The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - Let's Whet Together

Episode Date: January 8, 2021

Hi Everyone! Herein: four audio segments I think you'll enjoy. Each comes from a 25-episode podcast series I'm in the middle of producing for my province's annual organic conference.  So yeah, this is a teaser for the conference, but be assured that each segment in this episode stands alone as an interesting piece of audio on its own merits.  More info on the conference here: https://bcorganic2021.eventbrite.ca

I'm Jordan Marr and this is The Ruminant, a podcast about food politics and food security and the cultural and practical aspects of farming. You can find out more at theruminant.ca or email me, editor at theruminant.ca. I'm on Twitter at ruminantblog or find me on Facebook. All right, let's do a show. Hey everyone, it's Jordan and I still exist. It's been a while, but I still exist. So let me catch you up real quick. It was a crazy year. It was a crazy COVID year. I made it through. Okay. I hope all of you did too. In the end, actually revenues were just fine. There was just a whole bunch of uncertainty at the start. Did you like those ruminant drive casts? Those kind of spontaneous calls and spam calls and that?

I wish I could have done more. It didn't happen. But it's kind of inspired a plan, a plan for this year coming about the kind of episodes I want to do. Not going to talk a lot about that right now. Stay tuned for that. But here is what I want to talk to you about. now. Stay tuned for that. But here is what I want to talk to you about. A really fun thing,

a really cool thing is that I do some volunteering for the organization that oversees organic agriculture in British Columbia, where I farm. And I was on their conference planning committee. And of course, we had some big decisions to make about what we would do with a conference in a pandemic. And I pitched the idea of replacing all of the regular in-person seminars with a podcast series. Now I'm going to do a huge yada, yada, yada. So yada, yada, yada. I ended up being hired as the coordinator for the conference and I have been spending the last two to three months just furiously producing a podcast that has turned into like 25 or 30 episodes. I had a small team of interviewers. I did a ton of the interviews myself and I have been editing like crazy and we've put together a really great program. So in this episode of The Ruminant,

I'm going to share three or four clips with you and i will tell you right now they're not just teaser clips i've taken some segments from some episodes that are interesting in and of themselves these segments you will get something out of these segments but they're also meant to tease the conference podcast and to whet your appetite so here's how the conference works the centerpiece of the conference is actually the podcast. And so on January 15th, or just after we are going to be releasing the podcast in just about its entirety, I'll probably have a few episodes lagging that I'll post within a week or two after that. But most of the podcast 20 20 to 25, will get posted behind a paywall for ticket holders to the

conference. There's other stuff associated with the conference too. There's an online gathering on February 28th. That's going to feature one of the gentlemen who is featured in one of the segments in this podcast episode that I'm sharing with you. His name is Darren Qualman. More on him in a little bit. He's going to be talking about the climate crisis and how farmers are going to have to be adapting and mitigating to deal with it, how to farm amidst the climate crisis, how policies will need to change, how food systems will need to change, should be pretty interesting. He's an expert on farming and climate change. And he's with the national, the Canadian organization called the National Farmers Union. There's also other fun fun stuff there's a photography contest with beautiful handmade mugs on the line

i won't get into it all if you want to learn more about this conference and consider attending we've got a pretty good slate of content produced spanning lots of topics of interest to organic sustainable regenerative type farmers and gardeners. Don't take my word for it. You can go to the ticket page for the conference. It is bc, as in British Columbia, bcorganic2021.eventbrite.ca. Head over there. You can learn more about what we've got going on. And if you are interested, you can learn more about what we've got going on and if you are interested you

can buy a ticket and if you do so by january the 15th you can take advantage of an early bird rate minus the special only to ruminant podcast listener promo code that i'm going to give you now and also one more time at the end of the episode. So that promo code is Ruminant30. Ruminant30. It's going to give you 30% off the current rate or 30% off a slightly higher rate if you don't get there by January 15th. The rate as it sits right now is a hundred bucks.

I think it's a steal for the really rich series that we've produced. And I know all of us are used to consuming lots of podcast content for free, but the reality is it costs a lot to produce this stuff. In this case, it has taken hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of my time, as well as other people's time. And I'm super grateful to actually be being paid for it. I mean, don't get me wrong. I've been really grateful to those of you who have donated to the ruminant podcast. Um, but for the most part, the donations I've taken in on this

show have just helped pay the bills on keeping the website going and the server space for the podcast going, et cetera, but I'm actually making an income for this. And so you buying a ticket actually indirectly is supporting certainly me and indirectly this podcast, if you think it through. So I'm gonna stop talking as soon as possible. I want you to hear these four clips that I have clipped out of our conference episodes for you. So the first one,

you're gonna hear a part of my conversation with a brilliant man called Brian Spencer. He is an expert on predatory insects that we, some of us buy for our farms. He has been with a company in British Columbia that has sold beneficial predator insects for two farmers for like decades. And he's been working for the company for decades. And he knows like everything about this topic. It was one of my favorite conversations of this podcast. And I've just sliced out a segment of it that's about ladybugs.

And this guy knows a lot about ladybugs. I don't know a ton about ladybugs and and what what this guy knows a lot about ladybugs i don't know a ton about ladybugs i think he'll teach you something about ladybugs and how they're used in the industry that you didn't know um so i hope you like that i will talk to you again when that segment's done and i'll introduce the next one so here we go okay well brian i'm gonna we're gonna do one more tangent and then get to talking about those pillars of biological pest control if that sounds okay so in a separate conversation i was i mentioned ladybugs because and i i'll say you know i think in at least in my cul-de-sac of the farming industry that seems to be the one that most kind of think of when they think

biological pest control is ladybugs say controlling aphids but you you mentioned you mentioned that the ladybug we all picture is is is one that you can buy but is perhaps not the best species to use could you could you talk about that a bit i just found that well you know there's a number of things with ladybug there's no denying the poster child for the industry is the ladybug, which is really ironic because coccinellids in general, like we actually produce two ladybugs that are, they're both little tiny black beetles. One of them is specific for spider mite and one of them is specific for whitefly. But in general, the coccinellids have a couple of bad habits that really don't lend themselves to using them as a tool for biocontrol.

And the first one is the fact that they are grazers. They don't eradicate. If you give them an open choice in an open system like a big conservatory, they eat a lot of aphids. And actually, if it wasn't for ladybugs, we'd be up to our armpits in aphids. But they never clean up. They always leave aphids behind with their egg cluster so that their eggs, when they hatch, there will be food for their offspring. And so from a biocontrol point of view, that's a bad habit.

And so from a biocontrol point of view, that's a bad habit. When you lock them into a cage or into a conservatory, in the end they will be 100% effective because they'll have no choice. But if they actually have a choice, they'll graze, lay eggs, and move on. And their disbursement, when you get to the bigger ladybugs, like the hippodermia that's harvested in the wild in California that we all know, or the new beetle that showed up about 15 years ago in British Columbia called Harmonia, which is the Japanese multicolored lady beetle. They eat a lot of aphids, but they're constantly migrating and constantly moving.

moving. And so University of California, Davis was trying to demonstrate how well they could stay in their gardens. And so they did quite a famous experiment about 25 years ago, where they basically released, I think it was about 158 ladybugs per day in their experimental garden. And they painted the legs with a different color every day. And then they went out there every day and they were scouting in the garden and finding ladybugs. But it was driving them crazy because they could never find a ladybug that had the painted legs. And so their first assumption was

they're somehow able to clean the paint off their legs and so we have to stop the experiment and do something different. So they sort of dropped the experiments and tried to figure out different ways of painting or marking the beetles. And then about a week later, Fresno State entomologists phoned them up and said, hey, I knew about your experiment, and I've got some of your painted legs here in my garden. Well, that's over 100 miles away.

And so the paint actually did last. What they saw is what we've seen, is that the ladybugs that you buy and release in your field are not the ladybugs that you see the next day. The ladybugs you see the next day are the native ones that showed up because you've got aphids. And you bought the aphids because you had aphids, and the aphidsids are attraction enough to attract the ladybugs in so uh so we try and discourage people from from buying the ladybugs for a number of reasons when the main the main reason is efficacy but also there's certainly a moral aspect the it's one of the last things on the planet that's

still wild collective and uh and it really is causing a lot of serious concerns in the Sierra Nevadas. Habitat destruction, there's five grandfathered licenses to harvest the ladybugs, and they tend to hibernate under rocks up in the Sierra Nevadas. are Nevadas. And so these five different individuals are driving up in their hummers up the creek beds and shoveling them into burlap sacks and sticking them in a fridge. And the other concern, of course, is that hippodemia harmonia has showed up in California, and it is displacing the native hippodemia as well. And so the native population is under a lot of stress and it's going to probably become endangered in the next couple of years and of course the uh the droughts that they've had in the forest fires haven't uh haven't helped the situation so the for the reasons you've just described can stay away from this uh species can you share the latin name again the so the

california species that that you would recommend people stay away from? Yeah, the California, and there's another similar species in British Columbia. It's a native West Coast one. It's called Hippodamia. Okay. And they're a great beetle. I mean, as I said right at the beginning, if it wasn't for them, we would literally be up to our armpits in aphids.

So they have a tremendous impact on managing the total pest population. But as far as specific uses, there are much better products that, that persist and stay in your, your cropping area. All right. Well, I think we'll finish our conversation by talking about those much better products, but now I want to move on back to kind of our main thread. So again, in a different conversation, you mentioned to me that like, I think, I think the way you described it was three pillars of biological pest control or three main concepts. And I thought I'd ask you to take, take us through them. Yeah. Yeah. So I have a bit of an advantage because I wasn't actually

trained as an entomologist. So being a microbiologist, I look at populations rather than individuals. And so I find that very useful in this business because we're really looking at the population trends, not necessary specifics. But yeah, if you pick up a textbook, an old textbook in entomology, you'll see there's basically three styles. One is called classical, one is called conservational, and the other one is called inundative. And the industry that I'm in, we are the inundative industry. All right, so that's Brian Spencer. That is one short part of a conversation that went on for about an hour or not quite. The whole thing was fascinating. So

