Jean-Martin Fortier: [00:00:00] I’ve been living in rural Quebec for a long time. I’ve always thought that urban farms, they’re great because they allow a lot of people to get, to raise awareness about local food systems. I think if you’re on a quarter acre in the city it’s quite the big urban farm.
If you’re on a half an acre, I think at half an acre, you can start to generate enough produce to perhaps get one salary. It’s a matter of production. It’s like at one point, if you want to make enough to make ends meet, you need to grow enough to sell. So it’s really mathematical.
But, we see a lot of models that are not fully funded just by the vegetables, they’re funded either by, social equity that these farms are building or community raising, or there’s groups or NGOs that are involved around these farms. So there’s other ways to get the economics to work.
But if we’re [00:01:00] talking about just full on producing, selling, and generating a profit to keep the farm afloat the size of these farms for me are really important.
Josh Wilder: Welcome to the Mother Earth News and Friends podcast at Mother Earth News for 50 years and counting. We’ve been dedicated to conserving the planet’s natural resources while helping you conserve your financial resources. In this podcast we host conversations with experts in the fields of sustainability, homesteading, natural health, and more to share all about how you can live well wherever you are in a way that values both people and our Mother Earth.
Hello, welcome to another edition of Mother Earth News and Friends. I’m here today with Keith Arkenberg who is a small scale market gardener from Tecumseh, Kansas. He has a background in construction and science. He’s built a farm from the ground up combining his [00:02:00] own innovations with that of others to produce an operation that runs efficiently and on a budget.
Also with me today is the lead editor of Mother Earth News, Anna Skemp, who she’s a mother, farmer, and maker at Deep Roots Community Farm in Wisconsin. She raises a variety of livestock and in the summer the farm has opened up to local school kids for educational programming. Her family recently became the next generation to tend the family apple orchard as well.
And last but not least is Jean-Martin Fortier. He’s a farmer, author, educator, and advocate for regenerative, human scale, profitable agriculture. For over 20 years, he and his wife have operated a successful two-acre microfarm in Quebec, Canada. His best selling book, The Market Gardener, which has sold a quarter million copies in nine languages, describes the biointensive principles used at his microfarm.
His newest book, which we will be discussing today is Microfarms and it covers the art of sustainable small scale farming. This guide delves into low tech and highly effective organic farming techniques and unveils his proven methods through engaging case [00:03:00] studies, offering a blueprint for success, ecological farming.
Thanks so much for all of you to be here today.
Jean-Martin Fortier: It’s a pleasure.
Focus on Farm Finances
Josh Wilder: Jean-Martin, if you could, go into the process that this book took to create and where the kind of impetus came from.
Jean-Martin Fortier: Yeah, sure. Yeah, you talked about my first book, The Market Gardener, and I guess one of the reasons why it became popular is because I was talking about the numbers our farm was reaching back then.
And, we were saying that we were making more than 100, 000 per acres. And I remember that in those times I was around. 2011, 2012, you wouldn’t hear these numbers or you wouldn’t hear, growers talk about their sales bluntly like that. But for me, it was relevant because I was showcasing that, the farm doesn’t need to be big to be profitable.
And the book. Has its life of its [00:04:00] own, and I think it has reached the heart of a lot of growers, and it has inspired a lot of growers, but since then, I’ve started other projects. I’ve started a training farm, and we started also the Market Gardener Institute, where We give resources, training, so that people can become better growers faster.
And some of the feedback that we’ve been getting is really positive. We’ve had people come to us and say, I took the master class and after a couple of years, my farm is at that level. And at one point I was just wanting to share. That these kind of success are possible.
They’re out there. There’s people doing it. And then the book is about that is about sharing these stories, putting the profile of the farm so that we see their numbers, but we also see the layout. And then I shared some of the work that I’ve been doing the last seven years at the research farm, really dealing with how to build a team, how to really, take marketing to new levels.
[00:05:00] So a lot of the things that weren’t in my first book, so they’re talked about in Microfarm.
Microfarm Techniques
Josh Wilder: So a question that comes up when I was looking at some of the stories you talk about in the book is how universal the techniques are. Obviously. every farm has its own, specifics. But what is the universality that you find In the process and some of the examples that you’ve come across.
