Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Local farmers markets are an essential part of a local food source, and today we want to talk about why they're so important and what they really mean to us.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: Welcome to the Duster Mud podcast. This is episode 61.
[00:00:15] Speaker A: After 25 years of being in the air force, Rich was a fighter pilot. We decided to give up the Department of Defense and move to the Ozarks and start a first generation regenerative farm. We grow beef, lamb, pork, chicken, and some eggs and milk. And part of our mission about good food is this podcast, and we like to talk about it. So let's talk about some food again, but in a different kind of way.
[00:00:39] Speaker C: Yeah. Right.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: Yeah. It is a busy time of year for farmers across this country right now because they're gearing up.
[00:00:49] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: Farmers market season is here.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: Right.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: We spent the day last Saturday setting up for a new market for us.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. This year we are attending the, and happy to be doing it. The forsyth right near Branson Farmers Market. We will have an inside booth, and we had not set up an inside booth before, so it was a fun and different kind of challenge for us.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: In fact, come along with us. Let's go check it out.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: Okay, let me look at this real quick while they're watching that.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: You know you don't have to fill this space, right?
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Oh.
Giving you guys an opportunity to watch that right now while I go over my notes.
So help me God, if you use.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: That, that's got to go in.
[00:01:46] Speaker A: Today is a really exciting day because we are here at the Forsyth farmers market to set up our inside booth. Farmers markets are a great way to get local food into the hands of your local residents.
[00:02:01] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: We're really excited about this market. We're able to set up the booth once and it stays set up because it's an inside booth. We wanted to show you guys, just give you an idea of how we were gonna set things up.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: So come along, let's go get this thing set up. According to the USDA, there are about 8700 farmers markets across this country.
[00:02:26] Speaker C: Yeah, that's true.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: That's a lot of food grown by farmers that goes direct to consumers.
[00:02:33] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: It's seen a 7% increase in market numbers since 2013.
[00:02:39] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:02:40] Speaker B: And actually, the numbers between 2020 and 2022 jumped up quite a bit. So it is definitely growing. That the idea of fresh from your farmer, I believe.
I think it has a lot to do with some of the craziness that went on in 2020 with just the food, the transportation system, the supply chain was a little supply chain. It looked really fragile. In 2020, it did look really fragile. And as. As the supply chains get fragile, local becomes way more important. And we believe that having a relationship with a local farmer is really important.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: It became important to us. But I got to be honest, like, it wasn't until four or five years ago that I even would consider really shopping at a farmer's market. I. We were in the military, I shopped at the commissary, got all of our food from the big food supply chain, and I just. I didn't understand why people wanted to shop at a farmer's market. Of course, we visited some novelty markets when we lived in the UK and we would go to the market, but seriously, it was novelty. We didn't. We didn't go there to get our groceries.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: It wasn't for them.
[00:04:09] Speaker A: It wasn't. That's where they would go get their groceries. And they have a lot of amazing farmers and wonderful produce, especially grown in the UK. And their farmers markets are phenomenal.
But I didn't really get it until 2020, and that local source became almost a necessity because you couldn't get it any other way. And as my eyes were opened up to the supply chain and what the farmers were going through.
[00:04:47] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:04:48] Speaker A: And then getting into this.
[00:04:49] Speaker B: Well, for us personally, we put in an order for a whole beef in the fall of 2019, and we went and picked up that whole beef from the processor February of 2020, about two weeks before the nation shut down.
[00:05:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: And the. The. Having an entire, like, the whole thing, beef in the freezer, when that happened, it. It was just a complete and total eye opening experience, a total mind shift for us.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: Right. So when that happened, my mind was changed and we wanted to become part of a local food resource and ultimately to become a resource of quality, premium local food that people could get their hands on. And so we started growing it.
So last Saturday, when we were setting up, one of the things that really we're passionate about is not just growing the food really, really well, but presenting it in a good way and in a way that people feel comfortable buying meat from someone at a farmer's market. You need to present that in a way that it's appetizing, that it's appealing, that that's where they see you, that's where you see us. So we wanna make sure that it looks professional.
[00:06:22] Speaker B: There's not an inherent trust. Right. Like, you have to build that. And in our opinion, looking professional is like the foundation or step one of building trust with that customer base, because it's just the two of us. Right. It's not associated with some big market chain. It's just us standing there, and we're presenting meat for someone to feed their family. So you have to very, very quickly build trust. And so one of the things we'd like to show you today is come check out the booth that we set up last Saturday and the way that we tried to make the booth look professional.