that's something to look forward to at the COABC 2021 Organic Conference. Now here's another one. Our government in British Columbia has a Ministry of Agriculture and that ministry has an industry specialist for the organic sector. Her name is Emma Holmes and she was one of the volunteer interviewers for the conference. I asked Emma who she would most like to interview and on what topic, and Emma considers herself a real soil nerd and wanted to interview another soil nerd. So she talked to Professor Miranda Hart at a university in the interior of BC called UBC Okanagan. the interior of BC called UBC Okanagan. Miranda has a very strong background in microbiology and soil biology and does a lot of research in that realm. And so Emma had a long form conversation all about soil microbes with Miranda Hart. Here you are just going to hear around 11 minutes of

that conversation and it starts with Emma asking Miranda about the efficacy of purchased microbes to apply as an input to your soil. Here you go. And so as we are learning about the incredible feats that soil microbes are capable of, you know, what they're doing, just some of maybe the very many functions that they do. I think it's so natural to want to ensure you have those microbes working in your system. I remember getting so excited about soil biology when I did a field school in Cuba. And when I got back home and was farming, I was just super excited about getting about fertilizers and compost teas. But I also kind of felt like uneasy because I just felt like I didn't know very much and I didn't know where to go for the information.

And I was kind of wondering, like, are these working? Is this worth my time to be putting these out? I had the pleasure of working on some really long established organic farms. So I was like, well, do they already have everything they need? Are these connections already here? everything they need are these connections are already here and then something that I've seen that you've touched on both in your academic work but also in an article you wrote for the Canadian organic grower as one example is could there be unintended consequences of deliberate inoculations with microbes and so yeah I'd really like to hear more about your thoughts on you know for farmers who are like so excited about partnering with soil biology, but maybe just things that we should be thinking about.

I mean, there's a lot of stuff I got to unpack from what you just said, but I guess I'll start with the fact that, yeah, farmers are great. Farmers care about their soils and they love their soils. At least the farmers I work with are so dedicated to improving their soils and they love their soils and they are so at least the farmers i work with are so dedicated to improving their soils and making them the best they possibly could be but the problem is you're what you're you're right how do you know how do you know what's in your soil how do you know what you need in your soil and do you actually need to add anything i mean a lot of what farmers do that make a big difference in their soil is they add um carbon right they add primarily just carbon and yeah they add these um activated microbial complexes that that i don't

know what's happening with those nobody knows what's happening with those but a lot of time i think what's happening is you're adding a lot of nutrients with them and and that's what's making um that's what's making a difference for your productivity or your soils. Well, where I'm going with this is there's two things, right? Farmers really want to be able to monitor and develop healthy soils, whatever that means. And I think just even that term, healthy soils, is really problematic because it's too vague, right? because it's too vague, right? I mean, a farmer who's producing an annual crop who wants like big yields

is going to have very different health requirements from a soil than someone who wants to restore like a shrub-stepped grassland, right? So it's not going to be the same thing, right? You're going to need different things. You're going to need, like farmers are going to need as much as they don't you know regenerative agriculture organic agriculture all of these things are high input

and they're not high input of like synthetic biocides and fertilizers but they're high input in terms of organic material so that's one and i don't have the data for you or the information for you to tell you whether or not farmers should be using microbial additives. Because we don't know. We don't know. And it depends on the soil. And I always tell farmers that if you have healthy plants, if you have somewhat, if you have tried to encourage as many different kinds of plants on your land as possible that's the best way to ensure that you've got a robust microbial community and that's probably good enough if you've got plants that are happy on your land then you're probably doing okay you don't have

to worry about microbes i really don't i really am suspect of these like designer microbes that say they're going to do things for you because I know that we don't know what microbes do. We know that microbes are important. We can't say yet what a specific microbe does. So if a company is selling you a microbe for your potato crop, for example, well, I feel that's advertising because we don't know if there are specific potato microbes. And I can tell you right now there aren't specific potato microbes. There's a ton of microbes that will help the potatoes, but most of them are probably in your soil.

I mean, okay, all the industry reps are going to hate this, and that's okay. That's okay because somebody has to ask these questions because we don't have the data to support it i mean i'm working on cannabis right now and um cannabis is such a funny crop because there are you know such a highly manipulated crop artificially grown crop right at least traditionally um there's so many microbial products in the market for it and yet we're not able to get any of them to colonize these plants whatsoever. The plant doesn't want to grow with these microbes because the plant doesn't need the microbes. These plants are just swimming in nutrient broths, right? And they have these sterile growing conditions.

So it's just frustrating for me to see all these products with these claims that I know are not tested. So that's one part of the story, right? We don't even know if we need or if we should have these products. And I'm not going to put like, like condemn all of them, because sure, maybe there's some cases, they could be useful, and we need them, but we don't know when and where those situations are. And my other and as you said, the other thing to think about is, well, you're introducing an invasive species because if it's not invasive, it's not going to colonize your soil.

