The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e.35: Culinary Herb Production Done Well part 2 of 2

Episode Date: February 5, 2015

Culinary Herb Production, pt. 2: Veteran farmer Chris Blanchard built a thriving culinary herb business on his Iowa Farm, and thinks you can, too. In this episode, which features the second half of our conversation, Chris talks about how to harvest your herbs in a way that strikes a balance between high production and low labour costs. He took his inspiration from previous experiences managing intensive rotational grazing systems. Chris also oversees Purple Pitchfork, an educational and outreach organization dedicated to helping farmers and their farm businesses. Chris will soon launch a podcast of his own, which you can learn about on his site.  In our conversation, Chris references a culinary herb factsheet he has produced for Ruminant listeners. You can access it at farmertofarmerpodcast.com/ruminant

Yeah, and it's one of the things I think that makes it hard to benchmark something like agriculture because the limiting factors and the way you would measure profitability on an urban farm would be really different than how you would measure a farm, you know, measure land or measure profitability on a hundred acre vegetable farm. find. You know, in the city, the per, the dollars per acre is you're going to be your driver. When you've got a hundred acres of vegetables, it's going to be the dollars per hour of labor. Today's episode of the Ruminant Podcast, part two on herb production with a focus on harvesting. And here's the guy who's going to talk about it. I'm Chris Blanchard, and I run a company called The Purple Pitchfork. We do education, consulting, and working with farmers on business systems, looking at ways to help farmers make their jobs easier and be able to create more successful outcomes. I spent 25 years farming myself and have been doing the consulting and education work on the tail end of my farming experience.

And then now I'm doing that full time for about six years now. This is the Ruminant Podcast, a show that ponders the best way to farm. The ruminant.ca is the website. Editor at the ruminant.ca is the email address. And at ruminant blog is where to find me on twitter i'm jordan marr all right let's go hey folks this episode features part two of my conversation with

chris blanchard about culinary herb production this time we focus on harvesting herbs chris has some useful insights to share about managing an herb crop in a way that's similar to managing an intensively grazed pasture. This guy's smart. Take notes. But first, I have some wonderful news. I just received the first voicemail left at the ruminant hotline. You'll recall that this is the Skype number with a Beverly Hills area code, no less. I set up to allow you to call in to leave a short message to share with other farmers here on the podcast. I'm looking for good ideas you've employed on your farm or in the garden. Anyway, I finally received a message. Let's take a listen. Hey, my name's Jack and the name of my farm isn't any of your business. The farm hadn't been doing very well until recently when some weird guy at a gas station

walked up and offered me some magic beans. He wanted to trade them for a cow, but all I had on me at the time was an old VCR I was taking to the thrift store. He wasn't interested at first, but when I offered to throw in my blockbuster video card, we had a deal. Joke's on him, though. That card's expired, bud. Anyway, I planted the beans. The next morning, I looked out to the garden and discovered a beanstalk. It was a mile tall if it was a foot. There wasn't any golden egg laying goose at the top, like that dumb fairy tale says, but you should have seen the beans on this thing. They were bigger than me. I harvested a couple and brought them to some local chefs, and they offered me better prices than black truffles. They put them on their menus as gourmet thunder beans, but I call them scarlet gunners. Anyway, that's my tip

for your listeners. Magic beans. Hope that helps. Love your show. Thanks, Jack. And by the way, you sound really handsome. Now, everyone, imagine if I had a tip like that to share on every episode. Only you can make that happen. 310-734-8426 is where you can leave a message. I'd really appreciate you doing it. It'd be really fun to share some of your ideas. Okay, so that's about it, except if you like the podcast, please help me promote it. All of these episodes can be found at theruminant.ca, which makes it easy to share a link to each one on your Facebook or Twitter account. And while you're at it, write me an email to request a guest or let me know what you think about the show. Editor at theruminant.ca. All right,

