Episode #47： Saving The Family Farm With Forrest Pritchard
Episode Stats
Summary
Forrest Pritchard grew up on a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. As a kid, he dreamed of becoming a farmer, but growing up in the big city, he didn't have the same opportunities to grow up on the farm like other kids. So he decided to change directions and become a farmer.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Well, I don't know about you guys, but every now and then, I have this dream or fantasy
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that of going out to Vermont, buying some land, and becoming a yeoman farmer.
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But if I'm honest with myself, that's never going to happen.
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He's the owner of Smith Meadows Farm, located in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
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This farmer's been in his family for eight generations.
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And he just came out with a book called Gaining Ground.
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And it's basically his story of how he saved the family farm.
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Because before he took it over, it was in pretty bad shape and on the verge of being sold.
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And he decided to change directions in his life and become a farmer.
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We're going to talk a bit about his book, Gaining Ground.
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I'm honored to have anything to do with the art of manliness.
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You're a farmer, which is a manly profession, goes back thousands of years.
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So it's very appropriate that you're on the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Let's talk a little about your history before we get into kind of what your book's about.
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It's been in your family for seven generations, a long time.
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And you grew up on this farm, working on it with your grandfather and your dad, to an extent.
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When you were a kid, was farming something you saw yourself doing, like when you were in high school?
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Were you ready to get out of town and head to the big city?
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What I wanted to do more than anything when I was a kid was just be a superhero.
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You know, I wanted to be Spider-Man and the devil, and I thought my cousin Peter was the luckiest guy on the planet because he had the first name like Peter Parker.
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And I was stuck with this crummy name, Forrest, which didn't serve me until Forrest Gump came along about 30 years later or whatever.
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But no, I mean, you know, I think, you know, in the book I mentioned at one point, like I was playing Star Wars as a kid.
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And, you know, everybody in our generation and, you know, now more generations are going to play Star Wars and Indiana Jones and A-Team and all these iconic shows of our childhood.
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But I don't think it was any accident, you know, like Luke Skywalker.
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You know, George Lucas wrote that character as a farm kid, you know.
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And farming can be like a, you know, pretty confining feel where dreams can sometimes, you know, be squelched or made to fit inside a box.
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I wasn't like, you know, now you're five, get out and make some hay kind of thing.
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And that's not to say, like, you know, I didn't participate and I didn't grow up on the farm and I wasn't out there all the time because I was, you know, the barefoot, huckleberry fin kind of kid, you know, running around the fields.
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But I was also allowed to, like, have a childhood, you know, have an ability to kind of have fun as a kid.
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So, I mean, I think probably more than anything, kind of being given that freedom by my elders to be respectful of that childhood period and value it led me to want to farm.
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Because then I was able to not feel, like, miserable, not feel encumbered by a bunch of chores.
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And I didn't have that Luke Skywalker feeling where it's like, you know, Luke, go clean the moisture evaporators.
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Oh, you know, I want to go play with my friend kind of thing.
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So, like, yeah, farming really wasn't, it wasn't pushed on you, right, I guess.
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But when did you decide, like, farming is what you wanted to do?
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I mean, that's a big decision because a lot of people who are listening don't know, like, farming is an expensive job.
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There's a lot of expenses that go along with the profession.
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So how did you decide to, you know, make that leap?
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I mean, was it, did you feel called to it or was there some moment where you're like, yeah, this is what I have to do?
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There's an undeniable sense of stewardship that's just kind of handed down.
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And you don't have to spend long being around a farm.
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You know, you and I were talking earlier about your feelings, like, when you go to visit Vermont, for example.
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Like, there's just something when you step into these small farm towns and this era of sustainability and seasonality that just resonates.
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I mean, unless you spent your whole life in Las Vegas or something.
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But, I mean, the other side of all that is, is when you've got this kind of, like, cultural resonance on one side, but then you're, like, you're 19, you're 20 years old, and you're thinking, you know, what are you going to do with your life?
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You know, are you going to drop out and flip hamburgers?
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And you're driving down the road, and you see farms, literally, that you grew up seeing all your life, or you visited when you were a 4-H-er, or you went over to your friend's place and played in his barnyard, and they're being bulldozed straight down to the ground, okay?
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And I'm talking, like, you know, the late 80s, early 90s in the Shandoah Valley.
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Farms were being pushed out for housing development.
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And that's just a really tangible, kind of visceral thing that just hits you in the gut.
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You know, you're driving to town in one direction, and by the time you run your errands and you come back, the barn that you've seen there for your whole life is gone.
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It's just like there's dirt and there's bulldozers there.
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So, you know, it doesn't take a huge stretch of the imagination to say, look, you know, could that be our place?
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You know, I hear my parents grumbling over the bills, and Grandpa's gone, and, you know, he was the last person to be farming.
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You know, what kind of creative person do you have to be to say, like, you know, the writing might be on the wall if we don't do something?
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Yeah, that was interesting you were talking about how just, like, bulldozing land, right?
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And, like, putting development on there, like, shopping.
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Like, yeah, it's like, it's a sense of place, right?
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Even here in Tulsa, like, just in the past, you know, few years I've lived here, there's been a lot of development.
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And you, like, see it go up, and, like, I don't know, yeah, you feel like a part of you is missing.
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You know, because you see this, like, beautiful land that was once there, not there anymore.
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I mean, there's something about it that's just, it kind of makes you say, like, like, how?
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You know, like, okay, but it doesn't feel like a really good okay sometimes.
