Greenhorns Radio

This week's featured farmer on Greenhorns Radio is Anson Biller. Raised in Eastern Massachusetts, gone west, and now returning, Anson has been farming for five years. Initially managing the production at a Buddhist retreat center in Cazadero, CA, Anson then moved down to Sebastopol to operate a small CSA at the Permaculture Skills Center. He's now making the leap to start his own farm, Full Fork, on five-acres of leased land in Whitefield, ME. (www.fullforkfarm.com). "Growing for seed, the plants are in the ground far longer. There is a high need for seeds for growing, it's definitely there." [09:00] --Anson Biller on Greenhorns Radio

This week's featured guest on Greenhorns Radio is Brian Dewan, a musician and visual artist living in Catskill, NY. He sings accompanied by accordion, autoharp, electric zither or other instruments. His recordings include Tells The Story, The Operating Theater, Words Of Wisdom, Ringing At The Speed Of Prayer and Grange Future. He is represented by Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn and has performed at the Whitney Museum, the New Museum, the Museum Of The Moving Image, the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum Of Jurassic Technology. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA.

This week's featured farmer on Greenhorns Radio is Darby Weaver. After receiving her degree in Sustainable Agriculture from Sterling College in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, Darby packed up her Northern roots and transplanted herself deep into the Southeastern red clay of the state of Georgia. Being young landless farmers, Darby and her husband, Elliot, were forced to land hop from property to property for years, managing farms and starting small businesses in an attempt to save up enough money to purchase a farm of their own. All of this running around from Piedmont to the Coast and finally to the Mountains built character and gave them experience in a lot of different growing conditions. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA. "Biodynamics is seeing your farm as an entity where every living organism is an entity nesting in other living organisms. Everything is connected." [10:00] "In farming there's no such thing as failing, there's only moving forward. you can make mistakes and the land is forgiving. [12:00] --Darby Weaver on Greenhorns Radio

This week's featured farmer on Greenhorns Radio is Tim van Berkel. Tim is from Dutch origin and came to the UK to study in 2008. The beauty, remoteness, people, clean ocean and waves made him decide to stay and adapt to the Cornish way of life. Seaweed was not Tim’s first love, but starting the Cornish Seaweed Company followed naturally from his original interests. Tim is a conservation biologist from origin, and is involved as Scientific Director in the conservation of the rainforests in Indonesia through a charity called Frontline Conservation. Before embarking on the seaweed and rainforest journeys however, he gained ecological and scientific knowledge during a BSc in Environmental Sciences with Utrecht University and an MSc in Conservation & Biodiversity at the University of Exeter. His research interests in tropical ecology and conservation led him to conduct research and expeditions around the world including Indonesia, Cameroon, Uganda, Honduras, Peru and Bolivia. When not at work he can still be found near the ocean, surfing along the beautiful Cornish coastline.This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA.

This week's featured farmer on Greenhorns Radio is Mike Lewis. Since 2009, Michael Lewis has been a busy man. From becoming a husband and father to contributing as a Kentucky Proud farmer who is a Veteran of the 3rd U.S. Infantry, The Old Guard, he has proven how invaluable honorable service can be. He began full-time farming in 2010 and, after supporting local farmer’s market and community supported agriculture efforts throughout 2011, founded America's first Veteran Oriented food security organization, The Growing Warriors Project, in 2012. Growing Warriors, which has helped over 65 veteran families grow more than 18,000 pounds of organic food, exists to equip, assist, and train our nation's military veterans in agriculture production for themselves, their families, and the nation. In 2013, Michael was a celebrated recipient of Kentucky’s Local Food Hero Award, an honor granted by Seed Capital Kentucky and the Kentucky Department of Agriculture to exceptional individuals who promote local, farm-fresh food grown in Kentucky. Chosen from supporters who cast almost 2,600 votes, Michael stands out among 1,450 of his fellow Kentucky farmers for agricultural contributions he’s worked tirelessly for over the past several years, giving so many access to Kentucky-grown food straight from the farm. He has also served as a member of the Kentucky Industrial Hemp commission and, with the help of fellow veterans, operates America’s first federally permitted Industrial Hemp farm since 1934. At the close of 2014, Yahoo lauded Michael as one of eight people who “Made our World a Better Place,” touting his efforts with Growing Warriors and its movement to promote projects across multiple states. Compassionate and unfaltering, Michael’s impact is undeniable—even a brief conversation will show that his vision is contagious and will, as we work together, bring about the growth and change that Kentucky, the U.S., and our good green Earth so markedly needs.