here's part two with Chris Blanchard. Talk to you at the end. Okay, so let's move on to harvesting now. And I think this is a crucial topic. It seems like in terms of your, your, your, uh, your increase in focus on herbs, you, you made some big changes to how you harvest and maintain the crop, uh, to make sure it's productive and profitable. Um, yeah. So, you know, if we had a hundred plants out there, when we started, you know, if I had a hundred plants of time, I'd go out and I kind of look and I go, oh, look, here's the, here's the 25 or the 50 plants that are, that are nice and big. And that's the ones I'm going to harvest off of it. So we'd kind of bounce down the row, picking off of those. And maybe we'd only pick half of one plant because half the plant would be bigger than the other half, you know, and you do that once or twice and pretty soon your herb patch is a complete mess.

And then you've got stuff that's trying to go to flower. And what do you do about that? And, and, and I, I had, we were actually raising sheep at the time and, and we were, um, and I've, and I've been a big fan of holistic management and the kind of the managed grazing process that goes along with that since I got involved in agriculture. And we re I, I had this aha moment where I said, you know, we need to be applying a grazing wedge to our harvest. So what

we, what we started doing was instead of kind of walking through the field, cherry picking the best stuff, we always started at one end of the bed and we cut everything in the bed. So if I, if I start at one end of the, you know, I'm at the, I'm at the, let's see, we did the, we did the West end of the bed. We always started at the West end. So on the West end of the bed, I'm going to cut from the West to the East. I'm always going to go in the same direction and I'm going to, I'm going to cut, cut it down every plant back to the same level. So if I'm, if I'm going to cut it down, every plant back to the same level. So if I'm harvesting something like sage, I'm taking about a third of the plant. If I'm harvesting thyme or oregano, I'm giving it a crew cut.

If I'm harvesting mint, I'm going right down to the ground. We're going to take the plant right back to that level until we have what we need for the day. And then we're going to stop. So now I've got that whole bed has been that whole west end of the bed maybe it's 15 feet out of a hundred foot bed has been has been harvested and it's all at the same level it looks like you gave the plants a crew cut you know like you just went over with some clippers then when i come back the next time to harvest i start where i left off and I start picking from there. And I take another 10 or 15 feet.

And I'm going to do the same thing the next time. So now the block that I harvested two weeks ago is starting to grow back and it's all growing back at the same rate from the same point. So I've got a uniform block behind me to harvest. I've got a wave of product in front of me that's ready to harvest. And then I've got the stuff that's been, that I'm picking today, which is all getting cut back to the same level.

And Chris, with, with most of the, with most of the herbs we're talking about, is it kind of for a, for a given block that you're actually planting, you're actually harvesting? Is it kind of a scorched earth thing? Like you're just mowing them down? Like. Mow them.

Yeah. I mean mean so with the exception of rosemary so rosemary we harvested stem by stem but everything else what we discovered is that the cost the cost wasn't in growing the herb okay for us in our marketplace the cost was was was in um was in the harvest and then it was in the packaging. So we learned that to do the hard, so we actually worked backwards from this. So the packaging, putting the herbs in the plastic bags or eventually into the plastic clamshell containers took more time than anything else that we did. So what we would do is we learned you cut the herbs to exactly the height that you want them to go in the container. Our containers were seven and a half inches tall, so we cut the herbs to seven and a half inches.

And guess what? You found a snipper from Johnny's that was right about that length. So your laborers even had a reference point in their hands for how long to cut them. Yeah, you certainly never want to be telling a picker to pick 7 1⁄2-inch lengths of something. You've got to give them something to measure. So it was great that the snips from Johnny's were exactly right to do that. So we would always cut to that length.