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You know, like, that's what's, like, that's what's happening to that farm.
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Like, it's turning into, like, a, you know, another subway, you know, $5 foot long kind of thing.
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Okay, well, here we go, and there's going to be a parking lot, and, you know.
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But, you know, at a certain point, like, how many battles, how many battles can we pick, and how many battles can we win?
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And you have to say, like, look, I've got this family farm.
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I can't say family farms everywhere, but I can give a try on my own land.
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And that's kind of like, you know, when I was 20, 21, that's pretty much, like, what I was feeling.
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Yeah, so 20, 21, so were you done with college, or were you still in college at this time?
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Yeah, I was still in college when I was struggling with some of this stuff.
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I ended up being, I ended up battling in geology because I went to a liberal arts school, and they didn't have, like, an ag, you know, an ag or environmental track.
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So geology started to resonate with me in soil studies, and, yeah, that's definitely where my interest started to go about that time.
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All right. So you mentioned that, you mentioned a word when you were talking about the type of farming you do, you do sustainable farming.
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For our readers who aren't familiar with it, can you just briefly describe the difference between sustainable farming, what you do, and typical industrial farming that goes on?
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And just to, you know, kind of throw out, like, a Webster's definition of sustainable farming, you know, the word sustainable means, you know, not to repeat the only word in its definition, but it sustains.
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It sustains itself. It's like it's kind of a self-perpetuating mechanism.
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And for farming, that is, you know, it's commonly associated with, you know, organics and local and non-use of chemicals and things like that.
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But sustainable isn't just about production methods. It's about finances and the economics of things, too.
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You know, the overarching theme of sustainability is to not only grow things, you know, in a way that nature provides a sustainability, but the economics are sound, they're plausible, and they're repeatable.
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So getting back to your question, like, basically what we do is we do have an organic model where we don't use any commercial fertilizers.
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We use no fertilizers, we use no antibiotics, we use no hormones, and we market our food locally to customers that really care about this stuff, that care about, you know, where their animals race humanely.
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Is this money that they're spending going back to green space?
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Is the dollars going to be reinvested in the local hardware store, in the local feed store, in the United States area?
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And, you know, I want to back up one second and say, like, I've got no bone to pick with the other side, with conventional agriculture.
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You know, nothing in my book is about, like, you know, this side's right and the other side's wrong.
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Basically, what we do is we offer people an alternative.
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So what the alternative, you know, growing up that I saw to what I do now is how most of our food is still raised in this country.
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I mean, 97% and onward of the food that, you know, you'll get at McDonald's or you'll get at Safeway or Walmart or wherever you shop is raised with chemical usage, confinement, feedlot practices, grain that's animals that are strictly grain fed,
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and then fed antibiotics as a byproduct of grain feeding, food that has been literally trucked thousands of miles, you know, with a plume of diesel smoke behind it.
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And, you know, a little bit of that might seem like kind of ivory tower and, you know, kind of, oh, well, you know, there's an organic farmer up on his soapbox kind of thing.
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And, like, I get that, like, you know, when we're disconnected from our food, it's hard to say, like, you know, is organic really better or is conventional really better?
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Well, you know, I'm not trying to persuade anybody, like, to eat organic or to eat however they want.
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But when you stood on your family's front porch on a failing farm and you've been raising corn and soybeans conventionally, which I did about 15 years ago,
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and you get handed a check for 18 bucks, okay, like, your whole harvest gets turned over and you get basically a $20 bill for a year's worth of work.
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But, man, you know, that's going to cause anybody to rethink things.
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So talk about a little bit of some, I mean, let's back up here.
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And, I mean, what are some of the benefits of the meat or the product or the, I don't know what you call it, of doing it sustainably?
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I mean, what are some of the differences between, like, cows who are grass-fed between a cow who's corn-fed?
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And I should back up a second because you just kind of sort of answered my question for me.
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What we really do is we raise grass on our farm.
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We are a pasture farm, and, like, you know, why am I going to put, like, you know, big asterisk, neon light, you know, over top of this?
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It's because everything that we do on our farm goes back to sustainability.
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And, like, you know, if people out there listening, you know, just think about your lawn, for example, or the park, you know, the park that's in your neighborhood.
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We've got sunshine, we've got rain, and we've got soil fertility, okay?
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Now, we can go out and, you know, put some Scott's Miracle-Gro on stuff, okay?
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But, like, how many, you know, $20, $50 bags of Scott's Miracle-Gro can we sustain, okay?
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So then it gets back to, like, issues of sustainability.
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And what we've got is a built-in natural system where we take free sunshine and we take free rain,
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and we couple that with natural soil fertility that's just, like, you know, available to us.
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And that's really challenging how we can argue that that's not a self-sustaining system.
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I mean, that's the circle of life in a nutshell right there.
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Yeah, so it's something that could go on forever, right?
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So, you know, some of this is, like, some bigger picture thinking to get down to, like, what ends up on your plate
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when you shop at a farmer's market, when you take home, like, a, you know, grass-fed ribeye steak or something.
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Okay, yes, that's delicious, and, like, you've got to talk to the farmer and, you know, everything.
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Everybody feels, like, you know, warm and fuzzy for a minute.
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But we can, like, really go backwards and, like, trace this and say, you know, what is the root of sustainability here?
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Because the root, you know, is these roots down in the soil.
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So we're going to take a grass-fed animal and a grass-fed production model,
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and we're going to compare that with a grain-fed model.
