Fresh Growth
Fresh Growth
Oceanside Farms: Small Plot Intensive Farming in Alaska
In this episode, we talk with Don McNamara and Donna Rae Faulkner from Oceanside Farms in Homer Alaska. They raise a wide variety of vegetables, fruits, berries, and chickens, ducks and turkeys. They grow all of their produce and nine varieties of Alaska Certified Seed Potatoes without the use of synthetically based chemicals, pesticides, fungicides, or fertilizers. The farm serves their local market.
Don and Donna Rae practice Small Plot Intensive Farming (SPIN) and started out borrowing space in neighbor’s yard and selling their produce on surf boards places on saw horses. They now have land near a road for their farm stand and built 10 high tunnels with drip irrigation. They have an honesty box at the farm stand and also sell to the local market through the Alaska Food Hub.
They have worked in Kodiak Island villages, which typically has expensive imported food available, to set up hydroponics and growing their own food. Donna Rae, “They’ve gone from in many cases no in community veg growing to producing quite a lot of food” some are old airport sites
They are enthusiastic about Korean Natural Farming, creating their own videos for others to learn from. “We want to be soil farmers as much as plant farmers”, says Don.
____________
Thanks for listening to Fresh Growth! To learn more about Western SARE and sustainable agriculture, visit our website or find us:
Contact us at wsare@montana.edu
Welcome to season three of fresh growth podcast by the Western ser program that sustainable agriculture research and education. I'm your host, Steve Elliott alongside co-host Stacy Clary, just for background Western ser promotes sustainable farming and ranching the American west through research education and communication efforts. Like this podcast, it is funded by the us department of agriculture's national Institute of food and agriculture, fresh growth introduces producers and ag professionals from around the west who are embracing new ways of farming and ranching. They'll tell us about their experiences adopting more sustainable agricultural practice and challenges and benefits. They've seen. Today's guests are Don McNamara and Donna Ray Faulkner promotion side farms in Homer, Alaska, Don, and Donna rays, a variety of vegetables, fruits, berries, chicken ducks, and turkeys. They grow all of their own produce and nine varieties of Alaska certified seed potatoes without the use of ASIN based chemicals, pesticides, fungicides, or fertilizers, the farm serves their local market, Don and Donna. Welcome. And thanks for sitting down with us.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having us. This is a great honor to get to go with the podcast here with fresh growth.
Speaker 3:So you're farming in Alaska and I'm not sure that everyone can picture that. Um, can you describe your for us and, and draw a picture of what it's like there in Homer?
Speaker 2:Well, let's take a look at where we are. We're in south central Alaska, which is kind of the center of the state of, as you can imagine, we're at latitude 59, where two miles outside the Homer city limits. And we're a quarter mile as the Crow fries from Kack bay on east end road. And we're eight miles from the kilter homestead and 240 road miles from Anchorage. That gives you an idea where we are.
Speaker 3:So you're living the, the dream. What, uh, what prompted you and Donna Ray to, to get into that dream at and begin farming?
Speaker 2:So Donna Ray, a four HR as she was a child, 15 years of a biology teacher on the wrong coast and myself, a 40 year carpenter here in Alaska, signed its up for the master gardener class with a cooperative extension service, which entered a us to the NRCS program, equip, um, cashier for high tunnels. And, um, so with the master gardener class, we learned that if you feed the plants, they really respond and it's super fun to grow'em. So we had an overabundance after we took the farm cut and started growing. And so then we take the extra farm crops to our local farmer's market and we'd set up our surfboards on some saw horses and sell our vegetables off of our surf horse surfboards and with Wally and Curtis's help soon, we were spin farming, small plot intensive. And so what that is is you borrow your neighbor's front yard yard and you put vegetables in their yard too. And so by the time we had four yards tied up, we knew we needed a larger property. And so we started looking around, we didn't find anything for sale. We knew we needed to be on the main road, so we could have a farm stand. And Don Ray went to work at that. She went to the local borough parcel lookup and started mailing out letters to different folks to see if they would sell us their properties. We needed at least two acres. We got two responses and that led us to the east end road property. And the owner said she would make our farm dream come true.