So you want these microbes to be invasive if you're selling a microbial product or if you're making a microbial product in your garage over the winter, like so many, you know, there's so many farmers around here that are making their own tinctures. But if they're not invasive, they're not going to work so if they are invasive well what

are they going to do to indigenous communities in your soil or what are they going to do to the indigenous communities in the soil in the forest that's bordering your property or the grasslands that's bordering your property because these microbes move we know that microbes move globally they don't they're dispersed in the water they're dispersed in the air currents i mean there's evidence of our buccular mycorrhizal fungi from the goby desert in california just from air currents alone so it's it it just makes me very nervous that we have such a embryonic understanding of how these communities function and how they are distributed among the globe. And yet people are moving them around and introducing these invasive species.

It makes me very uncomfortable and very nervous. Yeah, that makes sense. And yeah, I think that's a good point about how you're saying we want them to be invasive so that they work. That means they're working. We don't want the ones that, like you said, on the cannabis plants are just not even colonizing at all. So then you're just buying something. It's just a waste of your money. But then if they do work, what does that mean? Are we creating like as you you made a reference to the cane toad example in Australia you know we don't want to we don't want to do that to our soil um and we don't want to hurt the wild areas that neighbor organic farms that's definitely not the intent of organic farming no no I know and I know and I know these

people people will stop but the problem is people don't I mean it's pretty obvious even being living in this pandemic that people have a really poor understanding of how microbes work, I mean, it's pretty obvious even being living in this pandemic that people have a really poor understanding of how microbes work, right? I mean, all these people who are worried about masks, well, microbes move and they move quickly and you don't need very much of them to cause a big problem. So what do you think? So one thing I kind of started to move away from biofertilizers as a farmer for these kinds of concerns, like are they working and will they kind of be a negative consequence of. I remember I was using this product that was from Japan and I was talking to a lot of other farmers that were using it. And then I was kind of like, hmm, like we're going to all have these microbes from Japan. That's strange. Like crazy, isn't it? Yeah, kind of crazy.

It is. And I was I was like well I wonder what microbes are here like nearby and that's when someone introduced me to Korean natural farming which for listeners who may not be familiar with it it's a system of techniques that introduce indigenous microorganisms from nearby wild spaces into a garden soil so I was doing things like putting rice out in the forest or the grass lands near my farm and then culturing some of those microbes and putting them back into the soil and in my mind I was like well maybe I didn't I still didn't know if it was working but I felt like I may be minimizing the risk of doing you know bringing a really invasive species from far away into the system.

But then I also... Well, I guess... Oh, go ahead, go ahead. Oh, sorry. I just also didn't know if I maybe was colonizing a species I didn't want in high numbers and then putting that into my system. And so... Well, I guess I was going to ask you, what were you hoping to achieve by doing that?

What were you trying to do? That's a great question. I was hoping to support, I guess I was thinking, oh, I'm boosting my natural soil biology in my farm because I heard that, you know, even in organic farming, I was trying to do low till and put lots of organic matter back into the soil. But I just knew that I was maybe having a negative effect on the soil biology and I wanted there to be all that all those good players in there

so I was kind of doing it for a similar reason that I was doing compost tea sprays before I was wanting to support the plants in being connected to the soil environment, have these kind of helpers to either help them forage for nutrients or water or different things like that, help them prevent disease. And so I was thinking, hmm, maybe the nearby areas will have some of the microorganisms that my soil is now missing. So maybe I should be culturing and then bringing them in. But I also had a lot of questions. I wasn't convinced that it was, you know, going to work,

but I just thought it might be better than bringing in microorganisms from Japan, for instance. Well, I think your motivation is spot on. I mean, you want high soil biodiversity and you want it to be as native as possible, right? And I think it's a good instinct that, yeah, there might be higher diversity in the surrounding natural landscape than in your agricultural field. But I guess my question would be why, if you're using rice, what you're going to do is you're just going to culture it. All right. Well, if you found that interesting, you, well, you know what I'm going to say. Go check out bcorganic2021.eventbrite.ca

to check out what else we got going on and to maybe buy a ticket to the conference. Next up for this episode, I spoke to fellow Canadian organic farmer farmer Jeff Klug out in Ontario. Jeff, is it Root Down or Roots Down Organic Farm? I'm going to say Root Down Organic Farm. Sorry if I got that wrong. Jeff has been through a number of e-commerce platforms for his farm. That was kind of catalyzed by the pandemic.

