Growing For Market Podcast

It’s that time of year when the pests and the questions about how to keep them in check are building up. So, in keeping with the mission of Dr. Anna Wallingford’s New Hampshire Community Supported Research to respond to what growers are wondering about, we surveyed our audience and asked her how to deal with the insect pests that are bugging you this time of year. In fact, we got so many bug quest...

When he was running Ardelia Farm in Vermont, Bailey Hale found that many trending flower varieties were not available in quantities market farmers could use, or available at all, which led him to start brokering orders with other growers. In this interview, we hear about how that business grew until Farmer Bailey plant brokerage became the full-time business and moved to Portugal. Bailey tells us...

Soil is finally getting the attention it deserves, and though many of the best practices in the field hold true in the greenhouse, there are some important differences and that’s what we talk about this week with Judson Reid. We talk about why you can’t apply all the fertility a long-season crop like tomatoes need at the beginning of the season, and how to handle supplemental fertility needs. Juds...

When Kate-Lynn Clark got the opportunity to take over a peony farm, it didn’t include the land. So she dug up and moved over 250 varieties of peonies to her family’s farm in Brownsburg-Chatham, Quebec. There she runs En Fleurs, shipping peony roots to Canada and the USA, so we figured she could tell us everything about planting and maintaining peonies! We cover the difference between tree peonies...

In 2023, Maggie Taylor wrote an article for Growing for Market Magazine about several projects she had started as part of a grant program incorporating agroforestry into Delight Flower Farm in Illinois. Since many of the projects were on a three-year timeline, we thought this would be a great time to check in and see how they turned out! The projects included alley cropping, windbreak renovation,...

Chip and Susan Planck ran Wheatland Farms growing vegetables in Virginia for 37 years, and in this interview, we talk with them about what worked, what didn’t and what changed in market farming over almost four decades. We talk about founding farmers markets, and then how they pulled off 10-15 farmers markets every week during the season. That involved employing hundreds of people over the years,...

“Hyloom” tomato varieties have become popular with growers for the combination of heirloom flavor and looks, and grower-friendly traits like improved vigor and disease resistance. In this interview we talk with Greg Vogel, Assistant Professor of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University, who is working on breeding hyloom tomato varieties. If you’re a tomato nerd you’re in luck because we g...

On this week’s podcast we talk with Drew Cramer of Ghost House Farm in Michigan about how he more than doubled his greenhouse tomato yields through good management and automation. Automation makes the difference between just controlling the temperature in a greenhouse and controlling the climate. And controlling the climate is what creates a growth-promoting, disease-discouraging greenhouse enviro...

Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium get a lot of attention, but there are other nutrients that are just as important for soil and plant health. In this week’s interview, we talk with Gregg Forster of Wisconsin Mineral Solutions about some of those other nutrients, including the role of calcium as the “truck” that helps move other nutrients in the plant, the role of boron as the “wheels” on the truc...

Garrett Corwin started Piedmont Microgreens out of his garage in Durham, North Carolina, and after six years he’s scaled the business to 350-400 trays a week. In addition to the farmers market, Piedmont sells to more than 50 restaurants, grocery stores and wholesalers, including FreshPoint and Sysco with just a two-person team. As the business expanded, Garrett realized the limitations of spreadsh...

One trend we’ve noticed is the growing number of flower farming cooperatives. We think it might be part of local growers banding together to increase market power as the American flower market bounces back from decimation due to the Andean Trade Preference Act, but don’t take it from us. This week we talk with Carrie Read, the General Manager of the Seattle Growers Market (recently rebranded from...

When Anna Wallngford got fired (twice) by DOGE from her job doing entomological research for the federal government, she formed New Hampshire Community Supported Research to keep the work she was doing on behalf of farmers going. If you can do community supported agriculture why not community supported research, right? Hear about the research she was doing for the government, what it was like to g...

In this week’s interview we hear from Colleen McCoole Payne about how she and more than 20 other growers built the Kansas City Flower Farmer Wholesale Market to help them sell more to florists by working together. In 2023 Colleen started working with a few growers to create a wholesale market similar to a farmers market where they did not need to create an LLC and each grower would invoice the buy...

Jakub Kosmowski left a career in marketing to start the vegetable CSA farm Farma Wola in Poland. In this interview, he tells us how he adapted the marketing principles he used with Fortune 500 companies to develop a market for and sell CSA shares for his farm. Jakub tells us how any type of farm can use the four Ps of marketing- “product, place, price and promotion” to think about the big picture...

Most point of sale (POS) systems were designed for businesses like restaurants and retail, and aren’t perfect fits for farm businesses. In this episode, Lindsey Lusher Shute tells us how she has been working on customizing POS systems for farmers, and how she has been beta testing the system in her own farm’s store. Innovations include being fully customizable to support a range of farms, being ab...

In today’s episode, we explore the range of people who whose job is to help farmers, and how to get the most out of these relationships. We refer to these people as a group as technical assistance, or “TA” providers, and it can include extension agents, people at nonprofit or NGOs, professors, etc. And our guest today is one of those people- Sarah Geurkink is the Organic Production Specialist for...

Most flower and vegetable growers can add herbs to their existing crop plans without changing what they’re already doing- and dried herbs can complement the fresh crops by providing a year-round income stream. On this week’s podcast we talk with Emily Springer of Meeting House Farm and Collaborative in Maine about how she grows herbs on the farm and sells them through the collaborative. Emily star...

Everyone loves sweet corn, but can you make money on it? This pod episode sets out to answer the age-old question, and shine light on the best practices that will give growers the best chance of being profitable with this summer favorite. We also discuss whether sweet corn can function as a “loss leader,” i.e. come for the sweet corn, stay for the tomatoes and salad mix theory that might justify g...

What does the future of market farming look like in the era of digital sales? Our guests this week, Amelia Ihlo of Rooted Farmers and Jill Shea of the Connecticut Flower Collective had the bright idea to take the 35th anniversary of Growing for Market Magazine as an opportunity to step back and look at the last 35 years of market farming, and think about what is going to shape the next 35 years. A...

Though Angie Machado is now an email expert, she got her start in the flower world, so she understands the unique needs of farm businesses. In this episode she shares her journey from working with flowers to specializing in email marketing. This interview covers how to build an effective email list, create engaging content, balance sales and value in emails, and avoid common pitfalls. Angie also h...

In this bonus episode of the Growing for Market Podcast, we hear from long-time GFM writer, farmer and Minneapolis resident Sam Oschwald Tilton about how immigration enforcement is playing out in Minneapolis. In an industry with an estimated 40% of workers undocumented, the way immigration laws are enforced probably has a bigger impact on farming than any other industry. Many farmworkers with lega...

Sebastian Aguilar started farming in 1997, and for much of that time he was growing flowers and vegetables for market with his family. Learn why they made the switch to seeds, and how their operation changed when they went from market farming to seed farming.  It’s not all about seeds, though- there are plenty of practical tips from Sebastian’s 30 years of farming experience. We discuss how they m...

Brian Bates and his wife Anne run Bear Creek Organic Farm in Petoskey, Michigan. A little over a decade after starting their farm, they are grossing over $1.5 million from their on-farm store- which is surprising considering that before COVID, their farm was mostly wholesale, whereas now most of their sales come from on-farm retail. In retrospect, it’s easy to think the last decade was an uninterr...

Luke Sheldrick and his partner Dana run Terramor Farm in Burnstown, Ontario, about an hour west of Ottawa. After a decade of growing vegetables and cut flowers for a CSA, local restaurants and retail as well as farmers markets, Luke uses a number of systems to plan out the farm year and keep the plan on track through the haze of the season. In addition to hearing about the farm, we’ll discuss how...

This week’s podcast guest Masha Vernik interviewed nearly 30 farmers in the Pacific Northwest about how they are changing their cropping strategies in response to climate change for her master’s thesis at The University of Washington. In the process, she collected a lot of data and anecdotes about all aspects of how farmers in the region are being affected by, and adapting to, climate change.  In...