The Collaborative Farming Podcast

Andrew Adamski, or walkie talkie callsign gopher, is one of the farmer owners of Full Circle Community Farm in Wisconsin, the land of coops in the US. He came back to his generations old family farm in 2017 after college, along with his now wife heather, to not only continue the family farming tradition, but diversify both its production and membership. He talks about his returning to the farm, their simplified and flexible business structure, using what he learned about ecology to develop the farms ownership/membership model, and that you don't have to have it all figured out to begin to include other members of the farm in the decision-making process. Heather, his wife, is the manager of the Slo-Farmers Coop, a farmer marketing cooperative of eight small farms providing a free choice, direct to consumer CSA, and we get into how that evolved over time, took off during covid, and how keystone farms can leverage their production capacity to not only sell more produce, but make space for beginning and specialty farmers, as well. They, and I mean the now five farmer owners of fun circle community farm, were awarded the marbleseed farmers of the year award in 2024. If your interested in hearing more about what they are doing, both Andrew and Heather will be presenting at Marbleseeds 2025 conference happening February 20th through the 22nd. Folks who support the show... Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill ASAP (Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project) will offer the Business of Farming Conference on Saturday, February 22, in Asheville, North Carolina. Find out more at asapconnections.org High Mowing Organic Seeds has the professional quality seeds and supportive grower reps to get you from seed to harvest. Visit highmowingseeds.com to request a catalog and use code NOTILL25 for 10% off your order of $100 or more!

Kelly Maynard is a cooperative development specialist at the university of Wisconsin center for cooperative development and we're going to get into some practical advice and tools you can use when thinking about going into cooperative farming, yourself, or yourselves, as it were. This is the second coop development person, or forth depending on how you define that role, I've had on this season to, if nothing else, drive the point home that there are people out there who's life work it is support the development of your "working together" ideas. Not only do you not have to farm alone, you don't have to build cooperative systems alone. Mentioned in the show... Farm Commons resource on FSA farm ownership loans Farm Commons and UWCC toolkit on sharing labor Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making UWCC recorded webinars, see Tools for an Effective Board and Decision-Making Tools for the Board Room Folks who support Collab Farm Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill ASAP (Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project) will offer the Business of Farming Conference on Saturday, February 22, in Asheville, North Carolina. Find out more at asapconnections.org Farmhand enables you to offload your administrative tasks, send and manage communications, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and book a free test drive at farmhand.partners/notill High Mowing Organic Seeds has the professional quality seeds and supportive grower reps to get you from seed to harvest. Visit highmowingseeds.com to request a catalog and use code NOTILL25 for 10% off your order of $100 or more!

Welcome back to Collab Farm, the podcast where we talk about all the ways small- and mid-scale farmers can work together, even in big $10 million food system rebuilding kinds of ways. Like this conversation that I had with Lexi Close from Appalachia Regional Cooperative Development and the Appalachia Producers Co-op. Now, Lexi is involved with much of the work going on in a cooperative beef processing facility that's currently under construction in Washington County, Eastern Tennessee. We get into how the project got started from the initial idea to the feasibility studies to raising such a large amount of capital. We also get into how the membership works, including some collective marketing opportunities for local producer members for the Eastern Tennessee region, and what these decentralized processing networks look like as much as 100 years ago, what we lost in centralization And how they can serve as a model for building them back. Folks who support Collab Farm Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill ASAP (Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project) will offer the Business of Farming Conference on Saturday, February 22, in Asheville, North Carolina. Find out more at asapconnections.org Farmhand enables you to offload your administrative tasks, send and manage communications, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and book a free test drive at farmhand.partners/notill High Mowing Organic Seeds has the professional quality seeds and supportive grower reps to get you from seed to harvest. Visit highmowingseeds.com to request a catalog and use code NOTILL25 for 10% off your order of $100 or more!

I'm going to be real honest with you, I've been working hard lately. If you're listening to this, I bet you've been working hard, too. Case in point, I JUST got our garlic in the ground in down here in zone 7, but better late than never I suppose. So, I thought I'd seize this opportunity to bring back an old episode, the very FIRST episode of collaborative farm, actually, a conversation I had with Chris bonder of Close to Home Organics and Glen Valley Farm. This one still comes to mind as one of the best collab farm episodes ever and now that we're reaching a wider audience, I wanted to give it the opportunity to reach more listeners. Chris is not only stellar farmer and a part of a cooperative farm framework, he's extremely well versed in the history of modern farm cooperatives. Folks who support Collab Farm Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill ASAP (Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project) will offer the Business of Farming Conference on Saturday, February 22, in Asheville, North Carolina. Find out more at asapconnections.org Farmhand enables you to offload your administrative tasks, send and manage communications, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and book a free test drive at farmhand.partners/notill High Mowing Organic Seeds has the professional quality seeds and supportive grower reps to get you from seed to harvest. Visit highmowingseeds.com to request a catalog and use code NOTILL25 for 10% off your order of $100 or more!