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And not, you know, not to be like Debbie Downer or anything, but, you know, I'm not interested, like I said.
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But, I mean, you know, far more eloquent people have spoken about this,
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and the Internet has got, you know, 10 million and one images of animals in confinement.
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And all you have to do is test this with your nose, okay?
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Have you ever been driving down an interstate highway, and all of a sudden, you know, you're listening to the radio,
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and everything's great, and you just catch a whiff of something, and you're like, oh, you know, what is that smell?
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There's a big, yeah, like one in Amarillo, right outside of Amarillo, Texas,
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whenever we'd go to Albuquerque to see my grandpa, it was the worst-smelling thing.
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It was like you had to hold your breath for five minutes.
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There's something wrong with that, Brett, okay?
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Like, I want your listeners to, like, think about that for a second.
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Like, why, you know, why when we smell something, like, rotten in our refrigerator or, like, you know,
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something dead, do we, like, recoil, like, on, like, kind of on a, you know, a molecular level?
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You know, we have, you know, we've been just kind of, for generations, been taught, like, you know,
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that bad, this good, you know, on a kind of caveman speak, you know, like, don't eat, eat this.
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You know, and so, you know, when we actually have to drive down the highway for, like, five miles
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with the windows rolled up and the air conditioner on full blast because it smells so bad,
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just imagine if you're one of those animals or, you know, or one of those people working in that feedlot
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where there's 10,000, 1,000 animals standing in their own excrement and being fed grain
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that has been trucked, you know, from, you know, North Dakota down to, you know, Texas,
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you know, and that, that trail of stuff and, and there's, you know, there's no sustainability
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when animals are, have been, they've evolved to eat grass, there's no explanation for giving
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them a monoculture diet of just pure corn and, quite frankly, their digestive system rebels
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against it, which is why antibiotic use is, is almost mandatory in a confinement system.
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So, I'm going to step off my soapbox for a minute, catch my breath.
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No, yeah, yeah, no, well, it makes sense. I mean, yeah, it's just, it's, it is unsustainable,
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I guess, right? Like, it's just, it doesn't make any sense. So, here you, you feed them this grain
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that, like, their body's not, I guess, really designed for. So, as a consequence, you have to
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give them more antibiotics, which probably isn't good for the person eating it, you know,
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like, I don't want to, I don't know. Precisely. You know, I think there's actually,
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really, getting this back to, like, the manliness thing, I think I've read studies about
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how the hormones in some grain-fed beef can affect testosterone levels.
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Of course. See, soy is loaded with estrogen. Yeah.
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Okay. And, you know, what, what's the coincidence when we've got a bunch of 10-year-old boys
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running around and, and we, we kind of say to myself, my God, does that kid need a bra?
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Well, I mean, you know, I mean, I'm, I'm not joking. I mean, you know, you don't, you don't
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have to, like, be, you know, you know, left-wing and, and organic lovey, lovey-dovey to be like,
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you know, what, what's going on with, with some of these kids? Um, so, you know, there's this,
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there's a direct consequence between what we're putting in our, putting in our food, uh, in our,
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and fueling ourselves with, okay? And if we're going to fuel ourselves with things that come from
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natural soil, like our ancestors ate, and this is where like the whole paleo. Yeah. And, you know,
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eat like, eat like a dinosaur and, and, and all this stuff. Um, you know, it, it resonates.
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Yeah. For sure. One of the things that stuck out to me the most, or not the most, but what I thought
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was really interesting, you started raising hogs or pigs. And I found fascinating that, um, the way
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you guys do it, like there's a system that you guys do. Right. Um, and what I found interesting is
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that, you know, usually we think of pigs, like, oh, they just like wallow in their own filth
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and like, they enjoy being, but you found that like the pigs actually, they go to a place to like
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do their business and then they come back somewhere else. And like, it actually like raising pigs
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isn't very stinky. It actually smells kind of sweet if you do it right. Exactly. Yeah. Our pigs smell
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like maple syrup. Um, I thought it was just like, kind of like this, like sensory clue I can,
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I can attribute it to. That was the most bizarre. Cause like that is so counterintuitive. Cause I think of,
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oh, you raise a pig and she's like sitting in its slop and it's just nasty. Why would you want
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to eat that? Even though I love bacon? Um, yeah, well, I mean, if we, if we give a pig,
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no choice, but to sit in its own slop, that's where it's going to sit, you know? Um, but you know,
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do we, do we, um, do we have the courage and the wisdom to say like, okay, let's give this pig
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some, uh, different choices and be able to have like the patience, you know, to, you talk about
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like some positive, positive male attributes, you know, wisdom, courage, and patience, you know,
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that's a pretty good platform right there. And to, and to go back and say like, look, let's watch
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this pig. Let it, let it express itself. Is there some way that we can reach an intersection
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of the pig being able to like express its pigness? Okay. And us being as farmers to be able to say
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like, look, we can raise this animal sensibly at the same time, you know, and that's a, that's
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going to be a win-win. That's going to be a pig. That's probably going to grow more quickly. Um,
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it's going to put out a much more flavorful meat by, by being able to like, you know, eat the minerals
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out of the soil and mineralize its body, which we cannot do by the way, but just eating corn
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all day long and living in its own filth. And it's going to create a sustainable story
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for people to come out, like visit local farms, see this, smell with their own nose, nothing.
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They're just going to smell fresh air, which is what you expect to smell when you go to a farm.
