No-Till Farming and Market Gardening in Zone 5b, 5,200ft (FULL TOUR)

[Music] what's up everyone Kevin from epic gardening here I'm here with Zach from primo farms that's right yeah so we're up in Reno where we're actually where are we we're a little bit outside of Reno yeah about about twelve miles north of Reno about a thousand feet higher about fifty two hundred and sixty feet is where we stand yeah and so we're in zone I believe 5a that's right 5a high desert high desert yeah and we're doing market gardening organic no-till 1.5 acres pretty successful yeah and your first couple years so I'm gonna hop behind the camera let's act me the star of the show and I just want to show you guys what's possible in a in a small-scale agriculture in a harder climate than many of the the other videos that I've done you've seen me do videos with Stephen and other farms urban farms in New York rooftop farms but this is a special climate and we got special farmers so I'm interested to see what's going on and I hope you guys enjoy the video so we're in the germination greenhouse right where all the Caesar started we've got this really cool German chamber here we've got charts all over the place and I think a lot of things that people don't think about in small-scale farming is the level of like systemization that you have to go through yeah and it looks really cool and it looks very plan C in nature-based but there's a lot of like raw business intelligence that's behind this as well so I'm hopping behind the camera I'm gonna kind of let Zach just talk you through what's going on in this section you'll see about 40 varieties of vegetables in here right now I mean it's pretty it's pretty sweet we do about about about 70% of the crops that roll through here and paper pot trays paper pots if you're not familiar with them their predetermined spacing and it looks kind of like this honeycomb and and what you'll see in that is that you get an opportunity to put two or three seeds in for tray which you'll see in this spinach and then these webs essentially they fold all the way out and this is 2 inch spacing and so when we put that right into the field it allows these crops to thrive at the right spacing so we'll do chard at 4 inches or our beets at 6 inches and they feed through a paper pot transplanter one by one each one of these little crops or cells gets gets transplanted into the field and before that before you have the paper pot what what did your labor look like what was life like paper bye guys you know I think we started like everybody else didn't and I think generations that come we'll never have that level of gratitude that we have towards just you know purely mechanical transplant nerves like the paper pot system but we we used to hand transplant every single seed yeah and there's some cool tools out there that make you know hand transplanting faster like the diddlers and the the gritter you know from never sink but we we tend to hand transplant every single things we just mark a bed with a rake and then cross that and then put seeds into every cell and you know it would take us three hours or maybe maybe two hours to hand transplant a thousand heads of lettuce into a hundred foot bed and now we look at you know eight minutes or ten minutes yeah and so on that and our scale about an acre and a half the paper pot transplanter from the gravity cedar all the way forward did the transplant saves us like maybe 60 hours forty hours every single week on farm and so we our base wage is fifteen bucks an hour so it's about nine hundred dollars a week you know that that is an investment for us is about you know it pays for itself important yeah yeah even if it was twice as expensive as it was still be a perfect investment right oh yeah yeah for a single season right yeah all the difference in the world so that's it's something that we rely on heavily on our scale right now how awesome so back here behind us we we run these little net afem sprinklers these are the green tips these are pressure regulators on there pretty pretty radical they stop all they drip from happening so a lot of times if you're just running an overhead setup or a mr. setup they're gonna drip continuously on the plants below but these little pressure regulator stop that they burst open they irrigate this house and you know it takes four minutes a day when the house sits at about eighty five degrees maybe five minutes a day and total irrigation to keep all the seedlings in here wet so do you hand water at all or do you just use this as your main watering system yeah yeah so I hit the corners with a just with a wand yeah so I'll come through in the morning and make sure that the corners stay wet especially when this house is packed right now because we're in peak season it's pretty much you know harvest out turn over plant every bed on the farm and so you know every this house will build up and stack up early in the season you know while there's not a lot of availability but right now since everything else or outside is flying we pretty much take it out of here and throw it right outside got it yeah cool so what kind of stuff you got going on you said you're growing like 50 varieties and yeah you might be a little crazy yeah it makes you feel crazy if I'm not crazy anyway but I am yeah we grow we grow 50 varieties of vegetables right now you'll see things from yeah you got zinnias some of the later cut flowers that we'll be putting in you got peppers back there some mint that we are that we'll be putting in back there at the end you've got a salad overhead lettuce that we do for either head lettuce or spring mix kohlrabi for fall and then you got some your celery here and late later herbs too so we just I'm worried what July 5th and so we're just gonna start planting some of our fall successions up here at our altitude I mean we pull our Tomatoes in August so that that way we have a winter succession yeah which is a huge deal yeah like it takes a lot