Building Organic Farms Inside Large-scale Housing Developments with Carmen & Tripp Eldridge

We sit down with Carmen and Tripp Eldridge of Convivial Foodscapes to unpack what it really takes to design, launch, and sustain farms embedded inside large scale residential agrihoods. We dig into distribution models, staffing realities, and why a neighborhood farm succeeds only when it is treated like essential infrastructure instead of a pretty backdrop. 

• Carmen’s route from family gardens to food politics, Peace Corps teaching, and statewide nutrition incentives 
• Tripp’s CSA “light bulb” and why restaurants and ecology led him into organic agriculture 
• What an agrihood is and why the model is “like an onion” with many hidden layers 
• How Arden was designed and staffed during early construction 
• Why they shifted from a fixed CSA pickup to a farm store with household currency 
• Land restoration challenges and the patience required to build soil and trust 
• The HOA funded amenity model and what it means for farmer autonomy 
• The importance of SOPs, operations manuals, and long transition runways 
• What Convivial Foodscapes provides: land vetting, design, budgeting, infrastructure, hiring, training, ongoing support 
• Upgrades from Arden to Carnes Crossroads including app based farm bucks and better resident experience 
• Why agrihood roles can professionalise farming while increasing “fishbowl” pressure 
• The talent pipeline problem and how agrihood jobs can lower the risk for new farmers 

If you're a landowner investor or developer exploring regenerative projects or if you're sitting on land and wondering what's possible you can learn more or reach out to the links in the show notes and if this conversation was useful consider subscribing or sharing it with someone working at the intersection of real estate investment and impact 

———————-
This podcast isn’t just about ideas—it’s about action. From these conversations, two organizations have emerged to bring regenerative real estate to life:

Latitude Regenerative Real Estate is the world’s first regenerative-focused real estate brokerage, dedicated to aligning values-driven buyers and sellers. With a strong presence in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions, Latitude also supports purpose-driven developments across North America through strategic marketing and branding services. If you're looking to buy, sell, or amplify a regenerative project, Latitude is your trusted partner.

Hamlet Capital is an investment and development firm committed to building resilient communities rooted in working farms. If you’re developing an agrihood or conservation community, we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can turn visionary ideas into thriving, place-based investments.

Transcript

Cold Open And Show Premise

SPEAKER_00 0:03

There's still something romantic that draws people in, and there is there's absolutely a movement for people to want to be closer to where their food comes from, or once want their kids to know that a carrot comes out of the ground and not out of a bag at the grocery store or whatever. Everybody loves food, and everybody has a food story, and I think that's what makes agrihoods so appealing. Yeah. It is it's a people connector.

Carmen’s Path Through Food Politics

SPEAKER_03 0:35

Welcome to the Regenerative Real Estate Podcast, a show that explores how land, capital, and community come together to create places that are financially viable, ecologically resilient, and socially meaningful. Here, we talk with the people who are navigating the real-world challenges of regenerative development, from financing, policy, design, and long-term stewardship. I'm Neil Collins, and on this episode, I'm joined by Carmen and Tripp Eldridge of Convivial Foodscapes, where we explore their journey building enduring farm enterprises within large-scale agrih communities. Instead of, say, a golf course with homes wrapped around it, you swap in a farm, and voila, you've got Nagrihood. But I can tell you from experience, this intersection is anything but straightforward. It's more like an onion, and to do it well, you have to peel back a lot of layers to understand the real challenges baked into the model. How is the land owned and held? What kind of farm should it be? How do you design it and who's actually going to farm it? How does the food reach the residents and what business model supports the operation? And of course, who pays for the infrastructure? These are the kinds of questions that inevitably surface when designing an agrihood, which is why today's episode goes straight to the source. The people on the ground who've been tasked with figuring this out in real time. Meet husband and wife team Trip and Carmen Eldridge of Convivial Foods Gapes. They are a couple brought together by a shared passion for local food and agriculture. Both wanted to build professional lives working in this space, though neither could have predicted where the path would lead, designing and operating farms embedded within residential developments in what is now an emerging asset class. Their journey into agrihoods began when they came across an ad looking for someone to start up a farm on a sandy patch of land in one of Freehold community's first agrihoods in Florida. Rather than proposing a single farmer, they suggested the role would better be served by a couple. And fortunately, Freehold agreed. What has followed has been a journey filled with rare, hard-earned insights for anyone considering agriculturally integrated communities. There simply aren't that many people who've started farms from scratch inside large-scale developments. Carmen and Tripp haven't just theorized about the challenges in bottlenecks, they've lived through what works and what doesn't. Today, they are the principals of Convivial Foodscapes, a company dedicated to helping developers design, install, and operate enduring farming enterprises within residential communities. While they often work at a scale larger than what some of you listening may be envisioning, their insights are grounded, practical, and widely applicable, with takeaways for anyone curious about bringing agriculture back into the fabric of where we live. Let's get into it. Where are you calling in from right now?

