The Profitable Mini-Farm – Introduction to Jodi Roebuck (E01) (FSFS264)

FSFS264 (TPMF01) - Jodi Roebuck

[00:00:00] Diego Footer: Welcome to the Profitable Mini Farm. This is episode number one. I'm your host Diego, and throughout this episode and all the episodes of the show, I'll be joined by my co-host Farmer, Jodi Roebuck from New Zealand. The goal for this series, which we're calling the profitable Mini Farm is simple: it's to do a deep dive into the technical side of market farming, how to grow crops, how to harvest them, how to treat your soil.

[00:00:33] All the growing side of things is what Jodi and I will be digging deep into as we progress through the series over the next year or so. The goal of this show is to help you become a better farmer. Whether you're a new farmer just starting out, or an established farmer who's trying to just refine what you do, get new ideas, or just nerd out on all things farming.

[00:00:58] We wanna give you the information that I haven't really done on this podcast in a long time. For the new farmers, you're gonna get a lot of basics right out of the gate. How to lay out a farm, how to lay out your beds, how to crop plan, all those things. For the more experienced farmer, hopefully these conversations will help you think about what you're doing on your farm in a different way.

[00:01:21] Today at episode one, it's gonna be an introduction to Jodi, what he's about and what his farm is like. As we progress into future episodes, we'll go a lot deeper into farming. If you wanna hear more about a specific topic, let me know via Instagram @Diegofooter. Today's show is brought to you by Paperpot Co.

[00:01:45] That's my company. Paperpot Co. is your source for high quality farm tools. From the paper pot transplanter to the industry leading quick clicked. We have a variety of tools to make your job on the farm. For those of you who've supported us throughout the years, thank you so much, and for those of you new to market farming, check us out at paperpot.co.

[00:02:08] We have a lot more than the paperpot transplanter and we have a ton of new tools coming in 2023. Follow along and learn more at paperpot.co. And if you're located in Australia or New Zealand, check out Active Vista linked to in the description below for farm tools in that part of the world.

[00:02:30] With that, let's get into it. The first episode of the Profitable Mini Farm with Jodi Robuck. Jodi, at this point in your market gardening career, how would you describe your style of farming?

[00:02:47] Jodi Roebuck: We've definitely got our own style. That kind of is built from my experience in the last 20 years from working with so many different people.

[00:02:56] I think, Diego, if I had to select out two growers that have been a real big impact on us, out of hundreds, if you put Curtis Stone in a blender with John Jeavons and then added my design background into that, that'd be our style. So the sustainability principles from John Jeavons mixed with. The fast DTM crops with Curtis.

[00:03:22] That's, that's been the two biggest influences that we've merged together, and it's only in the last six years that we've even begun to start selling crops and begin making anything profitable prior to that. We were just really focused on sustainability, but I'll be honest, it got to a point where I was working just with hand tools, a rake and a fork, and you get pretty tired at the end of things when you're not making any income back.

[00:03:51] Back then, I was also working off farm, in farm-related jobs.

[00:03:56] Diego Footer: Yeah. In regards to John, I'm a big fan of his work as well. What part of his system do you think doesn't translate into market farming? Is that, is it the intensity reliance on hand labor? What is it?

[00:04:12] Jodi Roebuck: Um, no, I think the, the hand labor and the intensity has been the making of our farm, like our design, more to lend, commented on our farm.

[00:04:22] And she said everything is so tight and that means we've chosen no turnaround space for large like tractors. We don't use them. Tiny paths. We've got room to expand, but the design of our farm is super intensive, like tiny paths, super deep living soils, really intensive planting. Plus, we've applied systems which will cover more like, you know, lean manufacturing, holistic management, decision making, so the intensive part of it.

[00:04:54] We haven't really changed much from my strong influence from John Devons. I've worked with John for near now 20 years. And this is a big call after, after being closed system for about 10 years. We were growing in the off season, a hundred percent of our garden and in cover crops. And you know, according to John's principles, growing them to maturity.

[00:05:19] So we're growing as much carbon onsite as we can. We'd already deepened our soils and we're on a sub soil. We'll come back to that. A hard pan. Uh, no organic matter. That was our starting point. So we deepened our soils, and I did about 10 years of cover cropping and seed production during the growing season.