of maturity on our part to start a seed in January let it go from you know June July August pull it to get lettuce and to make sure that we can satisfy our customers customer needs through the winter time yeah and your season is 110 days you said yeah yeah and gotta be like the systems have to be on lockdown because you have the clocks ticking from day one it is I mean you know we we do everything we can to hit the corners right you know and like I said we start planting in January we rely heavily on the house as early in the season yeah and then and then you know when when the outdoor beds open up and we can start to when the ground is thawed and we can start to plant outdoors we hit it with everything we have yeah because the seasons over before we know it cool cool and so then what we got going on right here in this little mystery box and this is a fight on extreme chamber it controls humidity and temperature it's got little extractor fans in it they draw the the heat out when it gets too hot and then it's got a little bubbler down at the bottom that heats the water up and gets the humidity going mini sauna that's exactly it for the audience so it's got a temperature spectrum I think of four degrees so it rides usually between between 72 and 68 degrees and what you get to see your things like this like middle a summer salad Nova germination you get yeah I mean almost a hundred percent right yeah that's unheard of but you 95 degrees out at nighttime we have huge diurnal shift here and these seem to just panic and talk to me about the price of that seed that's there's a student notice if you want to do germ on it's probably spell ANOVA right that's it's a you know if you're not buying it by the vitae case it's gonna cost you 50 cents a seed be on have you pick it up in large enough quantities you can get it down so it's reasonable but it's a it's an expensive expensive scene you get like the current of cucumbers and some of the stuff that we do the greenhouse cucumber varieties the tomato varieties you know 75 cents a seed fifty cents a seed you know and you're doing it you know 600 of those or 500 at a time you gotta get it right better yeah you better yeah and this is yeah this is a spot to dial it in if you're using that paper pot system and I mean if you if you're germination is 10% off I mean that's 10% before you get to the field yeah yeah it just doesn't work yeah yeah guys it's it's so interesting always when I come to a farm because it's a home gardener if I having some germ loss first of all I'm not but it's not my livelihood number one yeah and then number two oh well like maybe I just won't have as many tomatoes yeah but for you it's like I'm not gonna make money and my customers aren't gonna be happy which carries through into the rest of the business and if you have germ that's maybe this low right here like you said there's other things that will cause the plant to die oh yeah I know yeah totally so so what we see is like you know a lot of our promise cuz we're a newer form in our market is yellow and we're going up against huge California farms so we'll make a commitment or a promise to say like hey I'll have cucumbers for you in June because I know you're gapping in your market yeah and so a market will let us in and if we can't come through at that progress like we're done we're done with you yeah exactly because then we're just doubling up on what everybody else is already producing right over the border encounter probably for like a better price and Alessa yeah yeah yeah bigger farm cool all right guys well that was the germ zone we're gonna head out to the field now you get to really really get to see the diversity allows us like just a because we can come at the market with pretty much anything that they need you know we'll say hey we've got leaks or we've got we've got onions we have garlic you know we've got scallions we have cilantro we have a you know a hole cut selection of herbs or our bunched roots you see like carrots accessions coming on we do chard so the diversity for us is is you know it's I think it's just a reflection of how powerful a small farm can be and yeah yeah because you don't have to mono crop know you can survive without it yeah and I can I mean if I get it like we we got our frost up to June 8 this year and you know typically it ends and the end of May yeah but but yeah getting a frost that late like year I could just continue to plant more successions of direct seeded radishes and turnips and just work with the weather as it fluctuates cuz it's been I mean for most folk city like that I follow it's been more unpredictable than ever this year has been really weird yeah just even as a home gardener like my I'm in San Diego so my zone is 10 B and I had the wettest spring I've ever had yeah and June we had 4 sunny days yeah it was just a weird year I think everyone's seen it like globally yeah yeah yeah so we get I mean a hundred one hundred ninety percent of our annual precipitation came came in January and February this year this year twice as much as last year I mean so it really is like the ability of a small-scale farmer to diversify like this it just allows you to make decisions you know like like on the cuff and you know we can plant accordingly you know so it if I lose something in the prop house if I don't get into the field and then take all that time because the weather stays cold it allows me to plant something else that consisting in that weather pattern you know yeah and so we make decisions like that all the time up here you know it's just yeah we lie there wait and we'll hold off where we go quick and get things in when we get a splash of good weather like these carrots we put in and on March 15th we do carrots in a four-seater a lot from Conor creep Moore's model I mean we actually primarily follow it he's like yeah raishin for the farm yeah for those who don't know who who never sink is can you talk a little bit about your bed set up and