Jean-Martin Fortier: Yeah, that’s a great question. And we hear that often, you’ll hear that, every farm is unique and there’s a million ways to skin a cat. I don’t know why we say that. It’s there’s, there’s a million ways to farm, but it’s not so true. Actually, There’s different ways to do things, but sometimes there’s better ways, and I’m not saying that my way is better, but I, for seven years, I researched all the practices that we did on our farm, and always trying to improve the little, Techniques a little methodology.
Let’s say you’re seeding carrots, there’s different cedars out [00:06:00] there But there’s certainly some cedars that are better and then if you decide on that cedar, okay what’s the spacing and that what’s the calibration of that cedar? And what’s the density for these carrots and that connects to how deep the soil needs to be so there’s another Procedure there to make sure that when you’re seating at those density, your soil is loose and deep, and that ties into a permanent bed system.
And so it’s all connected into a system. Which in the end works where I am, works in Europe when, I, I’ve started projects there and I follow a lot of farms there. It works in the U. S. It works in, Chile where we have a lot of growers and we know this because at the Market Gardener Institute, we’re in 90 countries.
And so there’s things that are context specific, marketing, pricing weather patterns. We grow in the winter here, but obviously people down South, that’s not relevant to them. The, a lot of the how to [00:07:00] prune a pepper, how to trace a cucumber, how to put up a greenhouse, how to, all these things, there’s ways that are more proven than others. There’s techniques, there’s strategies there. And so I guess that’s my answer to you.
Keith Arkenberg: Yeah, and I know you go into a lot about tarping and prepping the beds early, so you can have a gibsdale seed bed. Are there any Other ways that you found or found from other farms to do that without the tarping, because during the times of year, when we actually go and start prepping beds and getting everything going, we’ll have three to five days of constant 30, 40 mile per hour winds out of the South and just even higher.
And they, for us, they are virtually impossible to keep down.
Jean-Martin Fortier: Yeah. Yeah. Tarps are really good when you, again, if you’re on a permanent bed system and you’re not. Really mechanized because then that’s your clever way to remove a crop and replace it by something else [00:08:00] You know, we’ve put up windbreaks on our farm.
That’s part of our solution. We have different windbreaks every X amount of feet and that helps a lot besides that, like it’s for us, it’s been and for a lot of people that are growing like we are, it’s been really successful. The beds are raised and they’re anchored down the tarps because the beds are raised because it creates this kind of like anchor every now and then.
But I hear you when they blow away. It’s terrible. It’s terrible. Same with same with these tunnels that we put up in the spring because we want to be super early and then they blow away and you’re like, Oh, so much work.
Keith Arkenberg: Yeah, we actually have the opposite. Our Caterpillar tunnels through the wind actually buffers them and drives them down into the ground.
So when we go to move them, the actual feet where they’re hooked to are six or seven inches in the ground sometimes. And we’re [00:09:00] just on like a silty loam clay, so nothing loose. It’s pretty thick turns to concrete when it gets hard. But it’s funny that I have the exact opposite of what most people have with those.
Jean-Martin Fortier: Yeah. And, obviously tarps are not perhaps not for all systems, I should say, but the reason why we developed that was really because we didn’t want to till. We didn’t want to have to always, flip a crop, flip a bed by using the rotor tiller or removing by hands or deep mulching. Like a lot of growers now they’ve gone into this practice where they cut, they bury the crop with mulch.
And for us, that’s also a lot of work, it’s a lot of material to move around. It’s a lot of work and, that’s not the direction that we we took.
Microfarm Context and Accessibility
Ana Skemp: Could we back up just a little bit and would it be possible for you to give me just a larger, a big big picture? What are you growing?
What are you producing? Where are you selling it? What does your farm look like? Is livestock a [00:10:00] part of it?
Jean-Martin Fortier: Yeah.
Ana Skemp: Overview would be great.
Jean-Martin Fortier: Yeah, sure. It’s a market garden and typically market gardens are not all the same, but, they range from, a quarter, half an acre to, I would say, two acres, three acres max.
So market gardening, why it’s different than let’s say small scale vegetable organic growing is that usually there’s no tractor involved. You’re utilizing space. You’re maximizing your space and your time, so you’re double, triple cropping each bed, you’re doing interplanting, you’re extending the season, and you’re trying to get as much production and as much yield per square foot as you can.
And so that’s. I would say the model. Our farm is two acres. We usually have five to six people for eight months out of the year working on the farm. And there’s no [00:11:00] livestock it’s vegetables, 40 to 50 different crops that we harvest and bring to farmer’s market on Thursday to farmer’s market on Saturday and through our CSA that we have on Wednesday.
So we have three, two harvests per week. We have three days of delivery total. We have plus minus 300 clients. That come and connect with us every week. So everything that we sell is directly sewn. So we have no middleman. We’re just direct selling everything. And what else? Yeah it’s we call it human scale farming because, we’re outside.
We’re, our feet are in the ground. We’re, our hands are in the soil. We’re using low tech hand tools. They’re sophisticated, but they’re not mechanized, except for the walk behind tractor, which is our biggest motorized tool on the farm. I don’t know if that paints a [00:12:00] picture for you.
Ana Skemp: It does. Absolutely. Thank you.
Jean-Martin Fortier: And I would also add that, market gardening, why I think it’s become so popular is that for a lot of people that are starting in farming, it feels accessible. It’s some, it is accessible because you don’t need to have a lot of. A lot of land. You don’t need to have a lot of machinery. You don’t need to have big markets.
You can really do a couple of farmers market and a CSA and or chefs and or a food co op and you can have you know you can get going in it and some growers decide after a few years that they want to scale up and then grow the farm some of them mechanize the farm and some like us, they stay small and we’ve been proving that you can be small and profitable year in, year out.
Ana Skemp: Have you found that your customer base has been reliable? You’re able to market your goods and you’re able to get a fair price for all of your work. Has that been consistent over the years [00:13:00] for you?
Jean-Martin Fortier: Yeah, that’s really key there because it, yeah, that’s exactly it. It is consistent, a lot of these customers, we’ve known them for a long time.
Our reputation, like it’s beyond that because it’s these people that we know. And because there’s no middleman, we’re getting, premium dollars for everything that we grow. And we’re servicing the community because people really appreciate the work that we do. So it’s really a win in my opinion and the model in it’s a, the market gardening and microfarms, the name of the book.
It only works in that kind of setup. If you’re trying to get in, into grocery stores or chains, or then you’re doing volumes and volumes, you’re better off in a more mechanized system. It’s not market gardening. That’s not what it’s about.
Keith Arkenberg: Yeah. And I would say when I first got into market gardening, it was actually from seeing you in to [00:14:00] be at Kansas in 2015 at the mother’s news fair. What about your book right away? It was great. Gave me that initial, step by step process, initial startup stuff. The one thing I never realized was actually how much it costs to get going when you really start going and that’s where the new book that came out or that’s getting ready to come out really highlights that more than anything, because that’s probably the most hidden thing that there is about market gardening, especially even like with YouTube and all the people on there.
They just show you the big, beautiful. They don’t tell you, it’s going to take time, it’s going to take money to get it going, and you’re really going to have to focus. Otherwise, if you don’t hit perfection a lot of times, you can lose money fairly quickly if you’re not careful out there.
You don’t have your full set, your full plan.
Educating on Microfarm Economics
Jean-Martin Fortier: Yeah. And you’re right. YouTube does that. Everyone’s wants to showcase when that thing’s perfect and I’m guilty of that. [00:15:00] When and you’re right, Keith the new book, microfarms it gives, it’s mostly farms that are, have been five years and under.
I think one farm from Quebec is a bit more than five years, but you see the, you see their numbers and their startup cost, which is much higher than the one that’s in my book, the market gardener, because I started my farm in 2004. And honestly, from that time to when we met in 2015, man, it’s just like the price of things have gone up and you’re right.
And even when I was presenting my work, I was presenting my work and my work was based on my experience. And then there was never like a real mise a jour where I said, Oh, these numbers back then now they translate into that. Cause I had not done that work, a BCS cost me.
6, 5,000 when I bought one and now it’s what, 12, 13,000. So certainly not the same. [00:16:00] I, to be fair though, like the price of the vegetables, they’ve most than more than double. I remember selling carrots, $2 a bunch. Now it’s $4, $4.50. When you see those YouTube farmers that are all glamour y, sometimes I know their prices and it’s $6 $7, U. S. dollars in, in, in New York City. And I’m like, wow, that’s that’s dreamy.
