- Today, I'm here at Sage Hill Farm, which uses no tractors, no fossil fuels. It's basically pre-industrial
market farming. Really, really cool, and it's on about three acres
here in a backyard, basically, and I think I see the owner here, Spencer. What's going on man? - [Spencer] Hey Kevin, how you doing? - Thanks for having me.
- Yeah, I appreciate you coming.
- You got a tool ready for me right now?
- Oh, yes sir. (Kevin laughing)
That's our hoe. - I love it. So talk to me. I mean, when we got here, there's houses around. It's a home, it's your home. - [Spencer] Yeah, so I
grew up in this house. We've been here for 22 years. Think about five or six years ago, we decided to start a farm. Actually, we didn't
decide to start a farm, we decided to start a family business and then as we got going along
with everything we're doing, we thought it'd be nice
to have a small garden, and that garden, it
became ready to harvest, so we set up a small farm stand and. - Is that this right here? - That's this little garden right here. So we started a little
small garden right here and it was ready for harvest. I made 200 bucks that
week and I got hooked, and I scaled from there. So within six months I
became a full-fledged farmer and went from there. - [Kevin] And that was how long ago? - [Spencer] That was about six years ago, so six seasons, yeah. - Talk to me about this. I mean, obviously you're saying no fossil fuels, no tractors, so the tool shed's gotta
be kind of extensive. - Exactly, so we're a four-acre farm. This primarily runs the entire farm. So no tractors, no fossil fuels, and so there are a lot
of tools that we use, we use things from other growers, so this is called the gridder and what this does is it kind
of standardizes the farm, so you roll it across your beds, and what that does, you're able to come in
and plant at the grid, so it gives you spacing, things like that, which is fantastic. - That's nice. - And then another tool, we often use these hoes like this. - I love this guy, yeah, yeah. - I loved it until I got one of these. - Oh shoot. - And so these are one
of my favorite ones. So this is a wheel hoe, and it's very ergonomical, so what you do is you walk behind it and you push and it hoes aisles. - And you come back and forth a bit, and like chop at the root level. - [Spencer] Exactly, yeah,
and it makes it real easy. And so with the other hoe, you're kind of on your ground like bent over like that a little bit, this keeps it real
ergonomical and real fun to stand upright all day. The other one of the fun tools
that we have on our farm too is this is our broad fork. So since we're a no-till farm, so then we do like a minimal tillage. We're just cultivating the top two inches. There's no soil inversion. We're using a broad fork to
stick the tines in full depth, and we pull back just to get
a little bit of aeration down. - Just to light loosen, yeah. Did you ever till? Because I'm sure we're
gonna talk about it, but this is nice sort
of terracing structure and obviously the soil had
to get improved in some way at the beginning. Did it ever? - Yeah, so in the beginning what we did is what we wanted to get like fertilization, nice and deep fertilization
mean like compost, alfalfas, things like that, so we came
in and we did an initial till, and then after that we've
been very surface level since, and what we found is that
every year since then, the return has gotten better, and that's just by soil care. The healthier it's gotten, the better our return has
gotten, everything, so. - I want to check out one more tool. What is this bad boy right here? - This is our tine weeder. You wanna hold that? - Look at that. - So what's the fun
thing about this guy is on larger scale farms, you usually see these things
being dragged behind tractors, and basically what you're doing is you're thread stage weeding, so if you have a crop that
is planted about two weeks, you can come through and drag this. It won't damage the crop, but it'll get all the thread stage weeds, so thread stage would be
something that is just germinated and it's got like this
little hair something. - You've got the top root and you got maybe a
seed leaf or something. - Exactly yeah. You drag this through two passes and it keeps your beds nice and clean. Yeah, so it's another effective way, so we operate on a
standardized 30 inch wide bed. Standardizing the farm
was a huge thing for us, 'cause it kinda really
simplified all the nuances of it. But, so this is a 30 inch wide, so it makes two passes there and back and your cultivation's done. - That's perfect. Yeah, I think the thing, the cool part about the
market farming piece is like you think you talk gardening, I think of that as inefficient farming. Market farming, you might say is inefficient monoculture cropping, but for very different
reasons, very logical reasons. And so then every tool set is designed for that specific use,
like I'm never using that, but I don't have 30 inch rows. I've got like raised beds. Well let's check out