SPEAKER_00 4:16

We're in Gainesville, Florida.

SPEAKER_03 4:18

Gainesville. Awesome. Carmen, I'd I'd love to start with you. Just how did you get into the line of work that you're doing right now? And what were those initial sparks that that set you on the trajectory?

SPEAKER_00 4:30

Okay. Well, I we grew up having gardens all the time. My mom always kept one, and my grandparents had one. Um, we my grandparents immigrated from Spain um in the 40s and 50s. And uh we so we were we always knew about agriculture. They were farmers in Spain, but from a really small pueblo where you were basically a subsistence farmer. It was it was not romantic. It was like you farm or you die. There's no stores. But when I when I went to college, I was I was very into uh political science and and eventually started learning about food politics. And that's when I learned a lot more about organic production. And at the University of Florida, I went in Gainesville here. But I remember when I uh went back and told my grandparents, my Spanish grandparents, like, hey, I'm like really into agriculture. I want to like make a career out of this. They were highly disappointed. They they thought, like, well, you know, we we came all the way over here, so we didn't have to farm anymore. And so yeah, I I think for for me, agriculture kind of combined my passions for politics and uh environmental sustainability and also community education because I've always wanted to be a teacher. Yeah, that's where I decided in school that I wanted to go into the Peace Corps and I wanted to get some real life experience in the developing world. So my my situation was a little bit unique because I was was the one of the few people that came in my group that had already been fluent in Spanish. So there was um the president of Panama's time at the time, her sister, his sister ran an agroforestry high school in the Darien, which is the poorest province in Panama. And she was looking for a full-time uh organic farming teacher to come work at the school.

SPEAKER_03 6:16

So catch me up, you leave Panama, and then what do you do after Panama to the point that you guys meet and start working together? And I I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm guessing at some point you got to start working together here because that's that's why we're on the call.

Tripp’s CSA Lightbulb Moment

SPEAKER_00 6:33

Yeah, I hadn't even at that point I didn't even know trip. Um so I get I get back, I come back to Gainesville after Panama because that's where I had the most connections. I'd gone to school, and my my former one of my organic farming professors hired me as a biological scientist, very kindly because I had zero lab experience, but she trained me on all the lab work. But I what I really enjoyed was the field work. So I stayed there for a while, but realized lab life wasn't for me. I did not enjoy lab coats and doing the repetitive stuff indoors. Uh so I moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where my sister was. I had family there. And uh I immediately plug into the food scene. That's kind of a similar thing, Trip and I have wherever we move to a new place, we plug into the food scene and we find our people. And I got a job managing a small community garden for the University of North Florida that was part of campus rec. And that was my first big project outside of the Peace Corps, where I had a small, tiny garden there, but this was like a bigger campus farm. And we had lots of fruit trees and a community garden space, so students can adopt a bed and really enjoyed that experience. But there was a nonprofit here in Florida called Florida Organic Growers, also known as Fog. They operate QCS, which is the largest organic certifier on the East Coast. And I had met Marty Mesh in an organic farming uh class, and he he immediately became my hero and I wanted to do food politics and work for him and change the world. He uh had gotten a specialty crop block grant to basically start a statewide nutrition incentive program for for Florida. And so I took over that project and and stayed with them for several years, and we raised over two and a half million dollars in grant funding to expand the program across the state. And uh I worked remotely out of a house on the beach in Jacksonville, Florida, and it was fantastic.