In the spirit of collaboration, I'm gonna do something a little different. A couple weeks ago I did a field day with OAK--that's the Organic Association of Kentucky--If you're listening to this and live in Kentucky you should totally be a member. We and acouple of dozen other farmers and farm professionals walked through our gardens. We talked about the conservation practices we're currently using on our market garden along with some of the lessons learned and fielded some questions. Before the talk, last minute, I decided to put on a wireless mic and record it so that we could share it with all of you. Now, I know it's not going to be as good as being there in person and some things you just have to see. My thought is that, again, in the spirit of collaboration, you all could share the tour via audio on your own time and maybe, just maybe, glean a little something from it. Mentioned in the show... Become an OAK member! Photos & video from the tour (Drive folder) The Backstory of Farming at The Church (YouTube) Folks who support Collab Farm Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill The OSC Pack Pact is a collective action campaign that works to reduce single-use packaging in the natural products industry. Receive a discount code to shop select products from leading natural products brands that you love. Click the link in the show notes to join the Pack Pact! Farmhand enables you to offload your administrative tasks, send and manage communications, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and book a free test drive at farmhand.partners/notill High Mowing Organic Seeds has the professional quality seeds and supportive grower reps to get you from seed to harvest. Visit highmowingseeds.com to request a catalog and use code NOTILL25 for 10% off your order of $100 or more!

This roundtable with Jameson Parker of the Moonlight Collective, William Crenshaw of the Nashville Food Coop, Rhianna Michelle of the Waterbear cooperative land project, & Lexi Close of the Appalachian producers co-op offers different perspectives on starting a cooperative business and was recorded at the '23 TN Local Food Summit. A special thank you to Natalie Seevers for inviting us down and coordinating the live recording. Save the date for the '24 TN Local Food Summit coming December 6th through 8th HERE! Folks who support Collab Farm Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill The OSC Pack Pact is a collective action campaign that works to reduce single-use packaging in the natural products industry. Receive a discount code to shop select products from leading natural products brands that you love. Click the link in the show notes to join the Pack Pact! Farmhand enables you to offload your administrative tasks, send and manage communications, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and book a free test drive at farmhand.partners/notill High Mowing Organic Seeds has the professional quality seeds and supportive grower reps to get you from seed to harvest. Visit highmowingseeds.com to request a catalog and use code NOTILL25 for 10% off your order of $100 or more!

Emma Busby used to be the former Chapter Coordinator for the Southeast TN Young Farmers and has since moved on to be a board member of the Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network. We met back at the '23 TN Local Food Summit whose focus that year was "cultivating cooperation" and she had some really interesting work and insights to share, particularly some work she facilitated with a group of small-scale farmers around coordinated crop planning (CCP) and building aggregation systems from the ground up rather than the top down. Folks who support Collab Farm Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill Harnois Greenhouses are engineered to face any North American climate, ensuring unparalleled brightness, agronomic performance, faster return on investment and lasting durability. Harnois Greenhouses, a leader in turnkey solutions for local growers. Farmhand enables you to offload your administrative tasks, send and manage communications, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and book a free test drive at farmhand.partners/notill High Mowing Organic Seeds has the professional quality seeds and supportive grower reps to get you from seed to harvest. Visit highmowingseeds.com to request a catalog and use code NOTILL25 for 10% off your order of $100 or more!

Sarah K. Mock has written two books that I absolutely love and have had a profound effect on how I view my own farming outside of just growing better carrots, Farm and Other F Words and Big Team Farms, about how we can begin to chart a path forward by… you guessed it… working together. She has a substack, People Eat the Land, and a much better podcast than this one, The Only Thing That Lasts. Folks who support Collab Farm Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill Harnois Greenhouses are engineered to face any North American climate, ensuring unparalleled brightness, agronomic performance, faster return on investment and lasting durability. Harnois Greenhouses, a leader in turnkey solutions for local growers. The OSC Pack Pact is a collective action campaign that works to reduce single-use packaging in the natural products industry. Receive a discount code to shop select products from leading natural products brands that you love. Click the link in the show notes to join the Pack Pact!

Ian McSweeney & Kristina Villa, co-directors of The Farmers Land Trust, are responsible for creating and supporting farmland commons, a vehicle for preserving farmland and ensuring its dedication to regenerative agriculture in perpetuity while respecting both the farmers and the communities they feed. I mean, what's better than that? If you like what you hear, are a farmer or a landholder, and want to know more, you can reach out to them at the thefarmerslandtrust.org Folks who support Collab Farm Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill Harnois Greenhouses are engineered to face any North American climate, ensuring unparalleled brightness, agronomic performance, faster return on investment and lasting durability. Harnois Greenhouses, a leader in turnkey solutions for local growers. The OSC Pack Pact is a collective action campaign that works to reduce single-use packaging in the natural products industry. Receive a discount code to shop select products from leading natural products brands that you love. Click the link in the show notes to join the Pack Pact!