[00:05:39] And my take on it, there's not enough time with hand tools and there's not enough. Yeah, there's, we don't have enough resources to grow all of our own carbon in-house, so we did that 10 years. These days, and we'll cover this in another podcast and we'll do it with videos too. We only do one cover crop at the end of our succession.

[00:06:02] And that's actually a financial cover crop. I love the saying you can't be green if you're in the red. So we do field pea shoots. We harvest the peas for our salad mix, and that gives us a huge amount of organic matter into the ground. And the key thing here is in, in a very short number of days, we used to be doing cover crops.

[00:06:22] That was seven months of the year, and to grow like your winter grains to maturity, they steal half of your spring. And we really need, we really need to be producing small scale and intensive as many crops a year as possible. On average outdoors, it's four indoors at six, and we know as our market stream expands, matures, and allows us, we can push our field crops to five or even six, and that's really where the income significantly increases. So it's all about your market streams driving what happens on the farm.

[00:07:01] Diego Footer: For people that aren't familiar with your farm, you're in New Zealand, can you talk a little bit about. The biome you're dealing with, what's the climate like there?

[00:07:11] Jodi Roebuck: So we're on the west coast of New Zealand. We're a very isolated island. We're in a extreme high wind zone and, and also a very high rainfall area. I'm gonna do it in meters cuz it's my understand that more, but we're five kilometers from the ocean. We're on a peninsula that's made from insane amounts of volcanic activity, like very abrupt explosions.

[00:07:43] The mountain next to us is still alive. Our whole peninsula is made from multiple explosions, and so we're called the energy province. We, so we're the most western part of New Zealand. We stick out into the ocean. There's nothing between our farm and Australia apart from ocean. So the saying here is four seasons in one day, and that's year round.

[00:08:08] We can get anything from a deluge of rain to an extreme wind event the following day, anytime of the year. So tracking the weather's super, super important. We're 10 kilometers from New Plymouth. That's our largest town near us, 80,000 people there. Again, we're five kilometers back from the ocean, so we miss the salt wind, and we're in a open valley, so it's quite a wide valley.

[00:08:34] It's elevated 20 meters above our river boundary and it's we're protected from our trade winds. The southwest westerly that can blow sometimes for six months, which is super nice to be protected from the wind that way. But no matter how much shelter we put in, we are super exposed when the wind comes back the other way from the southeast or the east.

[00:08:56] Our starting point in 1975, we knew this before we brought the property, the previous owners cut all our top soil off. Um, so we, our starting point to probably to flatten it out to make a nice hay paddock. So our starting point was extremely compact mountain ash sub-soil with no organic matter and we just built the built out.

[00:09:23] Production up by deepening our soils, doing a lot of composting, and all of this is straight outta John Jeavons� stuff. So we haven't changed anything apart from we've backed off from growing all our own carbon in-house, but we're still, with our bed preparation, our propagation, our intensive planting, our composting, we haven't changed.

[00:09:45] Uh, I mean, we've adapted, but the principles really come from John Jeavons. And I guess that's, I wish I wasn't saying this, but I'm pretty confident I'm probably one of the only if or there may be a few John Jeavons alumni that has turned the principles to also make it profitable, and that that's been motivating, you know, to see the lift and the income every year from the same land area.

[00:10:15] It's very, very wet. Sorry, I'll do Celsius, but it's on average, it's wet and windy, very little photosynthesis. It's overcast, windy and raining, and so there's not a lot of change in the temperatures unless the sky's clear. But it's about seven, eight degrees overnight and it's about 13, 14 during the day.

[00:10:38] Diego Footer: Eight degrees is 15, 45 degrees Fahrenheit and 13 is like 55. So you're, so you're right in there. Do you get frost?

[00:10:47] Jodi Roebuck: Very seldom. We might get one a year. This winter we haven't had any because it, you know, not been silly, but we can't get frost when it's raining , or there's, or it's overcast. So one year we've got 15 frosts.