why you do it the way you do it you don't tell yeah yeah yeah so it's I mean it seems like it's remarkably slow to do an ode to agriculture you know and I think that's like people like yeah it's really labor-intensive there's no way that you can make money doing it and our model really is inspired primarily by iconic quick more never sink farms and he does an acre and a half no-till we free farm yeah um which you know is inclusive of running 15 or you know like five full-time staff on the farm where can eight-hour days five days a week you know a really really nice structure you know permanent rate are permanent bed system not raised beds planning directly into the ground and and you know one thing that he follows that comes from Eliot Coleman is using that for row cedar exclusively and we use the Jiang cedar a little bit but a four row cedar is a cedar that allows us to get almost a thousand bunches of carrots on a hundred foot bed that's what we're looking at here one two three four down 100 feet that's it and what you'll notice is that everything here super super tight right and then a lot of space for us to get between and just run readers and so you know we run the hula hose through here so you can just walk it down the line that's exactly yeah yeah yeah and so we're not you know we're not allowing the weeds to get ahead of a lot of these crops in the farm we leave enough space to weed but then these things are so tightly spaced that the carrots has come up and they go like this in the bed they never took themselves out and they still get to full size yeah so it satisfies our market you know when we were doing the the jiang cedar and the mechanical precision cedars we could never get beyond 250 or 300 bunches of carrots on 100 foot bed and you said you're pulling a thousand that's right so that's a 4 3 at least 2 3 X increase if not four it's four I mean again like thinking from it from the farmers perspective or not the gardeners perspective that's money in the bank little less you sustain everything that you're doing yeah so having an increase like that on a crop you know that has such great potential and that like really gets you into a great place with this altitude the flavor and the carrot be crazy super-sweet yeah yeah it's a great it's a great attraction for people as they walk by your booth to know that you know you're pulling carrots and this is they said July 4th July fit we'll be pulling these carrots in the next week and just you know flushing a thousand a thousand bunches a week for the next 10 weeks off of these beds which is pretty pretty strong for us yeah yeah yeah no kidding man so yeah I mean again like what you get to see back here is just a reflection of our bed systems 50 feet if you can imagine running a and like a BCS tractor over this and then trying to turn it around halfway and then run it back it's inefficient and so no-till systems for us what they allow us to do is to plant a 50 foot section we simply straddle the bed run a four inch hula hoe and then we clean up the beds with the foreign to laho get all of the matter out of it there's actually somebody going to be doing that next we could show it sure and and and then you know the whole bed turns over and it's a matter of 45 minutes to get a bed tilth to with a small tiller yeah and and and then replanted you know so we we don't ever let the turnover is is insane which is key again on a small farm you got to find your efficiencies where you can cuz you're not mono cropping a potato on 700,000 acres right it's you got to find a fish and see where you can yeah that's it and so we're hyper efficient you know we run we run a lot of Elliot Coleman's tools we do like greens harvesters the four row Cedars nearly a Coleman tool and yeah we work we work a lot with that stuff but it's I think of the the idea behind that was that all its it's slow it's it's prehistoric and I I'd say that it's the exact opposite it's hyper efficient and makes things happen really really really quickly and it allows us to be hyper productive I was reading how to grow more vegetables by John Jevons and he had a line in there said we still have yet to design a machine more efficient than the human body no question and and it seems like you kind of are living that right here yeah yeah yeah I mean there's nothing like coming out and doing work like this with your body the way that you sleep at night you know you're not sitting in the tractor or pushing along tractor breathing and gas fumes you do most of this labor by hand and like the reward that you take from that I don't think that you could ever quantify right it's not a monetary reward which I mean we could talk about the money but there's much more than that in the lifestyle of running a farm similar to this yeah I mean it's it's like you just you you feel like you're so purposeful and you feel so full yeah you feel like you're actually intrinsically a part of nature that way yeah and you're not like apologizing to the land every time you run that tractor you diskette utilit yeah yeah yeah you're sucking a dry instead of building it up like you guys are doing yeah that's it that's on that level like thinking about regenerative AG you know cuz that's that kind of next the next big word I think in agriculture it's coming up yeah people are getting away from or you know just certified organic you because that's that's been infiltrated by by a lot of you know big corporate and yeah yeah a certified term now and it doesn't mean what it's supposed to mean that's it yeah so for us it's really the floor we are certified organic to like get our foot in the door that and show folks but you know that we are you know not spraying herbicides and pesticides and using toxic chemicals on the farm you know did they eat yeah but you know that really is just the beginning like we we run for soil tests in the farm every season through each bed and just to continue to say like they are we actually regenerative