities to work with other farms. They’re not offering a program, but you can just work with them and learn by doing. But mostly, if you’re interested, we want to talk to you.

Scott Cowan [01:04:58]:

I can’t believe I didn’t ask this question and we pushed our time limit, but I’m gonna ask a very simple question at the risk of, but organic. I mean, we kind of glossed all over that. Why? Yeah, why organic? And for those of us that are city folks. Break it down for us in terms that we can probably wrap our heads around. Sure.

Judy Feldman [01:05:36]:

So we call ourselves the organic farm school because we do teach 2 organic principles. There is nothing magical about the label organic. It is not perfect. The science is still out there about whether or not organic food is that much better for the human body. However, what I personally know is that organic food is that much better for the people growing the food. They’re not exposed daily to herbicides and pesticides. They are surrounded by more diversity in their fields. The soil is healthier because of that diversity. And so that part of organic remains to be important in our food system. What I would say is even more important from a nutritional standpoint is freshness. So the closer you can be to the source of your food so that you know that that romaine is not coming from 2, 000 miles away, it’s coming from 50 miles away or even 100 miles away. And therefore, it got to you within a week. That the freshness of food is going to be just as important as the quote organic label. If you’re not buying organic, make sure you know how to wash it. But again, the biggest difference is not, and this is just my opinion, the biggest difference is not the quality of the food going into the eater. It’s the quality of the experience of the farmer growing that food and how much they are exposed to that increases the risk to their life that makes organic that much more important.

Scott Cowan [01:07:26]:

That was great. When I think of organic versus non-organic and I’m oversimplifying it on my side. To be honest, I’ve never thought about the implications of it to the actual farm worker. So,

Judy Feldman [01:07:42]:

I don’t know if you feel guilty. I’ll give you a real life example. We have a friend, through a friend at the farm, and his friend went back to Mexico to harvest watermelons and he was overexposed to pesticides and he died about 6 weeks ago. It wasn’t the heat that killed him, it was the exposure to the pesticide.

Scott Cowan [01:08:12]:

But spraying, I’ll say spraying, spraying pesticides, adding artificial ingredients to the soil makes things easier is the kind of I think maybe the layman’s explanation of it. So what do you have to do on an organic farm to amend the soil? What are you doing for pests and how does that look different than just me walking around in a hazmat suit, spraying things with things that aren’t good for me?

Judy Feldman [01:08:44]:

Well, as with everything we’ve talked about, it’s a little bit more complex than that. The biggest, the biggest reason that we came to rely on synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides was our scale of farming began to get bigger and bigger. When you have 50 row feet of a crop, you can go in and control it. You can either exclude the pest, you can hoe, you can plant the spacing differently, etc. But when you have 1, 000 acres of that 1 plant and you get a disease that starts at 1 corner, and you’ve got a thousand acres of it, it can spread very quickly. And so that’s when it begins to make sense, right? To spray it, stop it at the source. On an organic farm, first of all, disclaimer, I have a personal really hard time thinking that 1, 000 acres of anything can be organic. Because organic to me implies a system, right? Not just a method, but a system. But on a certified organic farm, you are trying much harder to exclude or prevent the pest or the disease or the weed than you are to deal with it after it’s gotten a hold. That’s the biggest difference between an organic farm and a conventional farm when it comes to using those substances. You can still use herbicides and pesticides on an organic farm. They just have to be certified by the board that controls organic, which is why I say organic is not perfect. Right. You could still use chemicals.

Scott Cowan [01:10:26]:

So would this oversimplification be kind of accurate that an organic farm would be more proactive where a traditional farm would be more reactive.

Judy Feldman [01:10:34]:

Yes. And I would say again, I’m not a farmer and I can just imagine people across the country who might be listening to this. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Maybe true. But those herbicides and pesticides may be easier in the first year. They may be easier in the first decade. But then over time, you develop just as humans with antibiotics, you develop herbicide-resistant weeds, you develop pesticide-resistant pests, and then it becomes like a cold war. You’re escalating the products and it just gets more and more risky every year. Whereas it doesn’t get riskier and riskier to be proactive. It’s like that meme about solar, okay, what if it’s not the most effective way and, and, you know, we’re proven wrong and somebody says, well, they didn’t have any solar spills,

Scott Cowan [01:11:33]:

right?

Judy Feldman [01:11:37]:

It’s the same. Certified organic is going to require more labor. Annual vegetable crops require more labor, but the more proactive and preventative you are, the less you get caught in the escalation spiral.

Scott Cowan [01:11:54]:

The last question is the question, what didn’t I ask you that I should have?

Judy Feldman [01:12:02]:

We could have talked for 3 days and never hit on everything. I guess the question that I wish everybody would ask is what part of our lives doesn’t ultimately come back to food, doesn’t ultimately come back to farmers, doesn’t ultimately come back to clean water. Because if we grapple with that question, we begin to prioritize things a little differently. And we begin to support farmers, whether they’re industrial scale, community scale, regional scale, we begin to support them a lot more.

Scott Cowan [01:12:48]:

Well, I’ve taken a lot of your time and I appreciate that very much that you were so generous to talk to us about the farm and all the interesting things are going on there and I feel like we just barely scratched the surface. But,

Judy Feldman [01:13:03]:

so thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And Washington State is known as the specialty crop state because we have so many different microclimates, so to speak, that we grow a lot of those vegetables that you see in the grocery store. So regardless of the scale, the approach, the model, I hope that people get out and pay more attention when you’re driving down I-90 from west to east. Pay attention to what these farmers are growing. It’s fascinating how much food is grown in this beautiful state. So we’ve got great farmers here.

Scott Cowan [01:13:41]:

It’s interesting when you travel from the West side, you know, the more urban area of the state, you know, more densely packed people to Central Washington, Eastern Washington where it’s rows and rows of, you know, acres of wheat and potatoes. It’s different to see that. Even the farmers markets are different when you go around the state too. So, well, thank you so much. And we will put a link below so people can find out more about the farm and all of that. And We’d love to have you back on because I think we could go down a different garden path. Absolutely. And talk about things.

Judy Feldman [01:14:25]:

So thanks so much. Thank you. And just remember, everybody, farmers are honorable. Farming is an honorable profession.