SPEAKER_03 8:25

I didn't realize that you were in the Peace Corps as well. I saw Tanzania, but um yeah, what what was the spark for you? Like how did you grow up? Did were were you coming from Spanish peasants growing subsistence agriculture as well? Or is uh was that just Kermit?

SPEAKER_01 8:42

No, but you know, this is something I think that ties a lot of uh a lot of people together. If you go back far enough, I think you always arrive at a farm. You know, once I I get into college, I'm not really sure what what I want to do, um, like when I grow up. Uh and then senior year uh in an ecology course, we toured um a CSA farm. And I never heard of community-supported agriculture until that moment. And then the light bulb just clicked on. Well, Trick, why why do you say that the light bulb went on? What was it about that? Um, so it was uh so I was studying sociology and anthropology. Um, so it was, you know, something was very interesting to me about the way we live as humans and how we interact with each other. Um and then in this ecology course, um, you know, I was wanting to plug into sustainability and, you know, renewable um resources and and just learn about that part of of the world and thinking about how, you know, how am I gonna make a difference? What am I gonna do? Um, so we tour a CSA farm, and it's that uh it I don't know, it's like the most ancient of commerce in a way, where you just have these specialized skills uh that are being devoted, and then um you're sharing food with people that really care about that food. And I guess all through college I'd worked in restaurants, and it wasn't long working in restaurants, either front of the house or really back of the house, that you realize so much of restaurant work is dependent on the ingredients, you know, that kind of trash in, trash out kind of thing. But if you've got fresh, you know, locally uh grown food, like you're way more than halfway there. Okay, so so right before I go to Peace Corps, I I realized like I'm I'm all in on organic agriculture. So I'll just I'll just keep going after uh so you know, Peace Corps, Tanzania, um it was uh learned a ton. But then right after Peace Corps, you get out and you've got at the time um like return Peace Corps volunteer newsletters, and in the back of it there were job opportunities and things like that. So there was a farm um up in Pennsylvania that was uh advertised and uh organic farming apprenticeship, and they were doing a lot of cool uh like biodiesel, wind, uh some solar, you could just learn it all on the farm. Um, and it's Matt Steinman was up there, and uh his wife Jen, our partner Jen, that she was a returned pre Peace Corps volunteer. So they were teaching all this cool stuff, and you got to visit all these other farms in Pennsylvania and just see a lot of different um models of organic agriculture. So that felt like the perfect fit. So I I ended up going up there, apprenticing, and then I came back and I was just you know irreparably hooked and just tuned into organic agriculture ever since.

Landing Their First Agrihood Role

SPEAKER_03 12:04

So you guys are squarely in and like coming at this from like eerily similar backgrounds. I don't I don't think I've ever seen two returned Peace Corps volunteers and the agriculture program like end up getting married to each other either, uh, from different countries at that. Like what what's the first moment or opportunity that comes along to actually get involved with what I think is still pretty I don't want to call it counterculture and like the crunchy granola sense, but like having housing development and farming be mutually supportive is still pretty foreign to a lot of folks, right? At at what moment do you start to really eye that track as um a path in which you're gonna step into it together?

SPEAKER_01 12:58

So uh I knew about CRMB very early on, you know, watched that become a successful model. Um Paige and Justin were you know one of the original farmers there for a long, long time and um had an immense respect for what they were were what they were doing. Um if if you just take a look at what they've done agriculturally, there's a lot of you know content out there about what they've done with regenerative grazing and farming, but what they've done from a housing uh and and like providing affordable housing for their employees uh in a in a part of rural southwest Georgia that it I can tell you it had no housing options. I went there and rented a home and I bought trailers, like RVs. I lived in an airstream in the back of the home that I've rented so that I could bring more employees in to work with me.

