Episodes
April 20, 2024
Bruce Hennessey and Beth Whiting Level Up Their Business
It feels good that we're providing this product for people's nutrition, for their families. They keep coming back to us
and appreciating that. We are who we are; we're the face, we talk to them, we have them to our farm for …
April 13, 2024
Bruce Hennessey and Beth Whiting Climb Mountains and Diversify
I describe farming as really just one long extended expedition. It's very much like a mountaineering expedition where you wake up every day, you're working outside. You have problems, often new problems that crop up at least…
April 6, 2024
Haley Goulet Educates Her Community
Watching them [kids] come to the farm; at first, it can be quite challenging. There is definitely an arc of sort of comfortableness just with being outside doing chores, hard manual labor. That takes a minute for a lot of ki…
April 3, 2024
Toby & Melissa Malandrinos Pick Their Battles
I remember being seven or eight years old and drawing… having construction paper, big rolls of paper all over the living room floor, drawing pictures of where my cows and my sheep and my chickens would go on my future farm.—…
March 27, 2024
Zan and Kimberly Walker-Goncalves Circle Back to their Roots
We had bought this house in Brattleboro. We'd bought the truck. We bought the sheep. We bought dogs. We did all of this long before COVID hit, but then we were like, okay, this is our pandemic project.—Kimberly Kimberly and …
Feb. 15, 2024
Nicolle Ferrier Breeds Fowl for the Future
I've wanted to quit about a hundred gazillion times, a lot- a lot. But I want to do what I love. So that is the key, right? To do what we love. And this is what I love to do. It comes with difficulties and it comes with rew…
Feb. 7, 2024
Jon Turner Helps to Heal
There is a legacy throughout my family of having at least one member who served in all major conflicts back to the Revolutionary War. The other side of that coin is they were all farmers, homesteaders and innovators of their…
Feb. 7, 2024
Jenn Colby Finds Her Purpose
Your humble host has been through some stuff the last few years. At a recent food system gathering event this fall, the call went out inviting folks to tell their stories of transition and transformation. How we went from th…
Jan. 13, 2024
Ridge Shinn Thinks Big Picture
We could actually look into the animal, the live animal, see intramuscular fat and tenderness. We also had these tools, linear measurement tools that we could actually physically measure the animals and began to find almost …
Jan. 6, 2024
John Roberts Part 2: Finding a Purpose Serving Farmers
I'm excited that the pandemic--for all its negativity--also said, “Hey, wait a minute. We need to concentrate on food resiliency”. We need to encourage these small diverse farms because the big operations, the five huge com…
Jan. 6, 2024
John Roberts Part 1: Falling in Love with Farming
We'd rebuilt the milking parlor, which hadn't been operating. We've done all of this sort of stuff. When we came to close the sale we had two years of numbers to show that we actually knew-vaguely knew--what we were doing. W…
Dec. 23, 2023
Tricia Park Uses Holistic Management to Drive Her Decisions
“My husband had been fascinated by Scottish Highlanders. We would drive by this place and you'd have to stop, get out of the car and like look through the woods to see them. And I was like, they're just big, shaggy horned be…
Dec. 13, 2023
Erin Meding Grows a Farm
“I did not grow up in a farming family. I grew up in a small town in the Midwest…there's no one in my family that has ever farmed. I'm pretty sure most of my siblings think I'm crazy.” Erin and Charles Meding purchased their…
Oct. 21, 2023
Cameron Pedigo Farms for the Right Reasons
“I'd watch the deer, how they would interact with the cows and turkeys and, you know, other animals. I've always been a keen observer of nature. That started young. That's kind of like the foundation. I didn't realize that's…
Sept. 30, 2023
Chris & Samantha Kemnah Find Less Labor in Dairy
“Neither one of us came from a farm family or any kind of money in our background. We've just kind of done it on our good credit. We've leased the farms that we've been on. We are hoping to be able to buy the farm we're on n…
Aug. 15, 2023
Brad & Emalee Buttrey Find Real-Life Challenges
“We did have the sense to look and say, you know, God created ruminant animals to take advantage of grass and low input. You know, if we've got a grass base, and we take care of that, that's as low input as you're gonna get …
Aug. 9, 2023
Nicole & Jeremiah Vernon Talk Time, Family and Vulnerability
“I have a specific memory of the first time we ever did sheep, I was so mad at my parents, we were going to kill the sheep. And then fast forward like an hour into it. And I came running into the house holding a sheep tongue…
July 22, 2023
Troy Bishopp Part 2: Taking Risks and Being Realistic
Troy Bishopp web site TroyBishopp Instagram #lingergrazing On Pasture Grazing Chart link Grasstravanganza info: https://grasstravaganza.morrisville.edu/ Drop a review at www.choosingtofarm.com Join our Patreon! --- Send in a…
July 17, 2023
Troy Bishopp Part 1: From Guinea Pig to Linger Grazing
"My buddy Rock Langone, he runs my ice cream store up the road here. Him and I were the young farmers of the county, we were the chosen ones. We had high herd averages, you know, just got out of college. We were making milk,…
July 8, 2023
Karen Hoffman is Peaceful by Nature
"There was a guy in my office for years, who used to refer to people like me as hobby farmers. And it drove me crazy. One day I finally said, “You know what? These hobby farmers, if they are getting up every day, and taking …
June 24, 2023
Bobbie Jean Booth Becomes an Accidental Farmer
“I got involved with sheep and farming purely by accident. Aside from a semester Work Study program at UVM dairy, I had no background in farming and no interest in sheep. Then, one cold February while I was farmsitting, 6 ou…
June 10, 2023
Kate Osgood is All or Nothing
Kate Osgood of Birch Rise Farm in Sanburton, NH, along with her husband Ken and sons Hunter and Henry, loves to go all in on whatever they do. When they decided to move back to the east to raise their family, they didn’t kno…
June 7, 2023
Nick Weinstock Goes from Foodie to Farmer
Nick and his family have a productive history as small business owners, investors, and planners. After getting his construction management degree from Michigan State University in 2009, Nick returned to join the family cons…
May 9, 2023
Becky Harhaj Balances Calm and Chaos
From Becky: My husband and I moved our kids to a farm in rural southern Minnesota in 2016 to grow better food. We were already purchasing most of our meat from local farmers, but wanted to do it ourselves while giving our ki…