the hillside right here. So I'm curious like how did you? It wasn't a farm or it wasn't
a garden or a farm before, so how did you actually build out these sort of nice beds and these nice terraces? - So we came in, we terraced it. As you see, as we moved
down the hill, we see, we kind of started to think bigger, so up here, the first
garden here, did by hand. We got, then from here
we got a small tractor, five foot wide tractor that kind of tears in
these little plateaus. - Clear those out, yeah. - And then as you see, we get down to this
larger greenhouse here. This is when we started
really think bigger, and then by the time we got to, once we get to these larger
plateaus just down here is when I started to really
figure out market gardening and where I wanted to take this, and this is where the
plateaus were always designed to be able to fit a 30 foot by
100 foot long greenhouses on, and so to be able to now have this is kind of a big deal for us, 'cause we would find like in that six year moving towards our goals. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this zone right here,
aside from the greenhouse, what I think is interesting
is you've got this, you're sort of playing with the curvature of the slope anyways. Would that sort of go against maybe traditional market
gardening standardization? 'Cause you can't run it maybe
perfectly, but it's still, I think it looks even more beautiful. - [Spencer] And that's the thing too is what we found is at the time we were like, "Oh, this is what we need,"
you know, go with the curve, it's terraced perfectly with it, so the water sits in it. Drainage wise it's great. It's perfect. Ideally it's the hardest part though, because the curve makes
it hard to run rows, run drip lines to keep your frost cloth or insect netting on. There's the bend, you know,
the bend makes it difficult, and I understand why
people want things straight because pulling something
straight is a lot easier than forcing it around a curve, you know? We make it work. I think ideally as we move
forward as growers too, I think this might become
more of like an orchard style. We're thinking about doing blueberries and so we're thinking about running this as a whole blueberry and in
itself, which might be nice too, and these are things that are a little more permanent long term. They're less maintenance, so like. - High value crop too. I mean the berries are gonna be paying off for like years and years.
- Exactly, yeah. - Well, where should we go next? - [Spencer] Let's head this way, I'll take you to the nursery.
- [Kevin] Let's do it. I don't know if you know, I
used to sell microgreens myself. - Oh, did you? - 2013.
- Oh, nice. - I grabbed, like, I grabbed a kit off of, I don't even remember
where, somewhere online. Like I saw red garnet amaranth, saw the color of it and I
cut it off, called my cousin, we went, walked La Jolla and sold it to a couple places there, and I was like, "Oh,
like I'm in business." It's kind of the same thing
with like the farm stand. You're like, "Okay, dollars are coming in for this," you know? - Got hooked, yeah. So one of the cool things
about our nursery is that we kind of stack enterprises. So during like late December, early January, this is loaded out with our summer crops, so like right now we still
have some of our cucumbers, these are gonna get transplanted
out to one of our tunnels. We operate with, with peat pots. We found that with the cucumbers 'cause they're so, so sensitive that they have a hard time transplanting. - So you go straight in
the ground with the pot. - Straight in the ground with them, doesn't disturb the roots,
everything like that. But so this tunnel is
slammed out in early January with our summer crops, and so it's the only
tunnel that has heating, so it has electricity,
things like that to it. So we wanna see that it
kind of stacks enterprise and make sure that it's making
money once everything leaves. So what we started to do is we started a microgreen
business on top of it. I personally would never do microgreens if I didn't have staff. It is a tremendous amount of work, so my hat goes off to you. - [Kevin] Harvesting, all the cleaning. - [Spencer] Cleaning, receding, I mean, every three days this process is repeated. It's like boom, boom, boom. It's been a great, great venture. My staff that do it, they do love it, and they do have a specialized person that comes in and does it, that's her job. - Especially when you're
talking like value of crop, like on this table, I don't know if you know
off the top of your head, but it's a significant amount
of value just sitting here. - Yeah, yeah, it's a lot. I think per tray we're trying to yield just under $20 per tray, and that's hitting our mark. - Yeah, so you got a
couple thousand dollars worth of produce right here. And this is, you know, these grow fast. - They do. - So turnover's pretty quick on this. - Every 10 days. But then you're doing it every three days for whatever reason. - Yeah.