Speaker 1:When was that?
Speaker 2:That was in 2014 and we got to buy the place in 2015.
Speaker 1:And how long had you been doing farming in your, your neighbor's front yards before that? How many seasons?
Speaker 2:Uh, 2011 is when we first got our first tunnel.
Speaker 1:Okay. And go ahead.
Speaker 2:It was, uh, pretty good. It was a two, a, uh, quarter AC parcel on the ocean, hence the Oceanside farms. And so the NRCS equip program, the size of the tunnel is 2100 square feet. So we broke it into three different tunnels and just filled up the whole yard all the way around the house.
Speaker 1:And, and talk about what Oceanside farms looks like. Now. I have been there and I have seen the bay from, from your farm. Um, how many high tunnels and, and what do you have going on?
Speaker 2:So I say with like a small scale intensive with 10 high tunnels, we're using drip irrigation in the tunnels. We're getting a little bit older as you could tell. And so we're lots of perennials. There's just two of us. We do try and get some help. First during the summer, we have great people that come and volunteer and then we fix'em up with some vegetables and that kind of stuff whatever's needed. If someone else is looking for a farm dream, we would be glad to ha get some help in the future. So you can look us up. Um, we, in the tunnels, we're doing one tunnel is all tomatoes and peppers and Toma Teos. That's about 2000 square feet and another tunnel. We're doing 2000 square feet of cucumbers, peas, beans squash. We're doing 6,000 square feet of asparagus and grapes, three variety of hot in another tunnel, 600 square feet of herbs in another tunnel. We do lots of vegetables inside and out. Garlic, carrots, lettuce, spinach, all the coal crops, broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, and kale. We do winter and summer squashes inside and out. And we scatter onions just throughout the place. Everybody likes onions. So six sessions of quick crops would be turn ups, rub, and lettuce and spinach and baby kale.
Speaker 1:And is this for all just local farmers markets? Or do you serve the restaurants? What's who are you selling to?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so we are selling on the Alaska food hub. So, um, we tell the food hub, what we have on Friday. They sell it over the weekend. They quit selling on Monday night at 10 o'clock. They give us a pick list on Tuesday and we deliver on Wednesday. So that works out pretty good for us. Everything is pre-sold so you can't go wrong there. Yeah. Uh, a lot less labor. So we have a farm stand on the main road. And so most of our produce goes through the farm stand it's, uh, honesty box sitting there and it worked quite well for us, even through the pandemic it's been, uh, put right along and yeah. Doing what it does best.
Speaker 3:Can you explain to me a little bit more about, uh, the lack of food hub? Uh, I mean, I, I understand, um, they're actually the ones that are distributing the food, but who are their cuts? Um, how does that work for a small, uh, operation like yours to work with the food hub?
Speaker 2:Let's see. So they charge us$40 to sell on the food hub. And so it is over the computer. And so the people go online and order up the vegetables that the farmers post. And there's probably 10 there, 15 farmers that have joined together to do the food hub. And so it's quite, it's really pretty fun because that's the only time you get to see the other farmers. We're all working so hard on our farms. We never get to socialize. So it's a big social event when we're bringing our vegetables in. We, we deliver between 11 and one o'clock on Wednesday, and then they hand the produce out between three and six o'clock. Um, they do drive 90 miles up the road to Soldotna with during the summer months and they do fly it to salvia. And so the Soldo people can order from Homer also
Speaker 3:Very, you've talked with us a little bit before we got started, um, different some of the different practices you use. Um, that's part of all that philosophy. Can you just start telling us, uh, what that looks like? What, what, what are you doing on the farm that, uh, makes you feel good about how you grow the food and what it does for the land?