[00:11:02] That's one in 10 years. Usually, we get one frost a year. We're quite happy to get a frost. Not cause it kills the bugs, but cause we get to see the sun. And we get the, you know, for us photosynthesis is magic. And I've worked a lot in the dry climate, and I understand their, they've got the same thinking, but they're looking for precipitation.

[00:11:23] Diego Footer: Yeah. You and I have known each other for quite a while, maybe going back five, six years now, and, you know, we've done some past podcasts and you reached out to me about wanting to do this series of podcasts to talk about your method and style of farming. Why is that?

[00:11:41] Jodi Roebuck: First, I'd just like to give a big shout out to the work Diego that you did with Curtis Stone, especially the 2016 series on Farm Small Farm Smart.

[00:11:53] I've, I haven't seen such great content so detailed with what's making small scale, what's making the, the possibilities in small scale to, to really lift the income. And I think, you know, we love to, to talk about turnover. Um, but really, after your running costs, what you have left, your profit is quite a different conversation.

[00:12:22] There's not a lot of people talking about the numbers. I really like numbers, and I think the, the influence from, from Curtis's work has been phenomenal in helping every grower increase their income on a small area or even if you're a couple of acres to really lift your production. With the, with the fast crops.

[00:12:50] And we're gonna, in future podcasts, talk about quantifying tracking and the numbers. But the, for me, the most significant thing, or I, I'm not hearing people, people look, for example, if you talk about this year, our sales, I'll just choose a crop. Tomatoes, this year, tomatoes was our most profitable crop.

[00:13:13] The way I like to look at measuring crops is to divide your, your income from that, from your total season by how many days it took to grow and to put this into a spreadsheet and to measure crops by how much they pay you per day. And quite often, I see people saying, this was our. Most profitable crop, but I, I think the way to be presenting that is this year total sales were the highest, let's say in tomatoes.

[00:13:45] The, the, in short, the faster it grows, the more profitable it is because you're making more per day and you can get another crop in there straight away. So we're flipping beds immediately year round on average four crops a year. Four crops a year, sometimes more. And as our market streams matured, we think we can lift that to five crops a year by dropping some of the crops that are less profitable for us.

[00:14:11] So that's, that's our way that we're measuring our, our performance. And when we started, we, I'd already worked on so many farms, but I worked on Curtis Stone's farm both of JM's Farms, Elliot Coleman, Ray Tyler, a bunch of other growers, and we just took Curtis's model of fast crops and started with about 18 crops.

[00:14:37] Um, in hindsight, we, I would've started a year, first season with microgreens, but we took a year to get started with them. Double the by weight, the volume of our field salad. Uh, it's pretty, it's pretty significant. And the only way we sell microgreens in a conservative theory farming region is by combining them with the field salad.

[00:15:01] So I think it's fair to say. A lot of people doing salad, but the biggest gap I see in the small scale movement is not a lot of people are doing mixed salad. And we'll come back to this in, in future podcasts, but for us, we are, we only move forward with taking on new crops or new suppliers if we have optionality with every decision we move forward with.

[00:15:29] And so the mixed salad just gives us so much flexibility. We're always the same ingredients in both our salads, but by doing the mix, after our restaurant orders are put together and they could be single items or mixes, everything left over goes into one of two different mixes, and then that goes into retail.

[00:15:50] So it's just about building flexibility and everywhere as we move forward. That's been a huge transition for us in just de-stressing our production and knowing that we can be consistent at the optionality creates consistency as well, and, Yeah, so I think a lot of people get it, but a lot don't.

[00:16:13] That to lift your income, you don't need to work harder. You don't need more land. You need to accept that the fast, fast crops are more profitable, and I really believe you can sell them anywhere.

[00:16:28] Diego Footer: In addition to microgreens, which are inherently a fast growing crop, to give people some context what field crops are, you're growing on the farm right now?

[00:16:39] Jodi Roebuck: So we, we kind, I kind of focus on, I, I've got this saying, Diego, that uh, I wanna be able to drive a truck over it. So we're looking for stuff that's bombproof and year round. Obviously, it slows down in winter. Um, but that's the core of our business.