This week's featured farmer is Gowan Batist. Gowan is a farmer, metalsmith and soil nerd. Born on the Mendocino Coast in California and raised pulling crab pots out of the ocean with her Grandfather who taught her that work is love. She studied metal fabrication until succumbing to the pull to farm. She completed an Oregon State University Certificate program and Master Gardener training and cut her teeth on a 150-acre farm outside Portland. She always wanted to return to Mendocino, which she did to manage a farm at a local nonprofit, Noyo Food Forest. Now, at the age of 26, she is the proud owner of Fortunate Farm, made possible by a unique partnership with North Coast Brewing Company. Her 40-acre coastal farm focuses on heirloom vegetables, invasive species management, and large-scale composting. Her goal is to feed her community in a way that sequesters carbon. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA. "The backbone of our farm is a lot of work and as much community integration as possible." [12:00] "I would love to see more young farmers using technology." [14:00] "I would love to do everything in my power to get more farmers established and supported here." [15:00] --Gowan Batist

This week's featured farmer is Tyler Hess. Tyler has been an apprentice of various organic farms for several years, and is now growing produce at New Forest Farm in Wisconsin. A recent college graduate and avid traveler, he hopes to continue facilitating land-based projects as leverage points for the times ahead. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA. "We need people doing commercial market farming!" [18:00] "We [young farmers] need to collaborate and hold each other in this space!" [26:00] --Tyler Hess on Greenhorns Radio

Our First Show! Severine interviews Antonio Roman Alcala, San Francisco based activist and farmer who spearheaded an effort to revive Alemany Farm, which had been deserted for two years.

This week's featured farmer is Lea Zeise. Lea is the descendant of Oneida women who have worked to improve their community through activism and community organizing. Her mother taught her the value of a healthy environment at an early age, bringing her along to protests against mining on the Mole Lake Band of Lake Superior Chippewa reservation in the 80s. Now an adult with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, Lea has focused her energy on the improvement of agriculture on Tribal lands. Every day offers another opportunity to draw linkages between the health of the environment and her people, with food often playing a central role.

This week's featured farmer is Corrie Quinn of Goose the Market. Corrie Quinn is always hungry. After working in museums by day and restaurant kitchens by night, she moved a career in food to the front burner when she went back to Italy for a masters in food communication from the Università degli Studi di Scienze Gastronomiche. After graduation, the good folks at Goose the Market in Indianapolis fed her once and she never went away. She worked as a meat monger and wine and beer buyer there before managing the Goose Enoteca, or Italian-style wine and food bar, in the butcher shop's cellar. Over three years ago, Goose the Market grew to open Smoking Goose, a wholesale, USDA-inspected meatery that handcrafts slow-cured and smoked meats, salumi, and fresh sausages. Since then Corrie has been helping to share the Goose philosophy with an audience that stretches from coast to coast: because Smoking Goose believes real meat has a tale, we can all dine happily ever after. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA.

This week's featured farmer is Louisa Conrad. Louisa Conrad owns and operates Big Picture Farm in Townshend, VT with her husband Lucas Farrell. On their hillside farm lives a herd of 37 goats, 2 dogs, 2 cats, 30 or so chickens and an incredible team of employees. Big Picture Farm makes the finest goat milk caramels in the world and for their efforts have been awarded 2 SOFI Awards from the Specialty Food Association, 2 Good Food Awards, & an American Cheese Society Award. This program was brought Heritage Foods USA.

Mary Moody is an organic grower and an organizer and activist around local food, food equity, and sustainable land use. She is a founder of Hope House where hospitality is offered to people who need shelter and communal meals are shared by the hungry and lonely. She is also a founding member of the Dubuque Food Co-op, the Driftless Farm Crawl and Farm to Table Dinners, and serves on the Local Food Systems Working Group and Farm To School Committee for Dubuque County. She lives at New Hope Farm near Dubuque, Iowa which she and her husband founded in 2000 to promote communal living and integrated learning through living on the land. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA.