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People go out to the country to smell fresh air. They don't go out there to smell a hog extra.
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Yeah. Okay. Um, and you know, all this, all this stuff just gets back to like, what can be
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sustainable? Now don't, don't get me wrong. Um, the, the truly sustainable animals I feel on our
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farm are a grass fed cattle and our grass fed sheep, because those are animals that are out
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there, you know, eating clover, eating diverse grasses. And that's a closed loop of sustainability.
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Um, our pigs and our chickens are omnivores. So we do give them some pre-choice grain as a component
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of their diet. Um, but that all goes back into a circle of, okay, we're producing some product
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and their manure, which is able to be naturally distributed across the pasture because we rotate
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the pigs across pasture very intensively from a management standpoint, goes back to doing
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what? Fertilizing the grass for the cattle, for the sheep, you know? So that's just kind
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of how we just economic, being economical in every aspect. Yeah. I mean, you know, we can go
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out with tractors and, and get chemical fertilizers and, and ring up big bills for ourselves. Um,
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and, and by the way, you know, fill up our tractor with fuel and repair it when it breaks down and
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put it in a barn for 11 months out of the year when it's not being used. Or, you know,
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I could run a bunch of pigs out there. They look beautiful. They smell great. They taste fabulous
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when you put them on your plate. It's a humane way to treat our animals. Um, you know, whether
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you're vegetarian or, or you're an omnivore, um, far more humane than the way most animals are raised.
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And at the end of the day, their manure doesn't even have to be cleaned up. It just goes around
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to the pasture and it fertilizes the grass. It's awesome. So it's the circle of life. It's a
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beautiful thing. Yeah. I mean, what can I say? I didn't invent it. I'm just participating.
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00:24:31.200
to the show. All right. So you decided, uh, to get into farming, you're going to go the sustainable
00:24:35.400
route. Um, but this wasn't an overnight success, right? This, this, it was rough going in the
00:24:41.000
beginning. What were the biggest obstacles at the very beginning of your journey to become a
00:24:47.300
sustainable farmer? Oh man, that, that one's, I don't even have to think about that one. It was
00:24:53.260
a negative peer pressure, like, you know, all the voices and, you know, I get, I think I put that
00:25:00.220
right at the end of chapter one in the book. It's like, you know, this is what all the voices were
00:25:04.540
trying to tell me when I get that check for 18 bucks, you know, like you can't do it. Just like,
00:25:09.100
get it. God, why, you know, okay. You've had a few months to like, you know, dick around on the
00:25:14.120
farm. Now get yourself a haircut and, and, and, and a polo shirt and go get a job, you know? Um,
00:25:20.540
and, and that wasn't just all my friends who a generation before would have been young farmers
00:25:26.320
and we're now, you know, put on khaki pants and finding jobs in Washington, DC, which is about an
00:25:31.800
hour from our farm. That was other farmers. Okay. Saying that, I mean, they weren't, you know,
00:25:37.560
they were discouraging because for all, all through the 1960s, the seventies, the eighties commodity
00:25:44.120
prices were just going down, down, down. You know, I'm not making this up. You can pull up,
00:25:48.240
you know, umpteen different charts on this where commodity prices diverge from the cost of living.
00:25:53.940
Okay. It's just like a big, you know, greater than symbol, uh, commodity prices kind of flatlined
00:25:59.600
and trickled down in one direction and the cost of living went up and the gap in between as that,
00:26:05.000
as that V shaped diagram, uh, keeps growing over the years. Um, the gap in between becomes
00:26:11.620
insurmountable to bridge. Okay. And, and by 1996, when I was standing on a, you know, standing there
00:26:18.760
looking over our farm and thinking about becoming a farmer, um, the gap was just about as wide as
00:26:25.420
it had ever been. So, uh, you know, needless to say that I could not find many farmers in my area
00:26:31.280
that were like, you know, let's sign, sign you up, pal, you know, let's get, get you a straw hat
00:26:35.540
mobile and get you started. You know, they were like, you know, do anything but farm.
00:26:40.940
Yeah. So, yeah. And I guess too, um, I think you're talking about commodity prices, I guess
00:26:45.180
that a lot of that has to do with subsidies, right? Farm subsidies. And that, that's part
00:26:49.040
of the problem. Uh, a lot of farms that used to grow diverse, you know, products, produce
00:26:56.280
animals, because that wasn't where the money was at. They started diverting all that land and
00:27:01.520
resource to like soy. Of course. Soy, corn, bean. Yeah. Exactly. And so, yeah, I guess
00:27:08.160
that's, that's like, that was the way you were supposed to do it. So when, I guess when
00:27:10.740
you came along and said, Hey, yeah, I want to like feed my cows grass and I want to, I
00:27:15.980
got an orchard. I want to try doing some stuff there. People were kind of like, I guess a
00:27:19.460
lot of the farmers like, uh, what plant are you from, son? Or Brett, Brett, I literally
00:27:24.340
got laughed at at one point. Okay. And I write about it a little bit and you know, it's still
00:27:29.260
like one of those things that, uh, you know, makes the hair stand up on the back of your
00:27:32.480
neck from like, you know, kind of the indignity of it. You know, I still, I still like have
00:27:36.480
take umbrage, you know, it's like, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm serving at this party and you
00:27:43.160
know, I'm a, I'm working as a caterer to like pay in, I'm not as a caterer, as a server
00:27:48.780
for a catering company, um, to help pay my bills while I try to farm. You know, this is
00:27:53.740
like my night job. I'm serving like cucumber sandwiches to people. I'm at this party and I'm telling
00:27:58.780
these farmers, you know, in a, in a, in a, you know, 30 second little break, like what
00:28:02.120
I'm up to. And, uh, you know, they literally, after I get done telling them that I'm going
00:28:06.840
to sell grass fed beef and take it to farmer's market. And, uh, you know, we're going to get
00:28:11.220
like local customers. They turned to each other and made eye contact. It's like one of those
00:28:15.540
moments where you're like, they just couldn't help but laugh. You know, it's like, who's going
00:28:19.360
to laugh first? And it's like burst into laughter. And you know, I must've turned red from
00:28:23.880
the tips of my ears down to my toes, you know? So, so what kept you going? I mean,
00:28:28.700
through all those, I mean, like from the book, he sent it, it took a while for you to like
00:28:32.840
even start making a profit and the profits you made were very small, like 18 bucks.