[00:16:59] And so I'll start with the far, I'll do it in order. Fastness or, or the fast DTMs. So we do pea shoots in the field. We'll cover this with a video series and when, in some of the 12 days and winter, the 23 days, that's also our, it's our financial cover crop. We do a lot of these. We do them year-round. And then we do a, a huge amount of direct seeded baby mustard or mizuna, and we, we just love sewing it with the six row seeder.

[00:17:34] It's a super versatile tool and so we do a ton of mizuna in some of that 17 days and winter it's 45, and mizuna just out competes lettuce for us in, in just how fast it is. You know, we're direct seating it, we're harvesting it with the greens harvester. It flies through the washing pack. We do lettuce as well.

[00:17:57] Our climate, with our rainfall, especially outdoors anytime of the year. Last summer, we got hit with half a meter of rain in two rain events. And at that time, Mustard's only taken 17 days to grow. We actually first time ever lost about eight grand of salad during that, during that rain. No, no, no salad can handle half a meter of rain in its short lifetime.

[00:18:24] But we are able to bounce back with fast crops and it's what I like about the fast crops too, is when Mother Nature creates a crisis for you, you can bounce back super quick. Um, we do Tokyo turnips. We do radishes nine months of the year. We do coriander year-round. We're just direct seeding that, harvesting it with a�

[00:18:44] And selling it bunched. Uh, and we do a lot of carrots. The carrots, we've got one restaurant that buy 30, 40 kilograms of baby carrots a week. We have carrots nine months of the year. The challenge with our climate, when the days become short, the ground's saturated and there's no photosynthesis, is our weed pressure is the strongest or the most challenging.

[00:19:16] We can't surface cultivate. Um, and the cold season weeds are much more, I'll say, problematic than the warm season weeds in summer. We can manage it a lot better when the, when the ground is dry and summer. So the fast crops for us, our sales are the same every week of the year. And then in, in summer, because they grow so quick, you've got a lot more space where you can grow more variety.

[00:19:49] And I simply call these add-on income. Um, so in summer we are doing, our greenhouses are full of cherry tomatoes, cucumbers for et cetera, spring onions, purple lit onions. And this is when our variety comes in. I consider these longer crops just the add-on income to our 52 weeks of the year fast crops that are, again, same sales each week.

[00:20:16] Diego Footer: You've really got the system dialed in now, and with your approach on fast growing crops, how have you blended say the Biointensive method approach of John, which uses wider bed units with a traditional market garden style that uses 30 inch beds?

[00:20:35] Jodi Roebuck: So our original garden beds, we started forming in 2007.

[00:20:41] The there are standard John Jeavons bed. Uh, there are a hundred square foot bed in total. I'm sorry to do feet and meters in the same sentence. The 1.5 meters wide six meters long. And we've got about 50 of those beds and we, I double dug them once and then as then I met Curtis Stone and JM, they hosted an event on our farm, invited me to work on their farms, and I came back with the vision of establishing the market garden washing pack and the market streams and all of our new beds.

[00:21:18] As we develop standard 30 inch wide and they're kind of a half unit of, of a larger farm. Um, so they're, they're approximately 50 feet long. The small beds for us are really nice with flipping beds so fast. And so that's our standard unit 30 inch by 50 foot.

[00:21:40] And as we expand on, put in new areas of production, because we're on a severely compact subs soil, lot of compaction, no organic matter, we're now using a fork that have developed called the Roebuck Fork.

[00:21:53] And we're not double digging initially, we're just working from the surface down aerating the soil. So our double duct beds are 600 mills deep, and our market garden beds are 450 mill deep. It's a lot less work and a lot less, in some ways less disruptive and more ergonomic to develop, to develop them with it's like half of a broad fork, the fork that we've developed.

[00:22:18] So we still treat all the beds the same. The only thing the wide beds don't like is the paperpot transplanter. And that's so short. It just doesn't make sense, but otherwise we use Red Path hoops, insect nets. We use shade net to germinate a 70% shade net on top of the direct seeded crops to germinate tarps as well.

[00:22:43] It's, it's actually really easy using tarps on the short, wide beds. We tend to tarp single or double beds, not whole blocks because we're just flipping beds, so, you know, every day. Uh, so we work six days a week. I'm not ashamed of that. I love it, year-round. So 312 days a year. We're harvesting and planting.

