really thinking jericho center somebody suggested talk to the davis's who course are really farming right so to speak but but it's just that that's really not the point here the point is stuff that is it is not the traditional concept of vermont farming and it's very it's evolved evolving and so it's really quite active i think there are people doing things right here jerko center in the encroaching suburban environment it's still quite agricultural so it is not but but amusing as well so we've recruited several people who are who are doing things and and will have three talks and i'm going to go last in case the other two just blather on and on and on everybody's yawning and bored you can you can collect my this is my daughter just you know just mark and i say yes this is him and she says well i need to bother you but there's a couple of sheep in my yard i said ok i'll be right down we'll get a mother so i was thinking five thirty five was just about ready to head over to the country store and maybe get a creamy sit on the bench you know watch the traffic away and walk over here but that's a life farm don't get to do that all the time we get the sheep in anyway  settlers farmer has been around i guess since two thousand and two other two founding members of jericho sellars farm in the audience i'm not want to go there's only two and krista my wife and we hope the next generation may be nearby right now so two thousand two we got going we started at home we live down the road here clark struck center and we started a little garden about the size of the billboard the black billboard that was the size of our garden believe or not and i got a picture of krista and with that little garden behind her and then we got a couple big so we got a couple of chickens we got a anything with it is grown in the weeds and grass and i don't know we had a discussion or we just kind of moved in but we've kind of been there ever since so i think two thousand and three we kind of bumped up our chicken numbers bumped up our in a lot of how we got to where we are today and that's largely because everybody knows when lee is and we kind of store all of her contacts and she was a librarian she knew everybody we still library cards wrote down addresses and names and numbers of everybody and so we sent our first brochure out to all the people that emily knew and that like really getting a side that like got us got it got our foot in the door and it's been a wild ride grown there we have some meat birds there we are she certainly down there and we've had an exam in the past as a lot of different animals rotate through all these different properties and the other piece that's been instrument instrumental for our farm is the there so animal numbers you know in very small few animals i'm beginning we're anywhere from like forty to sixty pigs here that we raise in process i think forty ish lambs that we r how many chickens do we have we have currently on the ground counting the ones we haven't regimen and the ones here and your present are we have more chickens than our people in europe was a true story we have about thirty six hundred metre chicks down in richmond that were raising and there are about fourteen fifteen hundred laying hens that you see in the big who posts across the road and leans towards elves and oh and we count those birds every night so we know if you guys are snagging chickens good return on your investment so we get we've got quite a few animals so very diversified and we rotate animals through our vegetable lands rich slowly acquiring enough kind of hopefully cooling any vegetable diseases vegetable pests and you're just your basic giving back to the soil so it's all about you know protecting the soil getting back to the soil soaking in the long term to get back to you so a little bit about the operation here injured recenter it's i mean most people drive by you see those solar panels there and various groups thousand animals running around thank you oh i don't know if i have much more to enlist krista's things i've missed something because you may have something he thinks i should talk about nice all these high tech farmers farm was i'm sure most of you are aware that farming here dairy farming dairy farms went from underhill right on through right on down through you know richmond honey him down to br l and beyond i'm going to pass some pictures around that are of the old tillotson dairy farm which sat on where our property is some of you may there's also a picture of i don't know if any of you know dave tillotson but there's a picture of him as a young man standing on a tree i got those pictures from from dave's mother ruth because i was really curious as to how the dairy farm sat on my property there where my vegetable garden is is where his his barn was and kind of a funny story when i first started farming here gardening actually i was just make a garden at the end of the season i know if any of you know can atherton he lives across the street from us and he came in he said so how was your garden and i said well you know i did ok this was pretty rocky it's gravelly it was filling you know after a couple of years with some good organic matter i think i'll have some and  s pretty well started over here it's well i figured i'd let you go and so i did i moved back to where the cows have been for fifty years and that is the better part of my garden at this point but after fifteen years of putting organic matter into the soil my swell has gotten a lot better i farm on a much smaller scale i'm still kind of back a little bit from where crist and marco are we have a one acre  plot and my vegetables are on about a third of it