[00:07:09] Speaker D: We're about halfway through setting up our booth here. We're going to go with a black and white. We've got the freezer in the back. We have our table cloths on, and now we're going to set up how we want the different signage and stuff like that going. This is our display freezer that we put some beef and chicken and pork chops and such in there so that our potential customers can see exactly what we have to offer and what it looks like. One of the challenges of selling meat is that it has to stay in that freezer back there, and we need the customers to be able to see what we have to offer. So between signage and the display freezer, I think that we'll be able to show them exactly what we've got.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: Shelly's getting our signs fixed up. We bought the signs from the last folks that used this spot, and we're getting them all changed over to our information.
This is what we've got so far.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: Well, we have completed our project today. We're all set up here at the Forsyth Farmers market and ready for new customers. Let's take a final look.
One of the things that we think is really, really important, especially you military people, you're gonna get this. We gotta have a uniform. I mean, it's just the way he's geared. And for all intents and purposes, so am I. And it's just easier that way. I love to know what I'm putting, what I'm putting on, how to get dressed, and if I don't have to think about it, it's just one less thing. So one of the things that we do is dress like, you know, we.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: We want to look the part also. And in that, I don't mean that we put on a suit and tie so that we look like business folks, but we also don't show up all grungy from farm chores. Like, we have khaki pants and a printed farm shirt and our logo on hats. Like, it's a. We want it. We want folks. When. When we present ourselves, we want people to say, oh, they. They look the part. They look professional.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: They care.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: They care.
[00:09:40] Speaker A: If they cared enough to put on good clothes to come and sell me the meat. Perhaps that transfers over into. They care about what they're growing and how it's been packaged and how it's been cared for, because there are a lot of details from the time that a baby chick grows up or shows up on the farm to the time that it's in the free in your freezer, there's a lot of things that happen there. And in seconds, I need somebody to look at us, to look at the booth and say, I trust you.
How do you gain that trust? Like, in seconds? And so that's the goal of presentation at the market and trying to achieve that, whether we do or not, I don't know. People do buy the stuff, so we're hoping so, but it seems to be translating.
[00:10:30] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: And the. The care that we take in the product from the time that it's either born or arrives on the farm, all the way through, placing it in front of the person at the market table, like that care. If. If they don't trust you and won't buy that product, all of that care is just sort of wasted.
[00:10:55] Speaker A: Yeah. What's the point?
[00:10:56] Speaker B: What's the point?
[00:10:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:57] Speaker B: And, like, we, we do care a lot about our products.
Start with, say, our beef. We raise grass, only beef, meaning that.
Call it grass fed grass, finished. Call it whatever you want. They eat grass and hay. And that, that product, we, we are making it just as clean and as pure as we can. We're. We're able to then take the professional look and then talk about this product.
[00:11:30] Speaker A: Right. And have that person listening to you about that product rather than wondering what's going on behind the scenes. I don't want you to have to think about how this was raised. I want you to just go ahead and make that assumption that this is top notch just based on what you see right there at the counter.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: So we work, if you stand there longer than about 5 seconds, you're going to hear about.
[00:11:57] Speaker A: You're going to hear all about it.
[00:11:59] Speaker B: Because one of the things that we love doing is talking to folks at the market about what we're doing. And I would say probably the second market that we ever did.
All the way home, we were just floored by how much people cared about what we were doing and the care that we took in raising at that time, it was just pork. In raising the pork, it was. It, it was. It just floored us. It really did.
[00:12:29] Speaker A: Yeah. And we're very passionate about it, obviously. And we. We know a lot about what we do. And one of the things that we really enjoy is educating people on their food and what we're doing and why we're doing it. Lamb is another one of the products that we sell, and it is, to me, it might be coming up on my favorite, honestly.
[00:12:56] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: It is amazing as far as nutrition and flavor is concerned. Like, I absolutely am falling in love with it. The Berkshire pork, the premium Berkshire that we are now breeding has, is probably one of our best sellers, y'all.
[00:13:19] Speaker C: We.
[00:13:19] Speaker B: We got our breeding stock this past week, so Tex is the name of our boar. He's big.
[00:13:26] Speaker A: He's like the size of a small cow, y'all.
[00:13:28] Speaker B: He's, like 400 pounds plus, and it's a little intimidating.
[00:13:32] Speaker A: Thank goodness. He's nice.
[00:13:33] Speaker B: He's got huge tusks.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: Yeah, he does.
[00:13:35] Speaker B: But he's a really calm, nice guy. But we've got breeding stock on the farm now. Registered pure berkshires, bred for their meat quality, not their show quality. It's different about that on a farm. It's about their meat quality. And these guys, they're long bodied, so you get more bacon than on a short bodied.
