Welcoming Visitors to the Farm With Kathy McCaskill
FarmHouse
This week on the FarmHouse, a podcast by Lancaster Farming, we’re joined by Kathy McCaskill, co-owner and operator of in Rembert, South Carolina. McCaskill originally hails from upstate New York, where she grew up on an out-of-operation dairy farm. After marrying, she and her husband bought their South Carolina property and began slowly but surely setting up a livestock operation that sells directly to the local farmers market and from the farm store. Tragedy struck the farm in 2007, when the farmhouse burned down, but McCaskill now sees it as part of a larger plan for her family....
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Building the Real Organic Project with Linley Dixon
FarmHouse
This week on the FarmHouse, a podcast by Lancaster Farming, we’re talking to Linley Dixon, an organic vegetable farmer in southwest Colorado. Dixon co-created the , which is a label farmers can add onto the USDA’s certified organic label. “The Real Organic Project is a very grassroots effort,” Dixon said. “Many farmers felt like the USDA organic seal was no longer reflecting the way that they farmed. It started as sort of a rallying cry to make sure that soil health was still fundamental to what could be certified as organic.” The project focuses on growing crops in healthy soils...
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Experimenting With Whole Milk in Schools With Krista Byler
FarmHouse
This week on the FarmHouse, a podcast by Lancaster Farming, we’re talking with Krista Byler, the food service director at Union City Area School District in Pennsylvania whose whole milk study caught the attention of the dairy industry. Byler’s district had been offering fat free and 1% milks with student lunches, but thanks to a study conducted by the student council, Byler was aware much of the milk students bought ended up in the trash. On top of that, many students weren’t buying milk at all. “It was kind of a double-edged sword. We had students no longer taking milk and a lot of...
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Digging Into Climate-Smart Dairy With Carolyn Beans
FarmHouse
This week on the FarmHouse, a podcast by Lancaster Farming, we’re talking to Carolyn Beans, a freelance science reporter with a focus on food and agriculture. Beans is currently an MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellow. Through the fellowship, she is writing a series on climate-smart dairy that is being published in Lancaster Farming. “The fellowship is designed to support journalists who are working on stories that explore environmental solutions specifically for local audiences,” Beans said. The term climate-smart is a bit of a newer buzzword, but Beans said despite the new...
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Empowering Women Through Education With Annie's Project
FarmHouse
This week on the FarmHouse, a podcast by Lancaster Farming, we’re talking to Doris Mold, co-CEO of , a national nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering women in agriculture. Annie’s Project was founded in 2003 and named after Annette Kohlhagen Fleck, a woman who married into farming in 1947 and went on to take care of the business side of the farm. Annie’s Project honors her legacy by providing women with the knowledge and confidence to manage farms and agribusinesses successfully. The organization offers a mix of workshops, courses and online learning aimed at educating...
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Full Circle Flower Farming With Rebekah Mindel
FarmHouse
This week on the FarmHouse, a podcast by Lancaster Farming, we’re talking to Rebekah Mindel, a flower farmer and floral designer. Mindel owns Meadow Wilds, a full-circle floral design studio and flower farm in New York’s Hudson Valley. For Mindel, full circle means starting the plants from seed, harvesting and conditioning the flowers and using them in the final designs. “Farming and design for me go hand in hand,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to do one without the other.” Mindel designs floral arrangements for events and wedding using flowers grown on her farm plus purchased...
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What's Up With the Bees? Protecting Pollinators With Susan Jones
FarmHouse
This week on the FarmHouse, a podcast by Lancaster Farming, we’re talking to Susan Jones, a pollination expert in McCormick, South Carolina. Jones’ passion for bees grew from an unlikely source: a farrier and third-generation beekeeper visiting her family’s farm began nudging her to give beekeeping a try. He eventually gifted Jones her first two colonies. Those first bees didn’t make it through the winter, but that brief window of time was enough to get Jones hooked, especially when she saw the difference having pollinators made on her garden. “My garden went from OK to on steroids...