maybe maybe a little more than a third and we raise a couple of pigs every year for ourselves  i don't really i started just like mark in crystal i had a garden about like that blackboard and then the following year it got a little bigger in the following year and got a little bigger and before i knew i was  i was going to the growing to farmer's market and back at that time i was one of two organic farmers at the burlington farmer's market we started a market in the old north and i was sell it or restaurants  for better or worse it got in my blood and now i kind of and it's what i do you know a lot like mark and krista that they are just very dedicated to it and so  did i started doing the jericho farmer's market here early two thousand i guess is when we started there and  we went for a number years and it just we just didn't get the community support i just it just did not pay for me to go to that market i was bringing a lot of stuff home and feed we then decided to try a c s a and i asked around and people seemed interested so we decided to try a small c s a and it seems to work for my family  e at this point last year we had seventeen families i think will be comparable to that this year on the acre that i farm i do i don't have the luxury of being able to cover crop a whole lot or or things like that so i'm a pretty heavy user of of compost and in additives i do try to cover crop a little bit in the fall but my beds are constantly in use when something comes out something else is going in so we're not going to have pictures no doesn't work ok  because i i fought i the way that i farm is i have thirty or forty three to four foot beds throughout my third of  a real godsend to me was three four years ago now we put up after watching markers to grow vegetables in a hoop us i decided that we really need to get one and we put one up and it has been just great for the c s a because with this spring we would not have had i would have been able to start yet and i kind of like to start as early as i can and extend my that b b and well used to it till she got a job at the store john pays better than i thank you i don't want you to think you're off the hook completely because i'm sure that we question when i understand you have something i want to say w there's really room for improvement in terms of agriculture in the working landscape and and the vision that we see for the town for you know what we want to see the town be in decades from now and and you know have for looking at the town plan and working with bill on the planning commission to be able to possibly make comments or you know put in new sections and think about what you know what type of improvements i can be much i think in terms of the farming presentations were sinking lower and lower too you know from from people that actually do it down to the hobbyist but you know let's just stand right up and say what the truth is this so so it's a different it's sort of a different sort of thing these guys are talking about growing vegetables and so on and i'm sort of driving tractors and burning these little fuel and so on but that's kind of what i sort of for to do so one of the things is that i guess you know fifty or sixty years ago somebody standing up here telling people how to make a would be ludicrous because of course everybody would know but you know it honestly it's not exactly know that everybody in it certainly wasn't known to me until i tried to do it so many good times how do you make a what do i have to do it you know and so on the stuff that goes wrong and then what do we do it for and so on and so so basically we make absurd checkers not quite a week we make small square but right where it says up there we make squat  for a number of reasons this is easy to feed the horses and flakes you see the rat big round bales and most a lot of horse people don't want to feed their horses big round bales and they help rot horses have only one stomach as opposed to the seven eight or nine stomachs that cows have so it's really not good you know but the you'll see people do it i'm not going to criticise some of the doesn't but we don't want to feed ground bales to our horses and so these kind of particular kinds of things require very low moisture cont happen that's not always true of every other kind of making hay where he lived so these are the these are the steps that one goes through in order to make the head you know you cut it and then sometimes you crimp it sometimes as in one machine it's crushed it so that it dries better any kind of statewide office in vermont because he didn't know what a temple was i not only know what it is i have two of them one of them is completely you know broken apart and lying in the back of the farm which has got a few big advantage so i'm definitely going to be soon as i've done with this kind of stuff on the run for governor say i've got two terms then you're break it then you bail it and you pick it up when you stack it and you feed it then it processes through the horse and you take it out the other so it tends to be the most expensive thing and it also players with pears baylor three hundred bucks a fourteen t jonty for things like you know for maybe fifty nine or sixty or something like that and to keep it going i got my hay wagon for maybe three and i can't ferguson i got from up by my jenkins may remember the center here the engine was seized when i bought it that's why it's only twelve hundred my international three hundred i think i paid twenty six hundred and then the john deere twenty thirteen i'm not giving a in this town for probably for past food for vegetables and certainly for hay so you can't read the last night