(men laughing) You just gotta check a
lot of different things. - Exactly, exactly, so, but I mean, it's a fun one to have, it's a great one to
start off with, and it's one of those high value crops. - This though, yes, this
standard seed starting, right? - Yeah, yeah. So these, so what we do is every 14 days, we're reseeding salad,
bok choys, you know, beets, things like that, and these things are kind of like our main staples for our farm. Our farm is, we being small, we have like, quick turnover crops, so trying to kind of keep
things under 70 days, crops like that. This main table here though is a fun one. It's a big large heat table. We utilize housing for in-floor heating. - [Kevin] Oh, the radiant floor stuff? Oh no way, okay nice. - So we just, we ran a radiant floor with two piece of plywood and
then ran a pond liner on top, and then just run the heater. - Just water on top of that, no problem. - It's good to go. It's a real simple way of making like a really large heat mat, and the other thing to do, we run violas, so like edible blossoms, things like that for
like chefs and whatnot. It's a great one to have. Our chefs loves it. - [Kevin] This, I mean, again, like it's wild how much value there
is in some of these crops. I mean, I think guys like
M.A.H. Young, John Poitier or Carter Stone in the early days kind of came up with that whole idea. It was like, look like you can't grow, I don't know, melons for people probably on a market garden and do well, so you gotta do this kind of stuff. - And it's funny too, when we started, we went for whatever
reason they say not to, and I still went through
it and like, "Oh my God, I wanna try it, I wanna try." You know, you gotta try it. - You gotta learn your own lessons. - You do, yeah, and you do find out. Yeah, you can't have that. It just takes too long. - Apples or whatever, at least the area. - Yeah, exactly. Well, it's getting warm, so you want to? - Let's head out. let's head out. All right, let's see this. The grand reveal. Look at this. Tomato heaven. Oh my god. Wow. All cherries right now
or what are you growing? - So we have, this is our cherry tunnel, so on this side we have a grape cherry tomato or a grape tomato, which is a little bit larger
than a standard grape tomato, and then on this side we
have our standard red tomato, which we actually are
just getting our first few blushing out to red right now. - [Kevin] Oh, look at that,
yeah, they're starting to come. - [Spencer] So they're
pretty early for us. They'd honestly would be earlier if our winter wasn't as bad. You know, wet, wet winter. Even in the tunnel it affected us. - Did it really?
- Yeah, oh yeah. - In the sense of like? - Just gray days. You know, gray days and the cooler nights. I mean, we had to, I normally don't ever
run a propane heater, and I do remember one night in January I had to literally come
down at like 2:00 AM, it was like a frost warning, I was like, it'll kill the cucumbers, so I ran a propane heater in here. - That's crazy. You're training 'em up single leader, keep keeping the space in like a foot, foot and a half maybe,
or something like that. - Yep, so about 16 inches, and then single leader coming
all the way up to the top basically suckering everything out. Normally most growers, what they'll do, which is at these will
actually be a two head, you'll split 'em at the bed or at the base to be a two head leader, and then your rows are wider. You're operating at
like a 40 inch wide row, and then another, so it's
less rows in the tunnel, but it's less plants. - I just saw a farm where
they'll go double leader, and they'll do like a up down sort of tie, so they split 'em this way, and then they space 'em
out a little bit more. - And the trellising is
a little different too when they go to do that, so the trellising is actually
split, so you would have, instead of having a single line, you would actually split
it to where it's two lines about 30 inches or less apart. - I haven't seen this setup up before where it's like a big long
piece of just straight up metal, and then just tied to twine here. - [Spencer] Yeah, so
this is from Neversink. So Neversink came up with this system about like farming efficient
and things like that where he operates, it's
called the hook and trellis, but it's a wicked thing
that comes with it too, but what these are, these are our hooks, so basically we used to
operate with a tomahook, which were those. - That's what I use. - So Neversink has this system
where it's a reusable clip where you bunny hop and
as you move them down, you're bunny hopping the
clips as you lower and lean. So we operate on a lower lean method too. So basically lower lean
is like a big carousel, so as the plants grow taller, they're producing more and more tomatoes. - It reminds me of like
a dry cleaning setup, where everything just spins around. - [Spencer] Yeah, that's
exactly what it is. It goes up and then as they continue up, you're removing the lower leafs. As the lower leaf's removed, you're getting more fruit,
everything like that. - [Kevin] Because eventually you'll have a big chunk of
stem, big length of stem, which just kind of falling
down going this way. - Yeah, and there're
smaller tunnels we've did in the previous years. We have tomato plants that get up to about like 45 feet long, and so one stem. Ideally that one starts
coming back this way and it becomes this nice thing. - I've seen that most often in hydro, they'll do it hydroponically, and then you just see like this one tomato plant going this way, and then just a boatload
of vines just wrapped. - It's super smart. It's really efficient. It's really how to keep
the plant producing, so our hopes is that you
have a plant that produces for like the next like
seven, eight months, and that's the dream. You keep it moving, keep it growing. I mean, ideally, in Southern California, you might be able to go a whole year, depends on what the plants can produce. You know, great soil, you never know. - Because for you, it's like, it's gotta be one of the most
popular crops you're selling. - It is, it is.