SPEAKER_03 13:59

I still feel like that's a a hot button issue that people are we're trying to work through as an industry, right? Like, how do you actually provide housing for the farm workers, not just for the the residents that want to live adjacent to that? What was your first agrihood experience? Like, was that with Arden or different? Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

So it was with Arden. I think something that Trip and I have in common is that we in our farming careers, we've kind of referred to ourselves as landless farmers. Like I wanted to farm, but I came out of school with student debt and like the the economic cost of getting into farming was just so insurmountable to me. So I was actively seeking out opportunities where people could pay me a living wage for me to do my passion. So I just was like, let's go on Indeed and see what's available. And so I get on there and I see that Arden is this agrihood in South Florida that's hiring. And I was like, wow, Trip, this is such a rad opportunity. I'm obsessed with tropical ag like from Florida and Panama. Um, and I was like, let's just apply. They were only hiring one farmer, and Trip and I both applied in our cover letters. We reference each other and we said, you know, this is my partner. We you got to hire us both. So it was almost instantly the phone rang. And that was just like the beginning of this beautiful relationship with them. And they they ended up hiring us both. And we came on kind of, I don't know, in the early construction phase down at Arden. So, like, um, you got to have a lot of influence over the farm design and and kind of the infrastructure build out and building that initial uh budget.

SPEAKER_03 15:38

Can you guys share a little bit about Arden, just how it was planned? And I want to know more around that state that it was at. I mean, were they just like, there's the field over there and you're gonna go farm that?

SPEAKER_00 15:51

So Arden, Arden was really cool to us because it was very much so like a in our minds, it was like a land rehabilitation project. Originally that part of South Florida, you know, it was the Everglades and whatever years, whatever decades it was where they drained the Everglades and started farming it and really rich soil. We had uh, I want to say the whole the whole property was three acres, right? Including the foot, including the barn and the driveway and all that. So like we um we did the field layout and basically they said color within the lines, and we figured out the field layout and um we came up with uh operations budget, all the equipment that we needed, we went through all the purchasing, we we designed the walk wash spack wash pack area.

Turning HOA Dues Into Food

SPEAKER_01 16:36

Um and the model because the as far as the community, it's gonna be you know, three to four thousand homes. And if we're going to actually deliver food to that many people uh you know, as a part of their HOA dues, what does that look like? And um, you know, I guess some some agrihoods uh uh the deliverable is um you you live next to a farm, you know, and you can choose to engage uh, you know, it with the CSA.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

Yeah, spend money to join in.

SPEAKER_01 17:10

Spend spend extra money to join and participate or or not. And you know, we'd kind of looked at different models around the the country and um Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:19

So we were basically able to like take the ear the the um the acreage that they gave us and back into the harvest numbers and like how frequent that that CSA would would run. Um and yeah, we did all those calculations early on.

SPEAKER_03 17:36

Was everybody automatically enrolled with the HOA or did they have to opt in as well?

SPEAKER_00 17:41

Uh it was built into their HOA dues, the the CSA program. So based on the acreage that we had, it wasn't a weekly CSA. It was it was basically once a month. So our season down here runs for about 30 weeks. And so it was seven CSA shares over the course of the month. And we started off by doing like a customizable CSA share where you pick up at a particular time. But uh what we noticed and what we kind of evolved in over time is we we switched it to a retail model because we wanted to, instead of, instead of forcing residents to like show up once a month during this three-hour window, we wanted to like show up. The farm store is open, there it's called the general store, it's open 30 hours a week, every single week of the year. And then we created an alternative currency where um each household received the same amount of money, and then they could come and shop at their convenience and and and then it's highly customizable. If your family only wants potatoes and onions, then like by all means buy potatoes and onions. But if you want to try the radishes or like experiment with things that you don't typically eat, then it gave people who wanted to be more adventurous, they could be more adventurous. But you weren't forced to eat the radishes if you weren't into it.

SPEAKER_01 18:55

And it and it's South Florida too. So you could just save all of your tokens or or you know, money until the end of the season and wait until mangoes were available in the summer.