well but but basically we put up about seven hundred bells which which might be like a joke to some people who you know bail ten thousand or something like that but then again we're doing it part time and we need like two bales a day to feed our horses and that's about it but people talk about first cut second cut i do one time period because it takes me all bloody summer to do one  cut the seven hundred bales and put it away i mean i don't know what would be what people used to do when they did that for full time as a job but it takes all summer to do is just about so kind of what some other and forth i just leave a mold looked up to the appropriate thing and i can go step by step along and keep all four tractors going i can just go and i watch the weather all the time entry can testify to this every single morning all summer long i look at the internet i go you know twenty x thirty thirty percent chance or a no cut forty percent no and sometimes of course it doesn't work but i watch it but i need three days and so i watch this all the time and it ruins my entire summer so in terms of how long it takes with that with the rate cooking goes it takes me two to three hours to to cut what i'm going to cut and then i'll probably take about that amount of time to bail and we've had you know read the wheels fall off all the time of the test or it was free so we then we break it and then much did but basically everything breaks on the stuff all the time and you're always now the good but you think it's because it's off in the fifty's but honestly i've talked to you know people with more modern equipment it still is still breaks and i went down to get some parts of dave conan down the cone for him he's got all sorts of brand new stuff because he's constantly repairing i mean it's just goes with you know basically you have to know how to repair the stuff or you're just going to be completely shut down the p the cutter bar on the red tractor and there's injury attending again i think she loves to ted so so here i think is my next to final for you so what's what is it like you know to do this kind of hobby stuff today lots of fields i could find all sorts of people who'd love for me to pay their fields it comes out much nicer than rush hardy it's good for everybody i just don't have the time there is still some help out there part of the thing is that you're a little bit little bit alone used to be farms all over the place and mentioned wells things tractor supply you still have they're here if they're in shelburne it's a bit of a pain but end when you screw up and make but by the way most change is mostly available you screwed up get rained out it's crap and you can't feed so we can yours and you know this is all if i didn't have this i don't know what i'd really do so there we go mern and i came and we blew up if the form of terry now own us and we farmed with our children for twenty five years and terry's now for twenty five years and some of the experiences we had as i'm a jersey guy i didn't know anything but i want to became kind of a harmony hubby harmer and that we ended up at one point was five cows for campers two horses a pony and in between times we'd have three three sheep and maybe two pigs plus a cat and maybe repairing a mower and getting the engine to run just about right and you make about three passes around the fields on the outside and it's just moving from beautifully there and he would go through as is his inventory said no i got to order this it'll be two weeks so what do you do you wait the two weeks and then you start trying to do that  poughkeepsie and drove horses with a weigand as a full time job when when his father was a young man and raised the family and then they came to jericho but he knew forming unfortunately he had to reach over and we had four children and he taught me what i do about farming and raising and we would share bowing we would share well i but how they get that's the hay compressed in the middle and that means he and how they get the string around it and then how mechanically it ties a very tight knot in there it's of very intricate little bit of of a quote like that for a hobby farmer who didn't know anything i'm glad arnie's certainly knew how to do that but we raised our group and i did research in our deeds and terry has a notebook that parcel of land goes back to seventeen ninety eight and that house was built about eighteen  seventy nine he said self the room behind the kitchen where there's a the stone foundation we think was the original house that samuel french in the history he came to jericho in seventy nine he by ox cart walking from connecticut and establish that first house on that property and terry has a notebook that i put together that has all the history from that time up to up to the present that's my story terry's property my other hat is that i run the jericho center cemetery next to mark fashion and of a couple of little stories about mark fashion and these settlers farm is when they were coming along ten years ago they used to grow papers out in the back there and of course in may mother's day and memorial day is when we get a lot of the cemetery visitors and every once in a while of that time we also have a  i was going up to fix a monument and they had been growing cows i guess for beef they were black out of this and they were fairly young and the fence line back there is about four foot tall all of a sudden this one here for leaps the fence it was enjoying our flowers fortunately when i got to wave good to him he hopped back over the fence the other way so that's kind of what occurs sometimes with you when you have the have to have a neighbors with