00:28:37.720
Right. Um, I mean, what kept you going through all the negativity and I mean, the, I mean,
00:28:44.820
just like the, the lack of results. I mean, what kept you going?
00:28:48.240
Right. Um, you know, if, if we think about farming, uh, you know, farming and writing
00:28:54.500
both are, are not really notorious for, uh, being great, um, careers from a financial
00:29:00.920
standpoint. Okay. There's reason why people go to law school and medical school and all
00:29:05.600
these things. Um, so I, I had help from my, both my parents, um, they realized that they
00:29:12.860
could not farm. Okay. Again, keep in mind, this is the late seventies, early eighties when,
00:29:17.020
you know, you know, stock market was, was doing very well and the economy was going
00:29:20.340
strong and all this stuff, but commodity prices were just in the toilet. So both my
00:29:24.840
parents, they were not farmers. They both had off farm jobs in, in Washington, DC and
00:29:30.600
another local big town. So when I came along, like there was no logical way for me to say
00:29:38.540
like, I'm going to make a living here until I had enough time to like either figure it
00:29:44.700
out or fail trying, like fail nobly. Okay. Like you gave it a hell of a go, you know,
00:29:51.080
it's been four years and you know, it's not working out kind of thing. So, you know, I'm,
00:29:55.500
I'm just constantly grateful for my parents and, um, to like, believe in me, you know,
00:30:01.040
and, and what greater, what greater honor can, can anybody have been like, you know, your
00:30:05.920
dad who's working a desk job in DC be like, look, son, like, I don't really think it's going
00:30:13.400
to work out. Um, I don't, I don't see the light at the end of the tunnel, but like, I love
00:30:17.780
you, man, you know, and we're, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to stick
00:30:21.780
behind you as long as, as long as you keep going. Um, and you know, in a lot of ways,
00:30:26.940
this, this book was, was kind of a, uh, written in gratitude to, to that spirit. Um, it's just
00:30:32.960
a spirit of something bigger than yourself, you know, and that's the best way I can describe
00:30:38.700
farming. It's like a commitment to a, to a faith, a faith and, and, uh, and spirituality
00:30:47.240
I love that. I love that so much. Makes me want to be farmer right now. Um, so you're,
00:30:51.660
you're a big success now, right? Um, you got a book, uh, the farm is, is thriving. I mean,
00:30:56.940
it's like, it's like a, it's like a, you have multiple streams of revenue coming in. I mean,
00:31:00.900
it's like a little corporation almost, right? Um, what was the tipping point, uh, for you?
00:31:07.280
Was there a particular moment or were there moments where you're like, man, yeah, this
00:31:13.220
The moment was when I got interviewed by Art of Manliness for a podcast. It's living history,
00:31:19.780
folks. Oh man. Like, uh, you know, um, the, the easiest way I can, I can answer that is like,
00:31:29.000
you know, it was like an overnight success after, for 15 years, you know, it's like, okay, this
00:31:34.320
guy, this guy, this guy's a, this guy's a success, right? Overnight. Uh,
00:31:37.260
um, just overnight over and over and over again. Like the, the biggest thing I can attribute any
00:31:42.400
of this to is like my customers believing me. Okay. Like, you know, in the acknowledgements,
00:31:47.920
I'd say, thank you. That's the last thing I say to my customers and none, like nothing I could have
00:31:53.900
done could have happened if my customers didn't say like, look, there's this 25 year old guy.
00:31:59.800
He's on the back of pickup truck. He's wearing a bandana and a, you know, a t-shirt with no sleeves
00:32:05.180
on it. Like, like who in their right mind would buy like frozen ground beef on a street corner
00:32:11.540
from like a human that looked like me. Okay. Like if they didn't have like a greater mission
00:32:17.960
about what they were about, like, what did they value, you know? And my customers just bring me
00:32:23.500
their values. And that's like, you know, about humane raising of animals about like, you know,
00:32:28.860
organic growing practices. It's about, um, like, you know, they really want to support like small
00:32:36.780
family farms that are just like with transparent growing practices, you know, they value the fact
00:32:42.060
that they can get in their car and drive out to my farm and just like go to walk around and open
00:32:47.100
the barn doors. And they're not going to see like bags of chemicals that like I'm keeping,
00:32:50.640
like in the back of the shed, you know what I mean? Uh, so yeah, it's, you know, it, it all,
00:32:56.780
it basically all comes down to, you know, people believing you and, and after a while, if you get
00:33:02.140
enough people believing in you, then, uh, yeah, you start to rock and roll a little bit.