- Right, so the longer you can
keep that season viable, especially as you get into
the shoulder months, right? Like the demand probably stays high, and price might stay high too, 'cause who else is gonna have it? - Exactly, and the idea is
too is that with really, it's smart growing because instead of having a single like head lettuce, you chop it out once and it's done, these plants are here for eight months. Now you're just maintaining
a crop and it's producing, financially it's giving you money back. - [Kevin] It makes total sense. So on the cukes, I mean these, they're popping right now. - Yeah so our cucumbers are going off. We're struggling a little bit. You can see on this side we
have a little bit of like soil health issues and problems with that, and one of the main reasons
we're having that is actually you can see where we had
a mini tunnel over here, and that's where this side of it kind of is all producing really well. The soil, we really cared for
the soil a lot over there. Here it kinda got a little bit of neglect, but these, I mean these
crops do, they look decent. We've definitely grown better cucumbers. They're still like really
tasty, if you wanna try one. - Yeah, let's get a bite going. - Yeah, snap that in
half and give it a go. They're really good. Some of the best cucumbers ever, you know. - That's really good.
- Sweet, very fresh. - That's really nice.
What variety is this? - This is, it's a Japanese
variety called nugani. Sometimes I'll forget, you know, but yeah. - It's dense, you know, it's nice. - Thin skin, small seed,
is very nice that way. Ideally they can get about 16 inches long, so they're really profitable. It is another one of those
profitable crops that where you can plant 'em on the
ground and they can produce a ton of produce for you
with a single planting, and so it's another one of those crops that we really kind of gravitate towards is when we're looking at like
a business being profitable as a small scale is that we're
looking at something that can constantly give back with
a minimal amount of care. The other thing too is
what you see right here too is kind of in our greenhouses, we don't use any type of pesticides. - Oh, look at that, you got some ladybugs. - Integrated pest programs. So we actually purchase
ladybugs and other insects like green lacewing bugs, things
like that to kinda do our pest management for us. 'Cause I don't want to, I'm
not exposed to any pesticides, my family's here, my staff don't wanna
be exposed to anything, so what we do is we
invest in ideas like that where it kind of push forward, where these things are doing work for us. - Makes total sense. Because it'd naturally
be here in a garden, but this is of course a
more protected environment so you gotta reintroduce. - Yeah, inside a greenhouse too, what's really nice about it, it's such a controlled environment that you can flush the
house with a beneficial and literally wipe out the problem. - Clean them out. - And you just over flush it, purchase a ton, it wipes the
house out, open the doors up, they can leach out into
the farm like that. On the farm too, we have
beneficial head rows too, so we have flowers and
plants of that nature that kinda bring in that kind
of bugs for us, which is nice. - Awesome, cool. Let's check it out. It's getting hot in here.
- [Spencer] It is. - [Kevin] We're outta the hot house. - Yeah, it was hot. - It's not even that cool out here, but it's just much cooler than there. - It's breathable. - So you've got some
baller rain capture tanks. I was telling you, I got
about 7,500 gallons here. One of these is more than
that, so talk to me about this. - Yeah, so we have a 10,000
and 8,000 gallon tanks, and one of the things about our farm that's been kind of really cool is the fact that we're on this terrace, so we came up with these ideas that were, I think other farmers don't
really have the ability to, so what we did is we
plumb the entire house for any freshwater that we use in there to drain into these tanks. Same time the house is guttered, our mini house, our nursery, we saw the microgreens
that is also guttered for rain catchment, so all these tanks, it comes through these, it
goes through desilting tanks, so lose the dirt, everything like that, goes in the one tank and
then into the next tank and then comes down and
goes into our booster and then gets refed
back out into our farm. - So this challenger right
here, that's a booster pump. - Yes sir. The booster pump is on the left, but yeah, then goes pressure tank. What's really cool is that, so now the fresh water that we have to purchase for our wash pack facility
is now being repurposed and reused back in our farm, so our tomato house here
is being reused in there, for our field blocks down
here is being reused there. - So you're coming outta
city for the washroom, 'cause you have to. - 'Cause we have to. - And then you're doubling
up by putting it into here. Yeah, that makes sense. - So then our big rains this year, we filled both tanks up
within like two weeks. The fact that we had our microgreen house, the fact that it's plumbed
for rain catchment, a ton of water hits there. So the idea is what we wanna do is we wanna put a reservoir
in on top of the property and then these main houses here, this house here and the other house here, have these as rain catchments. So this house is a 30 foot
by 100 foot wide greenhouse. Imagine the amount of
water that hits that. - [Kevin] So much, 'cause
I think it's something like every 500 square feet, it's like a thousand gallons per inch or something like that. Some math like that where like
it's thousands of gallons. - And so what's
interesting about this too, it's a 30 foot wide house, but it took a 55 foot sheet of plastic to cover the whole thing, so even if it's hitting the side walls, that's still 55 feet of
coverage giving collecting. - The total surface area,
the curved surface area. - Right, so we knew at
this point we're like, "Okay, we're gonna need a reservoir," so I think the idea is that
we're gonna off this house, this house, and there's actually
a third one of this scale gonna happen right down there is those will be our rain catchments that will fill our reservoir
up top and then it's. - So like a open air reservoir? Basically like a natural pond, I guess. - Yeah, a natural swimming
pond, kind of fun. - That'll be cool. - I got my daughter.
- And that'll go back up? - That'll be at the top of the property. So we'll have another booster pump that'll pump this all the way back up. This is not an inexpensive process. - When you look at this,
you go, "That's dollars." - It's fun. It's nice to have this
though because we talked to, we had this water
management fellow come out and he said that he doesn't
know of any other farm in San Diego that has this program running where they're reusing
their wash pack water. - I haven't heard of it. I mean it makes logical sense completely, but like the execution of
it I think is the hard part. - And I think that's
what our elevation change opens it up for opportunities like that. - Yeah, I was gonna say like the fact that you were in
this disadvantageous slope, so to speak, just unlocked something that I think most people
wouldn't have even tackled. - Exactly. - Awesome, dude, I love that, I love that. - So let's walk down,
I'll show you the other, our kind of our orchard area. This is kind of like
one of my favorite spots in the whole farm. Up underneath of our fruit
trees, we have our veggies. Our fruit trees, we have
peaches, apricots, and plums. These are all Santa Rosa plums here that we planted last year. - [Kevin] Doing really well. - [Spencer] Yeah, they're doing very nice. So this is also where you can
kinda see where we thought we had a kind of an odd
corner part of the farm and we knew that we still needed terrace, so we came in and we did
like a double wide terrace. Make it a little bit easier for us. One of the cool things
that we operate with is insect netting. The insect netting kinda is
another preventative method of keeping us away from having
to use any harmful pesticides or chemicals like that. - And this is all greens here,
right, for the most part? - Yeah, so we grow,
there's all salad greens, there's beets underneath these, these are daikon, bok
choys, and things like that. One of the really cool things too is you see our slopes here, so this is another great way to like, for like weed management, since we didn't use
any type of herbicides, if you look up here, these slopes up here that
kind of have like an array of different species of
weeds and things like that. I came up with the idea that maybe we would choke out our
weeds with a dominant species, so I seeded in here a new white clover, and what that does is come through and it is actually choked
out any other species of weed where it's this single crop of clover. Then what we will then
do is we'll harvest it, we'll chop it back, and we'll
actually use that for compost, so then we can turn that
into something else. You can also see in the tree line too, we incorporate birdhouses and
so we use those birdhouses kind of to our benefit. Primarily the insect netting for us now is to stop like rabbits
and things like that. When we first started growing, we were having issues with
like with cabbage moths and things like that, and so we would use the insect nets and then I noticed that
underneath the nets, it was getting worse and worse. I'm like, what is going on? So I pulled back nets in frustration, and within two weeks I noticed that the population of
