Episode 26: Support Your Local Farmers

Here are my insights after the recent Rogue Valley Farm Tour of which over 2/3rds of the attendees were over 65.  
TAKE Action:
Pull together to fund buying farm land and then create a business plan and then HIRE young farmers at LIVING WAGE JOBS WITH BENEFITS to run these farm on 99 year leases for long term community food resilience. 
https://oregonfarmlink.org/

And... if you work for a local food non-protfit, please center and uplift the voices and livelihoods of actual working farmers over other programs.

Also: find and generously support your local food system networks.
Here is ours:
https://rvfoodsystem.org/

Here is the video version: https://youtu.be/IsEn-WJSx5k

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5XIdIaHbRGidd690CFKQcR?si=2c77ae0e786c4c56

More at:
 www.thetippingpoints.net

Seeds & Tools - https://www.siskiyouseeds.com/

Show notes:

Check out the following books by Ursala Le Guin:
The Dispossessed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dis...
Alway Coming Home
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_...

#growyourown, #organic, #openpollinated, #heirloom, #seeds, #seed, #organicseed, #nongmo, #farmtotable,  #healthyliving,  #seedfreedom, #gardening, #‎slowfood‬, #regenerativefuture #growyourgroceries, #theagrarianrenaissance, #dontipping, #tippingpoints

Check out more at:

www.dontipping.com

Courses & Farm Tours: https://www.siskiyouseeds.com/pages/workshops-and-tours

Seeds & Tools - https://www.siskiyouseeds.com/

Growing Tips https://www.siskiyouseeds.com/blogs/news/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, hey there, good people. This is Don Tipping, and here is another installment of the Agrarian Renaissance podcast after a bit of a hiatus because I've been busy farming. And it's July twenty fourth, and by now we're harvesting some of the early seeds from what was spring planted, like spinach and mustards and that type of thing. And all our garlic is out of the ground, and we're clipping it and getting it ready to send out to the people before planting this fall. And I wanted to focus this next uh iteration of the podcast on kind of my own visceral feeling of a recent uh tour we did here on the farm that's called the Rogue Valley Farm Tour. And this is a program that's been happening for, I don't know, about 10 or 12 years. And we've been part of it, perhaps seven or eight of those. And it is a valley-wide, basically open house at about 20 farms and ranches throughout the Rogue Valley here in southern Oregon. So our approach to it is basically like an open house where we have little farm tours on the hour every hour for five hours. So I led five farm tours. We probably had about two or three hundred people come to the farm. And I would say the demographics of that was about 70% people that were over 65. And uh, you know, we we may describe as baby boomers. And so I would I would do a tour, uh, you know, just walking up our main field and talking about what we're growing and our approach to uh uh selecting and adapting uh varieties of vegetables, flowers, herbs, and small grains for our climate to produce seed and and basically how we function as a bit of a research and development facility because uh the government doesn't do that work, nor do our land grant colleges or their associated extension um research centers. So it's up to folks like myself and my colleagues who are doing the work of curating, stewarding bioregionally adapted seed banks to do this work. So we would do this tour, walk through the field, we'd end up in my order fulfillment center in our barn where we do uh all our order fulfillment, and we have two climate-controlled seed rooms. And then I would use that as an opportunity to just share some of my insights of over 30 years of full-time farming with who was there because there's a part of it that's a bit of a feel-good kind of thing. You know, we want to make everybody feel good, like yay, yay, local agriculture. And I also uh I'm increasingly aware that I'm the only farmer that most of the people that I know know. Where contrast that with much of the last multiple millennia where we were agrarian peoples, most people were farmers, so you definitely knew a farmer, or you were one, or your parents were one, or something to that extent. And we've seen an increasing uh consolidation of labor up at the top of the system, basically earning money off of the hard physical work that those of us on farms and ranches do. And one of my friends and mentors one time made the assertion that all wealth comes from three sources, and those are farming, mining, and logging. Because you can imagine those are the vocations that are are extracting the raw materials of the earth and creating the building blocks of civilization. So we've all seen that meme where like you need a doctor maybe once every year, uh, you know, you need an attorney once every five years, but you need a farmer every day if you want to eat every day, unless you're water fasting or something. So when you think about this in a certain way, though, like to just break down the paradigm, uh, with mining, no one sells raw ore, like rocks with some stuff in it. Nobody does that. You uh it it's like a corporate approach, usually financed somehow through uh shareholders or I don't know how they do it. And they they mine the ore, they refine the ore, and then they sell the refined material, whether that's iron or silver, gold, oil, coal, what have you. All the the basic building blocks of civilization. Then we move over to logging, uh, where no one sells just logs. You know, maybe somewhere people do, but that's dumb. Uh they they mill it into wood, or they mill it into wood and then engineer it into plywood and other various like engineered lumber products, like uh, you know, OSB-oriented strandboard or glue lamps or structurally integrated panels, something like that. And the the the smart money, like Wirehauser, no longer sells lumber, they just sell paper products. So contrast this with farming, where people sell raw materials, like they sell corn, wheat, potatoes, whatever it is, apples. And how the farmer is completely at the whims of the commodity banker, speculative derivatives market, hedge fund insanity that's gamified the whole financial system to the point that here in the US, right now, I don't know if most people know this, that the average net income for farmers is negative. Negative. So the only way farming works is that somebody has an off-farm job that actually makes the money, that gets the health insurance, and creates the regular paycheck to support the insane amount of cash flow it takes to farm. And one of my early mentors, uh Jim Leap, uh, I got to see at an ecological farming conference I went to about budgeting on a farm when I was younger. And he said, double your expected expenses and cut your expected yields in half. And if you hit that, you're doing well, you're succeeding. So that basically means whatever your goal was, a quarter of that. And I would say that's actually pretty darn accurate. You know, in any given year, we have things that don't work out, no matter how good a job I do. There's just there's weather, pests, nature, uh, the vagaries of the market, disease, uh, wildfire, who knows? Um, and and uh another element of all this is I look at how like when we think of the mag 7, the magnificent seven that are like basically fueling the stock market right now, they're all tech companies. And they don't, in my view, really create anything of value for civilization. Um, you know, sure, like Google Docs are kind of helpful, but we figured it out with a pad and paper and a pen for years, uh up until that