00:33:07.180
Um, so what's typical, what's the typical day on your, on the farm? Like for you, I mean,
00:33:10.960
is it like really like what you read about in those books or like you grew up watching an old
00:33:15.580
movies where you wake up at four o'clock in the morning? I mean, is that what it's like?
00:33:19.480
I mean, what kind of walks through your day? Sure. Um, yeah, I'm not exactly sure what a
00:33:25.100
typical day really is after, after 17 days, 17 years of farming. Um, there is some routine
00:33:31.200
in it. We do, we attend seven farmers markets in Washington, DC every weekend. That doesn't
00:33:37.060
mean like from May through October, that's year round. Okay. Um, we, we have a year round
00:33:41.960
food platform in the form of livestock, you know, livestock, it's got their seasonality to it.
00:33:46.580
Don't get me wrong. Like we only raise our chickens, for example, in the summertime when
00:33:49.880
the grass is out, our, our, our meat chickens, I should say, but everything else, even our land
00:33:54.300
hens, you know, um, I I've got dozens of pictures of chickens out in the snow year after year after
00:33:59.940
year. So, um, like what's a typical day, but if, if aside from our weekends where we attend
00:34:08.040
farmers markets, um, Monday through Friday is going to be like, just, just absolutely fraught with
00:34:14.520
variability. It could be anything from, you know, putting up a new fence to taking a chainsaw
00:34:20.660
out to a tree that just fell on the new fence. You know, it can be, uh, changing the oil in our
00:34:26.300
truck, uh, as preventative, uh, you know, in our, in our 13 year old farm truck to finding out that
00:34:32.600
because we didn't change the oil, like the head gasket went on it, you know, now we got to get the
00:34:36.600
truck to the shop. Um, you know, this morning I, um, worked a bunch of sheep, trimmed hooves,
00:34:44.280
checked the parasites, um, fixed a flat tire on a livestock trailer and, uh, picked up my farm
00:34:51.900
hand for lunch because his truck was out of commission and like ran him over, uh, to where
00:34:56.700
he lives. Um, you know, that's, that might not sound very like romantic. Um, but that's like my
00:35:02.260
typical day, man, working with livestock, checking on pastures, making sure stuff isn't broken
00:35:07.680
and fixing it. Well, you sound like you had a much manlier morning than I did. Like I went to the
00:35:12.780
post office and I went to office depot and I bought some envelopes. So that's not very manly. I need to,
00:35:22.340
you make me feel inadequate. Well, you know, that's a not, not intentional for sure. I like,
00:35:30.380
I like, I love a good envelope, man. Yeah. Who doesn't? Um, all right. So
00:35:35.980
people who are listening to this podcast and they're like, man, I want to eat a pig that smells
00:35:41.880
like maple syrup. Um, or I want a cow, like I want to support this sort of sustainable farming. I want
00:35:47.740
to reap the benefits of this. What can these people who are listening, these guys who are listening,
00:35:51.860
what can they do to support sustainable farming? Right. The, the best answer I can give to that,
00:35:59.400
like the easiest answer is, and, and, and it's easier than ever, frankly, um, is, is know your
00:36:07.060
farmer. Okay. Know your farmer. Like anybody that's out there listening right now, um, tell me
00:36:13.380
who your farmer is. Like who pops to mind. I want to, and I want to face in a name. Okay. Like who's
00:36:18.140
your doctor. Okay. Does it, you know, um, who works in your office, you know, who's your kid's soccer
00:36:23.440
coach, you know, like, why do we know all these names and faces? Like, but we don't know who our
00:36:29.700
farmer is. Okay. Or our farmers plural. So the easiest thing to do is go know your farmer. Where
00:36:35.280
do you find a farmer? You find them at farmer's markets. Okay. You find them through CSA through,
00:36:40.760
which is an acronym for community, pardon me, community supported agriculture or community
00:36:47.020
subscription agriculture. Um, you can find them through buying clubs where someone in your
00:36:52.300
neighborhood's like, Hey, I know like you're too busy to like go out and find your farmer.
00:36:56.580
But like, I know this person, um, I've been out to their farm. I'm going to like pull a bunch of
00:37:01.480
food. Cause I've got like a 20 cubic foot chest freezer, you know, and, and, and a big, a big
00:37:06.640
refrigerator in my garage that I'm not using. And we're going to have like a drop-off, um, for this
00:37:11.500
farmer. So you can go to a farm, like say, I want to buy a cow, right? Like if you wanted
00:37:16.940
to, yeah, yeah, sure. And that's like a fourth option. Yeah. And like my greater point is
00:37:21.120
like, there are myriad options and like, I'm not like blowing smoke. Like these are real
00:37:25.120
things. Okay. Like farmer's markets, there's like, you know, it's one in a, in an economy
00:37:30.120
for the last 10 years where all you hear about is like how bad the economy is. Like, you know,
00:37:34.360
both the bums out of office, they're gridlocked. They can't get the economy going. Well, guess
00:37:38.100
what? Like farmer's markets in the past 10 years have gone from like something like 500
00:37:46.240
Wow. Okay. And that's growth. Like any, any industry would be incredibly envious of.
00:37:52.300
And this isn't like, you know, let's make some more widgets in Hong Kong. Okay. We need
00:37:57.400
more action figures because Star Wars has a new movie out kind of thing. These are like
00:38:01.360
family farms that are just like strapping it up saying like, look, customers are really
00:38:06.800
finally give a damn about the food arising. Now we're going to take it to farmer's market.
