Chapter 1: Farm intro

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0:17hi my name is Steven Williams uh this is Foxtail Farm we are a 10 acre certified organic

0:26vegetable and flow Farm located on Whidby Island in Washington state right

0:34in the middle of the Puget Sound we are just Northwest of Seattle just south of the Canadian

0:43border we grow just about everything that most farms grow we're we're diverse

0:50we sell mostly direct to the customer we do a farmers market once a week we sell

0:57from our farm stand located here on the property and we sell through our local food Hub but yet every year has been

1:05better than the last and we hope that Trend

Chapter 2: From Desk to Dirt

1:14continues when I was growing up as a kid I did not know what I wanted to be when I grew up and so when I graduated high

1:21school I went to college cuz that's what you were supposed to do after sort of flailing around for a few years I ultimately decided to major

1:29in business and so yeah after graduation I got a job with a company that was doing manufacturing and sales and things like that and stayed there almost 10

1:37years before I started getting the itch to do something else so I put in my resignation in

1:45February of 2012 and that started the journey into into this small scale organic farming thing that I've been

1:52doing for the past 8 years uh so in 2012 I was exploring the

2:00internet trying to find programs that I could maybe learn how to do this type of work in an expedited way and stumbled

2:08upon this program actually here on Whidby Island and it's called The Organic Farm school it's a year-long intensive

2:16program where they they teach you obviously crop planning you do a lot of field work you do a lot of classroom work we did things like go to farmers

2:25markets we had a CSA it's a good cross-section of basically what I do today and we just do

2:31this on on a larger scale so pretty cool program that I was fortunate enough to be able to go

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Chapter 3: Farming on an island

2:44to forming on an island has its unique challenges despite being close to a big city we are pretty rural out

2:53here you get here by ferry and so that just naturally makes the population lower which which is a good and bad

3:00thing uh we're in business so we need to be able to have an audience of people to sell to and it's also a challenge trying

3:08to find Labor uh I can plant and harvest things and sell them all day long but if we can't get it out of the ground that's

3:16always you're spinning your wheels at that point we have the operations split up

3:23kind of two ways in a unique way we have the vegetable side and then we have the flower side

3:30on the veggie side we have three people working full-time every week in the flowers there's one full-time person and

3:38then her mom helps her almost every day so at any given point in time there'll

3:45be six or so people working here we work really hard Monday through Friday and

3:52then let those guys take the weekend off then hopefully come back fresh on

3:58Monday we only sell to people on the island we don't Market any of our produce off the

4:08island we have a farm stand here on the property and about 50% of our annual

4:14revenue comes from that Farm Stand it's 140 ft and it's it's a an amazing little

4:22building of

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Chapter 4: The flower operation

4:28Commerce for the past 3 years we've gotten deeper

4:36into the flower side of the business and that's because Emily who's been around with us for a long long time approached us about taking over the flower

4:44production and we thought it was a fantastic idea she has a degree in Horticulture so it really made sense so

4:51we designated a corner of the property gave her a little Halfacre of plot to grow as many flowers as she wants

4:58to uh she does a fantastic job we sell them retail she makes us bouquet we sell them at the market in the Farm Stand and

5:06then she handles the wholesale bulk side of it she'll do weddings events and she does a fantastic job and we're happy she's around and we've both benefited

5:15from the the arrangement back in 2017 we bought our

Chapter 5: Tunnels & Trellising

5:21first caterpillar tunnels from farmers's friend like a lot of people thought about well we'll buy a hoop Ender do it

5:30ourselves try to save some money then Farmers friend started carrying them and the math was just obvious that it made

5:38much more sense to buy the kit yeah they've been something that has been a really important milestone for us

5:46to be able to grow things in them during the relatively mild Northwest Summers

5:53we've grown all of our hot crops uh tomatoes peppers zucchini we're growing watermelons in there now for the price

6:03per square foot you can't really beat

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6:10it so we utilize the Clipper system in our caterpillar Tunnels for all of our Tomatoes it is a unique system with a

6:20rod and a spongy clip or two and it's the easiest most effective way to

6:27Trellis tomatoes that we've ever used it makes pruning and trellising the tomatoes on a weekly basis a much more

6:36efficient and faster process it's pretty

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Chapter 6: Words of advice

6:45sweet farming gives me a sense of purpose it's something that I can do to

6:52make money and feel like I'm not just going through the motion waking up in the morning morning

7:00is easy cuz I'm excited to come out here and do it and it's hard work there's there's no way around it but

7:09the community that we've built from the people supporting the farm gives me a

7:16lot of Joy it's been something that I was

7:24nervous to get into at the beginning because I didn't know how well it was going to go and it succeeded my

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7:39expectations if I had to give a word of advice for somebody that wanted to get into this business to to do this for

7:45living is don't be in a hurry it's okay to be maybe a little bit older and have

7:52some life experience and work experience and maybe save some money to start

7:59I think I benefited from not being a 20-year-old jumping into this I'm a big proponent of this line of

8:09work I I would love it if you know every couple of miles there was one of these Farms I didn't seek out looking for the

8:17good life but we somehow found it and it's been pretty

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8:27awesome this is the good hi guys I'm Jonathan with Farmers friend if you enjoyed this video hit the like button and subscribe to see more

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