are we making the soil better than what we found it are we leaving this earth better than the way that we found it you know I've died two daughters and my goal is that they can come out here and work through this land and this they'll find this land to be better then than when we found it it's a big deal yeah yeah it is so Aaron if you want to show them real quick just what that looks like for a bed turnover we tend to rope it off we straddle the bed and then we just run the four inch ruler over the top and that removes all the sediment and so let's say that there was you know some steady roots in there or anything like that that green waste would all be eradicated you'd sever the roots and then we just go back through with the five gallon bucket we pull it up and we put it right into the right into a five gallon bucket into the compost yeah it allows us to separate wat rocks to so we put all the rocks into the pathways anything they kind of deter our care like month over month bed over bed turn over your d rocking your beds just lunge evety wise over time that's it 100% you know rock free but yeah it's um it's a it's a perfect setup for our scale and he's you know he's only in an inch right now he just turned over the top inch then we put a then we put you know one hundred a hundred pounds of compost onto that bed and tilt it back in we plant it yeah and these beds will have three or four lives in the season Wow in your compost you said about 10% on-site 90 percents coming from a pretty interesting source yeah there's a local prison in in Carson City it's about I guess about 60 miles maybe less and miles from here and they the full-circle compost started a program with the prison where they they recycle their food waste and turn it into compost and so they they run a whole compost facility out of the prison now yeah so readit earth at here and we use about 24,000 pounds of compost to season while on on farm and that's a free input for you not free not free no no we pay for it but yeah that goes back to a really like another local business and yeah and we invest heavily in that stuff like we seek out local businesses even if it means for us to call or to expend a little bit more cost but to support local families gather like if I give you a dollar you give me back a dollar we've actually created an infinite value of $1 yeah and I'm really interested yeah you know like yeah I love supporting local families and local folks and like and just creating a barter system or a process like a community like that I think it's I think it's beautiful run yeah cool [Music] and that's just a drill that's not in the walkie 18 volt drill turning the bed over I mean look at the seat top it's like yeah you're pretty much ready to plant into this thing oh that looks so nice yeah look at that soil and that's it you know - like no salinity no no hardpan up here no compaction just just pure life you know like pouring through this soil yeah how 2 percent doing amazing so this this for Rossiter um actually then we dumped these guys out I'll show you what this looks like on the inside the brush density where the the seed density is determined by these little little seed plates and so they're they're notched in there you know and you have four different side seats so you've got you've got an a plate a b a c and a d plate so determine on on on the seating density whether you want multiple seeds per drop or a single seed per drop I'm doing ha cried turnips right now and so I have to put them in a single seed per drop otherwise we cut out and they Bowl yeah not a bowl you have to close that's it okay and so yeah what I what I have to do is when I'm doing these is is that I determine which would seed plate and then after that you have to make sure that your brush settings are correct and what that means is that these what our brushes are down at and they're actually just pushing up really lightly against that metal knob and again that seems you know like compared to the Jo cedar or even a paper pot which you people may transplant turnips I've seen you really just want that little brush to be touching the top of the the seeding rod and that way it skims off any extra seats that are coming in mmm yeah there's small little tweaks well that's it I mean and these are the things that you learn over a season or two you make enough mistakes and you're like my precious retired iris they're on right all right you see it afterwards and you see like your hopper went twice as fast as the other one you're like I forgot to adjust my brushes and you lose it all so yeah from here we just because these guys up [Music] you don't need to fill a certain amount just because once you stop you stop right it's exactly it yeah so it's all gonna go through this floor Rossiter and I'll show you what it looks like as informant sure and so then those the wheel turns the seeds drop right up out of the backside yeah and you know the spacing is already determined by those little seed plates that run in there now the speed density this took us from doing like a hundred and fifty bunches of turnips on on a 50 foot bed to running you know close to 300 bunches of turnips on a 50 fold moly double that's it and you know just the intelligence behind this is it feels it feels like it's just you know like as high as it gets or as good as it gets really so once you're done seeding like you just did what is the process after that we just run the year we'll all run a bed a bed leveler on it just to put the seats in because we do have some kill deer and quail and and birds up here that love radish and and then small seeds in the velkommen munch yeah so I just run a bed roller on it to get the seeds into the soil and and then I turn the irrigation on for about about 15 minutes and just water I'm in yeah and yeah then I usually water them in extra 15 minutes every every day and until I see him germs so usually three or four days and they pop this time of year that easy 50 feet