And so maybe let's take mint as an example because we did a lot of spearmint. So maybe my spearmint would be 12 or 14 inches tall. We would just harvest the top eight inches of that. And then once that harvest was put away in the cooler, we would come right back out and we would cut down what was left after we'd harvested. We would cut that patch down right down to the ground, chop it all off. Okay. And, and so, yeah, I mean, when you got done, it was, it was scorched earth. Now something like, something like sage again, you know, sage has

that very strong central stem. It's a, it's much more of a, of a, of a bush than it is a shrub or a mound. It's really got that strong, it looks like a plant. It's supposed to look. And so on those kinds of herbs, you want to take about a third of the plant, but we didn't cut stem by stem. We would, we would actually go out and just give the, give the plant a trim. It was like, like cutting a hedge. You know, you guys have boxwood hedges out there in British Columbia. And so it was just like trimming a boxwood hedge. You just take eight inches off the top of it. And then, you know, you had a bunch of leaves that got cut in half. You just let those fall on the ground and then you, you put the rest of the stuff in the tray. And then, again, you got nice, even regrowth that way.

You'd taken the whole plant back to the same level, and every plant in the field had been taken back to this, or every plant that you were harvesting that day had been taken back to that same growth point. It made the maintenance super easy. And I think the large takeaway point here that you make in your articles is that you really need to figure out what's costing you the most. In your case, it's labor, and I suspect that would be the same for anyone doing this kind of herb production. And therefore, you don't go out of your way to get the most dollars out of each bed. You go out of your way to harvest it so that it reduces your labor costs to a maximum. Jordan, on spearmint, I was making $200,000 an acre on my spearmint.

Now, I didn't have a market. Again, this is the herb business, so I didn't have a market for an acre of spearmint. But that is if I had taken the beds that I had and I multiplied those out, it came out to something like $200,000 an acre. So if I only, if, if, if I grow more spearmint than I need, um, so that I can, so that I can maximize the efficiency of my harvest. So what if I only make $150,000 an acre or even $100,000 an acre? That's still far more than I'd be making off of any other crop that I could plant in that place. Now, I also had to grow crops like chives where we weren't making nearly that much money and where the labor was super intensive. In fact, we lost money on chives, but we made so much money on the spearmint that it made up for it. We had to, for our situation, marketing retail, we had to have the whole line. So yeah, trying to think again, what's going to make my slow step easy? And this

is actually a really important business concept for farmers, I think, no matter what. I was going to say, Chris, I'm going to, sorry, I'm going to step in with an example of my own. I mean, you can apply this to so many crops that a market gardener grows certainly i look at my my densely planted uh greens beds for salad greens the the most efficient harvest is the first harvest and i think there's always a a real uh you can fool yourself into thinking well you know it took those greens four or five six six weeks to grow. I'm going to leave that bed in for three more weeks and just keep cutting off of it. But each successive cut takes a lot more labor. It slows you down. And I think there is a balance to be struck at a point where you say, no, I'm turning this bed under and getting a new bed in because that eventual

harvest is going to be way quicker. And it's the labor that costs so much. Is that? Well, and depending on where you are now now jordan if you're farming on a quarter acre in the middle of the city where there's no potential for you to have more land to harvest from maybe maybe labor is actually abundant for you but land is really scarce and then that second cut and that third cut is going to become really important and you're going to put a lot of emphasis in making sure that that that can happen and even if it takes even if it's a slower harvest you know when land is the limiting resource then you really want to focus on making the most of every square foot that's a good point it's a good point about you really also have to figure out your conditions and where your

costs are yeah and it's one of the things I think that makes it hard to benchmark something like agriculture because the limiting factors and the way you would measure profitability on an urban farm would be really different than how you would measure a farm, you know, measure land or measure profitability on a hundred acre vegetable farm. You know, in the city, the dollars per acre is going to be your driver. When you've got 100 acres of vegetables, it's going to be the dollars per hour of labor. You know, it's how much money can your pickers produce, and that's where we were. We didn't have 100 acres, but even at our 20 acres,

that's really where we were with the herbs, was how much production can we get out of our people was far more important to us than how much production can I get out of my, how many dollars can I get out of a bed of herbs. So two more topics, I mean, we could cover, there's so much more to cover. I'm just going to have to say, people need to go to Growing for Market if they want to get all the details from your articles. And I think a little later, you're going to talk about another document you've produced on herb production.

But... Well, and Jordan, I mean, I'm going to jump in here and I'm going to say Growing for Market. I've been reading Growing for Market since 1993. I've never missed an issue. And I think, I mean, if you need... It's chock full of good information. And I mean, I'm pretty proud of those herb articles. I thought they were good. And it was fun to take that

opportunity to summarize what we'd been doing. But there's always tons of good information in growing for market. And you never know where that piece of information is going to come from that makes a difference in your operation. I mentioned, we came up with the model that we needed to use for harvesting the herbs from reading about rotational grazing, where the goal is to keep the plants from going to flower and to maximize your vegetative growth. And they use the same kind of technique. We didn't. Who would have thought that we were going to learn about herb harvest from

reading about rotationally grazing cows? And so if you're in the business of farming, I mean, growing for market is, I almost think, an absolute must. I mean, I almost go so far as to say it's the differentiator between an amateur and a professional. If you're a professional, you're taking the time to read those materials, read the information that's out there, your trade magazines that are targeted towards your industry to give you fresh new ideas for how you can improve your business. And I think Growing for Market is the best resource out there. I'm certainly enjoying it now that I'm finally subscribing. So far, I can back up what you say. Now, back to harvesting of herbs. You bet.

One really quick, easy one that just came up for me. Thinking again about a farm that isn't doing this super seriously, but it's kind of an afterthought with their herbs. What are your thoughts on harvesting by tearing with your hands versus having a good quality pair of snips? How important is it? Wow, I would never even think about tearing by hand because I don't think there's any way you could do that without bruising the leaves. So I think those flower snips or herb snips from Johnny's.

And Jordan, is that something you want to put in your show notes? I can get you the link for Johnny's for that. I'll follow up with you for sure. Yeah, or you've got the description in your article, so I can post a link to those specific snips. But I know there's certain herbs I've torn just because I'm in a hurry, and I read your article, and I was thinking, I don't think Chris would approve of that.

No, you know, I think you've got to treat the plant with some respect. I mean, you know, when you're tearing the herbs, you're going to be putting pressure on the roots and kind of unsettling those. And I think you're just likely to bruise the stems or the leaves. And once you do that, then the plant's going to start deteriorating that much faster. We always talk when we're harvesting plants, I mean, roots obviously, root crops are an exception to this. But anytime you're harvesting leaves, you want to be holding on to the air around the plant rather than the plant itself. Okay. So you don't, you know, you want to be thinking of it that way. You're cradling this product. You're not grabbing it.

Right. You know. So, and this was especially important with crops like the salad greens. But yeah, you bruise a, you know, you bruise a spearmint leaf, it's going to be the, you know, it only takes one bad apple in the barrel to ruin the entire barrel of apples. You know? You got to, if you have a bad leaf, that's going gonna start to affect everything else on that on that harvest okay and then one really crucial thing we haven't talked about is you you already described that when you go when you send your when you're out going for harvest you're you're picking for the for the labor in packaging so if we take the example of the spearmint that you mentioned it's a really tall plant you're only taking the top eight inches so there's another crucial step

you're then sending a crew out back after the harvest to to maintain the crop so that the next time you return to that same block it's in good shape so that so can you talk about crop maintenance yeah so again that i mean that that cutting back we always think of harvest and maintenance they go together they're you're you're always doing both and the harvest isn't done until the maintenance is complete. So we would, you know, we harvest that top eight inches and then if we, if there's extra left underneath, we're coming back and cutting that plant back down to the right level. So something like sage, we didn't have to come back and cut that back to the right, to a certain level. But thyme and oregano want to get cut down to maybe a half inch