Keith Arkenberg: Yeah. That’s the same way. We’re within an hour and a half of a big city like Kansas City, Kansas. But our main markets in Topeka, and it’s more of a rural community, highest price we can get is 5 for a salad mix, but that’s because we have salad mix that’ll last 2 to 3 weeks in somebody’s refrigerator.
Than that, we have to price everything down similar to grocery store organic prices. Otherwise, they just won’t buy it.
Jean-Martin Fortier: Yeah, so the economics coming back to that when we’re talking about farms and farming models, like when you give some of the metrics like what are your [00:17:00] sales? How many employees? How many months are you operating? What’s your price list? It tells a lot about what the farm is and I would say my aspiration and what I’ve been trying to do is also to show that I would say the top tier farms, the ones that are doing better, it’s good to showcase them also, because we need to learn from people that are doing things, perhaps a bit better, or they’re having success, like success leaves clues and I’m a big believer in that. So microfarms that was semi the goal. These are not, extraordinary farm. They’re, regular people, but they’re getting, they’re getting success. And I think that’s the story that we also wanted to share in the book.
Keith Arkenberg: Yeah. And I will say that actually seeing. the investment it takes to get these farms up and going makes me feel a lot better about how much it took to get this one up and going. Cause I, the first couple of years you’re just in [00:18:00] sticker shock and that’s just trying to shoestring it along and not really, turn it into a full pumping production model.
And we built from basically 2016 to 21 is when I kept building on the farm. And now that we have gotten into that model. Now it’s, now I can actually start to work on the farm instead of just working, building the farm.
Jean-Martin Fortier: Yeah. I like that you say that because at one point capping the growth of a farm now, when I was starting in farming, like no one was talking about capping the growth of a farm.
It was always about scaling up. There was, there’s no other trajectory. And, but the sooner you do that. The better you can work on details and the, the better, the faster you’ll pay your investments. And I’m not really sure that’s why we never grew the farm. I think my wife always liked it the way it was.
And I was, I was doing all these other projects. That’s how I got excited about novelty, even if the farm wasn’t growing. But [00:19:00] certainly now that I look back, the farm’s been in operation 20 years. And I think all of our investments have been paid off for 10 plus years. So every year, it’s once we’ve paid the employees, the operating costs, it’s money in the bank, money in the bank year in year out.
And it’s, it’s a pretty good. It’s a pretty good way to go about things.
Keith Arkenberg: Yeah. After you got the machine built and you just run the machine.
Jean-Martin Fortier: Yeah.
Keith Arkenberg: Yeah. And we’ve actually in the past, about two seasons now, we’ve cut back by at least a third on the farm. We hit a high point, bunch of labor involved.
We’d lose an employee, then it’s back over to me. So then all of a sudden you’re out there working another 30 hours, 40 hours a week on top of what you’re doing before. And it just. It wears on you. And we mainly go pretty much through the year here too. We take the greenhouse production down quite a bit, but we still [00:20:00] have stuff growing, so we still have fresh produce all year, so there’s no really downtime.
Now what are some more ways to think about either going seasonality or just going all through the season?
Jean-Martin Fortier: There’s different approaches. Like I’ve. I farm at the research farm year round for now it’s, this is our eighth year and we’re able to grow vegetables in the winter and we’ve really developed the skill about that and a market, pretty good, a pretty nice market for that but at my home farm.
Let’s say my wife, the last thing she’d want to do in the winter is, go and harvest because she’s off and she’s happy to be off because she changes mind. She skis, she does other things, and then when the season kicks in March, she’s ready to barbecue. Different strokes for different folks.
But definitely, starting sooner for me is really the key. Like I’ve always said, the first at market at farmer’s market is king. And it’s, that’s when [00:21:00] market gardeners, we can make more money is in the spring when we’re the first one with all these vegetables. That’s when people are excited about buying.
And if you can be super early with tomatoes before everybody else, boom, you’re making a good sales there. So I really see like the spring is really the opportunity. In my opinion,
Ana Skemp: How many farmers do you know who are able to just farm and make a sustainable living off of that? Keith and I were talking a bit before you hopped on I can count on one hand the number of people I know that don’t have a second full time job on top of farming What’s the future of that?