Speaker 2:So we're grown with organic methods using on-farm compost as our main fertilizer. We're gathering some of the inputs off the farm, IE beer, grains, kelp fish, and sawdust and leaves and all, everything else comes from the farm right now, we have about 35 tons of or yards, I guess. Why should you say yard? Because it's so light of compost working, we grow lots of com free and add it to our compost and make compost tea with it. Um, it's high in potassium. And so it's better than green sand as a implement to your farming fertilizer, a few more things on the farm. We have two more sites off of farm, our apple orchards. There's 80 trees total there, and we have a hundred apple trees on the farm with the varieties of seed potatoes. We, we do crop rotation. And so in, in the, in between years, once every three years, we play at potatoes. So we have to have two other half acre parcels ready to go. And so we do a cover crop cocktail on those other half acres in between potato time. Um, we do, we're set up for 25 lane chickens, 50 to a hundred meat birds in tractors, and also fresh Thanksgiving turkeys pasture raised. Of course we grow red raspberries, golden raspberries, purple raspberries, black and red currents, gooseberries, CTCA, strawberries, seascapes, strawberries, hash cap, and Arona berries, seven varieties of blueberries. And we propagate most of these for armed farm sales in the spring time. And so on that note, it makes me tired just thinking about all that. So
Speaker 1:I was just gonna ask, I mean, 40 years a carpenter, how did you learn to do this? And how do you still learn with other farmers there in Homer and, and elsewhere?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we do lots of YouTube. And so we love stone. Like we talked about earlier and, um, Richard Perkins is over in Sweden at latitude 59. Also, we got to bump into Tim Meyer. He's out in Bethel. He's awesome. Also at latitude 59. And so we are doing all this fun stuff on the farm and the Cali folks, which is the co Kodiak ACO leader Institute were doing a tour of farms around the Kenai peninsula. And so they came to our farm and, um, they stayed longer than they had planned. And we've been with them for five years as a mentor on their farms. And you cannot believe fresh produce in the villages of Kodiak island. It's 50 cents a pound just to get it from the city of Kodiak to the village. If you were buying some food from Safeway, you can imagine the cost savings and just, they can use up all their cardboard boxes in the compost pile. And yeah, it's nothing but good things for the small villages to get fresh produce.
Speaker 1:That's gotta feel good for, for you guys too, to have been part of helping that happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah. To see it happen is just totally amazing.
Speaker 4:Many of those villages don't even have, uh, their own store. And, um, now since the beginning of their project here, which was about five years ago, they've now gotten two high tunnels in each of those villages and they have some soil farm space and are, um, doing hydroponics as well. And they're, some of them are gonna be expanding into doing a little bit of kelp farming too. And we've been along with them since the beginning. And so we've taught classes, um, at a central location sort of in Kodiak city where people will fly in because they only have, uh, flying or boating abilities from most of those sites. Um, they'd fly in for classes or they'd come to our farm and butcher chickens learn to butcher chickens or to grow things. Um, and we would go to their sites and help out Don's skills as a carpenter and contractor came in handy as we helped to survey in some cases where the high tunnels were gonna go and making them level and that sort of thing. Um, but they've gone from in many cases, really no, um, in community vegetable, growing to have producing quite a lot of food and even being able to send it into Kodiak city, as sales at their farmer's market. Um, we have an Alaska grown logo that a lot of farmers use up here. Well, they've created one, that's gonna be antic grown logo. That's coming out, which we're really excited about. Um, but they're doing fantastic things and spaces that are now farms for each community were once a, um, old airport sites or, um, forested areas that, where they took a little bit of the forest down to create a farm and, um, have some sunshine to do that with. It's amazing. Um, how fantastic they're all doing growing over there.
Speaker 1:That sounds like something to see. I'll have to get out there.
Speaker 3:Another thing you've sounded kind of excited about when we've talked is, uh, the youth, the Korean natural farming, is that something you can describe for us?
Speaker 4:Um, the basic idea of Korean natural farming in my view is that it's all about the plant getting it's food and it's nutrients from the soil food web. And so real. We wanna be soil farmers as much as we wanna be plant farmers. If you feed the soil, that's what feeds the plants. So what happens is a lot of the plants will grow. They will send down food to the microbes down along their root zone. And then you get a lot of bacteria and Funguses and other small microbes, um, and insects and things, um, right near the roots of the plants and those animals. When they're down there, those little microbes are gonna be eating and pooping and doing all of their things, eating each other and breaking down rocks and minerals and making it into a plant soluble form. So if you feed those microbes, they'll feed those plants for you. And you can start with microbes that are in your native environment by culturing them.
