February 2023 - Pick Tn Conference Read out. New Connections and learning

First, a thought on professional groups and conferences.

If you have a goal, you will not achieve that goal if you do not surround yourself with people of similar passions. Join Groups (paid ones), attend professional conferences and build a network of friends who can aide you, coach you, help you, mentor you and be a catalyst to unlocking ideas you did not know you even had.

Thanks to Chris and Suellen Simpson of Field of Dreams Farm for hosting me. The Simpsons are a pasture raised / regenerative outfit vicinity Nashville, and we are happy to call them friends.    

Conference Big Rocks – New connections, new learning.

Super excited to meet Amy Price Neff, MD of Nashville’s Mind Stream Integrative Medicine. www.mindstreamintegrative.com. Mind Stream is an integrative medicine and behavioral health practice in Nashville that offers services of behavioral medicine, hormone health, Ayurvedic medicine, microbiome health, cancer support and prevention, functional medicine testing and interpretation and - regenerative agriculture. Dr Neff and I had great discussion about the hypothesis that there is a correlation between the deficiencies in the human gut biome and the shortfalls in our soil’s microbiome. There is a growing body of literature on the subject and Dr Neff has contributed several white papers on the subject. We are super excited to have met Dr Neff and look forward to collaboration and sharing information in the gut biome arena.

While staying with the Simpsons, I met their daughter, Melissa. Melissa is in her late 20s and has started a fledgling seafood shipping business from her commercial fishing adventures in the waters of Alaska and New England. Last year’s trail run with her parents provided several hundred pounds of King Salmon, Scallops and Shrimp to clients of Field of Dreams Farm. We are tickled to have struck an accord with Ms. Melissa to include a second farm -  Land Basket Farm in her seafood shipping operations this year. We look forward to being able to offer our customers fresh unadulterated seafood from Alaska and New England. Stay tuned to newsletters on that.

Was great listening to Steve Groff, ( https://www.stevegroff.com) International cover crop expert and Author of the book: The Future Proof Farm. The books premise is that today’s consumer increasingly demands that the food they eat and the clothes they wear come from farmers who observe responsible farming practices and those farms that don’t will go extinct. The author also believes that real food should be viewed as medicine – a means of healing todays human condition – a result of the industrialization and commercialization of the food industry. Was great to spend some time with Mr Groff getting coached on cover crops at Land Basket Farm to increase the quality of our own soils.

We were delighted to meet the Tennessee Department of Agriculture’s Deputy Commissioner Mr. Andy Holt. As it turns out, Deputy Commissioner Holt is a big pasture poultry lover and will be visiting east Tn next month. We are hopeful he takes us up on the offer to visit Land Basket Farm and find out how the best chicken in Tennessee is raised. 😊

Great, listening to Mr. Ray Tyler, a family man, and farmer who started with nothing. The title of his class was growing organically 52 weeks out of the year. Mr. Tyler, from scratch has built a $500k a year business raising organic vegetables in high tunnels and direct selling them to the public. It was a super talk. Tickled to have been able to video Mr. Tyler and intend to share that video with Mike Russo- Chefs Harvest Farm and Paul of Mountain Roots farm so we can all benefit from this fellows expertise.

Happy to have met Mr. Andy Westfall of Westfall equipment, a small family owned  wine making equipment company. Andy has a passion for making fruit wines. I was delighted to spend some time with Andy, talking about the therapeutic effect of making homemade wines from your own fruits. We are super excited to meet Andy and have him as a friend.  Land basket farm intends to dabble in that area to with our vast number of persimmon trees. We think we can do more with persimmons than just make our fall hogs happy. 😊

It was great seeing Shannon and Eric Jorgenson of Forage and Feast Farm of Hancock County. Shannon and Eric are regenerative farmers in Hancock Country and run a custom process facility too. Shannon has strong views on organic methods and raising clean whole foods for people.

Last, a big thanks to Mr. Mike Brown. Mike is a friend of the farm and respected leader in business development for the Tennessee Department of agriculture. Mr. Brown has been an ally and we are grateful for our relationship with him.