in 94 seconds something like that easy easy as that yeah yeah all right man where are we now succession of the high altitude Tomatoes you know em we experimented with a lot of varieties over the last couple of years we've definitely sunk our teeth into the inspiration that comes from Conor he's in the same zone you know as we did through that stuffer for 11 or 12 years and kind of got his systems in place so that it's right and and so what we're looking at here is a lot of a lot of tomatoes we do early slicers and these are big Dana's that's a big day now right there holy crap we actually we take these off twice a week and so we'll come through and I off of you know out of this house a lot of these a lot of these tomato plants are going to produce 35 to 40 pounds in a season yeah you'll see that they've already kind of hit their roof up here lower and leaned another foot but they're there they're there about ten foot tall and we'll take them all the way up for another two months of just pure production and so it's this is this is you know you run a cost-benefit analysis on building a greenhouse that's kind of airtight weather tight and it's it's really hard not to invest in this level of infrastructure okay yeah just just just thinking you know like if you get five pounds of tomato off every plant and you put 70 in a row you know that sits $3,500 or row and one of these houses will cost you about $20,000 you know so you're making it back in season one right totally yeah yeah yeah yeah so it's a big deal I mean when you start to sit down and look at numbers like that and I think that that's what I see with a lot of other market gardens and and people that are really struggling is that they're they're scared to invest in labor and scared to invest in infrastructure but if you sit down and pencil it out and I mean yeah just looking at it as a business yeah you know that it's really really it's really easy to continue to invest so a smaller farmer might be artificially gating themselves on their growth by just not spending the money that's it yeah yeah and being afraid of the investment whereas if you could quantify like for you even just with the paper pot you're like oh this plays itself off in two months hey I have to do it yeah it's it's dumb not to do it yeah you know the price tag when you look at it just raw price maybe whoo yeah in the solar plexus yeah but you know it really is I think that the more I've continued to not withdraw myself philosophically from this because we are like we're deeply entrenched in it but like I try not to get so emotional about that stuff and nor did I look at it from like a just a stabilized business perspective I realized man like there was just a world of potential here you know like we could feed you know who knows 800 800 people off this farm a thousand people off this farm if we can inspire 100 people in our community to do this yeah over the next 20 years I mean that's a significant amount of folks that would be fed in in in a system that nobody you know is growing food for but yeah yeah yeah I mean so the way I'm gonna hop off come in front cuz I think it's important it's like the way I kind of see it is like we want to see I want to see at least thousands of yous yeah right because then you can do all this localized sustainable stuff that you can't do at scale conventionally right because your transport costs like just the raw dumping of nitrogen like all that stuff yeah so I would like to see in the future kind of like a high-tech naturally very systemized very scaled right everything's very efficient but it's also not that big and you're not trying to maximize profit like crazy obviously you got to make profit yeah yeah and then and then there's a bunch of people like like Zach or Steve and you guys have seen a bunch of with the other people that have been on the channel doing this as just a respectable viable career almost like returning to the ancient time it feels like you you know yeah yeah but just just with the tools of today that's it yeah yeah and I I do I agree with you hundred percent I mean I see like I see the interest and I think that people are just really seeking like there's no there's a hunger for for methodologies you know yeah and and yeah I couldn't recommend following you know Connor Creek more and just looking on Instagram or getting signed up for one of those online courses and in your investing the time in that enough because I think that that level of infrastructure and that level of confidence is your approach something like this allows you to really just go all into it yeah and I if we had like I just think about you know the the viability of our food systems if we had localized food systems like that we you know like then you develop like tradition around food again and seasonality and you get culture about your community which is like what we don't have in our suburban life right yeah you don't know our neighbors you know like there's there's a lot of fear and stuff that that our bodies are just filled with you know an anxiety and you eat this food you know it has some intrinsic benefits that help out in that way some medicinal stuff yeah and then you get to be part of a community that makes you feel whole and complete things that you actually yearn to be for sure so we use these telescopes which they come from Johnny's by the way that we just weave it as the plant grows weekly we come through we weave it around these strings you'll see that it's all tied to a really simple plastic clip down here at the bottom which essentially becomes obsolete just because you've woven it around the plant so many times when it hits to the when it gets to the top of its string what we do is we take that plastic clip we pinch it right on the side and then it actually drops down and dispenses about I don't know the circumference as that is but it's probably about six inches of string mm-hmm so then we just drop it six inches at a time on a weekly