resources and came to the understanding from traveling a little in nicaragua and going to new orleans and helping with katrina and coming to that so the clear kind of understanding that she really wanted to go back home and farm so we are here we have the opportunity to visit with jessie meter and the farm is chickadee creek farm and its twenty five acres of produce and absolutely as you can see gorgeous expanse of natural local foods but she's grown herself and succeeded in making a profit in a farm which i have heard is a very difficult thing to do welcome jessie thank you jenny just how did you get from cornell university studying natural resources to ending up farming and so when i was that cornell i was setting ecology basically the degree name is natural resources but i was studying ecology and ecology is studying the interaction of soil plants animals water and the human place in it so there's not too much that's more related to ecology than the way we produce our food it takes up an incredible amount of land on the planet and i grew up on a farm and i trained to think about farming and think about lee and to use so that wasn't too much of a jump to think ecology just interactions only just looking at a pristine system or only a slightly compromised system ours farming you're entirely manipulating the system and still trying to get good ecological results with soil health and with healthy crops and good balances of beneficial insects that are able to take care of your past insects so it's a lot more manipulated in good ways i find there's the opportunity to to try to work towards good manipulations in sustainable farming so you were really able to use some of the education that you got at cornell but in addition to that you told me that you went to nicaragua and you want your limbs and i'd like you to tell us a little bit about what happened there so i went to new after the hurricanes that hit to do relief work there and it was really emotionally challenging because that place was a disaster zone but i found it to be super fulfilling as well because of working with people is what you figured out about yourself through yeah well just that i like tangible work with people like i do this you get a benefit from it like that that works for me so the interaction with people was what you would appeal to you i think it was you had helping people and being close to family how does how how do you bring them back to farming how does farming help people for you everybody needs to eat as it turns out that's actually true yeah and there's a whole range of things that you could eat that you could put in your body and some of them are better for you than others and they also have all these extra analogies that come along with them so one food is produced there's a whole system in which the food is pretty produced and that could either have good effects for the world around us and for our future health really in terms of water cleanliness in terms of the search illative potential of our soil and you can either produce good effects the way you produce food or bad effect depleting the soil polluting the water so this this is how i choose to farm like i'm choosing to farm in a way that i certainly hoping is improving the soil keeping the quality of our resources our air our water keeping that quality good or better than how i found it and giving people something to eat that isn't go hurt them i guaranteed not to hurt you guaranteed a little now i'm really not hurting you i think it actually it does say it's good but that's the thing like a lot of the food we eat actually is going to hurt you so i find that fresh food not just the suit i make on my farm but fresh and vegetable taste five to six times better than what is commonly available at a grocery store which sometimes it's fresh but most the time it's not  and below this very strange but beautiful vegetable they're going to find a little slip of how the heck to use the thing so this expands people's food horizons so let them see it let them be able to taste  we sample stuff like crazy markets so you came back out of college and you came back and you started farming but there's a little history here tell me about that i think your parents had a dairy farm there was some farming in the past tell me a little bit about how the needers had been farming over the last ok fifty year ok there is a dairy farm a little ways back so i'm actually a thirteenth generation farmer so there we can go back thirteen generations and the my direct descendants have been farming for each of those generation like each person has really been doing this i think it's probably i mean you go back five generations and everybody's the thirteenth generation farmer this was this was in everybody's blood great grandfather came to the states he started a dairy he had a dairy herd near washington crossing state park in new jersey and that herd got sick at one point  and he lost part of a farm the state brought it turned into washington crossing state park the next generation which included the great grandfather to some extent invented this really cool machine called the it was the first machine that would grade and process eggs when farmers had eggs to sell is they would weigh them one by one on these little tipping scales one by one like this is a great it they made the egg a matic and they were still farming on the side at the same time so my grandfather still farmed corn and wheat i think you experimented with a lot of different things just because he loved it and he was interested in it  and then my dad had a full time job as well as farming at one point is farming two hundred acres as well as having a full time job he was doing soybeans and wheat and now he primarily does timothy hay that he sells to horses s really grew up on a farm eating fresh vegetables ironically there were some fresh vegetables my dad had a little garden in the back so we had fresh vegetables from that once in a while but a lot of the vegetables were also frozen in a store bought frozen and then micro micro it was a year so you know difference then yeah i know how mushy and terrible micro dreadfuls can be i have a question here you are farming and you grew up on a farm but your farm is profitable which is pretty exciting congratulations by the way thank you for that that's an easy task in the farming industry and i want to know tell our