[00:14:01] Speaker A: Who doesn't want more bacon?
[00:14:02] Speaker B: Right. So the people that say, how do I get more bacon?
[00:14:06] Speaker A: Grow long bodied pigs.
[00:14:07] Speaker B: Long bodied pigs, which is what we've got.
[00:14:10] Speaker A: They're a heritage breed, and they have wonderful intermuscular fat, or intermuscular marbling, which enhances the flavor and the moisture and the tenderness.
[00:14:21] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: There are one, only four pork breeds that will do the intermuscular marbling, and it really does add to the flavor profile. And they're fed all GMO free food from our local feed mill. And we didn't mention the lambs. Our lambs, as they're growing out, they're raised their whole life on our pastures, and then they get a little bit, just as a supplement of non GMO or GMO free food from our local feed mill also.
[00:14:54] Speaker A: And we grow chickens. We will have chicken there. We have whole chickens, and we will have some cut up chickens, because not everybody wants to cook a whole chicken. As it turns out, some people just like a breast or maybe a. Like a thigh quarter. I'm a legging thigh quarter kind of girl, y'all.
It's where the flavor's at. Seriously?
[00:15:14] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:15:14] Speaker A: Anyway, so we do have chickens. We are growing the Cornish cross chicken this year, and they get non GMO or GMO free food.
[00:15:24] Speaker B: And they spend, from the time they can move out of the brooder, they're on our pasture and fresh grass every day.
[00:15:30] Speaker A: Yes. And that we're.
I've turned into a chicken snob, as it turns out.
[00:15:38] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:15:40] Speaker A: Chicken should taste like chicken. Chicken should taste like it did when you went to your grandma's house back in the seventies, and that chicken had some flavor to it. And that's the way this chicken tastes. And I'm so excited to be able to offer even more this year because we are plusing up to almost 600 birds.
[00:15:59] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. And then we sell eggs also. And same thing. We chose the. The breed of egg layers for their production and their ability to forage. So they stay on our pastures also, and they get fed a, you guessed it, GMO free feed from our local feed mill.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: So that's what we're growing here at heir to ground farms, and that's. We will have all of those products, the cuts, all the cuts that you can mostly imagine available at the Forsyth farmers market come this Saturday. Now back to the local markets.
The importance behind locals. Local farmers markets. The importance behind the local economy.
One of the things that I didn't realize about the local farmers market is that local economy back in the day, there are ways that we can keep our dollars in our communities, and that is by shopping local. And the local farmers market, when you buy tomatoes or when you buy chicken or when you buy whatever it is that you're buying from a farmer, the thing that you're doing is you're taking your dollar, you're giving it to a local person, and then they are growing food locally, and it's not exiting your county or your state and going to a corporation or your country, or your country, for that matter. And it's staying right there within your community. And one of the things that we do is we shop local, as local as we can, especially when it comes to the farm stuff. All of our feedback is locally sourced.
Our non GMO feed is they source their grains as local as they possibly can to shorten the supply chain as much as they can.
[00:18:12] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: Another thing about the farmers market is you get to meet your farmer.
Like, being able to talk to the person that grew the food, I think is just a really cool experience, and you can interact with them, find out what their farming practices are, and decide for yourself. Does that meet with your own priorities?
You know, how they raised the thing. If that's not how you want it raised, then go find another farmer. Right?
[00:18:45] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. If you don't like the way that we're doing it, then there's surely someone that's doing it. How you like it. Or maybe we're those people that you've been looking for. Perhaps a GMO free, humanely raised, sustainable as possible farmer in the local southwest Missouri area was the, was what your freezer was looking, was needing, you know? Well, it has happened, as it turns out. And shortening the supply chain is also really cool for the environment.
[00:19:21] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:19:21] Speaker A: I, I'm, I'm not.
I like to, I like to help our environment out. I don't get way out there on that kind of stuff. But it makes sense to me that my beef comes from, like, just down the road rather than Argentina on a boat.
[00:19:41] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: Like, that makes sense to me.
[00:19:43] Speaker C: Right.
[00:19:43] Speaker A: And not hauling it all around the country.
[00:19:45] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:19:46] Speaker A: Because if we're going to be green and if we're going to care about the environment and we're going to reduce footprints, then, then not hauling massive amounts of food around the world is a good way to, is a good place to start. Yeah. And finding a farmer's market and finding a farm local to you is a great way to be, quote, green. I use air quotes if you're listening to this.