basis and continue to weave it and and and and that allows us to grow 35 or 40 foot tall tomato plant yeah because eventually so you've got this one here which hasn't been lean too many times yeah then you've got those over there which have been lean quite a few times and they just start to wrap right sit yeah so you can I mean that's how you grow those Tomatoes they drop into the ground in March if on March 15th for us mm-hmm we begin to harvest cherries late April early May and they go to August right that's it yeah yeah yeah and the only way we can make that happen is by it you know you're gonna get a 40-foot tall plant you have to be able to find a system that allows that to happen and now there's there's a lot I think that's taken from big AG and put into small like the that's sustainable or successful Lauren lien was a big AG technique totally yeah because I mean uh and also just looking at like crooning suckers and and all of that so this is one single line when you train everything to a single leader that's it yeah and you have to otherwise it just goes like this and it takes up so much space mmm so on a 30-inch bed top you can't have multiple leaders I've seen folks get away with two mm-hmm but even that is chaos for me so I'd prefer to keep it you know a single leader grow it 20 feet or 25 feet on it on a slicer and still get 35 or 40 pounds of fruit off of the plant per plant times what 70 per a row that's it and then the math starts to really if you're on early you know you could you could really hit your hit your market and it like I said it can give you a stronghold yeah and in a market that so if you're wondering like well how can I get into my market and and what can I offer go to the markets and shop them and that was a technique that I also learned from Conor and then you know saying like hey I can offer you this you know I could bring in tomatoes and and and in May or June mm-hmm make sure it's your second year you know don't throw that out there on your first but yeah you can you can do that okay yeah and then I give you a stronghold to give you a good month I've just exclusively being the grower because you kind of have to have some kind of not a trick but some sort of in some differentiator so they give you a chance yeah market managers are looking for that do you know we actually manage a market we started a farmers market because we grow four seasons up here and so yeah we realized that as a market manager if somebody comes to you and they've got this yield to say like hey I noticed you guys are missing this I would love to offer you this that's the type of grower that a market manager once they're like you see this or forward going yeah yeah yeah it's like searching for an employee almost you know yeah there's somebody you're investing in mm-hmm sweet so we're still in the same greenhouse but we got what's at our feet here we got some bok choy yeah that's right it's a beets got some beets and so this is another instance of just making the most of your space yeah yeah yeah totally and so we I mean you think about it on that scale of 50 feet on a 30 inch bed top and then you just what we tend to do is we'll plant the beets two weeks or a week before we plant our bok choy you can find that simultaneously and so if I have some extra bok choy in the prop house I'll just run through a half tray or a full tray and put it in the outside of the skirt of my beds and the same thing with things that like like little gem lettuce oh also you have 30 days yeah I'm a notable varieties yeah and they aren't going to get shaded out by these cucumbers or or by the tomatoes they rush and so with that that continues to allow us to be diverse and maximize space but you just if you're thinking about it in terms of square footage and that's how I tend to look at the farm I want every foot on the farm of the bed just every row foot to make $30 ok and so if I'm thinking about it like that and every egg you know then I realize like oh cool if I've got 500 dollars in bok choi on the perimeter of the beds with these cucumbers not just in a single planting but over this season like is it going to achieve those ends though I'm always using that as a cross reference and saying okay there's this is this a viable way for us to do it is this a you know coming to meet those ends yeah and and then things like this are just so simple and like seeds especially for things like bok choy cheep-cheep yeah oversee them yeah now that salad over we have over sedum so for us like in the prop house I'll put a hundred feet of seed in every week and that doesn't mean I'm going to use it but it doesn't mean that yeah like I'm you toss some trays at the end of the month yeah but so be it like I would prefer to have that and extra so that every time I plant cucumbers I could throw extra bok choy in there are some extra gem lettuce in and you know just make it make it happen so and even I mean even on these Tomatoes like if you're worried about shading out your pruning everything off the bottom anyways and this is affect I mean besides I guess a little shade thrown by the canopy right here yeah these are getting relatively full Sun there yeah and so we put these in if we put these in a week before this year and next year I'll do two weeks yeah because you'll notice a lot of them clumped up to almost maturity yeah and then they haven't finished sizing up and so we just ride it out with them yeah we pull about 10 bunches off of the bed a week right now and that's about it but that's still I mean it's it we're just maximizing square footage that space wouldn't have gotten anywhere else all right sweet we're in the wash impact zone and we're looking at some charts yeah yeah so um on a daily basis the farm kind of revolves around needs but uh what you see is this is a topographical map of the entire farm with all of the bed numbers listed on it yeah what we do is is then we'll say like you're on you're on here's a good example wash and