caterpillars had diminished. - Birds were just destroying 'em. - Birds were going haywire. So I put in birdhouses and
our problem was fixed there. - There you go. - It was nice. - Yeah, so this is more of
a mammal netting you guys. - Yeah, exactly. - Awesome, well what's going on in here? - This is our most recent structure. We kinda ran into a situation
in the beginning of the season where we needed to plant our tomatoes. These are our large slicing tomatoes. We planned to run the same
exact system as you saw up in the upper tunnel,
but the tunnel wasn't done, so we had to plant everything
out and then build. We built the tunnel over 'em. - Got it. - But it's been a fun. - So you will eventually start going, you'll go single leader
on yours slices as well? - Yeah, so we just set the system up. We just got this literally
skinned yesterday. So we just put the
plastic yesterday on it. - It's fresh. - And the idea is that
we'll come back through now and we'll stand 'em all up,
but these are our bell peppers. We're gonna do like the
Florida weave style. - [Kevin] I was gonna ask, yeah, 'cause you're probably not
coming down from the sky on that. - Some growers do. Some growers will actually, they'll trellis em just like
the tomatoes will, but we find it's a complicated one. You gotta be a really good grower. Hey, what they'll do is
they'll splinter it off to four heads. - Oh shoot. - Those four heads, and then they'll trellis
from those four heads. - Oh, so they go long season, they do a top or a quad top, I guess, and then they say like, "I'm gonna take my bells three to five and I'm gonna go like 15 to 20%." - Exactly, yeah. And it's, it's a pretty
complicated system, one that I'm not quite there yet. - It feels worth if you
can master it, right? But otherwise, like, I mean, how are bells just going back to like, you're growing for profit, right? So like how are bells
versus, I don't know, shishitos or something else? 'Cause you just don't get as many, right? - Sure, the bells are more
profitable than tomato. - Really?
- Oh, sure. - Is it per bell? - Pricing? It's per bell, but it's
more the popularity of it. For that and cucumbers. Cucumbers and bell peppers,
the popularity of them are. - Just insane, yeah. - But yeah, so these are actually,
and what I do with these, it is a really kind of a fun new variety that we've never grown. It's a Japanese pink
tomato, so it's very sweet. Instead of being like, I noticed a lot of growers
they go with, for the chefs, things like that, they head
towards like a French heirloom. I had a Japanese fellow,
he brought me a tomato. He's like, "This is the
sweetest meal you'll ever have." I tasted it, I was like, "Oh, it's more like a tomato fruit," but it was more like a fruity flavor, than a like acidic tomato, and so I got the variety
from him and I was like. - What's the name of it? (Spencer stuttering) - Momotaro? - Momotaro. - It's Momotaro, yeah,
I've grown that one. Yeah, I've grown that one. - It's very sweet. - Yeah, I mean, I've grown
two of them, not 200, but still like, it's very aesthetic. Honestly, even too, which again, that matters in farming, right? Makes it to the market. - I'm actually very
excited to try these out. - No way, that's rad. - Yeah.
- Awesome. - It's cool that you knew it too. - Yeah, yeah, no, I got mine
I think from Kitazawa Seed, back in the day. It was like three seasons ago I grew it. But it worked, I mean, it was
an amazing, delicious one. - That's good to hear.
- Sweet. - First time doing it,
so I'm very nervous. - Be happy, be happy. - Cool, cool. So yeah, so this is
our wash pack facility. One of the really cool
things about our farm is it's all on site, so the crew's walking 20 feet of the fields back up
into here, which is amazing. So everything comes in
here and gets wash packed, and then me and my father, we built a walk-in
refrigerator right here. So this is our cooler room. - Got the cool bot set up? - Got the cool bot. It's a 10 by 10. Pretty nice, and you
know, it's really nice. - Take a peek? - Yeah, absolutely, go on in. Feels really nice in there. - Ooh, that's nice. Got some, there you go, some beets. Ready to go. Nice. - So what's really nice too
is we'll bring things up, wash 'em, put 'em right next door so it keeps 'em really nice and fresh. So one of the other things we do is we go through a ton of
greens, so we do have about, we do about 400 pounds of salad a week. And then during our high season, like summer when people are eating more, we do about up to six. A lot of snails. - Little guy right there. - So these are our double bubble tanks, so we put the salads in. Are you familiar with bubblers? - I am, yeah. - So we put the salads
in, we bubble 'em go, from tank to tank. These are our spinners. - Converted washing machine spinners. - Yeah, so these crank,
crank out, spin 'em out, and then everything gets packed, and then placed right into storage. Yeah, so this is our kind of our brain kind of like mapped out. So one of the things that
we did was that we broke up the field blocks into field blocks, and so then what we did, we're able to map
everything out on the board. So we have lots one through eight, and then we have our other
property down the road mapped out there too, which is nice, so instead of like telling
someone to go to row 300, you're telling someone to
go to lot four row five, and this makes it a little bit more. - Like grocery aisle style organization. - Kinda helps out with that too. You know, we got all our tools and then we have our harvest board. This is our harvest board. Where this goes like chefs,
so these are all our chefs, restaurants, and grocery stores. - Oh, so this is a varietals or crop and then this is a customer. - Yeah, I had it, it was a nice grid, and then obviously the concept white. But now, yeah. So we have all of our chefs up here. You kind of used to. - That's a clever way to do it. - Yeah, and so you would see
that you have to harvest. - Well when you're
taking the orders though, are you taking orders and
writing the order on the board and then harvesting to the order? - Yeah.