Speaker 2:And so with the Korean natural farming with the YouTube, we were listening to Dan Kittridge, he has Bionutrient food association. He is the coolest guy. He, they, a bunch of people got together, not just him, but he pretty cool. Um, again, so if you can point something at a elephant jury and know what it's made of, you can most certainly go in the grocery store and point it at a carrot and know what it's made of. And so that's where garden is, is heading. And, um, farms in general, you're gonna have to grow really nutrient dense food, or you are not gonna be able compete in the market. So that's how we bumped into Korean natural farming. Dan Kitter had said, oh, you can look at Korean natural farming. And that's a big rabbit hole to go down, but we did go down that rabbit hole and it makes perfect sense. So the latest things on the farm, we did a airlift brewer for a compost tea maker. So it kind of air goes in low in the brewer and picks the water up and throws it in the top. And so it's coming out the bottom and making a circulation kind of like a Creek would do. So you're getting a lot of air in the compost and good circulation, no dead spots in the compost tea. And then, um, we did a gas pump sprayer for spreading it out on all the crops. You know, the plants can eat through the leaves. So stoma opens up early in the morning and you can feed'em that way and lay in the evening. Also you can feed'em through their leaves. So spraying compost tees on top of the plant is a really good way to add nutrients and what doesn't go on. The plants drops and feeds the soil biology. So as you're feeding the soil biology, that's feeding the roots of the plants also. And by growing all this microbiology, you're having better water retention too. So people in a dry eye climate, if you can build your soil by growing bacteria and fungi, you're gonna have a lot less water usage and a lot more cushion between waterings before the plants go completely dry. So in the Korean natural farming, they have a bunch of recipes you can do so you can grow lactobacillus bacteria and that, uh, beneficial bacteria that helps keep the bad guys in order or the bad bacteria to a smaller scale. And they're super hungry. So they don't live very long. So you have to add those over and over. They're doing kind of, um, small. So the Korean natural farmings for like third world countries where people don't have a lot of money and that's mostly farmers don't have a lot of money to spend on for, and those kind of things. And so they're doing like no smell pigs with the LTO basils, they do kind of like a Hoel culture underneath the pig pen and all that wood and compost and leafy debris sucks up all the moisture from the pigs and the microbiology down there just eats it up. They did sensors underneath the logs in the Hoel culture, and no water was getting through from the pig pens. And once again, once the big cattle lots and all those figure out that they can do the same design and get rid of all that water where they don't have to have those big lakes of sewage on their property and then worry about getting rid of it and the smell, oh man, it's gonna be a whole different story. It's gonna be like heaven on earth. Hmm. So some of the other things that you can build with the Korean natural farming, um, you could take like the comfy plant and tear it into, you know, something like you would eat a lettuce, a salad, and add it to about one third of one, half weight, um, brown sugar. And then the brown sugar sucks. The moisture outta the comfy or whatever plant you're using. Just wanna use one plant at a time. And now you have a, the exudates from the comfy that normally would be going down to feed the roots. Now you have it in a captured, in a jar and you can feed it to the plants as you feel fit. And so it turns the farm from, uh, monoculture into a permaculture because the plant doesn't know where that comfy exudates came from. It thinks there's a comfy plant right next door. So that's, that's super cool that you're feeding all the microbiology instead of the plant having to feed the microbiology for itself. So Elaine Ingham has been studying this for her whole career, how the plants put exudates into the ground and feed the microbiology. So I would say if there's any children out there in middle school or in high school start studying microbiology, and they only know what 5% of the organisms are in the soil, a teaspoon and soil has a few billion creatures in it. And we only know what 5% are, and we don't have a clue how the all relationship is all together. All we know is there's more cooperation than competition in the soil. They're all working together. They've learned that over the millions and millions of generations, they don't live so long. So, you know, two days might be 10 or 20, 30 generations of microorganisms. Um, so a couple of inputs that you can make really easy with the pre and natural farming, as you can make calcium out of egg shells. So I don't know if we have time to go into all that, but you can