Chapter 1: Intro

0:16Hey I'm Elliott Seldner, one of the owners of Fair Share farm, and I'm Emma Hendel, the other owner of Fair Share Farm.

0:24We're here in Pfafftown, North Carolina where we grow on almost two acres and a lot of that is under cover.

0:35So we sell our microgreens, lettuce, tomatoes, edible flowers to restaurants,

0:41and then we bring a wider variety of seasonal produce as well to our farmers markets. About 60 to 70 percent goes straight to restaurants, and 25 to 30

0:52percent goes to the farmers market.

Chapter 2: Background

1:00Starting in college I became interested in agriculture. After graduation I started apprenticing and interning and working on farms for five or six years until we started Fair Share Farm in 2014.

1:16We've been running the farm full-time since 2014. Myself and Emma's come on full-time probably 2017 to help run it together.

1:28We found that focusing on quality of product and what other folks weren't doing was most useful, and that's why we sort of fell into that restaurant groove

1:37first with microgreens, and then lettuce, and our other products. And that's worked out to be more profitable for us because we haven't needed to offer the spectrum of seasonal produce to satisfy a CSA.

Chapter 3: CSA

1:51We found the CSA to be a lot of work for not the right amount of return. It just didn't fit what we were interested in what we wanted to be doing.

2:06Luckily we had some guidance early on and helped to steer us towards selling

2:11greens... we always knew we wanted to do lettuce and other like baby greens and stuff like that in part because of the Quick Cut Harvester. We just pursued the

2:21things that we've been passionate about and that's what we've been able to sell the the easiest as a result.

Chapter 4: Timing

2:34We grow our lettuce undercover, that helps us maintain clockwork style timing.

2:41Like a lot of modern businesses we try to run it just in time, and we need to be

2:46able to plant, cultivate, irrigate, harvest on our schedule. Simple and

2:52cost-effective improvements like the Caterpillar Tunnels help us stay on a

2:58schedule that's our choice. That makes things like taking a day and a half off

3:04Saturday and Sunday for the whole crew feasible, that's what lets us offer paid

3:10time off for our crew, that's what lets us leave the farm, because a schedule gives you mental space to then tweak and improve the system. It might be the same

3:20lettuce year over year, but we're always looking, "Is the spacing right?" "Is the timing right?" these sorts of things continue to steal our interest.

3:34The Caterpillar Tunnels are really important because they're allowing us to grow year round and harvest lettuce every week regardless of the weather.

3:47The cost of building the structure versus the revenue generated by selling one

3:52crop, more than pays for the structure put up in one season, so if you take that

3:58then and say, any given spot can crop lettuce five to six times per year, if

4:03that's what you wanted to do, you could then think about how profitable then the space underneath the Caterpillar Tunnel really becomes.

4:14Opportunities came with microgreens and we applied what we knew from using the Quick Cut to the micros

4:22and in a very similar fashion we just set up sort of a bed of microgreens in a line and go "Zoop" like that. It was a "Why not?" like, "Why not?"

4:32"Why can't we?"

Chapter 5: Support

4:41It really is a full-time farm, it really does support us, and we can't do it on our own anymore either.

4:49It's our whole life and livelihood.

4:53Simply by being closer to our sales and closer to our customers and taking the

4:59time from harvest to sale and shrinking that, we know that we're getting a better quality product to our customer.

5:09I like customer service man, I like growing great quality produce and delivering that, and getting positive feedback, that's why I do it.

5:19We both enjoy walking around the property and talking about what's next and enjoying what we've done and created, and so that's really great.

Chapter 6: Mission

5:35I think that if we have more small-scale farmers the opportunity for research and

5:42improvement of these systems, it just increases with each person and each business that gets into it.

5:53Our mission is to grow the best food we possibly can and to feed as many people as we can, and hopefully in doing so we get to make money, and our crew gets to

6:02make money, and alongside with that it's to bring joy to people's lives,

6:08and with fundamentals like that it's been very easy for us to succeed because we try to stick to our values in that regard.

6:16That's been key to our success.