Hey folks, it's Jackson and today I've got a bonus episode of Collab Farm with Mike & Armonda of Rose Hill Farm Stop in Bloomington, Indiana. I attended a session with them at the Organic Association of Kentucky conference '23 and was really impressed. You'll see why in a minute... Now, you may have heard the last episode of The No-Till Market Garden Podcast with the great Alex Ball speaking with the owners of the Argus Farm Stop in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and thought, 'yeah, yeah, yeah... that's great you can do that there, but probably not here.' That is exactly why I love Rose Hill Farm Stop. They spent some time at Argus and have adapted the model to be a producer coop and replicated it in a more rural area with a lower median income. We talk about how they got the idea off of the ground, how it functions as a producer coop, how they have solved some of the logistical challenges, and what the farm stop looks like a little more than a year into operation. You can support our work by picking up a copy of The Living Soil Handbook, becoming a Patreon member, joining our free online growers community, or just sharing this episode with another farm friend you'd want to start a producer coop with? Just sayin'... Remember, many hands make light work.

Tianna Kennedy is a founding member and 1/3 owner of Star Route Farm in New York and owner/coordinator of the 607 CSA. She talks about how Star Route Farm began as a partnership, how/why they incorporated a third owner and how it's multiform CSA component split off to form a whole other organization which she now coordinates. Now, the 607 CSA includes dozens of producers, hundreds of members, and covers a not small region of New York State. She gets into how it grew from a simple two-farm-veg-CSA into a sprawling network of producers and eaters and the relationship-based assets and logistics that make it all work. I found Tianna as a part of the SKYWOMAN project and she talks about her experience there, as well. Also mentioned in the show... The 607 CSA farmsite with producer/delivery maps, income calculators, and cool AF shirts. GrownBy, Local Line, & Fellow Farmer online sales platforms Signal app for communication Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast. Remember, many hands make light work.

The Full Plate Farm Collective began in Ithaca NY nearly 20 years ago when Chaw Chang & Lucy Garrison-Clauson' of Stick & Stone Farm and Nathaniel and Emily Thompson of Remembrance Farm came together to offer a joint veg CSA. Since, it has grown to about 700 members and is now a substantial part of their farm revenue, enough to have a full time coordinator (ie. Molly Flerlage), and brings in product from dozens of other farms and value added producers throughout the region. Molly and I talk about her role as the CSA manager, how full plate operates at-scale to afford an awesome CSA manager, and how they have leveraged the CSA to help new farmers and address food insecurity. Stick around after the credits, because she reached back out to add some honest thoughts on how scale can provide better long-term solutions to CSA challenges than third-party CSA management platforms. Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown & Growing for Market Magazine. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast. Remember, many hands make light work.

Author, academic, and podcaster David Bollier! David works with the Schumacher Center for a New Economics and has studied and written extensively on commoning for the last two decades. For those who aren't familiar with that word, commoning is simply the act of managing shared resources like land or information. We talk about how he came to study the commons as an alternative for change after being disillusioned with the political system, can't say it's gotten any better, starting from where you are, however small, and examples of commoning in our everyday life that we simply don't have words for, and often overlook. You can find his writing, books, and podcast on his website. Mentioned in the show... Think Like a Commoner (book) Frontiers of Commoning (podcast) Elinor Ostrom's 8 Principles of Managing a Commons My two favorite episodes of FoC... Treating Food as Commons, Not Commodity Why Ivan Illich Still Matters Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown & Growing for Market Magazine. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast. Remember, many hands make light work.

What does it look like to give Burmese and Bhutanese elders and families, and by extension immigrant and refugee peoples, meaningful growing opportunities? Today, I chat with Tallahassee May, the farm director of Growing Together Nashville. First, let's just agree that Tallahassee May is one of the best names we've ever heard. Second, Growing Together Nashville is a part of the Nashville Food Project. It leases a couple of acres of church land in inner city Nashville to Bhutan and Burmese farmers, most of them elders, so they may grow produce both for their famalies and community, make a supplemental income, and have meaningful work. After the conversation, stick around because Tally asked some of the same questions to the farmers through a translator. Not only is it important to hear the voices of the farmers themselves, you can hear the birds, the trains, the inside jokes lost in translation, the airplanes, the laughter, it's just a great listen. Let it play. I just cannot get over the amount of gratitude these people have simply for the opportunity to grow. The Growing Together CSA Farmsite Follow Growing Together in Instagram Mentioned in the show... The Nashville Food Project Faithlands, an Agrarian Trust Toolkit No-Till Growers video w/ The Treehouse Farm Collective Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown & Growing for Market Magazine. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast. Remember, many hands make light work.

"Liberation Farms is food justice in action. It is a demonstration of the success that is possible when marginalized communities have the opportunity to organize and lead themselves." Today, we hear from Lana and Muhidin, the farm manager and executive director respectively, of Liberation Farms in Lewiston, Maine. Liberation farms is a 200+ acre farm in the Little Jubba Agrarian Commons. Sound familiar? This was one of the first farms moved into the agrarian commons framework by the Agrarian Trust (listen to my conversation with them here). Lana and Muhidin tell us how the farm and commons began, how the land is used to meet the personal, economic, and cultural needs of the Somali Bantu community, the ways in which the farmers self-organize into iskashito groups, a little about access to farmland in Somalia, and how they are working to bridge the agricultural divide between Somalia and the US as well as current and future generations of Somali Bantu farmers. Follow Liberation Farms on Instagram Check out their very informative website & contribute to Liberation Farms Mentioned in the show... The history of the Somali Bantu peoples The Seed Growers Podcast w/ Dan Brisebois Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown & Growing for Market Magazine. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast. Remember, many hands make light work.

A conversation I envisioned since the beginning of this podcast, I talk with Brent Lackey of the Kentucky Center for Agriculture and Rural Development about cooperative development, step by step. Mentioned in the show... Understanding the Capper Volstead Act KRS 272 on Cooperatives Cooperation Works! Development Network Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown & Growing for Market Magazine. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast. Remember, many hands make light work.

As a follow up to last week's Aliments Farmhouse Food conversation, Hannah and Natalie from Ferme Agricola share a bit about what it's like being a member of a producers cooperative from the perspective of the farmers. Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown & Growing for Market Magazine. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast. Remember, many hands make light work.

Aliments Farmhouse Food is a multifarm cooperative of seven farm members co-markting their produce, meat, dairy, and more through a home delivery CSA to some three to four hundred members throughout Ottawa, Canada. I talk to farmer member and general manager Leela Ramachandran about how it all began and has grown over the last few years, leveraging the low overhead of direct to consumer delivery to reach beyond traditional markets, the balance between standard boxes and efficiency vs customization and complexity, the roles and responsibilities of the farmer members and staff, logistics, and a whole lot else. Mentioned in the show... Aliments well designed website My previous conversation with Aliments farmer member Agricola TrackPod (app) for delivery optimization Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown, Growing for Market Magazine, and Veggie Cropper crop planning software. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast. Remember, many hands make light work.

Do you grow enough diversity for a full-diet CSA? Or just stick to what you grow well? These are two extremes of the spectrum, but... what if you could do both? Mikey and Erin of Boxcar Acres provide a multi-farm, full-diet, full-choice CSA in Henry County, KY. They aggregate and distribute veg from their own farm and several others, along with protein, dairy, honey, and value-added goods, all full-choice at a flat rate. We get into how their entire farming career has been characterized by collaboration, how the full-diet CSA works, the challenges of the model, and we get a bit candid about what it may mean to put the 'member' back in CSA member. Mentioned in the show... The past episode with Valley Spirit Farm A really amazing short video/post, For the Hog Killing, if you're a fan of Wendell Berry... New Roots CSA & Fresh Stops Demo how their Google Doc order form works Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown, Growing for Market Magazine, and Veggie Cropper crop planning software. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast. Remember, many hands make light work.

Talking cooperative compost company with Nathan and Michael from Tilth Soil, folks. Tilth Soil and Rust Belt Riders have been collecting and diverting food waste from landfills and, as a result, have been making some of the most amazing composts and soils around. When I heard they had officially organized as a worker cooperative, I had to get them on the line to learn more. Not only am I excited to learn more about a worker-owned compost business, I personally want to see more regional high-quality composters across the country. So, let's do more of that? We talk about their humble beginnings, how they've always maintained collective decision making and are now formalizing those processes, how they have left and taken ideas about collaborative effort and growth from other industries, and philosophize a bit about the world changing nature of simply making some good ol' compost. Mentioned in the show... Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows (book) Dr. Elaine Ingham's Soil Food Web Course The Evergreen Cooperative Model Slack for company communication The Knowledge Project Podcast The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber (book) On Farm Composting (free ebook) The Compost Handbook by Robert Rynk (book) Community Composting Systems by James McSweeney (book) Financial Intelligence (book) The Community Composter Coalition Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Growing for Market Magazine and Veggie Cropper crop planning software. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast. Remember, many hands make light work.