One of the things that you were mentioning just a few minutes ago was talking to people at the farmer's market. And that is one of our greatest joys. And the reason is because we now have people in our lives that we consider framily.
[00:20:36] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:20:37] Speaker B: They're our food family.
[00:20:38] Speaker A: They're our food family. And they, we all refer to it as that in the way that that relationship was built. Was. It started at a farmers market. We got to talking.
We aligned with what we were, what we were talking about with the, with food culture.
[00:20:58] Speaker C: Right.
[00:20:58] Speaker A: And the next thing you know, they're part of your family.
[00:21:03] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:21:03] Speaker A: And that's how we view our customers here, is you become part of our family, and we want to make sure that you're taken care of.
[00:21:11] Speaker C: Sure. Absolutely.
[00:21:13] Speaker A: And I have a feeling we're not the only farmers in the country. World who feel that way. Farmers are passionate about the food that they put out there for people.
[00:21:23] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: And we get really good feedback on the, on the product.
[00:21:29] Speaker A: Yes, we do.
[00:21:30] Speaker B: The folks like that. That's important also to have that feedback loop. One of the least satisfying things I have done since we've started this journey was a person that, I do not know, made an online order, and we packaged that up and sent it out, and I heard nothing back.
And that is probably the least satisfying thing I've done. We made a sale.
[00:22:06] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:22:07] Speaker B: And it was a good sale, but there was nothing.
[00:22:11] Speaker A: There was that interaction, it was Amazon. Yeah, it felt like Amazon. You make the order, they send you this stuff.
[00:22:19] Speaker C: Right?
[00:22:19] Speaker A: The end.
[00:22:20] Speaker C: The end.
[00:22:20] Speaker A: And I don't, both of us were like, oh, gosh, I'm not sure I like that. I don't like that.
[00:22:28] Speaker B: That interaction, that feedback to the farmer is also really important when, when folks come back and say, oh, my God, that leg of lamb was amazing. I have a birthday coming up. Do you have any more of that?
Right. That type of feedback, is it, it, it feeds us. Right like that. It's the, it keeps us going. Ah, yes. That's, that's amazing. That's awesome to hear that coming back. Then, then you want to show up and say, hey, if you liked that, try this.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:04] Speaker B: You know, and it really does build a relationship there that, that you can have with your local farmer. Right. And that, that really does just become a family.
[00:23:18] Speaker A: Well, a story that you were just mentioning about someone had a, had a birthday coming up last weekend. We were super busy. They needed the food. We worked out a delivery in town and like, hey, can I pay you this? Or I'm like, look, just take the delivery. Here's the food. Enjoy your birthday. We'll settle up later, you know. And it was like three or four days later before we were able to finish the transaction. But she had her food that she was wanting for her birthday. Here you go.
She has bought, they have bought from us multiple times at the farmers market. Dude, if you're going to trust me to grow your food, I can trust you. Pay me later. You'll be all right. Just go eat your wonderful birthday dinner and I hope you enjoyed it.
[00:24:09] Speaker B: I know.
[00:24:10] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.
Anyway, so there, there are stories like that and that connection is what really to wrap this up a little bit. That connection is what makes your local farmers market just a joy to attend and to build the relationships and get some of the best local food that you possibly can. So I have an announcement to make.
[00:24:35] Speaker B: Uh oh.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: No, it's a good one.
[00:24:37] Speaker C: Oh.
[00:24:38] Speaker A: So as of right now, we're ticking. And I think today we're about to go over 5000 subscribers on this little YouTube channel.
[00:24:48] Speaker C: Crazy.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: This community is growing, growing, growing. And we are super excited about it.
[00:24:54] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:24:55] Speaker A: Yeah. So I just wanted to make it. I think we'll be going over 5000 and I will make a community post as soon as we do because I think that it is like one of those moments, you know?
[00:25:07] Speaker B: Well, the call to action to go along with that is, if you're not subscribed, please do.
[00:25:11] Speaker A: Yeah, please do help our numbers man.
[00:25:13] Speaker B: Join the community.
[00:25:14] Speaker A: Join our community. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:25:17] Speaker B: One of the best ways you can support us is by sharing the videos.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: And if you're looking for any of our other products, make sure to check out airtogroundfarms.com. That's our website.
We've got some. Instead of gear on there along with, yes, you can order our stuff. And we'll be at the Forsyth Farmers market from eight until two on Saturdays. And we have some more information coming. I'm just going to leave it at that. Tease, tease, tease.
And until next time, bye, y'all. Bye.