with animals and such a also talking about their chickens every once in a while about three or four times during the summer time chicken feathers in the cemetery and i suspect it's the hawk or a coyote that well you know listening to to terry and mike is a lot of cross pollination in the farming community in this in this little farming community in that arnold henry plowed some of the first fields for our vegetable operation at at the up at him when stuart's place there are twenty two barbara farm road so we have that connection we've been in a pinch in trying to do some paying ourselves so we went to the resident local hay expert dr hook we weren't quite sure he was serious but we tried it and we didn't operate that thing i guess you don't you had to be terry hooked operate that thing because things were falling off left and right and i think we got maybe ten twenty feet with that thing and then we took it back oh but i remember one point we also used john deere manure spreader to spread some compost on our vegetable fields mike in his young daughters remember one year when we were raising pigs next cemetery and they'd come over and buy piglets from us every few years and so it's it's interesting to hear all these you know a lot of different connections are right and we have three chickens at home and if we ever run short we know where to find a program like a register program or is it just something you do on your own  no we're not registered we just decided that that was the way that we that farming was going to work for me i at the time that i decided not to do the jericho farmer's market anymore because it just did not pay it was very difficult to get into the burlington farmer's market and i wasn't sure that i really wanted to spend my saturday there when i should be home farming and grown vegetables so we decided to do that anybody can do a c s a you know you decided this is the way i'm going to market my stuff and you just you know it's mostly friends that we started with and now by word of mouth people come and say hey can we get in and that's that's how it works i don't suman you you were similar you just decided that's how we're going to do it yeah i mean see it's a song yeah it was a concept started in japan like maybe thirty forty years ago and it's just it's not like official it's not regulated it's just a another way of marketing and but the concept behind it is that the community commits to the farm the members commit to the farm up front at the beginning of season and the farm commits to the community or the members and guarantees them a share of the harvest but the members take on some of the risk so if it's a horrible season other some natural disaster or something and the farm doesn't yield what it expects the members may not get as much and then if it's a really really good growing season they might get a lot more and and so that was the original concept in some c s a is even have members who work on the farm or have a certain hour commitment to become a member  now the term is used pretty broadly and there are as many c s a models out there as there are farms and some people will say oh we have a c s a but they just do like a pre buy credit program at their farm stand and they don't even specify like what the crops are people just come and select what they want and they just get a discount for committing some dollars upfront but one of the you know so there's lots of advantages for both the members and the farms and one of the big things for farms is early on in the season before your production has really started at least for vegetable operations primarily you have all these expenses but you have no product coming in and so you know you have a cash flow deficit early on and so the part of the a model allows the members to support the farm through that cash flow deficits they don't take out operating loans and in a way it's like your communities loaning to you at that time and then you're giving back to you know the farm gives back all season long and  then it gives the farmer production efficiencies because you can roughly know like how many members you're going to have you can plan out what crops are going to be in the share and you know you may not specify like own week two we're going to do this and week three we're going to that because the weather regulates everything but you know you know roughly how many pounds of cucumbers you need to generate and there's not going to be a lot of waste because you know what your market is and where it's all going to go so yeah so it's just a term that is used for a lot of different models but the main concept is that the community commits to the farm in the farm commits to the community and the details of that relationship you know just vary a lot on each farm so  can you talk just a little bit about the gleaning projects that goes on with that from a food bank thanks oh you have so exude access is certainly a big issue  everywhere in vermont and not the nation of course and so the wrong food bank is really active in working with farms to acquire product that would otherwise go to waste in the field and so farmer one of our biggest costs is labor i mean especially a vegetable operation you know probably seventy five percent of our cost almost as in labor and so if we have a product in the field or a crop in the field that we know we can't market or we can't market all of it or whatever we're not going to spend the time and the labor harvesting it so the food bank works with a bunch of different partners to do cleaning operations and there's a lot they operate at a lot of different scales and it's not just a food bank there's other  food food shelf type