make, um, phosphate out of cow bones and pig bones as another fertilizer. And then with the natural farming, they've got kind of a recipe book and you add, you know, eight ounces of no eight millimeters of like calcium and eight millimeters of fermented plant juice, which would be the exudates that we talked about from the comfy. And you could do the same thing with fruits to make a, a fruit fermented fruit juice. So as you're fermenting, that changes the property of the materials and it makes it more plant soluble, which is super cool. And so the guy that we've been studying with is Drake, and he is@purekandf.org. He's super knowledgeable. He's been doing this since 2008. He's made multi old trips to Korea to study with match Cho, who is the guy who kind of put the whole thing together. But if you read master Cho's book, uh, it's a little bit hard to read. His English is not translated so well. And so, uh, it's easier to read what Drake is doing on the big island there on the Hilo side,
Speaker 3:I've heard of really inspiring presentations about the connection between soil and, and human health. Have you received feedback from your customers either on the incredible taste of your produce, or if they themselves feel healthier after starting to, to eat what you grow,
Speaker 2:I'm gonna say our customers really do rave about our vegetables to us, and we get lots of feedback. We get little notes in the honesty box there saying what a wonderful thing that's going on here at Oceanside farms and especially our eggs and our duck eggs, that they are really outstanding. Just the color of the yolks and the fluffiness of the whites. Um, one other thing about the Korean natural farming, one of their main inputs is indigenous microorganisms. So you go out in the woods by your house and you put some rice out in a Cedar box. And in a few days to two weeks, it turns into a white cotton candy looking thing. And you bring that in. And once again, you mix it with brown sugar and, um, kind of get those organisms, the fungi to go dormant. And then you put those in your compost pile and it's the funniest thing ever. We've been composting ever since we took the master gardener class in 2011 and this compost pile came out furry. I don't know if you've ever seen a furry compost pile, but the fungi ratio to bacterial ratio had to be out of this world. And you composted a couple more times to just keep building those indigenous microorganisms. And the reason you get into IOUs microorganisms rather than going down to the local growers nursery, um, those Michael Rold could have come from Washington or California somewhere with a different climate. And so they might come up here and say, yeah, I'm going back. So,
Speaker 1:So I always get to ask this question and I don't know why she makes me ask it, but what have you done that didn't work? And what did you learn from it?
Speaker 2:So we took the master gardener class with the cooperative extension service and we learned how to make compost. And so we lived down at the beach there. And so I just walk over the edge of the bluff and haul back some kelp and whatever I could find down on the beach for ingredients, for the compost pile and the master gardener class just do'em in four inch lips. So we'd add some seaweed and then we'd add some cardboard and then we'd add some leaves and then some more green matter from the garden and then some newspaper up. So we added four inches of newspaper torn up. Then we had a paper mache, compost pile. It took, it took about three or four years for that compost to get broken back down into something that the microbes could eat. But that was one thing that didn't work.
Speaker 1:So it wasn't fake news. It was just, you know, non-edible news. I,
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I would say, uh, everything in moderation. So put your newspaper on, in a little smaller layers.
Speaker 1:Very good. And then what other, what advice would you have for young growers, somebody who wanted to get into this, um, and, and make it successful other and work ridiculous number of hours, which it sounds like you guys do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I would say start out a little small with maybe one or two front yards and just get well at growing. And then if you still like growing, then you would pursue some property. And I would say plant some apple trees, as soon as you have control of the property and some more perennials berries and those kind of things that don't take too much work, but you get a lot of growth from them. And that generates quite a bit of sales.
Speaker 1:That's good advice.
Speaker 3:I guess, following up on that, you, you are working a lot of hours. You have a very, very large diversity of things that you grow, and that has to be hard work. You called it living the dream and you seem to be enjoying yourself. So for someone who's starting out and looking at those hours and the amount of work is it, what is a passion behind it that keeps you going, that they should see that they have?