This week's featured farmer is Cebastien Rose. Cebastien Rose is the Collective Coordinator and Seed Project Manager of Owl Peak Farm Collective. Owl Peak Farm Collective is an agro-ecology farm providing affordable food, regionally adapted non-GE seed and starts, compost and sustainability education to our local community. We farm in a high desert salty floodplain in the company of beavers, grasshoppers, drought and epic floods. We are an incubator farm (first incubating ourselves), working to model sustainable agriculture enterprises to help revive farming and support self-sufficiency in our community. We are a non-profit organization. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA "To be denied the right to name your chili, its like being denied the right to use your own name." [16:15] "Three corporations control 50 percent of the worlds seed market." [20:00] --Cebastien Rose on Greenhorns Radio

Today's featured farmer: Alice Melendez. Alice has found in Plowshares for Appalachia the chance to tie together threads from her life-- learning and teaching, love of the earth, farming heritage, and practical interest in the social structures and cultural tendencies that have set us on a course to destroy so much of what is precious. She has returned to her rural Kentucky roots and the management of the family farm after a 10-year odyssey which took her through extended stays in and study of Central America, Dartmouth College and the “Ivy League” experience, tense times in Philadelphia at the height of the recession, and five years in the “PetroMetro” Houston, Texas where she worked both with established community development and refugee resettlement organizations and with post-Occupy activist groups- particularly focused on anti-extraction work. Today, her two small kids, Ana and Severo, and her husband, Emilio are all happy to be living with wild space and gardens, gone country again. And Alice now has the chance to join her mother, Laura and the other partners in the farm, on the project of making the family farm work-- economically, ecologically, and socially. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA. "It takes more hands on the land to manage land for a profit." [07:00] --Alice Melendez on Greenhorns Radio

Today's featured farmer is Hedda Brorstrom. Hedda Brorstrom is the owner, farmer and florist at Full Bloom Flower Farm in Graton, California. Full Bloom Flower Farm specializes in growing and arranging chemical free, local blooms for weddings, grocery stores, restaurants and events. Hedda grows 80 varieties of cut flowers as well as acting as a host to hundreds of pollinators and birds. Interest in agoecology took hold from a young age having grown up in agricultural rich Sonoma County. Hedda completed her undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley in Conservation and Resource Studies and later got a certificate in Ecological Horticulture from at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz. Inspired by the flower program at UCSC Hedda decided to leave her job as a garden coordinator in San Francisco and begin Full Bloom Flower Farm back in her home town of Graton, just outside of Sebastopol. Hedda is passionate about farmer advocacy and has helped to create the North Bay Flower Collective which provides monthly meetings on flower farms where florists and flower farmers share information, inspiration and work together to promote the Slow Flower Movement. A recent graduate from the California School of Herbal Studies, Hedda hopes to add herbs to production this coming season. Dahlias, rose geranium, and scabiosa stella must grows for Full Bloom Flower Farm, but Hedda changes favorite flowers as the flowers bloom and pass with the seasons. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA.

Today's featured farmer: Emily Garrity. Emily Garrity was born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska. There she found her love for farming in her late teens working in yard, garden, and flower maintenance. At the age of 24, she moved to Homer, a seaside community at the end of the road in South Central Alaska. Her first solo commercial endeavor consisted of less than 1Ž4 acre of garden space on borrowed land and a small table at the Homer Farmers Market. In 2005, she began her first CSA season with four subscribing members. Later that year, just over nine acres of south sloping, spring fed, topsoil rich real-estate became home to the farm she now owns and operates as Twitter Creek Gardens. Over the past nine years Emily has spent most of her waking moments and all of her income on the infrastructure of the farm. One 26’x96’ high tunnel, three homemade low tunnels, a large passive solar greenhouse, a root cellar, two work-shops, and a little farm house now make up the complex. Incorporating animals into the farmstead has been her newest endeavor. Small flocks of laying hens, broiler chickens, and hogs have made their way into the field rotations, providing much of the soil nutrients required to grow the current one-acre vegetable plot. The farm supplies food for a 20 member CSA, the Farmers Market, local restaurants, as well as the cast of characters who work the land. Emily sits on the Homer Farmers Market board, Homer Soil and Water Conservation District Board of Supervisors, and heads a farm-to-school project at the Homer Flex High School. She looks forward to the expansion of local agriculture and food security in the state of Alaska. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA "I was really interested in the CSA model initially. That's where I got started, I used borrowed land and had four members just to get the ball rolling." [04:00] --Emily Garrity on Greenhorns Radio