Can we really just farm and survive?
Jean-Martin Fortier: Yeah, that’s, these are big questions. Yes, you can, because, we know, we, around here there’s probably 12, 15 farms that are full time farmers just around here. And, being in the market gardener network, we’re connected to all different farms.
We what I’ve seen is a lot of people [00:22:00] are part time in the first few years when it’s really hard to, cough up all the cash to pay for the buildings, to pay for the infrastructure, the equipment. But, I think also the book. Gives examples of this and it’s always for me I don’t want to compare and I don’t want to say the farms that are not full time.
They’re not successful. That’s not what I’m saying. But there’s ways to get to that for sure to get there. For sure.
Josh Wilder: I’m curious if you’re familiar with any co op structures in any urban farming environments, because it’s certainly something that’s come up a few times, and obviously there’s a lot of complications that come with that.
With a structure like that, but as far as, sharing resources, that sort of thing, are you familiar with any situations that you’re aware of that where that works better than others?
Jean-Martin Fortier: I think, a lot of growers, they’re finding solutions to the fact that land is expensive, to get everything going, [00:23:00] costs a lot of money.
We have a few co op farms around here. I’m really good friends with Tournesol Farm. They’ve been in co op for 25 years, but they’re not urban. They’re more out in the countryside. It’s like a lot of people that start farms, and I was like that. When we start in farming, it’s, it, there’s a big need for community and that’s one of the reasons why we get into farming.
What I’ve learned along the way is that for me, community is who I service to. It’s not really everyone involved in my thing because I realize with, through different experiences that I’ve had, good and bad that, I like to own my, Own things and I like to run things the way I like to do things.
That’s why I like farming. And so you’ll find also these these points, these flex point where the communal aspect of sharing resources hits a [00:24:00] hurdle where you’re not getting along that well with other people. And that happens. And yeah I’m, I don’t know why I’m saying this, but that’s my experience with The communal aspect of co managing projects.
Keith Arkenberg: Yeah, what I find around here more than anything is that farms are in direct competition with each other. Don’t necessarily want to work with each other as much because you’re almost seen as helping your competition take your customers more or less. But once you get out to, 50 miles away or so to where they’re going to different markets, they have different clienteles.
That’s where I’ve actually found more of the cooperation, buying in bulk doing actually food hubs up to where they’re more willing to share techniques, tactics, buying in bulk. Just. It changes once you get outside of that little central hub where everybody’s fighting over the same piece, basically.
Jean-Martin Fortier: One of the things that we had going here for many [00:25:00] years in Quebec was there’s a big network. It wasn’t a co op, but it could have been 220 farms together. And we were pooling CSA advertisement and marketing. And so you had one umbrella organization that was farmer run. And we’re doing all the advertising and marketing for, raising awareness about local food, about CSA shares.
And then they had a big website with a lot of traffic. And then from there, people, customers would click on where they live and then they would, it would connect to a farm. And that was, like you said, like sharing resources and pooling to grow sales. That’s interesting. That’s really interesting, actually.
And I could see, and when I go to France, because I go to France a lot, you’ll see these farmer shops, these co ops they’re stores and they’re owned by the co op. So farmer owned stores. [00:26:00] And that’s really neat. That’s the part where I think we can get along better.
Farming is a dynamic space. Food hubs, everything’s evolving, technology’s coming in. We have good stories like I said, and then what happened to our CSA network, it got co opted also. It’s a it’s a dynamic landscape. All this, the local food scene is never just flatline something that’s always the same, it evolves.
Community of Small-scale Producers
Josh Wilder: Yeah, actually, just yesterday, I did a little bit of help with the organization out of Wisconsin, the fair share CSA coalition. They were doing some testing on a farm search tool. They were listing a number of CSAs and hoping to expand it out. It’s primarily Wisconsin and Minnesota, but looking to expand it outside of that space.
And I think speaking to resource sharing and, and especially online marketing, like there are so many [00:27:00] different, entities that are trying to do different things. In the US obviously we have each state has their own extension service, that’s a lot of coordination across state lines across, federally.
And when you get talking to Keith about he’s doing a grant writing, course right now to learn more about that sort of thing. And there’s a lot of different resources. But pulling those like what? And obviously it’s obviously a lot different in Canada. But What sort of advice do you have for people who are looking for those sorts of networks, in their area?