Speaker 2:So I think if you're doing intensive small scale farming, you've got to enjoy what you're doing and then it's all play. And you don't really think of it as work. The time just flies by, from the time we're up in the morning, to the time we pass out at night, we're going like crazy doing things today were smoking chickens. And that's just another story that's out of this world tasty.
Speaker 4:So I, I think one of the things that I would say is that, uh, one of the good things and the downfalls of us as a married couple is that we both get excited and curious about lots of different things with farming. And we're both foodies. We love good food and that we really worry about the United States, uh, nutrition and food programs and the food that's being produced here in all sorts of ways. So we believe in local, non pesticide foods and things like that. So some basic nutrition things, um, but we both get excited and we keep upping the ante all the time. And so that's not necessarily a good quality about the two of us. We thought it was, but each of us gets excited about something new and thens boosts up what we're doing. So instead of cutting back on things at times, um, we have constantly been building up in different directions. And I think I'm hoping that we're gonna be kind of honing in on what we really wanna do and maybe cutting back on some of the different crops or, um, activities that we do and focusing more on other ones that might be easier for us as we get a little bit older.
Speaker 2:And so I would just add to that, that do lots of perennials and they don't take as much to time and effort as like say lettuce and carrots and quick crops.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We use a lot of typa on the ground cut out or burned out holes and things so that we can avoid some of the weeding. And then hopefully with the Korean natural farming ferments, we can still build the soil biology very well in those areas too, when we aren't, um, rotating or cover cropping.
Speaker 2:One thing that we've learned is bacteria like acidic soil and fun guy likes
Speaker 1:Little
Speaker 4:More alkaline.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A little bit more
Speaker 1:Basic soils. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Neutral. Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so
Speaker 2:By building your biology and your soil, you're really making it, so it's a hostile place for weeds to grow. And so you're really gonna take care of your weed problem with your soil building.
Speaker 1:Do you have, do you have insect pest problems in your high tunnels and how do you deal with those?
Speaker 2:So I would say our worst culprit is a spider mite. And so we rinse'em with, uh, soap and water. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And then we can't forget our friends, the ducks.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah. We do have a slug problem, but our friends, our friends, the ducks have a slug problem too. They can't get enough of'em
Speaker 1:Sounds like more of a slug problem than a, uh, the slugs have a duck problem. Not the other way around. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Our ducks are on quack. We should talk about one more thing. If you have time still, I'm sure you'll edit through all this stuff and make something that's coherent. But, um, the Johnson, Sue bioreactor, another another thing we got off of YouTube and it seemed to be pretty spectacular from the documentation that Dr. Johnson has. So he made one bioreactor, he got a grant to take care of Kapu. And so he, he was trying to compost Kapu and he was shoveling it. And he would come home with dirty clothes and said, his wife got tired of doing dirty clothes in the laundry. And so she kind of drew up a she's an engineer. Also, she, she drew up a vertical, a compost pile that nowhere in the pile is further than one foot from outside air. So you have pipe holes in the center of the compost. It's about 42 inch diameter. It fits on a pallet. So you can pick it up with the tractor and move it around so you can build it in one spot and then move it somewhere for storage. It takes a year to make, but the fungal growth in, in there is just about perfect for your garden scenario. Um, it's about five or six feet tall, however tall you can get to, uh, still load it. It, you need to load it in like two days, because it goes through the thermal process in about a week. So it goes right up to 150 degrees and then tools write down and then just sits there for a whole year, turning into fungus. Um, it's two pounds per acre in a fo spray. And you're probably making 400 pounds in the bioreactor. If you can picture that, look it up on the internet and you'll see it. And you'll say, oh wow, that is gonna change the future. So that dense of fungal mass in a compost pile is pretty darn good. That's where the Korean natural farming is going to building fungal compost. I just check, check the compost pile. Like I told you, the snow stuck on the ground, the compost pile is a hundred degrees sitting outside.
