https://www.michaelogormanfarming.com/press daily 0.75 2023-06-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61b126e4cfa8365fa2142635/26efd13c-5d71-46b5-9b0a-fdea7d14bb6c/michael+and+anne+copy.jpg MY BOOK 1n 1975, Michael and his daughter Emma are walking the fields of THE FARM in Tennessee. https://www.michaelogormanfarming.com/press/category/success+story monthly 0.5 https://www.michaelogormanfarming.com/press/category/press monthly 0.5 https://www.michaelogormanfarming.com/press/category/tips monthly 0.5 https://www.michaelogormanfarming.com/home daily 1.0 2023-01-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61b126e4cfa8365fa2142635/1b86119a-ea23-4eeb-a165-f767a8d7b1b8/Field+photo+by+David+Frohman+copy.jpg Home Over 50 years ago, I decided to become a farmer. The back-to-the-land movement captivated hundreds of thousands of us, looking for some refuge from a chaotic world. We read Mother Earth News and studied Robert Rodale. We planted cover crops and made compost. We struggled to grow food without chemicals. A decade later, few of us were still farming. America has never launched as many first-generations of farmers–farmers have mostly been raised into it. But some of us hung in there. I struggled for almost twenty years and then opportunity knocked – interest in organics blew up overnight and my experience became valuable. I got to grow organic vegetables at a scale that had not been done before. More importantly, I got to influence what other farmers grew – and how they grew it. My career became fun, exhilarating, and lucrative. When Covid-19 upended the marketplace, I was wracked with guilt. What possessed me to spend this last decade encouraging so many to try something so hard, so easy to fail at? Then I watched all of you – America’s new farmers. I saw you were outside when others couldn’t leave their home. You had work when others had time to pass. If you had kids, you shared with them the wonder of animals giving birth and crops sprouting out of the ground. Your world was technicolor when others were black and white. Yes, your marketplace may be in shambles; not all of you will survive. But many are finding new markets and neighbors and townspeople hungry and grateful for your food. This may be your moment. As larger farms lose labor, packing plants shut down, and distribution systems stop distributing, opportunity is knocking for smaller, local food producers. America’s large producers will be back. We need them to feed us all – and you need them to learn from. But this market, your market, will not retreat. My partner and sales manager at the large organic farms I managed always told me, “Michael, whoever you can supply at Thanksgiving will be back with you in the spring.” A buyer – your customers – will remember who fed them at their time of need. It likely will never be easy – you probably will never stop worrying. That is the price of admission. But remember it’s not your market or your business plan, or even your land that makes you a farmer. It is your knowledge of how to grow food. I never owned land and only once owned my business. If you are lucky enough to stay afloat through hard times, you will be welcomed into the farming community. Other farmers will not judge you for how you farm, only if you farm well. At the end of the day, when you are tired and go to pull your boots off, I hope you feel the power and freedom that farmers get to feel. And I hope it will make you want to get up early in the morning and do it again. -Michael https://www.michaelogormanfarming.com/about daily 0.75 2022-02-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61b126e4cfa8365fa2142635/353681a5-b274-48de-a11a-8344393a0061/mo_EB_003.jpg MY STORY - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61b126e4cfa8365fa2142635/ebba715d-bb21-4636-9b2c-efe4f791cd74/Trinity+River+.jpg MY STORY - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61b126e4cfa8365fa2142635/0b36f640-9389-4317-b8af-eef05f43a6c3/mo_TKO_020.jpg MY STORY - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61b126e4cfa8365fa2142635/f7867a21-335a-4db2-a8ab-172ddbea33a4/mo_GF_016.jpg MY STORY - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61b126e4cfa8365fa2142635/63f4ab22-48cb-46be-a533-41eeec192e78/new+photo+by+David+Frohman+copy+2.jpg MY STORY In 1971, my wife and I became founding members of the nation’s largest intentional community – or ‘commune’ – called ‘The Farm’, in middle-south Tennessee, not far north of the Alabama border. Despite my youth and relative inexperience, I ended up in charge of growing the community’s food. As the community grew to 1,500 people, including our four children, that responsibility became an enormous one, a journey filled with glorious successes, disappointing failures and a never-ending education. We were practicing vegans, so producing our food meant growing it, not raising livestock. At our peak, for several years, we were able to grow 90% of the community’s food on more than 1,000 cultivated acres within a fifty-mile radius – something that has not, to my knowledge, been repeated since. We grew soybeans, and processed them into soy milk, tofu, ice cream and more. It grew a variety of other dry beans, including kidney, black, pinto and lima beans, plus dry black-eyed peas. It raised every major grain but rice – white corn, yellow corn, wheat, oats, barley, rye and buckwheat – and milled its own flours and cereal products. Peanuts, popcorn and sesame seeds added variety to the diet. We grew a great array of summer vegetables – sweet corn, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers and green beans – with a strong influence from regional favorites – okra, crookneck squash, butter beans and black-eyed peas. Cool weather crops were mostly greens – cabbage, collards, turnip greens and acres and acres of kale (long before kale was cool). A large canning and freezing operation turned our excess produce into canned tomatoes, pickles and frozen vegetables for the winter. We grew larger acreage of potatoes and sweet potatoes for twelve-month supplies. Sweet potatoes were both a dietary mainstay, and selling certified sweet potato seed stock and transplants became a cottage industry. A two-story potato barn housed sweet potatoes up top where it was heated and onions and potatoes down below. Forrest soil, compost, sand and sawdust were trucked in for what was a very sophisticated plant growing