or three quarters of an inch from the soil, from the surface, or from those horizontal stems. So you just don't have much growth because you want it to come back nice and lush and even for good, high quality, easy to harvest stuff the next time. With the mints, we cut those suckers right down to the ground. And we used to have to, I mean, you try to get people out there who think they like plants and cutting them back down to the ground, that just doesn't make sense to them. But the mint really does want to be cut right down to the soil surface. And then you're

going to get nice, lush regrowth from all of those horizontal stems and rhizomes. And that's really what you want. And it comes up nice and even. And then when the next time you come back to harvest, then you aren't going to end up trying to pick, you know, if you've got a four-inch, let's say you've got a four-inch spearmint stub, you've cut off the top of it. It's going to start, the growth is going to come out from the side branches. And so now you've got this little spearmint stub down there. So if next time you come back and harvest, you might be getting into that old stub, which is now going to be a little bit woody, and maybe it's going to be a little bit pokey. I don't want that going into my herb packages. I want nice,

fresh, lush, green herb. So we cut that right down to the ground so that we're never getting back into the old material. And then another thing you're absolutely methodical or even ruthless about is any sign that the plants are going to flower. So I took, really important thing that I found from a management perspective was to go out every week on my farm. I had time, it was typically on Sundays, which I don't like to admit that I worked on Sundays, but I did do it, was to go out and walk to every field every week and go, what's going on here? Let me assess. And so at that time, I would look at those plants and see if there was any sign of flowering. And there's – the plants on – the herbs, you know, and I'm thinking particularly like thyme and oregano.

They have this funny thing that they do when they're getting ready to flower where it's like the growth kind of starts to bunch up at the top of the stem. So it might go from being – from having things being kind of regularly spaced to having kind of this tighter look to it. It's almost I don't know how I'm sort of, I'm bunching my hands together and curling my fingers and bouncing them up and down. That's what it looks like. I think I've seen humans look like that when they really want

to procreate as well. They just tell. You can see it. And so you want to look at that plant and you see it's ready to flower, then you have to cut back all of the plant that's ready to flower. And that's where this harvest wave

makes such a big difference because you've got something that's, you've got fresh growth coming behind you and now you can cut back all of this excess that is getting ready to flower and go to physiological maturity. And, you know, again, it's really hard. I mean, I'm a leftist hippie. You know, I'm big on food.

And I watch these documentaries about food waste. And they make me feel guilty. But, you know, you got to cut it. We'd cut it and throw it on the ground, okay? Because that's how I'm going to keep my plants in production. If you were, I mean, maybe if you were cooler than I was, you'd take that harvest and you'd put it in your dehydrator or your big drying room and you could get dried herbs and you'd have value added to do in the winter. That can be really great. But you've got to get in there and cut it down. This is where I think a CSA, if you've got a CSA and you're going to farmer's market

and you're selling your herbs wholesale, this is where you can really use the CSA to help you manage your herb supply. Because it's the week that you give the CSA time is the week before the time flowers. So it's when you go out there and you go, that stuff's getting ready to think about flowering. I'm going to cut it all back right now and put it in bunches, and now I've got 50 bunches of time. And those bunches can be 10 inches because you're not putting them in the clamshells. Do I have that right? That's right.

Yeah, you make them as big. Yeah, and so you just cut that stuff back and get it out of there. We actually had an arrangement with another CSA farm that was larger than ours so that when we had surplus herbs like that, we could, if we had enough labor available, actually harvest 800 bunches of an herb and sell it to this other CSA. And then they distribute it to their members. So that was a way to manage our supply. But if we didn't have that, you just cut it and put it to this other CSA, and then they distribute it to their members. So that was a way to manage a supply. But if we didn't have that, you just cut it and put it on the ground because that's what's going to keep the plant growing. You've got to keep it in vegetative mode.