And I'm in a similar situation. I've used a few e-commerce platforms as well. So between us, we were able to have a conversation where we just aim to help people think about considerations that they need to put in if they're going to be taking on an e-commerce platform for their farm for the first time or just moving over to one they haven't considered yet. And in this segment of our roughly 45 minute or one hour conversation, we are just talking about some of the considerations you need to keep in mind when you're shopping around for a platform. And in this segment, we'll also be touching on some of the

pros and cons of a few of the platforms out there. Okay, so here is a segment between me and jeff klug yes um so those are the three i have experience with so i think we've both kind of given that summary i'd really like to just jump in now to talking about how to choose this software and we'll spend a few minutes doing that jeff and then we can um then we can actually talk about each of these platforms that we've got experience with sound okay sure yeah awesome so let's let's start with the one that is usually the first talk about each of these platforms that we've got experience with. Sound okay? Sure. Yeah. Awesome. So let's, let's start with the one that is usually the first question that, uh, farmers have if they're considering this stuff, which is price. Um, in my experience, you can kind of simplify this consideration to kind of two, two models of, of, of pricing. And there's also kind of one that integrates the two models one is a percentage

of your sales which is scary um and the other is a flat fee and then there's the odd model that kind of incorporates the two has that been your experience yeah i can i can start us off we've both used farmigo and the model that farmigo has always used is no upfront service fee, at least when I was using it. Like if you're a new customer with them, there's no upfront fee. There's a very lengthy onboarding process that you work with them to set up your initial account with all the details you need for your farm. And then you pay a small percentage of your sales. I believe it's around 2% of the sales that you do on the platform. Um, and I know that is a kind of a, it frustrates a lot of farmers because the more successful you are, the more you pay them. Like, and to me,

and I'm interested to know what you think about that. Like if you, if you, if that stresses you out, it's just hard to imagine that, like, if I double my sales next month, you know, I have to, with Farmago, I'm going to pay them, you know, twice as much. Um, and that just doesn't, it doesn't feel super fair when you know, their marginal costs of like supporting you through that doubling in sales is, is much lower. How do you feel about, supporting you through that doubling in sales is much lower. How do you feel about percent-based pricing? Well, it's kind of a mixed bag, especially with Farmigo,

because, I mean, there are a fair amount of people who aren't necessarily wild about Farmigo's corporate ethics as a business. That being said, if it works it works and you know for me like it depends on how much price you put to quality of life in season and i at least for me tend to have more money than quality of life in season and if there's a way i can buy some quality of life in season, I'm probably going to do it. But what we have found with Farmigo is it works really well for what we're doing as a CFA. And it's pretty much hours worked. There's no, it's never down.

There's no glitches or anything like that. I do also know of two fairly large farms that have negotiated their own pricing structure with Farmigo. And so I think once you reach a certain level, you know, there's conversations to be had about that. But, you know, for the mid-sized farm, I think it works pretty well. And, you know, it's pretty transparent. You know, it's, it's pretty transparent.

You know, you know what you're getting into. So I should also add that with Farmigo, you only pay in the months you're doing sales, which is like a little different, right? Cause I only ever ran a summer CSA. So for the five or six, seven months I wasn't selling, I didn't pay. Whereas most of the companies that are charging you a monthly rate, you're paying all year, no matter what. Um, unless, unless you cancel your account, but then you kind of lose all

the, um, all your settings and, and, and your customer lists and everything. So that becomes a headache in itself. Um, no. And you know, we always have this perennial conversation every fall where we're like, are we going to do Farmigo next year? And, you know, like, because, you know, you get all these emails from like Harvey and all these other places. And, you know, we always end up just sticking with it because, like, you know, it's to the point now where our, you know, we have long term CSA customers. They're pretty familiar with logging into their Farmigo. You do. You have to think about ecosystem. Just like all of us have phone or internet browser ecosystems we're used to, it can be really jarring to switch and so that is a yeah a barrier to switching and so i mean it's it's you know like our customers like like i had a having a conversation

with somebody the other day where you know we do this fall share and a woman showed up and she's like uh oh i'm i don't know i'm like are you sure you signed up for the fall share and she said hold on let me log on to my farmigo account and she on her phone was like oops i didn't sign up sorry and that was it you know what i mean and i was like blown away by that yeah i will we'll um we'll talk some more about the the pros and cons in a bit because i i have lots of it's a very strong back end i have lots of compliments for it. But just to move through pricing. So then you've got a company like LocalLine that is generally you're paying a monthly fee. You save a bit if you commit for a year all at once.

And then they have like a lot of software companies you can pay a little bit more a month for certain add-ons to your account, that sort of thing. I'm noticing that some of these companies also, like they charge an upfront fee, like a service fee to get you going. And having gone through the signup with Farmigo, I understand why.

Like some of the setup is very time consuming. So I understand why they want that commitment just to get you set up. But it also becomes another barrier to moving. Like it would really hurt to, cause I've seen, you know, some of these fees can be two, three, four, $500, um, for, you know, to just to set up your account. And then that becomes like, you know, it's going to hurt if you realize three months in, you don't like it and want to switch. You've just, you know, you're going to be thinking

about that money in your mind. Yeah, no, I, I never even really took that into consideration. Yeah, no, I never really took that into consideration. Yeah, there's that too. I mean, I know with Local Food Marketplace, I think it was kind of a package deal. Like it's exactly what you say you pay, you know, your initial setup charge and then it's a monthly fee. And, you know, for our market, we're spreading that essentially amongst 35 vendors so it's it's extremely reasonable like you know for what it is for an individual farm i think it you know becomes a bit of a different story but again at least it's fairly predictable you know what you're paying every month whereas with farm you go sometimes you get the farm you go bill and you're like holy you know it's it's a little bit of a sticker shock you know for sure for sure for sure um so let's now move on though and talk about another major

consideration if you're going to choose a platform which is what is your type of selling it really matters for for influencing what you're going to choose um it sounds like both of us, I mean, I'm oversimplifying, but both of us still feel good about Farmigo for managing a CSA. Yeah. I mean, it also depends on what kind of person you are. Like, are you a spreadsheet person or not a spreadsheet person? And I've met tons of people who have created their own Google Docs and Google signups and all this stuff and manage their CSAs and seem to do just a fine job with it. But I'm not that person.