This week's featured farmer is Ginger Edwards. Ginger Edwards is an organic farmer and owner of R-evolution Gardens. She began in 2008 as a market gardener on a 1/2 acre of heavy wet clay and tree stumps and since has grown her farm to serve a 65 member CSA, a weekly farmers market and many coastal wholesale accounts from a lush 2 acres of diverse organic vegetables. Farmer Ginger, in addition to being a full time food producer, is a passionate educator of young farmers and a founding board member of the Nehalem Valley Farm Trust, a nonprofit that expands the vision and practice of sustainable agriculture throughout the north coast of Oregon. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA. "If you don't have access to investment capital you're reliant on banks, and credit cards, etc." [07:00] "Not everybody can be a farmer, but everybody can be supportive and be a part of the food styem thats supporting farmers. Thats what we need more of anyways." [17:00] --Ginger Edwards on Greenhorns Radio

Jared Zystro is Organic Seed Alliance's research and education assistant director. He has a master’s degree in plant breeding and plant genetics from the University of Wisconsin. Jared has worked in the organic seed industry for over 10 years, managing seed production at two farms and conducting research and education projects with OSA. In his work at OSA, he manages OSA's regional development, conducts participatory breeding projects and variety trials, and teaches farmers about seed production and plant breeding through publication and at workshops, conferences and field days. Jared lives in the coastal town of Arcata, CA with his wife Lisa and son Toby. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA. "The word heirloom often makes you think it's something that gets passed down from generation to generation. The reality is that seed and heirloom varieties do change - they are part of our global ecosystem." [11:00] --Jared Zystro on Greenhorns Radio

Today's featured farmer: Alice Melendez. Alice has found in Plowshares for Appalachia the chance to tie together threads from her life-- learning and teaching, love of the earth, farming heritage, and practical interest in the social structures and cultural tendencies that have set us on a course to destroy so much of what is precious. She has returned to her rural Kentucky roots and the management of the family farm after a 10-year odyssey which took her through extended stays in and study of Central America, Dartmouth College and the “Ivy League” experience, tense times in Philadelphia at the height of the recession, and five years in the “PetroMetro” Houston, Texas where she worked both with established community development and refugee resettlement organizations and with post-Occupy activist groups- particularly focused on anti-extraction work. Today, her two small kids, Ana and Severo, and her husband, Emilio are all happy to be living with wild space and gardens, gone country again. And Alice now has the chance to join her mother, Laura and the other partners in the farm, on the project of making the family farm work-- economically, ecologically, and socially. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA. "To get value out of the land, it takes more people on the land." [13:00] --Alice Melendez on Greenhorns Radio

Today's featured farmer: Rich Lee, Co - owner, Tender Soles Farm, Dresden, ME. Tender Soles Farm is a horse-powered, MOFGA certified organic, mixed vegetable, herb, and flower farm in Dresden, ME. Kate Del Vecchio and Rich Lee own and run the farm business on a leased farm and are currently in the process of closing on the purchase of a farm of their own in the neighboring town of Richmond where they plan to continue to sell through a farm stand, two farmers markets, a local buying club and coop, and several wholesale accounts. In addition to growing crops, they enjoy making their own hay loose, collecting eggs, and logging in the winter with their three draft horses Jess, Tony, and Molly. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA. "We're just keeping out eyes on the prize. We know [owning land] is what we want to do." [09:00] "There's definitely room for more value added products. People are excited to try different things - they are really opening up their palates" [12:00] "I think there's certainly a romantic side to working with horses - that's definitely what threw me into it." [17:00] --Rich Lee on Greenhorns Radio