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Tasting What Was Grown in Farm-Made Hot Sauces With Alyssa Adkins
FarmHouse
This week on the FarmHouse, a podcast by Lancaster Farming, we’re talking to Alyssa Adkins, a produce farmer in Freeport, Maine. Adkins and her partner Nathan Broaddus own Farthest Field Farm where they grow produce and make their own jarred products. The farm specializes in peppers and hot sauces. “My partner and I decided to start with value-added products,” Adkins said. “There’s so many CSAs to choose from, there’s so many farmers selling vegetables at farmers markets. So it kind of made sense for us.” The farm sells five varieties of hot sauces as well as salsas and other...
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Changing the World for That One Animal With Amy Marciano
FarmHouse
This week on the FarmHouse podcast, we’re talking to Amy Marciano, founder of , a 501(c)(3) non-profit animal rescue in Greentown, Pennsylvania. "I pretty much came out of the womb loving animals. It was just in my DNA," Marciano said. "There's a quote that I pretty much live by, it's basically you can't change the world by rescuing one animal, but for that one animal you change the world." Marciano started her work in Brooklyn, New York, where she founded the Sugar Mutts Dog Rescue in a warehouse. After about a decade in the city, she moved her operation to the Poconos region where she...
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From Dietitian to Farmer With Jennie Schmidt
FarmHouse
This week on the FarmHouse, a podcast by Lancaster Farming, we’re talking to Jennie Schmidt, a grain and grape farmer on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Prior to farming at Schmidt Farms full time, Schmidt worked as a registered dietitian. “I was able to kind of meld my training,” she said. “I always tell people that farming is the front end of nutrition. They’re the same continuum.” Thanks to her knowledge in both fields, Schmidt was offered speaking engagements, at first with dietitian and nutrition groups. This then led to her speaking nationally at conferences held by groups such...
info_outlineThis week on the FarmHouse, a podcast by Lancaster Farming, we’re joined by Lindsey Shapiro, a vegetable farmer from Bally, Pennsylvania, and the Farm Bill campaign organizer for Pasa Sustainable Agriculture.
Shapiro is a first-generation farmer who discovered her passion for agriculture while helping her husband’s family on their urban farm in Philadelphia.
“I was just so enamored with the tangible joys of growing food,” Shapiro said. “We’d harvest the food Friday morning. We had wheeled it out onto the sidewalk Friday afternoon, and it would end up in people’s dinners by Friday evening.”
Inspired by their experience, Shapiro and her husband started their own operation, Root Mass Farm, in 2011, where they grow a variety of vegetables, fruits and herbs using sustainable farming practices.
Root Mass Farm sells at two farmers markets and offers a Garden Stake CSA in which customers pay at the beginning of the season then deduct their purchases from their balance as they shop the farm’s stand at the markets. Shapiro explained this is often appealing to customers with smaller households or those who can’t commit to a weekly pick up.
Having customers come to the farmers market for their CSA shares also allows Shapiro to interact with them on a more personal level and answer questions they might have about her produce.
“I had a customer that was like, why is the celery so small? I was like, well, I had to harvest our celery a little bit earlier because it’s been so dry that we haven’t really been able to get it to size up very much,” she said while reflecting on some recent customer interactions. “But, it’s going to be delicious. It’s going to have a lot of flavor. It’s still going to make your potato salad or your soup just sing with celery goodness.”
At her off-farm job at Pasa, Shapiro works to get farmers involved in the Farm Bill reauthorization process. She stresses the importance of making sure farmers’ voices are being heard in spaces where decisions are being made that will affect agriculture.
“I get to talk to a lot of farmers in that work and learn more about what their needs are, and try to be very solution-oriented,” she said, “and figure out how we can improve policies in this country so that farmers in Pasa’s network have a better shot at doing the incredible work that they want to do.”
Shapiro also discussed why the new Farm Bill has been so difficult to pass, touching on the competing needs of many Americans who depend on the funding tied to the bill, from nutrition funding to climate change mitigation.
“There’s just not enough money to go around,” she said. “So, there’s some hard decisions that have to be made. And I think it’s ultimately come to a matter of priorities.”
You can find more information on the Lancaster Farming stories discussed in the beginning of this episode here: