The Urban Farm Podcast with Greg Peterson

155: Lawrence Parkhill of the Veteran Farmers of America Helping our returning veterans heal through farming and agriculture.Lawrence signed up for the infantry at age 16 when the towers fell, and left at age 18 to go to Camp Pendleton. He was deployed twice to Iraq with India Company, Third Battalion, First Marines.  Lawrence extended his contract by six months or so to deploy with the Marine Corps Forces, Special Operations Command (MARSOC) to Afghanistan. He has a total of five year’s active duty as a machine gunner and got out as E5 (sergeant) with two Purple Hearts, and a Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal with V device for valor. Lawrence is the President and Co-Founder of Veteran Farmers of America. He is also the National Maintenance Support Manager at Mission Produce in Oxnard where he lives.IN THIS PODCAST: Greg is honored to talk to Sargent Lawrence Parkhill who shares his story of how he founded a new non-profit which is helping veterans reintegrate into non-combat life with jobs in agriculture. Veteran Farmers of America is working with returning servicemen and women to find internships and jobs in various aspects of the agriculture industry.Visit https://www.urbanfarm.org/2016/11/10/lawrence-parkhill/ for show notes and links.

Julian Awad on Backyard Riches and SPIN FarmingTaking a Small Plot and with Intensive Farming generate income.Julian experienced entrepreneurship early at the age of 12 when he first started importing candy from Singapore to Malaysia where his family was living at the time. At 19 he started his first company in real estate. Since then, his interest for business and social responsibility has taken him from refugee trips in Sumatra, Indonesia to driving new innovative genetic risk assessments.It was while working with Google on marketing and advertising, that Julian realized the need for marketing agencies which focused on a Return On Investment or were performance oriented.  Eventually he formed JSA Interactive Inc. to meet the growing demand for his marketing and commercialization services.Julian has over 15 years of professional experience in marketing, strategic planning, project management, and internet technologies. He also has 10 years of entrepreneurial experience in marketing companies, launching consumer focused internet startups, and financing small businesses. He states his greatest achievements are finding and marrying his wife/best friend and having his new son and twin daughters.IN THIS PODCAST: Greg talks to Julian Awad of Backyard Riches, who breaks down some of the intricacies of turning a backyard plot into a profitable urban farm business.  As an entrepreneur who has figured out how to turn ideas into businesses, Julian describes the models that he offers to help urban farmers become successful in a sustainable way.  The method of Small Plot Intensive Farming is the new way of being a farmer – especially in urban areas.Visit https://www.urbanfarm.org/2016/11/08/julian-awad/ for show notes and links.

Forest started urban farming in 1969 in Berkeley, California. Through the People’s Park Movement, he was launched into gardening and got the basic training and motivation for becoming a seedman. He has been a full time, independent, professions seed provider since 1972 and has owned, led, or helped launch at least four seed companies, and founded the nonprofit Abundant Life Seed Foundation which produced and distributed up to 600 types of open-pollinated vegetable, herb and flower seedsSince 1974 Forest has been giving workshops on seed saving and the importance of genetic diversity, and was the keynote speaker for the 2012 Northwest Permaculture Convergence and, also the Regenerations Seed and Plant Exchange in Hawaii.  Forest had a radio show for a couple of years with 30 minute interviews featuring a variety of people including many permaculturists.IN THIS PODCAST: Greg is enthralled by the story telling of Forest who brings us along on the adventures of a seedman.  Forest felt the pull of his calling in the late 1960’s and has been actively gardening and harvesting seeds ever since. Moving through a few seed company projects over the years, he has also harvested skills, friends, experiences, and an appreciation for the importance of native seeds.  With so much experienced focused on the tiny seeds that are essential to all gardeners and farmers, Forest’s story connects with everyone in one way or another.  Listen in and harvest your own kernels to save.Visit https://www.urbanfarm.org/2016/11/05/forest-shomer/ for show notes and links.Go to www.urbanfarm.org/blog/podcast/ to see our list of podcast and to sign up for weekly updates.

Making a difference through social permaculture and gardening.Matt is an experienced teacher, family guy, author, consultant, farmer, seed saver, plant breeder, musician, blogger, & permaculturist. He frequently speaks at conferences, colleges, schools, and events about permaculture and education.Applying his years of working as a teacher writing curriculum from scratch using online classrooms, Matt has opened an online program to accompany his textbook series The Permaculture Student.Focused on starting resilient small businesses and homesteads from scratch, students of all ages and families learn through weekly collections of videos, worksheets, coloring pages, projects, activities, & critical thinking with teacher's guides, recipes, plant focus, seed saving, & Q&A.IN THIS PODCAST: Greg meets another permaculture enthusiast in Matt, who after a significant wake-up call regarding the health of his wife decided to pursue a healthier lifestyle for him and his family. This decision led him on the path to education and gardening which he combined with a new understanding of regenerative design to become an activist of permaculture education. Now he tells how he is bringing permaculture teachings to new areas and students.Visit https://www.urbanfarm.org/2016/11/03/matt-powers/ for show notes and links.

Saskia is a passionate gardener who believes everyone can grow some of their own food. She is trained in Permaculture, Environmental Science, and Regenerative Entrepreneurship. After turning a house in Anchorage, Alaska into an abundant urban homestead, she created a successful business teaching others how to garden. She recently turned her hands-on food gardening course into a curriculum and manual to help others teach gardening in their own communities. IN THIS PODCAST: Greg meets Saskia, a young woman who was motivated enough to transform her life and career to encompass the ideals of permaculture. However, she was not happy just making her own garden, Saskia has a goal of having everyone or every yard have the chance to garden. So as she started making the changes to a gardening lifestyle she was determined to find a way to make a living with this new mode of living.  She has done this partly by helping others become teachers of gardening in their own areas.  Here she explains how she is preparing her army of educators and how they can make a living teaching others how to garden.Visit https://www.urbanfarm.org/2016/11/01/saskia-esslinger/ for show notes and links.

Transitioning to a plant based diet for a healthy lifestyle.Karine was once an extreme carnivore and she happily ate sweetbreads, blood pudding, lots of meats including game, and all kinds of raw meats. Food was her life. She had a catering business and organized dinner parties that would have made a vegan faint. Life was spent in the kitchen, and life was good. Then she embarked on her vegan journey just over year ago to combat significant skin issues. She started by first eating fruits and vegetables in large quantities but she struggled from low energy levels. Then she tried a paleo diet which did not work out for her, so she started educating herself about plant-based protein.Education was the key to her success, and two pillars of veganism became important to her: mercy for animals, and protection of the environment. Grains, seeds, and nuts are now the biggest part of her diet while she is striving to achieve a complete plant-based diet.  She loves whole and natural ingredients, and wants to show others how a vegan diet can be fun, easy, and delicious!IN THIS PODCAST:  Greg gets to chat with new friend Karine who has a mission to help others cook delicious vegan meals.  Karine shares her experience of going vegan and explains why she was she was motivated to make that change. With her experience running a catering business, it makes sense that cooking would be a passion that continues even with a dramatic lifestyle change. She is committed to helping others by sharing her journey and sharing many tasty and healthy vegan recipes and she explains why this is so important to her.Visit https://www.urbanfarm.org/2016/10/29/karine-kuchipudi/ for show notes and links.

Considering design in architecture and it’s impact on urban agriculture.Sean complements his design practice with research in green building technologies including, among other things, urban and vertical agriculture. Sean is a Lecturer at Danube University Krems, Austria, was an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong, and is a frequent lecturer at international universities and conferences.For the past several years, Sean has led research in Urban & Vertical Farming, and developed a prominent exhibition on urban ecology and biomimicry at the Hong Kong-Shezhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. His research has been presented to key stakeholders at the United Nations, as well as for multiple international governments, diplomatic, private, and non-profit organizations. Sean believes that urban agriculture can provide a multi-faceted solution to the health and resilience of cities while catalyzing community and economic growth.IN THIS PODCAST: Greg gets to interview Sean Quinn, who works to meld sustainable architectural design with urban agriculture for one of the largest global design firms. Sean talks about how this field has changed over the years and is tackling the issues of food systems and just connection to nature in highly urban landscapes like Honk Kong and San Francisco. Just by focusing on these issues, he has developed a sincere passion for designs that build solutions combining flora and human interaction.Visit https://www.urbanfarm.org/2016/10/27/sean-quinn/ for show notes and links.

Growing Food, Jobs, and Hope on the Urban FrontierMichael Ableman, the cofounder and director of Sole Food Street Farms, is one of the early visionaries of the urban agriculture movement. He has created high-profile urban farms in Watts, California; Goleta, California; and Vancouver, British Columbia. Michael has also worked on and advised dozens of similar projects throughout North America and the Caribbean, and he is the founder of the nonprofit Center for Urban Agriculture.His newest book is called Street Farm: Growing Food, Jobs, and Hope on the Urban Frontier and is out now by Chelsea Green Publishing. Michael lives and farms at the 120-acre Foxglove Farm on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia.IN THIS PODCAST: This is an interview that Greg has wanted to do since before he even started the podcasts. A epic urban farming project more than a decade ago inspired him greatly, and now Michael brings Greg up to date with his Street Farm project he’s been working on for the past several years and it is just as epic and inspiring. With a natural ease, he tells us the story of an urban farm that is situated in the heart of one of the worst parts of a large city and is farmed by a group of the lost and disenfranchised. This project takes the hopeless and the discarded, plants them on the unwanted and unworthy land with a box and some soil, and magic happens.Visit https://www.urbanfarm.org/2016/10/25/michael-ableman/ for show notes and links.

Utilizing managed intensive grazing for maximum benefit for land and animalsShawn and Beth have been farming together since the 1980’s, for the last twenty years in eastern Ohio, where they manage 24 acres designated by the state as ‘not suitable for agriculture’.  Using intensive grazing as the primary source of food energy, they raise dairy and beef cows, sheep, farm-fed hogs, and a variety of poultry, producing most of the food, and feed, on the farm. Concerned that farming is so often dependent upon multiple off-farm resources, from feed, fuel and fertilizer to water and electricity, their ongoing project is to identify and test the means by which farming was done for centuries with a minimum of off-farm inputs. Their research has led them to identify grass conversion, especially the daily conversion of grass into milk by dairy ruminants, as a key to whole-farm sustainability, combined with the integrated nutrient feed-backs that are possible with a community of diverse animal and plant species, domestic and native. They are the authors of The Independent Farmstead, Chelsea Green Publishing 2016.IN THIS PODCAST: Greg is thoroughly impressed with the transformational successes of Shawn and Beth on their “really trashy” plot of land to the diverse, beautiful, and healthy pasture they now enjoy.  They tell their story of how they bought what they could afford were prompted to do research and replicate the methods of grazing that preceded the modern day mass production farms. They explain why managed grazing is important and so beneficial to both the animals and the land they occupy. Visit https://www.urbanfarm.org/2016/10/22/shawn-and-beth-dougherty/ for show notes and links.

Robert is a scientist, author, and environmental entrepreneur who founded several leading market-based environmental concerns. Currently he serves as host of Green Sense Radio Show and Founding Farmer/CEO of Green Sense Farms.  Robert is recognized as a national expert and an authoritative source on brownfield redevelopment, sustainability and indoor vertical farming.He is the author of several books and numerous reports and articles on the subjects. He has appeared on national and local TV and radio programs, been quoted in national and local newspapers and has testified in congress in support of environmental legislation.  IN THIS PODCAST:  Greg gets to chat with Robert, an environmental entrepreneur who is transforming indoor farming and finding economic solutions in farming. Robert has been seeking out and creating solutions for environmental issues for many years and this has led him to the business he has now which is producing crops year-round. He also talks more about his radio show and introduces the Equity Crowd Funding project he is currently working on and how to find more about it.Visit https://www.urbanfarm.org/2016/10/20/robert-colangelo/ for show notes and links.