pack from 9 to 11 and then did you complete that yes and then Dino kale f4 f5 11 to 1:30 yes completed and then turn over these beds you want to etc and so the whole farm essentially revolves around this and it's a standard you know and so it works for me keeping everybody accountable saying like hey I know that it can be done in this amount of time and and so we start to execute things like this and and we hold each other accountable with that knowing that if even like all the positions are interchangeable every day yeah that every person holds that position down and you're getting better all the time right because you guys are just having like a packing speed competition oh yeah so we you know we kind of pushed that bar and say like is it possible to bag you know 30 seconds a bag for for retail greens yeah yeah absolutely they're just just you know seeing those processes on on everything that we do let me let me show you a little bit over here we do a we've got some green spinners which are pretty pretty radical tools these guys they I know a lot of folks out there using modified spinners the laundry machines and but they spend too fast and that's something else that comes from Corner Creek more but we we found these guys on ebay they shipped up from San Diego I don't know what yeah yeah and so yeah a couple a couple hundred bucks and it made it made it makes it makes washing the greens and drying them totally possible so we we get them into retail bags the day after we store them and some some totes some hard plastic totes with with the towel on organic towel in there that absorbs or wicks the moisture and then we bag in the next day but this allows the greens to not perish we get a lot of feedback that we hold greens for three weeks okay yum which is pretty pretty phenomenal for fresh salad greens especially from a small market farm yeah yeah yeah yeah talk to me about you're saying the cold chain right which I think a lot of people might not really know what that is yeah so we we get things from the field geez and bok choy right now and so what that looks like is he's out there he's budding cleaning them up harvesting them and then we dump them into 45 degree water so it may be 90 degrees in the field right now if I go and you know so your your plant temperature is probably around 65 or 70 and how in the world do you stop it from producing ethylene gas or ethanol gas ethylene gas Wow while it's in post harvest and cold washing like this is a secret for us mmm we get it right off over the field we don't let it get full even in the totes if it's hot outside we just bring them right back we dunk them into 43 or 45 degree water they either go then they go through this if they need to be spun there's fun but then we have a big hundred and forty square foot walk-in refrigerator we just walk everything right soon and and we push it from there so from the moment it's harvested it stops it stops I gas production and then we hold it there and then I built out a small reefer trailer in the back of a Sprinter van yeah that holds it while we do deliveries we run around the city or when we're at a farmers market we just plug in a generator hmm and we can hold it there for four or five hours at forty degrees so when people are coming up they grab a bat you know 40 degrees they're like wow yeah have you done this so from the time you harvest to the time it leaves the customers hands it only starts to warm back up at that point once they purchase 90% between then it's 40 to 43 degrees the whole time that's it yeah yeah yeah so you know veritable vegetable is the largest regional vegetable distributor and I used to work as a produce manager for for four years mmm and so that level of information and seeing things like that happen and and just seeing what that meant to veritable as far as keeping the cold chain yeah that was a huge inspiration for me it seemed like all right on that scale where you guys are dispersing all the way out to New Mexico you know or distributing out there why is it so important that you know when you when you cross the bridge from the warehouse into the back of the truck why is that refrigerated uh-huh and it's why so I think it's small-scale farmers you know for us to continue to be successful this this is vital to our success is keeping things just ice cold or as cold as you can you know fear a watch impact process yeah cuz then you got a customer coming back to you because they know it's not gonna go bad after four days in the fridge right we've developed a reputation you know like it's our second year through it we have we you know we've our markets are big you know and we've really established a foothold in our markets because people are like you guys have the best greens yeah there you go they're the freshest stuff out there so everything everything walks through here pretty much and then it hits the heads ended to this which we intentionally built right outside of the Washington PAC just to be fast just to be fast this is a Friday load for an acre and a half barn whoo it's cold in here yeah yeah yeah nice and ice-cold so now you get to see yeah what what the Washington pack looks like before before we get out for delivery we've already packed probably about 50% if you will get to see like when you come in here in the next month I mean it's packed to the ceiling the whole side that we're standing on right now also gets packed full and then it's just waiting to go to market or wait and go to CSA this is the mobile version of that I love this dude it's obviously custom built their home village but then this is like we do 80 people or 80% CSA off of the farm and you get to see like yeah pretty much our entire CSA and these half totes fits into here plus are an entire market and it's you know it's about nine square feet or $9.99 by now this is a this is like a dorm room if that yeah you know it works for us it's on our scale I built it to that size and you know I used to recycle a pod