viewers what is it like on a daily basis  tell us what happens when you get here six five whatever time you start and you have interns and you have some employees that's quite impressive for your it tell us how it all works out on a daily basis just going to the average day sure so typical day starts at seven a m and earlier if it's going to be hot that day so that we can work in the cool of the morning so it's myself and then two other young women who show up to work their apprentices their employees paid employees and when we show up i have the to do list for the day which is weather dependent and if it is too wet to be planting in the soil you there seeding that seed putting in seeds  directly or transplanting started plants into the soil if it's dry enough will be doing that that's too wet will be doing things like weeding both by and with hand tools and we do some weeding with a tractor that's our favorite type of weeding and very i really like it when the tractor does meeting other things we do our greenhouse work particularly if it's rainy if we're going to be having a rain day we'll work inside in the greenhouse  be doing some organizational tasks that's when we prepare our marketing materials on rainy days and some days we don't have a choice for working inside when it's rainy or too hot some days we just have to get stuff done in particular when it's harvest day before market we always harvest the day before market so it doesn't matter if it's rady or if it's one hundred ten degrees we have to do it that day and what markets are you are you selling it at this point we sell it three farmers markets the princeton farmer's market the wrec gardens farmer's market and the pennington farmer's market so what sort of will harvesting is i mean i have an idea that maybe people might want to know with sure so for things like salad mix where out there with harvest knives specialized knives we cut it with an oh and so there's harvesting and then there's washing and packing and all this takes a day so we rinse all the lettuce and then we spin it dry in a big spinner a mechanized spinner we don't do it by hand no no bigger ok yeah electric very cool washington so a lot of the harvesting is with clippers with knives depending on what the crop calls for with harvest forks it's sometimes it's with tractors for the larger crops like potatoes we have tractors that dig them out and then we pick them up by hand but the tractor digs them up because we're not going all the potatoes this is you call them apprentices they're yeah they're paid employees they are but they're learning a lot while they're here and that's really in tents of why they're here on this farm because i love to teach about this stuff and they don't get paid a lot it's there has to be an exchange there or like the the exchanges that i a giving them a chance to totally learn how to do this on their own they should be able to leave and do all of this when they're done well you know interesting but you bring up teaching because i do know that you are currently teaching a course in gardening at p d s so there's a whole bunch of different people who take that course it's young people who are considering farming as a first time career it's also people who are retiring and considering an encore career in farming encore corps so that course that it's really interesting it mostly deals with people's conceptions or misconceptions of what a farming life styles going to look like and whether or not that fits and so what they want out of their life is do they do you want to work seven days a week from dawn to dusk or not because a lot of people don't want to do that actually and that's fine you really have to enjoy doing this farming stuff in order to stick with it what are the tropics are you covering in that class that excite people from the things that you're telling them that would make them want to become actually most of the things we tell them in the class and diverting them from being farmers so there's there's some of the great stuff like working for yourself and making your own hours you know being outside having a really healthy lifestyle being able to interact with the soil all the time there's a lot of really quick tangible wonderful things about farming you do a day's work and you and see your day's work you can look at it and see what you did really aren't on this board yeah it's i mean you're constantly surrounded by wonderful things and when i'm here on my farm i love it like i have that in love feeling a lot of the time from this work it's great it's fantastic and it's really demanding and it's that demanding part that people need to evaluate and see if they're up for it and to make sure that they have a good business sense to make sure that they scouted their market and they know that they can sell what they grow and to make sure that the numbers are going to come out at the end of the day that it is a splendid margin and that requires a valuation before you get into it is the investment of time and capital that you put into your farm going to pay off are you going to be able to make a living i think farming a little bit like my experience with food people come into the food this is i have got a lot of money let me start a restaurant and they have no idea you know what they're getting into and i think farming has got this glorious romantic it is young wandering through the field here and look they know what you really experience yeah i'm usually kind of like covered in tractor grease and that this yeah i'm usually a mess and that's ok i like it but that's not what it's not what everybody would like for sure that's a little bit about what the course is about is giving them a real scope with their up and i wan ask you just speaking of the young blonde image what was your experience interacting with men in this field i still get the occasional old guy a farmer that asks me how my guard how my gardening is coming along my gardening and i try to respond with that kind of inquiry just by saying you know the farm is doing great but my sixty five horsepower tractor did just break and i had to rip open the hydraulic system in it and replace the seal on the pump and they're just they just kind of stop in there like oh that's what i had to do five years ago related like it's just it is the same isn't it it's a similar occupation she just happened to be a girl so it's