The Collaborative Farming Podcast

Andrew Adamski, or walkie talkie callsign gopher, is one of the farmer owners of Full Circle Community Farm in Wisconsin, the land of coops in the US. He came back to his generations old family farm in 2017 after college, along with his now wife heather, to not only continue the family farming tradition, but diversify both its production and membership. He talks about his returning to the farm, their simplified and flexible business structure, using what he learned about ecology to develop the farms ownership/membership model, and that you don't have to have it all figured out to begin to include other members of the farm in the decision-making process.

Heather, his wife, is the manager of the Slo-Farmers Coop, a farmer marketing cooperative of eight small farms providing a free choice, direct to consumer CSA, and we get into how that evolved over time, took off during covid, and how keystone farms can leverage their production capacity to not only sell more produce, but make space for beginning and specialty farmers, as well.

They, and I mean the now five farmer owners of fun circle community farm, were awarded the marbleseed farmers of the year award in 2024. If your interested in hearing more about what they are doing, both Andrew and Heather will be presenting at Marbleseeds 2025 conference happening February 20th through the 22nd.

Folks who support the show...

Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill

ASAP (Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project) will offer the Business of Farming Conference on Saturday, February 22, in Asheville, North Carolina. Find out more at asapconnections.org

High Mowing Organic Seeds has the professional quality seeds and supportive grower reps to get you from seed to harvest. Visit highmowingseeds.com to request a catalog and use code NOTILL25 for 10% off your order of $100 or more!

Kelly Maynard is a cooperative development specialist at the university of Wisconsin center for cooperative development and we're going to get into some practical advice and tools you can use when thinking about going into cooperative farming, yourself, or yourselves, as it were. This is the second coop development person, or forth depending on how you define that role, I've had on this season to, if nothing else, drive the point home that there are people out there who's life work it is support the development of your "working together" ideas. Not only do you not have to farm alone, you don't have to build cooperative systems alone.

Mentioned in the show...

Farm Commons resource on FSA farm ownership loans

Farm Commons and UWCC toolkit on sharing labor

Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making

UWCC recorded webinars, see Tools for an Effective Board and Decision-Making Tools for the Board Room

Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill

ASAP (Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project) will offer the Business of Farming Conference on Saturday, February 22, in Asheville, North Carolina. Find out more at asapconnections.org

Farmhand enables you to offload your administrative tasks, send and manage communications, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and book a free test drive at farmhand.partners/notill

High Mowing Organic Seeds has the professional quality seeds and supportive grower reps to get you from seed to harvest. Visit highmowingseeds.com to request a catalog and use code NOTILL25 for 10% off your order of $100 or more!

Welcome back to Collab Farm, the podcast where we talk about all the ways small- and mid-scale farmers can work together, even in big $10 million food system rebuilding kinds of ways. Like this conversation that I had with Lexi Close from Appalachia Regional Cooperative Development and the Appalachia Producers Co-op. Now, Lexi is involved with much of the work going on in a cooperative beef processing facility that's currently under construction in Washington County, Eastern Tennessee. We get into how the project got started from the initial idea to the feasibility studies to raising such a large amount of capital. We also get into how the membership works, including some collective marketing opportunities for local producer members for the Eastern Tennessee region, and what these decentralized processing networks look like as much as 100 years ago, what we lost in centralization And how they can serve as a model for building them back.

Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill

ASAP (Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project) will offer the Business of Farming Conference on Saturday, February 22, in Asheville, North Carolina. Find out more at asapconnections.org

Farmhand enables you to offload your administrative tasks, send and manage communications, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and book a free test drive at farmhand.partners/notill

High Mowing Organic Seeds has the professional quality seeds and supportive grower reps to get you from seed to harvest. Visit highmowingseeds.com to request a catalog and use code NOTILL25 for 10% off your order of $100 or more!

I'm going to be real honest with you, I've been working hard lately. If you're listening to this, I bet you've been working hard, too. Case in point, I JUST got our garlic in the ground in down here in zone 7, but better late than never I suppose.

So, I thought I'd seize this opportunity to bring back an old episode, the very FIRST episode of collaborative farm, actually, a conversation I had with Chris bonder of Close to Home Organics and Glen Valley Farm. This one still comes to mind as one of the best collab farm episodes ever and now that we're reaching a wider audience, I wanted to give it the opportunity to reach more listeners. Chris is not only stellar farmer and a part of a cooperative farm framework, he's extremely well versed in the history of modern farm cooperatives.

Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill

ASAP (Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project) will offer the Business of Farming Conference on Saturday, February 22, in Asheville, North Carolina. Find out more at asapconnections.org

Farmhand enables you to offload your administrative tasks, send and manage communications, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and book a free test drive at farmhand.partners/notill

High Mowing Organic Seeds has the professional quality seeds and supportive grower reps to get you from seed to harvest. Visit highmowingseeds.com to request a catalog and use code NOTILL25 for 10% off your order of $100 or more!

Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill

The OSC Pack Pact is a collective action campaign that works to reduce single-use packaging in the natural products industry. Receive a discount code to shop select products from leading natural products brands that you love. Click the link in the show notes to join the Pack Pact!

Farmhand enables you to offload your administrative tasks, send and manage communications, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and book a free test drive at farmhand.partners/notill

High Mowing Organic Seeds has the professional quality seeds and supportive grower reps to get you from seed to harvest. Visit highmowingseeds.com to request a catalog and use code NOTILL25 for 10% off your order of $100 or more!

Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill

The OSC Pack Pact is a collective action campaign that works to reduce single-use packaging in the natural products industry. Receive a discount code to shop select products from leading natural products brands that you love. Click the link in the show notes to join the Pack Pact!

Farmhand enables you to offload your administrative tasks, send and manage communications, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and book a free test drive at farmhand.partners/notill

High Mowing Organic Seeds has the professional quality seeds and supportive grower reps to get you from seed to harvest. Visit highmowingseeds.com to request a catalog and use code NOTILL25 for 10% off your order of $100 or more!

Emma Busby used to be the former Chapter Coordinator for the Southeast TN Young Farmers and has since moved on to be a board member of the Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network. We met back at the '23 TN Local Food Summit whose focus that year was "cultivating cooperation" and she had some really interesting work and insights to share, particularly some work she facilitated with a group of small-scale farmers around coordinated crop planning (CCP) and building aggregation systems from the ground up rather than the top down.

Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill

Harnois Greenhouses are engineered to face any North American climate, ensuring unparalleled brightness, agronomic performance, faster return on investment and lasting durability. Harnois Greenhouses, a leader in turnkey solutions for local growers.

Farmhand enables you to offload your administrative tasks, send and manage communications, and sell more to your customers. Learn more and book a free test drive at farmhand.partners/notill

High Mowing Organic Seeds has the professional quality seeds and supportive grower reps to get you from seed to harvest. Visit highmowingseeds.com to request a catalog and use code NOTILL25 for 10% off your order of $100 or more!

Sarah K. Mock has written two books that I absolutely love and have had a profound effect on how I view my own farming outside of just growing better carrots,  Farm and Other F Words and Big Team Farms, about how we can begin to chart a path forward by… you guessed it… working together. She has a substack, People Eat the Land, and a much better podcast than this one, The Only Thing That Lasts.

Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill

Harnois Greenhouses are engineered to face any North American climate, ensuring unparalleled brightness, agronomic performance, faster return on investment and lasting durability. Harnois Greenhouses, a leader in turnkey solutions for local growers.

The OSC Pack Pact is a collective action campaign that works to reduce single-use packaging in the natural products industry. Receive a discount code to shop select products from leading natural products brands that you love. Click the link in the show notes to join the Pack Pact!

Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill

Harnois Greenhouses are engineered to face any North American climate, ensuring unparalleled brightness, agronomic performance, faster return on investment and lasting durability. Harnois Greenhouses, a leader in turnkey solutions for local growers.

The OSC Pack Pact is a collective action campaign that works to reduce single-use packaging in the natural products industry. Receive a discount code to shop select products from leading natural products brands that you love. Click the link in the show notes to join the Pack Pact!

Hey folks, it's Jackson and today I've got a bonus episode of Collab Farm with Mike & Armonda of Rose Hill Farm Stop in Bloomington, Indiana. I attended a session with them at the Organic Association of Kentucky conference '23 and was really impressed. You'll see why in a minute...

Now, you may have heard the last episode of The No-Till Market Garden Podcast with the great Alex Ball speaking with the owners of the Argus Farm Stop in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and thought, 'yeah, yeah, yeah... that's great you can do that there, but probably not here.'

That is exactly why I love Rose Hill Farm Stop. They spent some time at Argus and have adapted the model to be a producer coop and replicated it in a more rural area with a lower median income. We talk about how they got the idea off of the ground, how it functions as a producer coop, how they have solved some of the logistical challenges, and what the farm stop looks like a little more than a year into operation.

You can support our work by picking up a copy of The Living Soil Handbook, becoming a Patreon member, joining our free online growers community, or just sharing this episode with another farm friend you'd want to start a producer coop with? Just sayin'...

Remember, many hands make light work.