Wherever that might be.
Jean-Martin Fortier: Yeah, I think it’s really important. I can say as a farmer and as somebody that’s been involved around, local farming for a long time, like all the support group, the support cast is so important. So important. It’s already hard to just grow vegetables, manage people, deal with the weather.
It’s like all these things. And when you have, when I hear that, [00:28:00] there’s people, the resources out there to help with grant writing, it’s yes, when there’s people out there creating food, creating market opportunities, either starting farmer’s market or running good farmer’s market, dealing with the conflicts that are possible in farmer’s market, raising awareness to the people about local food, the importance of that, Education, all of this for me it’s so important work, because without that support group, I think most farmers, like local farmers I don’t think we’d be doing very well.
Really appreciative of the people that are doing this kind of work. I really am.
Josh Wilder: They’re really at our core. I, I hope to see what we do, across our our publications and platforms as that sort of resource for people, not only to find different methods and different skills, but also to, at our events, obviously Keith learned a [00:29:00] lot from seeing you and, I think we’ve had a lot of similar stories over the years but really it is that sharing of.
education and that your research farm is an example of that. Like what sort of goals do you have for your research farm? And where do you see that going in the future?
Jean-Martin Fortier: I just before I answer that because you opened that door, like I want to say, like Mother Earth news for me is like it’s really important.
It’s a big part of my history, because I grew up in the suburbs, skateboarding, snowboarding, I was cutting lawns for a living. That’s what I was doing. And I went to university and I studied environmental science because I liked the outdoors. And then I realized that our system was broken and all of that. I went to the U. S. to do, to work on a farm, and then I saw Mother Earth News, and for me, that was like huge, like it was like opening up my my heart, my mind to a universe that I didn’t know that you can build your house [00:30:00] with cob and I didn’t know that you could have, you can do all these things, treat your water differently, that you can grow a garden, that you can do this and do, it was just like, it was so incredible.
And I’m sure that if this has happened to me, I’m not the only one. So I think the work that you’re all doing is really important work.
Forecasting Small-scale Farming’s Future
Keith Arkenberg: Yeah that’s why I was wanting to ask too, since 2015, that’s really when it brought me into it. And even one of the case studies in your book as well, they had mentioned seeing you in 2015, I believe it was in France, maybe.
So we had a really birth of a lot of market gardeners at the time. How have you seen that kind of evolve through the years? Do we still have that same upward trajectory? Are we starting to see them start to wane off more after, the, I’d call like the peak of all of that came through? Or are we still, going up to the peak at this point?
Jean-Martin Fortier: Yeah. Tough question to answer. [00:31:00] Somehow I saw numbers in the last two years the trend towards the local food movement has been going downward. And the demand after COVID went down, and I, I think this summer perhaps it stabilized, but, and yeah, there was an excitement that was there, that I’m not sure that is, is as much there now.
And I don’t think we can explain this for any one reason. I still believe that we need to have so many much more farms, market gardens, farms, feeding local communities. Because I, I really believe that’s the only way. To be sustainably fed and to create community so I believe that tremendously, but even in our movement, we’ve saw divide, we’ve saw, new things come up, and it’s I just feel that at one point, the movement lost its focus on just You know, being, growing [00:32:00] great food for local communities and topics and conversations were everything except that I don’t know, that’s my two cents, but, I’m hopeful that we’re still relevant and I’m hopeful that we’re still inspiring, newcomers to join in the battle because that’s what it’s about.
This is, this is a fight against a big ag and a centralized system that is. These are multi national corporations that we’re fighting with our small farms. It’s quite the battle,
Ana Skemp: What would you tell, so it’s hard, if you’re a young person trying to get into farming, the cost of land has gone up dramatically just in our little area, and around the country, around the world.
How do you, what do you tell, what are two things you would tell young people? Like, how are you going to get into farming? What bits of advice, and why is it worth it?
Jean-Martin Fortier: It’s a great question. I would certainly tell them to go work on a farm. To see if they really like it and if they’re cut up for it because not everyone is And if you’re inspired [00:33:00] by that farm, then you’ll probably want to farm some more So that’s the number one advice and then you know, i’m biased because that’s what I do But I you know, make sure that you’re probably trained to do the work because what can take you, five years or 10 years to learn could be learned in two, what takes you two hours to do could be done in one.