Well, and yeah, I'll say neither am I. I really related to what you said a little bit earlier about like, you know, you've got cashflow. It's your quality of life in the summer that you're valuing. And that's where some of these pieces of software really simplify things. So if you, you know, you're valuing. And that's where some of these pieces of software, um, really simplify things. So if you, you know, if you're going to want to get a sense of what a company specializes in and probably a good question to ask as you're browsing around is like,

figure out who they're, who is using the software and what kind of sales they're doing. Um, you got to go, you got to go beyond just their own marketing and promo and, and figure out, well, what, you know, what, what kind of farms are they attracting and try and talk to some of their customers? Um, yeah, I'm going to use a term that probably is obvious to most people, but I, I frequently say a la carte sales as another style. So this is just when like, this is more like listeners can think of your farmer's market stall is online. So you're operating like a farmer's market stall. You know, you, you, you're just, people can come on and make one purchase and maybe that's for pickup. Maybe you're delivering, that's kind of a separate set of considerations, but a la carte meaning, um, you know, in my case,

I set a minimum order for an order, but other than that, um, people don't have to commit for the season. So for, for a la carte, um, purchasing Jeff, um, that's what I use local line for my household distribution this year. All of my household focus distribution was not CSA. It was, it was, um, it was a la carte and, and I'll elaborate this on a bit, but that worked in a lot of ways that worked well with certain limitations on local line, but local line is a platform that definitely was designed more with a la carte ordering in mind fair to say i i think so yeah and but i mean i still think you know one of the limitations with vocal line is you still have to log on and create an account before you can do anything if i remember correctly

is that right yes so um let's let's that was going to be another consideration but we can we can lump it in here. So another thing, and this is more, so this gets back to the debate over the value of the front end versus the back end. In a market where you're not just selling your farm products really easily, where it's more of a buyer's market, you've got to think more about the experience for the shopper. And I know one thing that I at least was worried about this year with my sales on LocalLine was how is that experience? And we could compare it to a more generalized commerce platform like Shopify, where someone comes to your commerce site for the first

time and it's a Shopify based site. It's pretty quick for them to build an order and check out and they don't necessarily need, uh, an account in the system. So a barrier of entry for in, in my local line is if you, Jeff want to shop from me, I need you to go and make a basic user account. So there's about two or three steps just to get you shopping. Um, and, and then from there, there's like, you know, a a few steps to to complete an order uh whereas shopify is a little more streamlined is that fair to say that is and that is that was like the key consideration when we were um choosing this platform for this delivery service in ottawa was you know we were anticipating that this was a bit more of a, you know, it's an urban market. It's a bit more, it's a bit more competitive and that, you know, people were wanting that,

you know, you were going to lose a certain portion of people when they clicked onto local line or farm, you go, it just, they just didn't get like, what am I supposed to do? I'm supposed to create a farm, you go account. You know what I mean? They just just be gone. Yeah, totally. And because that's one of my frustration with Farmigo all the time I was using it was I found the front end just lacking compared to the beauty of their back end.

Yeah. So, I mean, to give an example about seller's market versus buyer's market, there was a period last spring during when the pandemic first hit where households were freaking out about supply chains. And so suddenly that barrier on local line, um, or, or any platform that requires a user account to participate was like not a barrier. I had hundreds in a normal year, a regular year trying to sign up CSA customers was really slow.

I had hundreds of signups over the course of two, three months, hundreds, like 800. Um, as an aside, most of them never ended up buying. They were mostly just panic signups, but the point is when they were, because they were panicking, I think they were willing to, to get through that barrier, to get on my system. Um, so context is, is very much, um, important. Um, so we've briefly touched on a CSA versus a la carte. I want to mention, and I briefly touched on it before, if you are someone who grows two products, right? Let's say asparagus and strawberries, and you tend to focus on bulk sales, whether it's to, you know, into the wholesale chain or retail chain system or directly to households. or retail chain system or, or directly to households. Um, if you're already using something like a Squarespace site, their commerce platform is pretty, um, is, is, is relatively appropriate. Um, their backend is not great for someone like me with 30 types of

veggies because they're, we're going to talk in a bit about reports and like features on the backend to help you manage your, your like packing your orders and harvest, um, Squarespace isn't great for that. But if you're selling blueberries by the case and you want to get online and you haven't been before, and you already have a Squarespace site, their, their commerce platform is probably going to work for you because it's, um, it's, it's a lot easier when you're just dealing with like one or two. All right. So the last segment I'm sharing in this episode is a feature conversation between one of our volunteer interviewers, Abra Brin, who is a food policy analyst and Darren Qualman. I mentioned at the head of this episode that Darren is going to be giving our keynote speech at our live online gathering. But Darren also sat down for a long form conversation with Abra about regenerative agriculture and the climate crisis and different ways in which the farming industry and our food systems will need to adapt.

It's kind of meant to complement the speech he'll be giving at the end of February. Darren is the director of climate crisis policy and action for the National Farmers Union. And I pulled out a segment mostly focused on cattle and how the industry will need to adapt if we are going to keep raising cattle without having them make negative contributions to climate change. Here you go. And I will talk to you one more time at the end. I like that you've commented that cattle can be part of regenerative agriculture or a key part of it refer to an agri-technology link, but I'd be much more excited and interested in having a beef link into, or a cattle link into a regenerative agricultural network. So how about if we get into all the different ways in which cattle are raised, because there can be huge differences in terms of, as you say, fossil fuel use, but also nitrogen fertilizer use.

The scale of like the land scale can have a real impact, carrying capacity of the land as well as just the density of the management production practices. So how about you tell us a little bit about some of the links between the management practices and the other the benefits that can be generated from those. Sure thanks yeah it's very interesting to dig into this so one way that cattle can be raised is on grass and when when that happens they really maximize a lot of benefits around soil and diverse grassland ecosystems and biodiversity. Other cattle are raised in confinement. In Alberta, for instance, there's a lot of feedlots where cattle are fed grain. An interesting thing happens when you take

cattle off grass, the methane emissions go go down when they're in a feed lot and eating grain they're not digesting all of that grass cellulose and lignin so the methane emissions actually go down so to some extent it's it's the cattle on grass that creates the methane problem and when you take them off grass that methane goes down but that's only the beginning of it because that grain that they're eating in those feedlots is itself the product of huge fossil fuel inputs and especially nitrogen fertilizer. So there's this whole plume of upstream emissions that goes into that. So really what we want to do is we want to maximize the benefits we get from cattle while sort of managing some of those emissions and probably the best way to do that is to have cattle grazing on grass despite the

methane we want to have them grazing on grass because that's where we get the benefits the ecosystem benefits the soil building benefits and and the key thing to remember here is we cattle produce methane but that's a completely natural thing. Ruminants have been grazing on grass for millions of years. And many will know that on the central plains of North America, there was a lot of bison. It's not really the case that we want to somehow solve the methane problem by making it go away. The methane that comes out of cattle is natural. In some ways, like this carbon dioxide that comes out of us is natural. And even in agriculture, humans domesticated cattle and other grazing livestock about 10,000 years ago. And for 9,900 years, the atmosphere was not changed by human livestock production. It's only in the last century that methane emissions and methane concentrations have skyrocketed. I should have mentioned at

the beginning, methane is about three times higher. The concentration of the atmosphere is about three times higher. And that's really a function of just the last hundred years. So for 99% of the time that we raise cattle largely grazing on grass, it didn't affect the atmosphere and the climate. So at the beginning you mentioned that a big part of what is the focus of our work and I think a shared concern is the livelihood of farmers. And I have to say, the market for grass-finished beef has been a hard one to create. And as someone who grew up on a farm where we grazed our own grass-finished beef, I personally think it's absolutely the best beef out there. But the consuming public has gotten awfully accustomed to grain finished beef. So for me, in all of this, I always see a role for the consumer. And I think there always needs

to be a lot of education. But for some, it's like, I mean, I think that the possibility of converting people through the experience of tasting like a fresh harvested heritage tomato or a fabulous locally grown carrot could hopefully be the same with grass-finished beef, convincing people that in fact grass-finished beef not only will contribute to positive measures around climate solutions but also be a joy in their mouth. So I'm hoping that that could happen down the road. So is there anything else? What about the difference between cattle raised for beef and those that are in the dairy sector? Is there anything there you'd like to talk about? Yeah, I would. But just let me add one more piece to what you just said previously. Not only can that grass-finished beef be wonderful for the land and wonderful on the plate,

it's also tremendously nutritious. I was at a conference where the person that was giving the talk about beef was literally a brain surgeon. And he happened to have equipment in his lab that looked at the fat composition of brain tissue, and he used it to measure the fat composition of beef and he compared grain and grass finished beef and the omega-3 to omega-6 ratios and the ratios for grass finished beef approach those of fish oils like it really is a different set of fats and tremendously healthy compared to some of the grain finished beef. So yeah, it can be more nutritious as well. I do think there's huge opportunities for high quality grass finished,

locally raised and locally slaughtered, slaughtered beef. And I know I'm pretty excited that the BC Cattlemen's Association has recently secured a lease to a federally registered plant, which will increase the opportunities for getting BC raised and BC processed beef into the grocery chains and onto people's plates. So there's still a lot of work to go to do to increase people's access to this kind of good quality beef that we're fans of mutual fans of but I think that there's some heartening signs there so I have been deeply involved with the organic sector going back to the mid-1990s and have a decided bias in that regard is there anything worth exploring in terms of organic management practices of cattle that there might be some things that they could or should know around reducing emissions or maximizing the benefits? Yeah, I think there's some things that organic producers are doing already that are tremendously useful and helpful.