[00:23:05] We've tried to eliminate every other job on the farm just to keep production going. So the wide beds, it would be less work to develop a new block of beds at 30 inch than to go back and try and reconfigure the wide beds. They're pretty much the same size. And, you know, if I could start it again�

[00:23:26] Um, although we are very standardized on the farm, you know, we joke, we've got the most wheels per half acre in the world, a lot of systems in place. If I start again, and we are designing a lot of farms, everything would be standardized. All the beds would be 30 inch field blocks, very, very simple design.

[00:23:48] Diego Footer: How many total beds now on the farm of the 30 inch and the wide?

[00:23:51] Jodi Roebuck: Approximately 50 of the John Jeavons beds and we must be 50, about 70, 75 market garden beds. And we've got another paddock. We've got room to expand. This season we're putting up a, a new greenhouse. It's about 400 square meters. And then we've already mapped out the, the rest of the field, how many, how much era we have to put in, you know, the standard 30 inch by 50 feet long beds.

[00:24:20] We've got, we've got room for about 170 beds in total. And then, and then that's it. We're out of land. Everything else is hilled.

[00:24:29] Diego Footer: Yeah, when you look at expanding, this has came up in a lot of conversations I've had with farmers lately. Why expand? Why not just stay the size you are, maximize that and call it a day? What's the reason for expanding for you?

[00:24:45] Jodi Roebuck: Hmm. Uh, very good question. I'm rarely keen on just pushing the envelope. Yeah, go. I'm just about 50. I'm healthy. I'm not doing hard graft cause we've set the farm up so that, you know, things are ergonomic. I'm really keen to push the envelope to see what's possible on less than an acre, direct marketed within 10 kilometers.

[00:25:09] I really enjoy all of the development work, the R&D, the going on in small scale market garden movement, this movement, you know, it's relatively new. And just seeing the new possibilities continuously, that's, that's a driver for me.

[00:25:29] And also seeing, you know, historically, not a lot of money in agriculture. I'm really enjoying seeing the potential of the return of income coming into the small scale space.

[00:25:41] Diego Footer: Yeah. I love the idea of pushing the limits. When you look at this series of episodes that we're doing, what's your goal for it?

[00:25:49] Jodi Roebuck: It's I want to, I wanna produce each podcast subject by subject rather than the 2016 series with Curtis, which was week by week.

[00:26:01] That was great to see during the growing season. So just to share content and to connect with, connect with more growers and share what we've been able to achieve. And it's, you know, it's through dedication, but it's also through my travels and been able to work with so many great growers, world-class growers all around the world.

[00:26:27] And just that the experience that I've been exposed to, we are just keen to help as many growers as possible. That�s our gig. If you're struggling with profit, we're keen to help. What tools, farm design. You're starting, you�re new grow. We train about 150 growers on our farm each year.

[00:26:52] They travel a long way to come. We also, we have employees, but we also have farm trainees and a lot of them are coming to us to start their own farm from scratch. And, you know, we mentor them, we help 'em with design, firstly, the market streams and appropriate tools and scale and crops and it's pretty�

[00:27:16] That's rewarding seeing people get set up quicker than us because of, you know, the, I've gained our insight and seeing them become successful in less seasons than it took us. And thanks to Curtis too, you know, we surpassed Curtis's financial numbers in our fourth season only because I trained with him.

[00:27:44] I understood the fast crops and had had him as a mentor. Without Curtis's influence, I don't think our farm would be as profitable as it is.

[00:27:58] Diego Footer: There you have it, Jodi Roebuck on the first episode of the Profitable Mini Farm. Now that you know a little bit about Jodi, be prepared to get into the hardcore nitty gritty of market farming starting next week.

[00:28:13] If you enjoy this episode, can you do me a favor? Take a minute and leave a review on iTunes. That may sound insignificant, but believe it or not, those reviews really matter. So while it only takes you a minute, the results of that minute matter a lot to us. So please leave a review. If you enjoyed it.

[00:28:33] That's all for this one. Thanks for listening. Until next time, be nice, be thankful, and do the work.