best just to fight fire with fire i think oh girl so what do you what do you see happening in the next five years where do you see yourself going with all this farming you know you want to eight years old what's going to you know how do you look back when you're thirty five what's the preferred vision for you in the dream so if i expect that the acreage that we haven't vegetables on this farm will probably increase to around ten to fifteen in vegetables it's currently four acres in vegetables and the rest of the acreage is being covered crops to improve the soil so that ten to fifteen acres vegetables will definitely require more employees and what i really want to be able to do is pay employees well and have them be consistent people who are here working with me year after year so well enough to be able to make a good living here so that i can make a good living sounds like what's the nice idea if you want to support your employees your room and working for you yeah i just you know some are saying where they come and they work in the summer that would be the d efficiently and not make mistakes then i can bring it to people at fair prices i think that's that's what i want to do and i want to improve this farm you know any ambitions of our i have to buy the farm actually yeah it has to be this farm because i love this farm my dad owns the farm and there's i'm not the only child so it's only fair to try to buy out my dad on the farm and that's what has to happen he had to buy it from his parents it wasn't given to him so that's the fair thing it's going to take a long time radishes and further back there's potatoes and then right over here because there's a salad mix growing and the baby carrots i just want to make sure you know what how do you keep the bunnies from eating all this we haven't really had a bunny problem because we have a puppy so smart have been told to only wilson the most popular vegetable at the farmers market the thing we sell the most of is actually tomatoes and potatoes the good old storage potatoes not super sexy so sort of surprising it's our top seller but fresh potatoes are they're a whole different ball beasts then their storage potatoes they taste a lot different so one of those things were across america can definitely tell the difference from what they're buying from us at a farmer's market and what they're buying from the grocery store that's probably nine months old how would you do different i would just say it's  it's it's firmer in your mouth that kind of potato it's it's got more flavor to it how would you describe the difference between a potato has been sitting on the shelf and shipped from mexico and a potato from the well off they're often shipped from idaho really there really are a lot of potato and idaho and the potatoes that we sell tend to be more waxy and texture are not as like mealy not mealy not really storage potatoes get kind of mealy and gross and  really really thin and gave me a sort of a personal way for it was so delicious i'd never too soon i think so sweet so do you think it's a new trend and really sampling and giving people an opportunity to stop giving them recipes i mean it's we're all part of the process of teaching people what local food tastes like i think and not being so scared about it i think farmers are probably becoming a little bit more marketing savvy and more willing to interact with their customers and let them taste before they buy farmers markets are becoming more prevalent and that's a good venue for being able to do that kitty creek farm does have a c s a program a community supported agriculture program in which the farm members prepa share ok we take their prepayment apply a book discount to it and then those members come to our farmers markets to pick out what they'd like in any given week they can come to any of the farmers markets that we attend and they can pick out whatever they want for their week share there's no person it's or type of at school that they have to take they know what i don't understand decide what if it fits for them for that week take it home with them and then we just debit it out from their account so what i like about that is if you're having guests for the weekend or a family party you can buy a lot of something if it's just a small weekend and no one's you know eating lunch you can buy a head of lettuce or if you're going on vacation and you don't have  anything and you don't and there's no penalty for that you don't miss out any part of your share i like your head like how i'm still there that's a real customized too and i think that's part of the culture of the farmers markets have to become more aware of how to customize to the customer you know how to make it easy yeah that's good customer service basically that's you know back to your old thing of recipes for tomato sauce and giving people a slice of a person if i'm in this is all just understanding the people out there really want to buy local food they really want to be a part of this movement of eating really good foods i mean michelle obama with her gardens and people teaching in schools and it's just everywhere and i think what's the farmers are getting hip to is is how do you how to sell their stuff there's something called the garlic scape that i've seen and i've been told it's a very rare season and i i just think it's wonderful looking it's a rich dark green color and it's who looks like a long way round up scallion but i'm not quite sure what to do with that idea is my favorite thing to do with the garlic scape which is the flowering stock of garlic it looks like a big green pig's tail and it's it's a milder garlic flavor than the straight up garlic ok and the recipe that we give out with it is for cutting it into about four inch long segments and sauteeing it with butter and till they just start to brown and they taste like really garlicky green beans they're all the licious i really got i  everybody write that down this fabulous idea those are called garlic scape i just need to jesse i just appreciate so much you having us here today this is just amazing and i'm so inspired by all that you've done at your your age you're quite the inspiration and hopefully the motivation for young women out there who want to become farmers thank you very much and thank you it was wonderful having you here and thank thank you so much for joining us for farm fresh