operations that are involved but we did one morse recently with intervale center and and they and another program called salvation farms and they would basically every week just contact us and say do you have anything you need cleaned and like for example during zucchini and squash season you know you can't keep up with them and so you know we'd we would pick them like every other day but on those in between days or in one of the days during the week they would come and pick them and that's great for us because it keeps as a kenyan squash small unmarketable the size we want but we don't need them every day and so they would get the harvest on those you know some of those days where we might have you know like letting last summer we had lots of fennel at one point or like i usually sell so and it's not legally so you know they would come and take out you know a couple hundred pounds of fennel or whatever we had another fall where we had like four rows of beets that we just were not going to be able to harvest before the cold set in and they came and took hundreds of pounds of beets to the food bank but they did the harvest they would recruit volunteers some businesses like dealer dot com i know has like in a lot of businesses do this ben and jerrys they would have time for their employees paid time for them to go and be a volunteer on these projects so that's that's one example in the field cleaning we also donate product that we have harvested that we can't market to the food shelf sometimes it's stuff just with cosmetic defects other times it's just excess crop or stuff something that's going to go by before we market it so we want to get eaten before it goes by so the food bank will come to our farm once a week during the main part of the season but from now through october and they take you know hundreds of thousands of pounds and most of the farms a lot of farms in this area do that yeah so we also donate to the local food shelf here in jericho like once a month and then oftentimes we have members in our c s a who maybe are going oh they're going to miss a share and we offer certain make up options and such to be like if they're going to be away for a long time sometimes they'll be like you can just you know donate my product to someone who needs it or donate to the food show so you know we have excess stuff go that way too yeah there's a lot of neat things going on in food access another one i just learned about  is being crafters they they basically tried to find products that were available within vermont's vegetable production basically commercial vegetable production that were not marketable or were going to be wasted and make them into some product that could be sold to the schools and other institutions so they came up with a bean burger that also has like kale and carrots and there's some other couple other ingredients where there was a lot of excess or ways store you know like cosmetically defective carrots you know things that they could buy at a low enough price point to keep these you know these high protein being burgers at a price point that would work for the schools so in a way to try to get local food into the school system within the budget structures that we have now for school food programs  if you go back to the eight thirty years the town of jericho was at the population is that just over five thousand population jericho's center and out to the range where all farmers the browns riverside was really an industrial base with the eleven mills that were up and down the area and it was a very busy time and farming back then basically was homesteading where you had anywhere from fifty to two hundred fifty acres and the mills collapse and geragos population actually dropped to below twelve hundred and when we came into jericho fifty years ago that was what the population was but there were still farms year our next door neighbor harold come in the white house up the street he had a barn across the street with fifteen  and he was able to keep his family fed with his farm springtime he would produce make the syrup in the story was you proust enough no maple syrup to pay your taxes as decrease of big part of the milking business changed in one nine hundred fifty seven because that's when the state law went into effect and you had to use a full tank you couldn't use the big heavy cans and have them sit in a spring cold water spring and then to ship them by truck or radio to the creamery to make it into milk you had to have it in bulk tank and picked up in the bar and a lot of these small farmers were fifteen to thirty five cows which terry was born actually i think when i bought it i figured it had about thirty five cows or maybe about calves that would have been kept in that barn the previous owner had been farming in that way for about twenty five or thirty years before i bought it so that's how farming has changed and how today you really don't have the cow with the cows that they've gone to the big farms like the cones and it's interesting to know that we can still bring in farming and it's a new operation and a different operation today than it was  yes you can hear your comment further bert's remarks few years back the select board asked the villa listing of how many active farms there still were in the town of jericho with the early alexander's are on the corner i mean just go like from the intersection of lee river road with brown's trace down to say the barber farm road between he stands at least twenty were there but twelve fourteen years or something i think one of these days we need a warning in the town record then we changed the mobs farm park to the fitz simons haifa mobs farm thank you