SPEAKER_00 19:05

So yeah, so we're the opposite of y'all. We our veggie seasons November to May, and then the summertime down there, we planted, we we were very into agroforestry, like especially with our experience at Candy Fork Farms, but um we did we went heavy on mangoes because that's popular, and on bananas because that's my favorite, and bananas are popular, but we also did a lot of uh papayas and a whole lot of like uh Barbados cherries, there's coconuts, coconuts, tons of coconuts. So it was a really fun CSA. And then the the the currency was as a as a token, which we with our next aggregate freehold, we made it an electronic currency, so it wasn't actually a a physical thing.

SPEAKER_03 19:47

I this is amazing. I have so many questions. We could we could just stay on this one property. Um let me actually try to get a bearings of of freehold. I you know, I know the name, I don't know anybody there. What why do you think that they were really looking at developing this kind of community?

SPEAKER_00 20:06

I think we could we could trace it back to Suzanne. Um Suzanne is the the person on the team there that really brought the idea to um to Arden into Freehold. I don't I don't remember it. I don't remember where she was where she got the idea, but yeah, I think uh she was inspired.

SPEAKER_01 20:25

Suzanne, um Madeline and uh Andy Smith uh were integral to that. They were familiar with uh Farmer D and he was uh you know in involved in the initial layout of the Arden farm. And um I think they went out and toured several agrihood properties, you know, went to Serum B. I think they went out to California, different places and uh you know felt that for South Florida, it didn't it didn't have an agrihood per se yet, and this particular property uh it's 1200 acres and it's right on the edge of the Everglades agricultural area. So, you know, you go just around it and it's Wellington, and there's you know, equestrian estates, and there's you know it just felt right for that spot. That said, it was a land restoration project. You know, we this wasn't like prime ever gold. With a lot of sand. No, it wasn't a ton of sand.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

We had no black gold like that. We literally saw the black gold like start after the property. It was like prehistoric beach sand where we found fossils from when Florida used to be underwater. And so the first year was was bleak, it was very bleak.

SPEAKER_03 21:51

The first yeah, I mean, couple years, just time is such an incredible ingredient that that you need to start to snowball this. Um And I'm sure the developers were kind of sitting on their their fingers being like, What's going on over there?

SPEAKER_00 22:06

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:09

But the the the residents were part of that story from the very beginning. You know, you I there's something really special about the pioneer group of, you know, residents in a neighborhood, and they're just all in. And they showed up to every workshop.

SPEAKER_00 22:23

And we we had our CSA pickups in the parking lot because the building wasn't done yet. So we just like pulled up with a truck and trailer with our coolers and packed with veggies. And um, yeah, everybody was just like joyful to get anything from the farm.

SPEAKER_03 22:38

So first off, I I see a lot of people saying, man, this is it'd be really cool to put housing and agriculture together, but what's what's the business model? And I mean, if you're developing three to four thousand homes, like you are squarely doing real estate development, was it did they just put you on payroll and the farm was always this amenity, or were they trying to stand up the farm entity that needed to be self-sufficient? Um where did you live? What is you know, you know, what is it like being the farmers within three to four thousand homes with a lot of eyes on you?

SPEAKER_00 23:19

Yeah, I think I think for art in particular, it was as an amenity. We we had the retail space to kind of drive sales, but I I don't think the goal was ever to fully, fully fund the farm independently with the retail space, just through the through the hoa dues and just like the operations budget being divided amongst all the houses there. Um we we thought about buying a house there early on, and maybe in hindsight we should have because it would have we probably would have made a ton of money when we sold it, but we didn't only because of work-life balance. And we we already we we felt like we needed some space, we needed some distance. Like um, we didn't want anyone showing up at our front door saying, like, I I'd like some more cilantro, but I can't find it in the UPIT garden. Could you tell me where it is? Like we needed, we needed that space. So we left, we lived in Loxa Hatchie right behind uh right next to Arden, and we also lived in Wellington for a period of time.