Once it starts to flower, you're screwed. Because once it begins to flower, then the plant's going to keep on pumping out flowers until you let it think that it's done with that reproductive cycle. So it really has to get to the point, if you miss cutting back, then, you know, and you start and you've got flowers, you have to wait until those flowers have actually turned brown and died. So they've been pollinated, they've kind of gone through their, their physio cycle, and the plant's thinking about starting to make some seeds then you that's the point at which you can take that plant back and turn it vegetative by cutting it back but you have to

wait until it's done with that process and that can take several weeks and now you've got this whole bed of flowering time that and and and vaguely you know i mean not just not just a little bit of flowers but lots of no that's that's when you get into the mess that we talked about at the very start of this conversation. Yeah. That's what my time looks like all the time. Right. And that's because I'm guessing that you're kind of going out there and you're picking a little here and you're picking a little there. So now you've got some flowers all over.

There's no easy way to maintain that. And that's where I think, again, as a CSA farm, if you really want to add value with those herbs, this need to cut things back right before they flower becomes a really great tool that you can use to keep your CSA and herbs, but also to manage that plot. Oh, totally. No, it makes a lot of sense. So, so, so listen, Chris, I, I, I'm going to finish up the harvest topic with kind of a selfish question, but I think, I think this one will be even more relevant to all of us who aren't doing herbs in a big way. I mean, all of us, oh man, every market gardener is doing basil, right? And, um, we take, we're pretty particular about how we harvest our basil, but I suspect it's not how you harvest yours. And I'm really wondering, so you treat basil, let's just, I think more or less as an annual in a lot of the case, you're starting from seed and you're replanting it every year, new plants. Can you just talk about, do you, do you harvest the basil in the same way? Are you

like taking, are you doing it in blocks or waves and you're just taking the whole plant when you harvest? Well, we wouldn't, with something like basil, we wouldn't be taking the whole plant when you harvest? Well, with something like basil, we wouldn't be taking the whole plant when we harvest, but we'd be taking about a third of the plant when we harvest because we want it to keep on coming. Again, it's got that tree form like a sage plant does, strong central stem, branches coming off of that. So we would take the top third of the plant. But yeah, we would just crew cut it because again, my limiting factor is labor. It's not the amount of basil that I can get off of a plant. If I was really worried about the amount of basil I could get off of a plant, then I would be going through stem by stem. some, when we were selling bulk basil instead of putting it in the clamshells, you know, yeah, sometimes we would go through and really be careful about how we were picking it.

The stuff that comes out of California, a lot of times it's 10, 12 inches long and it's ugly and it's beginning to flower. If you can, I mean, if you can beat that, you know, you're, you're going to be doing good, you know? So getting in there, you know, you got a nice six or eight inch piece of basil, it's nice and young and fresh, then that's really, that really that's really good so in that case like this is another thing i'm interested in are you harvesting some stem because one way to approach it is just just the the kind of not the buds but you know what i mean like you're just picking off like little like the larger leaves almost and leaving and leaving the tiny ones underneath uh at each kind of node um but it sounds like we're always thing with some stem We always felt like it was, yeah, we did want it to have some stem.

Because, you know, how much does a basil leaf weigh and how much does a basil stem weigh? Oh, I mean, in our case, we're charging a lot more for it. With the chefs, for instance, because it's premium. They don't have to do that labor. It's premium. And that's where you got to know your market, right? We used to spend a lot of time

trying to do extremely premium basil. We couldn't get a premium price for it. Because of our market, we weren't selling to restaurants. So we weren't able to capture the upgrade that we would have needed to make it worthwhile to go and just to really do what we would think of as being leaf cut basil. Okay. So what I want to know then is in terms of how you harvested it, you come and take the top third of the plant. What about maintenance? Are you coming back later in the day and just like mowing it down way to the bottom or is it different with basil? No, just the top third of the plant. And then so then the next time you come around,

it's regrowth. It's regrown that top third, essentially. Okay. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Thank you for helping me explain that. No, no, no. I'm asking because I'm thinking of shying away from just the leaves because the labor is terrible. Yeah, it takes forever unless you got really fast people.