some things that organic producers are doing already that are tremendously useful and helpful one one is that the feeds that they use when they're not grazing the cattle and sometimes they can't graze all the time the feed that they use rather those organic feeds are usually produced without nitrogen and other fertilizers and have a much lower emission signature than commercial feeds. And the other thing that I think I see a lot of organic producers doing is using manure very carefully and very efficiently and getting maximum benefit out of that. And sometimes non-organic producers that have recourse to chemical fertilizers aren't quite as careful in the way they use that manure. So I think organic producers have some benefits that way. Thank you. That's helpful. I do know that access to that manure is really critical for a lot of food production in the province, whether it's gardeners or other farmers.

And so it certainly is a problem when bad public policy reduces the animals on the landscape. when bad public policy reduces the animals on the landscape. So what do you think is the future of cattle in Canada? I think there's probably a certain level of pressure on reducing the herd size with regards to climate change and methane emissions. But as you've just indicated, maybe it's more important to address feed and management practices and how we finish them. But is there anything else you'd like to say about the future of cattle in Canada

in terms of the livelihood of farmers, our food security, and the benefits to the environment? Yeah, there's a lot there to say. I'll give you the good, hopeful part, and then I'll say some of the challenges. So on balance, I think the future for cattle and cattle production is quite bright. They provide a number of benefits. Like everything that humans do, they bring a mixture of benefits and problems. But, you know, that's really not the balance between the benefits and the problems isn't really a function of the cattle.

It's a function of how we manage the cattle, how we structure the sector, you know, the scale, the ways that we graze those cattle, the way that we market and process and all those other things. So I think it's up to us to get that part right. But the benefits are really, really tremendous. So we need to do everything we can to maximize the benefits and minimize the downsides. So we need to practice best possible grazing, rotational grazing, holistic management, regenerative agriculture, those sorts of things. We need to make sure that our grasslands are really healthy. Sometimes in tame pastures, you might want to include legumes and nitrogen fixing plants and make that grass grow better

and make it more digestible. We want to do everything we can to maximize the number of farms that have cattle so that we can have that mixed farms and nutrient cycling. But there are a lot of challenges to creating that kind of maximum benefit climate compatible livestock sector. And we have a lot of those challenges here in Canada. In our report tackling the farm crisis and the climate crisis we talked about the cattle industrial complex and what we have and it gets at your point about grass finishing we have a sector that's really under the control of a few big corporations Cargill and JBS tremendous tremendous control by those packers.

And they're shaping it in a way that this is bad for everyone. They're pushing farmers off the landscape. We've lost about half the cattle producers in a little over a generation. They're pushing down prices to farmers so that the economics of, of cattle production is very poor. And thus, when farmers want to make investments in rotational grazing, putting in water supplies, increased fencing, they're often really challenged to do that. They just don't have the capital to change their operations in ways that might reduce

emissions. And at the same time, they're pushing up prices to consumers. So we've done graphs we call the wedge graphs and uh you can sort of picture them if you imagine the last 40 or 50 years of cattle prices and hamburger prices the the price of cattle is this flat line across right at the bottom of the graph and the price of hamburger just goes up and up and up and up and the same thing with uh pigs and pork chops the price that the farmers receive has been flat for decades yet the price that people pay in the grocery store goes up and up and up and up and

what we're seeing is the packers and retailers taking more and more. So farmers are becoming more efficient. Farmers are becoming more productive. We're setting all kinds of records that way. Yet the benefits are all being captured by the few corporations that control those processing and retailing channels. And it makes it hard in a number of ways. It makes it hard to produce alternative beef, organic beef, to get premiumss in the market to sell grass-fed beef all of those things so really there's there's some impediments to getting to the maximum benefit minimum emission livestock

systems we need to get to all right so i hope you like that everyone it was really nice to talk to you i will be back here again at some point once all this conference stuff is done and i'm heading toward the main season kind of excited for a few things i want to try out you know probably just here and there you know how it goes on this show but anyway if you want to check out the conference if you want to consider buying a ticket bc organic 2021.eventbrite.ca it's in the show notes the promo code to use to get 30% off whatever the current price is ruminant 30 ruminant 30 i hope to have some of you come over there and check it out and maybe be a part of the conference. Either way, I hope you enjoyed these segments and I miss you all. And now you can, you know, listen to the rest of Vanessa's song without me ruining it. Okay. Bye. Because why would we live in a place that don't want us

A place that is trying to bleed us dry. 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 to keep my love going strong. So we'll run right out into the wilds and braces. Ride out into the wilds and graces We'll keep close quarters with gentle faces And live next door to the birds and the bees And live life like it was meant to be Pa-pa-pa-da-da-da Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo

Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo I'm out.