SPEAKER_01 24:12

But um, but as as employees, we were uh you know employed by the community management company uh that you know ran lifestyle and ran the supported the community. Um and then that's really how how our business fits now. Um if if you have an agrihood uh community and you uh want to hire a farm and not have that farm be its own like sovereign business entity, um, and you want to have the farmers work as employees of the community, then we're kind of a plug-and-play support mechanism for for that. Aaron Powell Tell me more about how that works.

SPEAKER_03 24:53

So the HOA would pay you guys, convivial foodscapes, to stand up the farm and and operationalize it, and you're getting paid from their HOA dues. Is am I thinking about that right?

SPEAKER_01 25:08

So we weren't convivial foodscapes yet at Arden.

SPEAKER_00 25:12

Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 25:13

We were employees of CCMC. CCMC was the community management company. And just like the community manager and the the maintenance person.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

So like saw director, and then we were the first farmers.

SPEAKER_01 25:25

Right. So we were we were employees of the of the community at that point.

SPEAKER_00 25:30

And because we were systems thinkers and we had worked on several farms before and we dealt we dealt with stuff staff turnover and everything, like we were very familiar with like the value of having SOPs and having a detailed operations manual. And um one thing that we found unique about organic or these farms and and agrihoods is the the continuity piece with staff. So if you have staff turnover, like how do you how do you capture season to season like what what the farmers learn? So you don't have to continue to reinvent the wheel or spend money over and over again making the same mistakes. So we kind of built that framework for Arden and did the hiring there and found our replacement and everything when we ended up leaving.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

But yeah, we put an 18-month notice in when we were leaving.

SPEAKER_02 26:15

So Yeah, we do you feel like that that's necessary?

SPEAKER_03 26:18

I mean, is that is that the the best practice is like you've really got to give somebody notice a long time in advance. I mean, I would imagine the farm could collapse if you don't, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:31

We felt like we wanted to have a long runway uh to find the right person, a good fit, and to be able to train them while we were still there.

What Convivial Foodscapes Actually Does

SPEAKER_03 26:38

So what how at what point do you say like we can make a business out of this? And um were you thinking design, install, stand-up, like what what's really the range that that you start to put this together?

SPEAKER_00 26:54

So I think the big, the big catalyst for us was the pandemic, and we had our child in the pandemic in 2020. Um, and so at that point, so much has shifted about our priorities and and our perspective on the world, like I'm sure with everyone um going through that experience. And we wanted to dedicate more time to parenthood and be closer to our family. So um it was at that point where we were kind of thinking about how can we how can we use our farm production skills, but also our teaching and community building experience to like make a business out of this. And Freehold was really the uh our biggest cheerleader. And they they were the ones that was was strongly encouraging us to to spin off and continue working with them. So while we were at Arden, that's when we actually started Carnes Crossroads, which is Freehold's second biggest aggerhood. But yeah, that's I think that's where we started with the we we we really like the design piece. I think we're both of us share this uh personality trait where we really like the startup phase and the puzzle and like trying to work out the details. Like we we thrive in that type of high pressure, lots of detail phase. We do the design, we do like land vetting, uh, we work with landscape architects and the developer team and engineers, anyone else uh on site, and uh do do the initial design. And then we also do uh operations planning and budgeting. So we do, we basically uh work with the developers to tell them how much it's gonna cost to build it. Uh and then we we participate in certain aspects of the construction too. We build a lot of farm infrastructure. So um irrigation, wash pack areas, greenhouse, raised bed, greenhouses, um, community gardens, like anything farming infrastructure we build. And then uh we also work on the startup phase, which is like the hiring. So we do, we vet candidates, we we recommend the team that will take it over. Um, so we help, you know, it's it's kind of like finding a needle in a haystack, but like we figure out who a solid team would be to take it over, and then we do the onboarding and training of that team, and then we we stay on uh with the HOA for kind of uh ongoing support and training. So I think I captured it.