Well, listen, Chris, there's a whole other subject that you focused on in your third article for growing for market, which is on post harvest handling. I think I'm going to, I'm going to leave it for today. This is a lot for, for listeners to take in. And we're, I know you've offered the time to talk, but I like to keep my episodes to a certain length and, and this was great. So, uh, perhaps I'll ask you back sometimes to finish off the topic. But before we end today, there's a couple of things I think you should talk about. First off, you do have another document on herbs that you've produced. Is that right? So what I did, I put together a quick sheet based on some of the things that I knew we were going to be talking about today, kind of

summarizing important pieces about herb production. Because I think there's some things that, well, a picture's worth a thousand words. And it's awfully hard to be writing down your notes about, you know, are chives something that gets treated as a simple perennial in a three-year rotation, or is it something that we're going to do as a growing it more like we do vegetables? So I put some of this information, nice summary information, a quick one-page sheet together just for listeners of the Ruminant podcast. And I put that, I've got it on my website. It's at the farmer2farmerpodcast.com slash ruminant.

So that's R-U-M-I-N-A-n-t name of the show here and that's that's something special that i put together for listeners to your show right on chris thank you uh now what one more thing at least one more thing you you're you you've got a you're cooking up a podcast of your own are you not yeah that's right we've actually well and and hopefully by the time this show goes live we're going to have that we're going to have that launch. So it's called the Farmer to Farmer podcast. We're working with farmers all around North America to just kind of suss out some of the stories of being a farmer, what kinds of perspectives people can bring to that. And, you know, I think one of the great things that we've had in the organic and sustainable agriculture movement is there is this,

you know, it's about so much more than just one person, you know. Everybody shares in this community, and I think it's really a great opportunity to bring people together to share what they've got, to share their stories, and there's so many things that we have to learn from other growers, and, you know, we talked about this with regards to share their stories. And there's so many things that we have to learn from other growers. And, you know, we talked about this with regards to growing for market. It's you never, you don't know what you don't know. And you never know where that piece of information is going to come from that really makes a difference in your operation. And so we're looking at, you know, trying to get some of the best growers,

but also working with beginning growers, anybody that's doing anything original or interesting in regards to agriculture, bringing them on the show and talking to them. That sounds really cool. I can't wait till it's going. You'll certainly have a subscriber in me, Chris. Well, thank you, Jordan. And I've already got the subscription to yours. So we're good trade back there. Um, and, uh, thanks a lot for coming on the podcast. I really enjoyed our

conversation. Jordan, nice, nice job with the interview. Thank you for setting a good example. It really, Jordan, it was my pleasure to be here. I just, I, uh, you know, I'm, I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to talk with you and, and, uh, with you and, you know, share some of what I learned over the years. It's really, it's fantastic. And I think this community of people that we've got that are dedicated to sharing information and facilitating the sharing of information is something that's unique and very special in our organic and sustainable and local food movement. Something you don't find in other places. We're very lucky. Agreed. Thanks again, man. That's it for that episode. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Next week, we'll feature a conversation with a gentleman who is a wine expert, and he makes the case for the important role that wine plays in developing

a food culture as well as he explains why he thinks wine has a role to play in increasing food security it's a really interesting conversation and i hope you'll tune in and i will talk to you then last thing i'll say, please consider helping me promote the podcast. You can promote it on Twitter or Facebook, or you can go, if you subscribe in a particular podcast directory like iTunes or Pocket Capture, any of the many, many different ways to subscribe to podcasts, consider going and giving me a ranking, rating my podcast within that directory. It helps place it higher when people search for podcasts on related topics. Okay, everybody, have a great week.

Talk to you next Wednesday. We could be happy with life in the country With salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands I've been doing a lot of thinking Some real soul searching And here's my final resolve I don't need a big old house or some fancy car