- Right, okay. Got it, got it, got it. - So what we'll do is we, every Tuesday and Friday
we harvest the order, so we harvest on Tuesday
and deliver same day, which is really nice. Our chefs really, you know, kind of like that, really help like push our
business in that way too, 'cause it kinda helped us gain customers, the fact that we were able to
harvest and deliver same day. - Sure, yeah, I mean who's gonna say no? - But this is also really
helpful for staff too. So if you have staff come in, they see, they know exactly what they're getting, so half this crew that does a harvest, they know they're getting 60 charred. The other half that's in here that's doing the washing packing, they know where that 60
char is being broken up to and who it's going to. So it's kind of. - So then you're kitting
it when you're washing it, you're like kitting into
boxes for a customer. - Yeah, exactly. So like right here, this
is all green onions. These are going to two different chefs, and I think over there
we have like nettle, which is like a native weed, we're actually selling to
chefs too, which is fun. Yeah, so you kind of really getting all that fun nuanced stuff. - Speaking of, let's go to the farm stand. - Yeah, let's go there. - All right, so we're here at the stand, which is where people are coming, right? Like a couple times a week or? - Yeah, so what we do is
we open up every Saturday to the public, so people can come out, they can shop on the farm
and they can walk around and see where things grown. I think it's really
important people can come out and see where it's being grown, 'cause I think a lot of times
people have this disconnect of like, if you expect you're
selling at a grocery store or farmer's market, they don't know what the farm looks like, so being open to the public, that gives 'em like the ability
to see how we're doing it, 'cause I mean, we're doing
a real natural method and that method that I don't
think anyone else is doing in San Diego. - [Kevin] I don't think so. I've seen a lot of 'em. I don't think anyone's
doing quite like you guys. - [Spencer] Well thank you. You know, and I'm proud of that too, and I think we're kind of, I kind of want to be in that foot going forward
leading the way, kind of, and opening the door and showing people that this is something that they can do themselves, you know? There's not a lot of younger
people coming into the game, which is kind of like a scary feeling, so it's, at the same time,
it's like what I want my farm to be modeled is that
it's not flat by any means, and so, even by not being flat, you can still make it possible. - Well, here's what's interesting to me. Like you didn't start out farming, you didn't have like
the advantage of birth, of like growing up in it. You're 6, 5, 6 years deep, you're on the north side of your property, which is not optimal, right? And on a terrace, which again, maybe it is, maybe not. I think you've turned it
into an advantage for sure, but most people wouldn't
say like, that's amazing. And you've got like six, seven
different streams of revenue. You got four employees, like it's working. - Yeah, and it is, and it's taking time. A lot of headaches, a lot of pain, a lot of like fear of
failing, things like that, but honestly, it's possible, and like I said, that's
one of the reasons why we started this foundation
of learning center, 'cause we wanna teach people, bring them in and teach people. 'Cause people come up with this, all these questions all the time. Like, "How do you do
this? How do you do this? And like, how do you make a business? And how are you even succeeding
as a business this way?" And so I think it's a great opportunity for us to kind of like,
"Hey, I can help you, but I need to be funded." At the same time there has to be like that because I can't take time away. I'm a cog in the system. I'm part of the system, you know? That's another part of
the about farming too. 'Cause a lot of people
don't understand is that you wanna start a farm,
you're gonna be the farmer. - You don't really have a choice. - But it's been a fantastic
process, it's been super fun. I just had my baby and so she gets to grow
up on a farm too now. - Look at that, yeah. - So it's been like this
amazing little story. - That's amazing. Well dude, thanks for showing it to us. We really appreciate it.
- I appreciate you coming out. Yeah, great time. - We'll be back, I'm sure. Hope you guys enjoyed. Sage Hill, you can check
them out in the description. Good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