And so the more skilled you are, learn, knowing how to do things and then with internet now with programs, and there’s a lot of good teachers, there’s a lot of good teaching out there, you can really speed up your learning curve because that’s one thing that you can control. So these are my two advice and I, and still I would encourage people to start farms because we’ve had a beautiful life on the farm.
My two kids were raised there. Now I’ll have to leave because we’re going to a hockey game. They’re 20 and 15 and I just feel that we were really privileged and [00:34:00] blessed to be able to raise our kids in the countryside on a farm. And I just hope that, young people or young parents listening to this were like, this is what I want to do with my kids.
Ana Skemp: I have another question about predictability, when we got started, you were talking about the right carrot seeder, the right spacing between your carrot seeds. And for us, at least, over the last 15 years, the weather patterns have gotten far more unpredictable. So we’ve had 1, 000 year flood events, 500 year flood events in our county.
Pretty intense. We lost some cattle fence line three years ago. We lost our entire tomato planting. How are we as farmers going to handle this increased unpredictability that’s unavoidable?
Jean-Martin Fortier: Yeah, diversity, for sure. And we need to build resiliency into our farms, but also in our communities.
And there’s really I really believe that, the fact that we can [00:35:00] be growing all these different vegetables, for example, that helps the fact that there’s all these farms that are different places. That’s also very important, for all the trouble and the hardship that we face and we’re going to be able, we need to design farms differently.
We need to design our farm so that we can capture flash flood. And make sure that the water gets channeled away from the growing area and is pooled where we can use it later when we have drought, which is the other flip side. So there’s work there, I’m again I don’t want to give up on, on small scale farming because it’s getting harder because what’s the alternative?
The alternative is what I’m hearing all the time when I go to U. N. farming conferences is hydroponic farms, it’s robots and farming, it’s farms in the oceans, it’s all these technical, technological. Solutions that don’t imply soil that only don’t imply people working [00:36:00] the land and I just feel that’s not where we should be heading.
That’s not where I want to. I don’t want to be fed that way.
Soil as Source of Wellness
Ana Skemp: Talk to me more about soil. Like as farmers, we all know that soil is integral to what we do and we don’t want to be growing. Why? Why is soil vitally important to us as opposed to hydroponic systems. Can you articulate that a bit?
Josh Wilder: And then, yeah, if you, and then we can let you go.
Jean-Martin Fortier: I’m going to have to cut it at that, but I love that question. And I would talk for hours about soil because soil is where all the magic happens, like we, we do not understand anything about soil. It’s so dynamics. It’s so alive. It’s really like when we all, the four of us, when we die. We’re going back to the soil, and soils are everything to the plants, and the plants, they need that soil to be in equilibrium, to be healthy, to be really [00:37:00] good plant tissues that we then eat to be good, healthy humans, and A lot of the modern diseases are directly linked to the fact that the food that we eat now doesn’t have the nutrients because it’s not grown in soil, or it’s grown in soil that’s been depleted with all the chemicals and the fertilizers.
And so everything relates back to soil and Whenever we try to circumvent it to to do without, because it’s easier, because it’s more lucrative, because there’s financial incentives to do without we bypass a really important part, and my best image is let’s say you’re, it’s, you want to eat good food and you’re, you’re fed by ivy is it has everything that you need, but it’s compared that to a nice healthy meal and fresh vegetables. It’s not the same. And so that’s really [00:38:00] where our modern society is really going wrong here.
Trying to do without soil. I really believe that’s the way back home is with soil
Josh Wilder: Thanks so much. That’s a great place to end.
Jean-Martin Fortier: We should do this again with more time.
Josh Wilder: Yeah, we’ll have to do this again sometime.
Thanks for joining us for this episode of Mother Earth News and Friends. To listen to more podcasts and get connected on our social media, visit www.motherearthnews.com/podcast. You can also email us at podcast@ogdenpubs.com with any questions or suggestions. Our podcast production team includes Kenny Coogan, Alyssa Warner, and myself, Josh Wilder.
Music for this episode is the song Hustle by Kevin MacLeod. The Mother Earth News and Friends podcast is a production of Ogden Publications.
