Year 3 Review

Visiting my brother and sister in law in Florida, it was brought to my attention that I hadn’t completed Year 3 Review. So, well, here it is.

I’ve been thinking a lot of sustainability lately, again. Specifically, around measurement. But more on that later.

The year always starts off with planning, planning, taxes, and planning. Upon pondering my dilemma of not selling as much vegetables that I had wanted. I had a thought. Freeze.Dryer. Yep, I had been studying ways of preserving foods - freezing, pressure cooking, water bath canning and I stumbled into freeze drying.

I bought one. For Christmas.

Then I started looking at all the recipes for freeze drying and I found a pet food recipe. The lights went off and I started experimenting with different recipes made from veggies from my farm. I knew a couple of good meat farmers in the area, and we partnered up. It was super important to me that everything be sourced locally to reduce carbon spent with transportation and well …. everything tastes 100x better when it’s grown in your own back yard.

So that was my plan.

Once I got my recipe semi perfected, I contacted my favorite local farm store - Agricole and asked if they would be interested in my freeze dried pet foods. And they said, “SURE!”, please send me your license. Awkard silence.

I started researching what was needed to get a feed license in Michigan through the USDA. I started the process in January, and I think it was March before I received it. The biggest hurdle was the food analysis. There are 2 options for nutrition analysis - either have your product sent to a lab or evaluation or calculate it yourself using the USDA’s database and measuring the product.

That’s what I did.

Along with Agricole, we partnered with Argus and did 3 markets in 2023 - Dexter, Whitmore Lake, and Lansing. By the end of the season the realization of profitability with markets was evident. It’s very difficult as the market is dictated by vacations, other festivals, and weather. So, for this year - we’ll focus more on retail stores and reduce the number of markets we do.

We finally finished the greenhouse. We put geothermal properties in it by digging down 6 feet and filling the hole with weeping tiles and some pex tubing for a backup solution. I had seen the studies on climate batteries concepts and I was interested in how it would turn out. The jury is still out. It still hits outside temps inside the green house at night. So I put the pex tubing in to pipe in some radiant heat for a slow, low energy heat. The barn also has radiant heat in it.

Next year, we’ll invest in solar for it to help energize it.

One area I plan to expand in this year is more apolopathy products. More plants that have medicinal value for tinctures, teas, and SPA products.

We spent the year growing, selling and preserving and now we’re back to planning, planning, taxes, and planning for the upcoming 2024 season.

We’re looking forward to opening up our CSA’s for the first time. We also joined the Michigan Flower Growers Collective and we’re excited about selling wholesale to local florists.

Ok, back to sustainability.

I continue trying to reduce the amount of plastic on our farm - removing the plastic row covers to help keep weeds down. We’ll have green walkways again. I think if we edge the rows and do a better job of weed whipping - we may stand a chance against the weeds this year. Roots capture carbon, so instead of wood chips in the walkways, we’ll do green pathways to let the roots do their job.

I get to work with technology companies and focus on how to measure carbon in software. Burke and I were thinking about how we might calculate carbon for our products. If I put the amount of carbon spent to produce the product, would that matter to people? Would they know what it means and how to relate it.

So I found a machine learning dataset which was a few years old, but it’s the closest thing we have today. So I used the dataset to calculate carbon in our product. The number was 55 CO2eq for beef and .05 CO2eq for chicken. But, what does that number mean and how do we go about reducing it?

Not shipping around the world and staying local is a start. But ….. to expand my market, I need to ship. So, what to do? And what kinds of reductions do I get when I follow regenerative agriculture or implement a climate battery. How about if I add solar? We already buy offsets to aid our energy company to invest in clean energy. Do we take extra credits there?

I have no idea. The research and thoughts about sustainability continues into 2024.

Here’s to a great 2024!