00:38:11.860
And what we as customers have to do is say like, yes, thank you. We're going to show
00:38:17.460
up. We're going to buy this food. We're going to, you know, create a relationship with this
00:38:22.440
farmer and get to know, you know, not just one farmer, like, you know, a whole market
00:38:28.920
That's awesome. So just, yeah, get out, just find a farmer and put them in your Rolodex
00:38:33.900
or your iPhone. I guess people don't use Rolodex anymore. So yeah. Awesome. All right.
00:38:40.380
So there's probably some guys who are listening to this like me who are, I'm talking to you.
00:38:44.480
I'm like, man, I want to become a farmer. I'm not sure that's doable right now, but there's
00:38:49.220
a young guy who's like, you're, you know, he's 20. He was the age that you were when you
00:38:53.260
decided I want to become a farmer. Any advice that you can, um, give these guys who are considering
00:38:59.620
this career? And in fact, I think you're, you're actually writing a guest post for us
00:39:02.780
about. Right. Exactly. So yeah. The cliff notes version, I guess.
00:39:08.780
Yeah. Um, and I've touched on a bunch of these, a bunch of these subjects, um, within the podcast,
00:39:14.760
but yeah, like the kind of like the cliff cliff notes version of, you know, like, you know,
00:39:19.140
the top, you know, top 10 rules of like starting your own farm. Number one has to be stay out of
00:39:25.300
debt. Okay. Like what is it about our culture that wants to take shortcuts on everything? Okay. We
00:39:33.320
want to like get to the finish line first. We want to win the video game first. You know, we want to
00:39:38.020
have like the most likes on Facebook. Okay. You know, slow food, local food, organic farming has nothing
00:39:46.740
to do with shortcuts. It's like the anti-shortcut. Okay. Um, and what we do as a culture is we feel
00:39:53.920
like, look, I really want that $600,000 house and man, I need it now. You know, I need with a
00:39:58.780
swimming pool and I need it within like, you know, for under a 40 minute commute to my house because
00:40:04.220
I don't want to live in the city, but you know, I really want to have this house. So we finance it
00:40:08.220
with debt. And then guess what happens in 2008, in 2009? Okay. The chick, you know, to borrow a farm
00:40:14.780
analogy, the chickens came home to roost. Okay. And we all got in trouble. And this happens over
00:40:19.320
and over again with, in farming, because there is so much variability with the weather, with prices,
00:40:28.220
with our own personal energy levels, with unexpected, you know, calamities, uh, health
00:40:35.080
problems. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. And you can't have any of these things
00:40:39.780
and farm successfully. Like you, you can only farm when everything's successfully,
00:40:45.340
when everything's going right. So we have to assume that lots of things are going to go wrong,
00:40:50.360
which is where I get down further in the post and I say, expect to fail and accept failure,
00:40:54.820
like value failure. Okay. Um, but you know, knowing that we're going to fail, like stay out of debt.
00:41:02.520
Okay. Um, and that's the best way I can say, like, just grow slowly and, and buy what you can
00:41:09.900
afford. You know, if you can only afford to rent, you know, five acres and you've got a farm,
00:41:16.220
then there's nothing small about five acres, man. You can grow a lot of vegetables and a lot,
00:41:22.720
you know, you could raise a whole flock of free raised land hens on five acres and make money on it.
00:41:27.180
You know, I challenge anybody to go out and raise five acres of tomatoes and, uh, and tell me that's
00:41:32.920
not a job. That's a small farm. Okay. Yeah, for sure. Um, so how is this whole experience,
00:41:40.200
how long has it been like 15 years in the making about, how has this 15 year experience of saving
00:41:46.360
the family farm, um, becoming a sustainable farming, how has it made you a better man?
00:41:51.440
Um, well, that's a, that's a pretty challenging question. I, I, I think, I think the best way,
00:42:02.580
um, the best way I can answer that is to say like, um, it made me a willing father. Okay. And that's
00:42:10.680
going to sound a little weird for the first thing to say, but I've got an eight year old son. Okay. And
00:42:16.300
the farm has been in my family for seven generations now. And, you know, it doesn't really matter if
00:42:22.360
it's been in my family for one generation or, or, or 10 generations. It's just, that's the way it's
00:42:27.720
been. And for seven generations or six generations before me, somebody had to say yes. Okay. Somebody
00:42:36.180
had to say like, you know, I'm not taking that job in town. I'm not going to run for politics or
00:42:41.920
whatever, you know, or, you know, fill in the blank. I'm going to be a farmer. And when I came
00:42:49.360
along, I had to be that person. Like a farm isn't a farm without a farmer. Okay. A farm is just a
00:42:56.680
piece of land. It's a, it's a park. It's a, it's a woods that you drive by on the highway. It's a
00:43:01.180
protected, you know, piece of land that was bought by some billion dollar endowment. Okay. A farm has to
00:43:07.600
have a farmer. And if I'm going to be able to pass anything on, like if I'm going to be,
00:43:14.800
you know, fulfilled as a man, um, then I have to have a son or a daughter to come along behind me
00:43:23.660
and say like, yeah, dad, like, this is cool. You know, uh, what you're doing, what you're doing
00:43:31.180
works. And like, I want to do it too. Like, you know, the kid in the back of the crowd, like pick me,
00:43:36.420
pick me, I want to be on your kickball. You know, that, that kind of excitement. That's,
00:43:40.440
that's the way it's got to be. So like, you know, I didn't, when I was 20 years old,
00:43:44.580
I wasn't thinking about any of this stuff. Um, I was, you know, thinking about pizzas and going,
00:43:49.620
going to watch a movie and, and, and, you know, waking up with enough energy the next day to,
00:43:53.440
to farm for, you know, 10 or 12 hours. But then you do this for a year after year after year
00:43:58.820
and your, your, your priorities and your goals just begin to shift. And when you entered,
00:44:04.620
you know, when you bring another human life into the farm, it just really completes,
00:44:09.420
completes the picture for, uh, you know, as another component of what sustainability really
00:44:15.320
Yeah. So it's, I mean, it's kind of inspired you to like start, you know,
00:44:19.140
inspire you to like start leaving a legacy, right? Like you want to be able to pass this
00:44:25.100
Yeah. That's, I think that's really well put. Um, word legacy is like a very poetic
00:44:29.960
kind of encapsulation of exactly what I was talking about. And, you know, and there's
00:44:35.140
plenty of legacies out there that, uh, you know, that we, we were going for like that
00:44:39.820
brass ring and we're, we're, you know, we're going for the golden parachute, whatever.