system. We dismantled and reconstructed a large glass greenhouse that was complemented by numerous cold frames, all heated by a wood burning boiler that was also used, organically, to sterilize the soil mixes. And we were deeply committed to improving our soils. Crews went out daily to shovel out walking horse stables, clean cotton gins full of nitrogen-rich waste, gather fields of spent hay and more. Every scrap of food waste on the Farm was collected and composted – an enormous accomplishment. A box car each of rock phosphate and granite dust, were added to the fields. We were pioneers in using cover crops, decades before cover crops were common. We used a mix of red clover and barley for fields we wanted to turn in early and hairy vetch and rye for fields we could leave in to late spring. And we grew all our own cover crop seeds, planting the legumes and the grains separately for better harvest. And while the land owned by the community needed a lot of improvement, we were close to farm land in neighboring counties that were world renown for their phosphorous rich soil. This allowed us to grow most of our grains and beans with relatively little fertilizer (potassium for the legumes, both potassium and nitrogen for the grain). In early years we made money growing and producing sorghum molasses. And later we attempted growing vegetables for both wholesale and retail markets, including two winters in Homestead, Florida, the nation’s southernmost growing region, but inexperience in marketing produce and Florida’s coldest weather snap in a half century forced us back to focusing on feeding ourselves. After eleven years at The Farm, I moved away with my wife and children. Our kids had literally grown up eating what their dad had grown. And I had an education in farming and working with others that would benefit me during my entire career. Trinity River Farm: 1982-1985 and present: Growing Roots https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61b126e4cfa8365fa2142635/895015e4-7091-4ed1-86a9-1aa4e6a01a2a/rodale+2+copy.jpeg MY STORY - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61b126e4cfa8365fa2142635/c2fd4259-c226-48ec-9e00-5de77a62f553/Michael+Del+Cabo.jpg MY STORY - Make it stand out After two seasons at Earthbound, I wanted to farm in a way that was closer to my ideals. I wanted more latitude to run it the way I wanted to run it and, if possible, continue farming in Mexico. My old boss at TKO, Todd Koons, brought me to meet Larry Jacobs and Sandra Belin, owners of Jacob’s Farm/Del Cabo, Jacob’s Farm was a grower of organic culinary herbs in Central California and had started a unique grower’s cooperative, Del Cabo, with 150 landowning families in the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula. Larry and Sandy had met on Elliot Coleman’s farm in Maine, and were close friends with Helen and Scott Nearing, whose book, Living the Good Life, inspired a generation of back-to-the-landers. The Del Cabo growers were producing high value basil and cherry tomatoes and air-freighting them to Los Angeles. They asked me to go to the Northern end of Baja to start growing basil and tomatoes in the summer when it was too hot for them down south. After several months of driving down dirt roads, greeting local farmers over fencerows, and gaining their trust, I was able to help a number convert some fallow land to certified organic and start production the first of 1998. I would mentor the growers, grow their transplants, provide them with organic inputs, sort and pack their crops to head to the states, at first just a few pallets a day with a local trucker. By my second year, I started renting our own farms, still producing about 30% with outside growers, and building five unique growing regions from the middle of the peninsula north. Eventually we had 1,000 employees farming 1,600 acres under my management, shipping 3 to 4 semis north each day. Demand for our vegetables and herbs skyrocketed once we were able to establish year-round production. Small tomatoes became my biggest crop, eventually planting 700 acres on poles each year. Grape tomatoes quickly took over cherries, and over time we began breeding and adding our own unique and colorful varieties. By the time I left Del Cabo, my group was packing a half million clamshells of organic small tomatoes a week, 10% of the US market, and the overwhelming majority of organic ones. My second crop was basil which we would bunch for retail sale and pack loose for restaurants. Bulk boxes were pre-sorted and sent to Los Angeles and San Francisco for placement in retail packs. At first, growing basil was stressful, mostly for its post-harvest challenges, but I grew to love it, and we soon were shipping a semi-load of fresh cut organic basil a day. Another important vegetable for us was peas – determinate English peas and indeterminate snap peas and snow peas that we would grow on poles. Being a legume, the peas were great for rotation, and we got to reuse some of the 130 semi loads of stakes we had purchased for our tomatoes. Equally important, the November through May harvest kept many of our employees working year-round. Mexico is the largest exporter of tomatoes in the world, and most of it is now done indoors. I got to grow 30 acres of indoor, trellised tomatoes, rotating with cucumbers. Our tomatoes were organic, planted and cared for in soil, just as we would outside; the structures kept out wind, dust and disease vectoring insects. I got to learn from some amazing growers down here, most notably my friend David Rifenbark, who shared some of his insights for a recent FVC conference. Coming to the end of 2007, I was President (Administrador único in Mexican legal terms) of Agroproductos Del Cabo. I oversaw a growing region that stretched from the Northern end of Baja California down to Vizcaíno in Baja California Sur. I was also the only American employee. It was time to let the Mexicans run the company. The Del Cabo growing region I developed thrives today, and hundreds of farms have since converted to organic production. The farms are now run by the children and grandchildren of my first growers, who benefited from steady employment, fair compensation and help each year with school supplies. Many of the children finished their education because of this advantage and are now doctors, lawyers and agronomists. 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