Speaker 1:What's he, what's he load that reactor with, I mean,
Speaker 2:Um, so he was doing Kapu and I'm not sure what else he did. So then the, after 10 years he did it again. And then he compared the finished product and they were almost identical. And the second time he was using leaves out of his yard. Okay. And garden debris, so leaves and garden debris, you kind of get it all wet to the moisture content that you like when you load it into the reactor. And then you have pipes in the middle and you pull out after a couple days, and then it just stays as a whole shaped all the way through. And the pallet underneath gives it air from the bottom. And so it really works pretty darn good.
Speaker 1:Go ahead. I'm sorry. Send Stacy link sends Stacy links to these things and she can put'em, you know, on the sites where, where the pot is. If, if they've got a little description, we can include links so people can see and visualize and, and learn more
Speaker 4:Sure I'm with you, Steve. I was just thinking the same thing, uh, with COVID being, as it's been over the last couple years here now, um, we were unable to do in person classes in Kodi for some of this time for the farmers over there. So we ended up creating a little YouTube channel, not really to be YouTubers, but to share information easily that they could access on the internet. And so Don did a really nice, uh, video on building our Johnson. So bio reactor and all the inputs to that. So that's a really good link. It's um, a semi-professional YouTube, uh, video, but, uh, that might be a good link for people.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 2:As you can tell by now, she's the smart one.
Speaker 4:Oh, now
Speaker 1:One, one thing I found interesting is, is as you kept mentioning people you're learning from on YouTube, they're all same latitude. You know, that it, it's interesting to think of farming, you know, that banded, but in Alaska you would be,
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's good for, uh, our micro climate kind of a thing too. They're a little bit warmer in Sweden, but we're all doing the same thing. The small scale, super intense of farms, trying to earn a living off a couple acres.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Alaska, you know, you're far apart from everybody when you're in Alaska, from different people or farmers, even around the world. And so to find people at your latitude, they may have some similar, um, issues and have some different ideas and be able to kind of bounce some ideas off of them or at least listen to their YouTubes or whatnot is really pretty helpful. And even across the state of Alaska,
Speaker 1:I can, yeah. I can see that. I just it's, it's interesting to think of if farming a farming community, you know, that, that circles the world all at one latitude
Speaker 4:That's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That way we know it grows here.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We've learned quite a lot from Richard Perkins in Sweden and he has some good he's. He does regenerative farming as well. And so it's really great resource if you haven't looked to him up before.
Speaker 2:Oh, we have another good story. We're wondering about what failed
Speaker 1:In your
Speaker 2:Farming practices. We planted 500 strawberries, 450 of them died. The 50 that live. We have propagated them. And now we have strawberries everywhere that grow in our climate.
Speaker 1:So you just had to, you just had to weed out the weak ones, you
Speaker 2:Know, weed just had to weed out the ones that didn't wanna be here.
Speaker 1:That's right. The non Alaska strawberries.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When you were going through your list of berries, it was like, okay, I'm hungry. I'm hungry. I'm hungry.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I haven't had lunch yet. And you kept talking about food and like smoke chickens and berries and
Speaker 2:Baby carrot,
Speaker 3:All that baby carrots and duck eggs. Yeah. I gotta go get lunch.
Speaker 4:Farmers, farmers eat well. That's for sure.
Speaker 3:Well, you, you have what sounds like an amazing place. I would love to come back up to Homer and if I I'm in the area, I would love to stop by because everything that you've talked about and just the picture I'm getting in my head of, of your operation and your land and the ducks and then the chickens, it just, it sounds wonderful. You've you've built something pretty special up there. Thanks for sharing with us. Well, thanks Don. And Don Ray. It was wonderful talking with you and learning about everything and appreciate your time.
Speaker 2:Thank you too.
Speaker 1:Thank you
Speaker 3:Very much. Thank you. This is great. It was fun. Thanks.
Speaker 2:Glad you're spreading the news.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Thanks for working with us.
Speaker 4:Thank
Speaker 2:You. Bye bye.
Speaker 1:Thanks guys.
Speaker 4:Thank you. Bye
Speaker 5:You for listening to fresh growth. We hope you enjoy this episode for more information on westerner grounds and our learning resources visit westerner.org.