recycled insulation I had some old tape the metal taping leftover from the greenhouse I paid 300 bucks for a brand new a/c unit with a cool lot I think I'm probably in about six or seven hundred dollars for this well it took me two days Wow you know what I mean and so and use that you're bringing you've got names for your CSA customers right here yeah it was amazing and so you can come out drive out from here into Reno or whatever and set your market up and deliver all your CSA one fell swoop that's it yeah and so just efficiency you know like in quality all in the same listen you know at the same time it really makes all the difference in the world for us alright guys that was it I mean I'm sure we could go in-depth on let me do a video on every single part we just did many times over but big thanks to Zach for showing the farm and I kinda wanted to get a little history on the farm it you haven't been doing this that long no right no no I am and maybe maybe I should tell you guys with that like premise dance or supreme' for us means it means like unconditional love essentially and in sanskrit there's two types of loved ones kama and that means like I love you but only if you act like this and przemo means like I I it's it's big yeah big love like I love you no matter what you do and that that's uh that that's kind of our attitude towards farming it means like we give everything every moment of every day to the farm and whatever it brings back to us it gives to us and so that attitude I think is surrounded it's been pervasive out here and it's allowed us to continue to to work with the land and not against it um the first year we came out you know I was I was not in that mindset I was not in that space you know I I was fighting you know I was I was trying everything I could to make all of this happen in a way that I had seen other folks do it john martine 40a and and but I I just didn't have all of the right intimate tools and and you know year two we slightly tarped out everything outdoors we left it under tarp for about eight months and pulled the tarps back and really really got things started a lot us kind of to be weed free who allowed us to start to get into irrigation systems I think that I'm still in it and in a way that I know that I want this to be an incubator forum I want this to be an out source for information for the community that I'm in yeah and and we're still developing a lot of the stuff on the farm I mean without Connors help without John Martine forty a self and without like a lot of the other folks that we get to follow along I wouldn't have the information I do at hand but it's it's possible you guys like if I could do it up here at fifty to sixty anybody and other lower outs just could make it happen I mean and you're not it's not like you're just doing it at 50 to 60 you're doing it pretty successfully on a small scale because I know a lot of small scale farmers that are struggling to make ends meet or to just so it's almost a conceptual thing of how they're thinking the farm like you're talking about okay if you're out there for eight hours pay yourself 25 bucks an hour and realize oh I spent eight hours and the wrong stuff that says I just had to pay myself 200 bucks that's I'm not making the 200 back yeah yeah everything we've built out here has been has I run cost-benefit analysis pretty much in my mind on every decision I made say like cool like this level of infrastructure would be really beautiful and I saw some other folks have the nicest cleanest washing pack ever yeah but like I what I'm doing or what I have works really well and this is definitely a higher priority so let me put my attention where it needs to be and build the things that are gonna allow this to self-sustain and prioritize that stuff first I I think that you know like when you're in the mix of the middle of the season and things are chaotic it's really hard to make rational decisions sometimes it's putting things on paper yeah and running it like a business is really helpful I feel like running a business and I've never run a farm ever in like a small microgreens operation I'm certainly running epic gardening it feels like running a business is selectively ignoring stuff all the time like you walk around you see the stuff that you need to fix in a perfect world yeah then you're like no like the 80/20 analysis of it is this is what has to have to take up like a hundred percent of my time right now that's it yeah yeah and just no one wears worthwhile yeah yeah cool well like so where can people find you I know you guys have Instagram you've got some you've got a website if you're in the Reno area you can join the CSA you can hit them at market so drop some knowledge tell people where to find you out yeah ww Pima farm comm is the website you can find us on Instagram from a farm Facebook from a farm we do little weekly newsletters and just kind of like blurbs from the farm letter but no it's up if if you're in the Reno area like yeah come get us at markets we were in Thursday night markets over at McKinley we do a Saturday market at California Street and then up in Truckee if you're visiting the Reno Tahoe area you can get us in Truckee on Sundays sweet yeah awesome all right guys peace out good luck in the garden and keep growing I'm dropping everything in the description if you have any questions for Zak drop them in the comments and we'll pop in and see what we can do to answer those but until next time good luck in the garden keep on growing this elenova dude [Music]

Channel: Epic Gardening

Views: 216,406

Rating: 4.9477806 out of 5

Keywords: epic gardening, farm tour, garden tour, market garden, market gardening, paper pot transplanter, green city acres, curtis stone, neversink farm, conor crickmore, eliot coleman, jean martin fortier, profitable farming, no till, get started, no till farming

Id: KkY-ghHh_ow

Length: 43min 29sec (2609 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2019