Chef Mikey Russo on Building a Farm Brand, Not Just a Farm (CC58)

Do you think there's a point where the farm more or less feels like it's on autopilot? Obviously anybody who has a business, there's never total autopilot cause stuff's always going wrong.

But

do you

feel like it generally, it's a flywheel that's running, sales don't seem to be a problem hearing you talk, production sounds like it's good, and that enables you to focus on it a little bit less.

It's like you don't have kids, but when you have a newborn, you really got to pay attention to them all the time.

By the time they're 14, they can do their own thing more or less.

And it sounds like your farm is more of a teenager than a newborn at this point.

It can do its own thing.

You don't need to pump a lot more effort into it to raise sales, get more out of it.

So you can use your time to manage it and then step aside and build other forms of revenue.

Is that, would you say that's accurate?

Yeah, definitely.

So it's the paper pot transplanter and the Jang seeder.

That's most of what we do every week.

So once I can train somebody like, Hey man, this is your job.

This is what you do every single week.

And we're harvesting with the greens harvester for the arugula.

You know what I mean? So like, it's pretty simple to train people on those things.

Once somebody understands how to use the paper pot transplanter.

So I got a guy he's worked here for about a year and he's He, so he's got a year experience using the Jang Cedar and the paper pot transplanters.

So I kept him employed over the winter.

That was challenging, but we made it happen.

And so he's experienced at this point.

So the new people I'm bringing on is, and we've got a tractor with a loader so that we're using like no till systems mostly, or like low till you could say.

So we broad fork.