00:44:44.180
And, uh, at the end of the day, we, we might look back on and be like, what did I really
00:44:47.920
accomplish? You know, but if I can look back on and say like, look, we saved our family
00:44:52.540
farm and, and I've got a kid that like wants to take it over from me, like a family
00:44:57.560
business. Oh man, that's cool. You know, that's awesome. So last question, uh, Forrest,
00:45:04.140
I know you probably got to get back out and shear some sheep or whatever you do.
00:45:09.320
Yeah. Um, are there any like life lessons that an average guy, say a guy is not going
00:45:14.380
to be a farmer, but are there any life lessons that a man could take from the life of a farmer
00:45:20.820
Yeah. Um, I mean, let's think about being kids for a minute. Um, what, like, what are
00:45:29.860
the songs that we're taught when we're, we're in kindergarten? We, we, you know, we learned
00:45:34.420
about old McDonald and like all his, all the sound, you know, all the different animals
00:45:38.080
on his farm. We, you know, we were given like a, uh, you know, play set for, for a barn
00:45:43.500
with a farmer and it's, you know, a donkey and a cow and all this stuff. And, um, like,
00:45:48.320
like why, you know, after we're all so removed from being on farms ourselves, like, why do
00:45:55.740
we still value as a culture, like the idea of a farmer, you know, there's gotta be something
00:46:01.960
there. You know, we don't, we don't give our kids like, you know, uh, a cubicle to play
00:46:06.640
with. Okay. We don't give them like a little guy sitting behind a desk with like, you know,
00:46:10.980
uh, a computer. Okay. Hey, you know, happy birthday. Play with this. Like, we don't do
00:46:17.540
that. Like, like, why don't we do that? So like, you know, even if you don't want to
00:46:21.380
get into farming, like we just have a cultural resonance that says like, look, we, there's
00:46:27.440
certain things we value about farming. Like we can take these things away and make ourselves
00:46:32.400
better. And like, what are those things, man? I hate to say it, but they're, it's like,
00:46:38.340
it's poetry. Okay. You know, I, I know we, we're not supposed to read poetry. Like, you
00:46:42.960
know, Robert Frost, uh, and everybody aside who, you know, Robert Frost being a famous
00:46:47.400
farmer himself and Wendell Berry for that matter. Um, but like it's issues of faith. It's issues
00:46:53.840
of, of dedication. It's selflessness. You know, it is the desire and the willingness to
00:47:00.780
wake up for 50 years in a row and say, I'm going to put on my boots this morning and I'm
00:47:07.100
going to go out and, and, and, and fix a broken down fence. I'm going to go help pull a calf
00:47:13.120
out of a cow that's straining and it's going to take me all morning. You know, I'm going
00:47:16.840
to go out in the rain this afternoon and, you know, take care of my chickens that are otherwise
00:47:23.300
going to be out there getting, getting pneumonia. If like, I don't take action right now and
00:47:28.020
like wash, rinse and repeat for 50 years. And then what do you get at the end? Do you get
00:47:32.380
like severance package? Do you get like benefits, you know, when you retire? No, of course you don't.
00:47:39.600
Um, so what kind of person does that pay? I don't know. For some reason, our culture continues to
00:47:46.520
value it. And, uh, and, uh, I can't say I disagree. That's good stuff. I'm ready to like get my
00:47:54.080
pitchfork and overalls. Well, go for it, man. By my farm. Well, Forrest, this has been a fascinating
00:48:00.480
discussion. Um, I, all you're listening, I highly recommend go, go out and get his book. Um, it's
00:48:06.700
just, it's an interesting read. Um, so Forrest, thank you very much. My pleasure, Brett. I appreciate
00:48:12.060
the opportunity. Our guest today was Forrest Pritchard. Forrest is the author of the book
00:48:17.500
Gaining Ground. And you can find that on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:48:25.300
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,
00:48:30.400
make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. And if you guys
00:48:34.920
could do me a favor, if you enjoy the, this podcast, this free podcast, uh, you can go to iTunes
00:48:40.420
and give it a rating and a review that would help me out a lot. Help us, um, help other people find
00:48:47.120
the podcast. So if you knew that, I'd really appreciate it. So until next time, this is