point. And and then for those of us who are like small business owners, the amount of subscriptions and the learning curve to figure out all the new apps and things are it it's a waste of time, you know. So we wind up having to spend so much of our time to learn the new thing to stay current with the tech that it's like I don't know, ultimately not helpful in a lot of ways. However, the people that work for those things and most of the people that live in cities now earn a living sitting at a desk, writing emails, responding to emails, or Google Docs or PowerPoints or whatever that is. It's basically they're not really creating anything of value for civilization. They're just in what Vivek Ramaswamy coined the term the administrative class. They just create red tape that the rest of us need to deal with. And then we need to pay them like six-figure salaries with all these benefits for the privilege of accessing whatever the hell it is they're offering us. So when I had all these uh folks in my barn finally, you know, once again, to clarify, most of them, at least, you know, three-quarters or thereabouts, were over 65, I would, you know, just kind of go out on a limb and be like, unless you're figuring out a way to directly support, not just like buying seeds from me or going to the farmers market, but like you use your your financial leverage and the um the privilege that you had just by you know being born earlier, that you're basically born halfway between third base and home plate, uh, and that it you know, you don't you you only had to work so much and your purchasing power is so high that you could like buy cars and homes and pay them off. I think it's like over 40% of boomers own two to six properties, whereas your average millennial or Gen Z would just dream of owning one property, even if it was a 40-year mortgage uh uh associated with that. So, what I was imploring these people once I got them in the seed barn, I was like, all right, you came here. Now I get to get on my soapbox, and pardon me, I'm on my soapbox right now, is please participate in your local food systems, whatever organizations that are advocating for and supporting local farms and ranches, get involved, donate money, show up, give pro bono if you have the skills like legal accounting, marketing, graphic arts, whatever you got, and and help out these farmers because you know, imagine if you will, okay, imagine if you got 30 people together who each had an extra hundred grand. Uh, and a lot of boomers have definitely more than that in some 401k Roth IRA Fidelity Count, index fund, something like that. Imagine if you had 30 people like that put 100K in. That's $3 million. You could buy three farms that were a half million dollars each with a half million operating budget, so that's $3 million total, and develop a business plan, get uh folks like myself and others that would be willing to help craft this for towards a successful, regenerative, resilient farm-ranch kind of system. And and and then offer living wage jobs to people, young people who otherwise would never be able to afford their own farmland, but so desperately want to farm, have the energy and the mojo because they're younger and they still have the naivete and the optimism to do it. Give them a job at $40 an hour managing a farm with a month of paid vacation and uh you know a healthcare stipend. Because that's what's normal in the you know nonprofit space that's advocating for these farms. But good luck as a farmer finding a job that's gonna pay you forty to fifty dollars an hour plus benefits, yeah. Good luck. You're gonna be in an austerity path for at least a decade if you don't give up and just go work for the man and some golden hencuffs job. If we want to see local farms and ranches, it's gonna take people stepping up to the plate to help share the burden of the inordinate amount of investment, uh infrastructure, and ongoing maintenance that it takes. Because I'm 30 years in here on my farm, and all I gotta do is walk outside to see something that needs to be redone, uh, improved, renovated. They all have you know four to five figure price tags on them constantly. It never lits up because compared to your average urban person, that all they need to do their job is a laptop, electricity, and Wi-Fi, and somewhere quiet to do that thing. Uh the amount of things I need to do what I do, I probably have a hundred plus hoses here, all the irrigation equipment, multiple trucks, tractors, electrical systems, uh, you know, uh 25 buildings I have to maintain, and upkeep and and heat and the winter. Um it's it's never ending. It must be thousands of things compared to those three that I listed before. Plus, we have to have those three, like Starlink and however we're doing our online thing. We've managed to make it work, but it's hardly like we're getting rich doing it. And I guess I just want to uh, you know, uh put forth the challenge to, you know, the the boomers, I'm just gonna call it out, and the nonprofit industrial complex of all these people that maybe they wanted to go start a farm or a ranch, but they realized like they had kids or a mortgage or uh they just didn't have the time. So they got a job for some nonprofit and they're earning, like what I mentioned before, $40 to $50 an hour plus benefits and all that kind of stuff, and a reasonable work schedule. Where like farmers, a reasonable work schedule, like forget about it. You you just have to do what needs to be done. And overtime, forget about it. Uh paid time off, paid sick pay, forget about it. Like no one thinks about that. 401k uh you know contributions from your employer. You're the employer, you can't afford that. It's gonna go to a new well pump, new tractor, something like that, new tires on the truck. If people only knew, and that's why nobody's wanting to become farmers except those that are naive and don't have the resources to do so, or it's people that have some trust fund or they worked a golden handcuffs job for years so they could it finally like do the classic thing of how do you earn a million dollars farming? Well, you spend two million. Um, so get involved in your local food system. And then the challenge to those of you involved in the the nonprofit industrial complex, as I like to call it, is put farmers first. The first thing on your budget and your your strategic plan should not be your own salary and cost of living uh you know raises for your employees, it should be the local the people you serve. That's what a nonprofit is for. It's a charitable organization, that's why you're not paying taxes. Serve the farmers because I'm beginning to watch farmers slightly older than me who are wanting to retire, and the only way they can do that is sell the farm. They don't have money sending them in some retirement count, or if they do, it's like woefully inadequate. So they have to sell the farm. Who wants to buy a farm that's you know two to ten million dollars? Like no one's going to. And you know, unless we devise, you know, these I think a public private partnership would be the ideal thing between local uh nonprofits, like here we've got the Rogue Valley Food System Network that's doing amazing work to uplift the voices of farmers and ranchers and and showcase what's available to them. It's helping them identify grant funding through NRCS or you know, various state and federal grants. Um and I I see them doing really good work. I see this happening in other areas, but I also see a lot of nonprofits and other startups that are basically hitching their cart to the popularity of bi-regional food systems, and they're basically like dead weight, that are basically stealing a lot of the oxygen in the room from the voices of actual farmers and ranchers who are actually earning a living doing this, and that they're directing it towards how to support their bottom line and their salaries, and it's a sad situation. And I I get that people get wrapped up in this. This isn't to point the finger of blame at any one individual or organization, but if the only way to have a future as a young person in the local food movement is to go work for a nonprofit so that you can actually have a reasonable living wage job, that should be uh an alarm bell. And, you know, around here, the only people I really see starting farms are those that have family money or they somehow got some miracle windfall one way or another. Uh, because nobody's gonna give you a grant to buy land. That doesn't exist. Once you're on the land, you can get some grants. I haven't really followed that approach. We've more financed through just creative entrepreneurialism. But I just I so again, if this were a meeting, we are on a Zoom call, the action items are get involved in your local food system, support them. I think you should tithe like you do the roads and your property taxes. And I wish we had that kind of system. One of my heroes, Nash Huber, up in Squim, Washington, who has Nash's best, worked out a system where the uh the local uh natural food stores and stuff around Olympia, Washington, actually had a small tax that supported farmland preservation. And I would love to see more of this. And that that should just be part of the cost of living in a watershed is supporting those that grow the food. I also think there should be a little tax on uh the on somehow to support watershed restoration uh so that we have healthy, thriving uh salmon habitat and to stop industrial clear cutting in our headwaters and making the problem worse. Um and so you know, so that's one action I am. The second is those of you that do work in the non nonprofit sector, uh get farmers first. I want to hear their voices, not you know, somebody who works for some nonprofit, paraphrasing the good work that my fellow farmers and ranchers who are in the fields do said. And and really, you know, put that voice first because otherwise they're just gonna go away. You know, it if you think about the crisis of young people not being able to afford farmland now, fast forward 10, 20 years, think how many less farmers there's gonna be. It's already happening. There's a huge contraction in the amount of family farms in the U.S. as increasing consolidation, uh, farmland being owned by private equity and hedge funds and that kind of thing. So I'm gonna close here. Uh you get the gist of what I'm trying to say. And sorry for a little bit of a rant, but I believe very strongly in this, and I think it's a a clarion call that needs to be sounded. And in closing, Bill Mollison, who I was grateful to get to study with a little bit in the early 90s, in 1983 said, quote, there is one and only one solution, and we have almost no time to try it. We must turn all our resources to repairing the natural world and train all our young people to help. They want to. We need to give them this last chance to create forests, soils, clean waters, clean energies, secure communities, stable regions, and know how to do it from hands-on experience. So get to it. If you're not part of your local food system, and the only way you're supporting it is by buying uh food at the store or at the farmer's market, then I'm gonna say you're part of the problem. Go to the farmer's market, give those people a tip, slip them a hundred, slip them a twenty. None of these farmers are getting rich. I know it. I know enough of them, and they have regular challenges that would make whatever you are facing seem small because of the amount of infrastructure and logistics they have to contend with, while also needing their body to be in tip top shape so they can show up and do the hard physical labor of farming every day, and support the farm workers that are under attack, too, from all this craziness around immigration and ice and all that. It we're just that whole thing is barking up the wrong tree. These are these people are not the problem. So get involved, support them, give money to your local food thing, and ideally pull together with your friends that believe in this and buy some farmland and work with people like me or or your local food system nonprofits to come up with community farm models with a hundred-year vision, a 200-year vision, not just like 30 or 40 years until whoever uh is burnt out is ready to retire and need to sell the farm because that's what's happening. So thank you so much for listening to me. And I I'm very passionate about this, as you can tell. So please like, follow, share this uh podcast with anyone who you think it might be of value, and go out and either grow your own food or support those that are growing the food that you eat every day. All right. All blessings to you.