S1E96 - Elizabeth on Small Scale Farming

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Elizabeth talks with Brooke about running a small scale farm, including what goes into feeding over 700 families year-round, the importance of community accessible farm space, how climate change continues to mess things up, and how taking care of the soil really matters.

Host Info

Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Elizabeth on small scale farming

**Brooke ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host Brooke Jackson. And today we're going to be talking with Elizabeth Miller, a farmer, about her work in having an organic farm and some really cool stuff that she does that's worth all of us learning how to do a bit of. But before we get into that, we'd like to give a shout out to another one of the podcasts on the Channel Zero Network. So here's a little jingle from one of our friends. Doo doo doo doo, doo doo. [Singing a simple melody]

**Brooke ** 01:29 And we're back. So as I mentioned in the intro, I have with me today, Elizabeth Miller, a wonderful lady who owns a farm. And Elizabeth, I'll hand it off to you to tell us a little bit more about yourself.

**Elizabeth ** 01:46 Thanks for having me. I'd love to talk about farming and my community. I've been running Minto Island Growers for about 16 years here in South Salem. My husband Chris and I started the farm way back when. We were passionate about environmental science and community food systems when we met in college, and I grew up working on our family farm and it was the kid who always wanted to come back and work with plants. And when Chris and I formed our partnership we were ready to come back here, in 2008, after working at a farm in California and really building a community based organic farm. And I can delve more into what that means to me. But one of our primary works that we do on our farm is centered around our CSA program, which is an acronym for Community Supported Agriculture that's practiced in lots of different ways all over the world, really. Every farm does a little bit differently but you have a subscription based weekly produce box. And we do a main season and a winter season for that. And I can, again, talk more about that if that's of interest. And we have a farm stand where we also do lots of food: woodfired pizza and berry milkshakes and salads, things that we hope reflect all the beautiful abundance and diversity that you can grow and eat here in Oregon. And it's also just a wonderful community hub for families to come and gather and join and connect with nature and really connect with the earth. That's what I firmly believe food can do for us and feed our souls and bodies in all the really most profound ways. We do organic plant starts and we do mint propagation and we used to do native plant work that were projects that I grew up doing, but we don't do any of that anymore. And that's a short summary. And I'll stop talking so we can get into more detail.

**Brooke ** 03:46 No worries, thank you. Now listeners, you're listening to this and you may be wondering why we're having a farmer come on and talk and we've definitely talked a lot about gardening, at home gardening, growing your own garden. We've talked a little bit about community gardens. And what intrigues me about what Elizabeth's doing and what I think is useful to us is that she and her farm operate on a fairly small footprint. They grow an incredible diversity of food. And it's a fairly small staff. And when I think about the future and climate change problems that we're having and the number of food chains, food supply insecurities that we have, I'm concerned a lot about how we grow food to feed a community. And I feel like what Elizabeth does with her farm does feed a large community and there may be parts of that that are replicable for the rest of us. So if we find ourselves in a time in which our supply chains have broken down or we can work together to develop a farm, there's a lot of insights from what she does that would help create those kinds of things and replicate them in other places, because she's not a large scale