SPEAKER_01 29:16

Yeah, I mean that's you see, we we don't have a ton of clients uh and because we do. You're right. This is the whole team. This is yeah, this is it. And we're very involved and we know freehold and we share a vision for you know what you know our aggro hood model is. You know, we share that vision. We know they know exactly what they're getting with us, and we love their team. Um, so we felt very confident striking out on our own as a business, hitching our wagon to them, knowing that Carnes Crossroad was going to be, you know, not Arden 2.0, but it was going to be you know similar enough. And having you know ran that farm for five years, like we were anxious to okay, how can we approve improve on this and and you know do we could do this again? And we we do, just like Carmen said, we like the building process of it.

Upgrading Arden Into Carnes Crossroads

SPEAKER_03 30:16

How do you upgrade Arden into Carnes? Like what what was the top distillations that you think you brought there?

SPEAKER_01 30:26

I mean, it might seem nitpicky, but like when you get into the barn itself, just if you have if you have a closet that uh might be intended for you know mops and things, uh, you know, understanding that's that's not just a closet. That's going to be our tomato closet, you know, and like so we want we want it to be uh able to accommodate some different uses and throughout the season. Um and then we get into the retail area. You know, we want it to be bright and have just kind of more natural light and just the flow of how we accommodate uh people in a retail space and we we can reconfigure that space to allow more seamlessly to do workshops and and things like that.

SPEAKER_00 31:14

Just like stuff like that, just making sure the bar the barn makes farming sense and like the functionality for the farmer so that the farmer can thrive in that space. I think that's the unique perspective we bring to it.

SPEAKER_01 31:24

And you can never have enough dry storage, but you know, just a little bit more.

SPEAKER_00 31:28

Yeah. I think the big upgrade at Carnes is is how the farm share program operates because um at Arden we uh we opted for plastic tokens because uh we didn't have the funding to like do an app development. But at Freehold um went all in on uh having an app for residents where the electronic currency is there, and then they can just provide their last name at checkout and it just automatically deducts from the app. And uh that way, yeah, residents just it it re-ups on January 1, expires on the 31st of December, and it and it is just very automatic and seamless. So I think the the resident experience is is better at Carnes.

SPEAKER_03 32:10

Yeah, that's fascinating. So I mean you guys are having to work at a pretty large scale of development if the HOA is gonna be paying for the farming team, right? I mean, this isn't it's not necessarily a farm entity that's gonna be, you know, s trying to stand on its own two feet.

SPEAKER_00 32:31

Yeah, I think it um at least 2,000 homes or more to support the farm at that scale with this model, I would say.

SPEAKER_01 32:40

Yeah. We won't I mean what we challenge our our farm teams to do is like try to run it like a business. You know, try to uh you have a retail store, you know, you're you're growing food, um and then you know, spend money as if it's your own and then uh move product try to move product, yeah. Like it's how do you incentivize that? Well, you I think it starts at hiring, like you have to you have to some intrinsic motivation.

SPEAKER_00 33:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:11

And and for the most part, we've we've been uh really lucky to get you know good solid people that can that can do that. Um but it's something you have to keep tabs on as you move forward because your budget uh you know you start a community uh at one level where you're growing one acre, and then Carnes is gonna ramp up to like 10 acres are growing.

SPEAKER_02 33:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:35

And uh, you know, so your budget's gonna follow suit.

SPEAKER_03 33:41

Outside of just hiring the right person, like did they do they have a sense of there's not like a bonus mechanism in place.

SPEAKER_01 33:48

But I mean everybody has a relationship with the residents that they're seeing every every week, and there's an expectation um from you know freehold if they're visiting the site, which they do regularly, and we come quarterly reviews as well, like when we on site walking through the farm and we see the we want the farm store to be full and vibrant. And um, so if a if a prospect, if somebody's thinking about living in the community and they visit the the retail store, they want to see it lush, like a like a produce section in a grocery store.

The Agrihood Farmer Career Tradeoffs

SPEAKER_00 34:24

We we have like over the years kind of talked more about like what type of measurable incomes or measurable outcomes for the farmers, like how do you define success in that moment since it isn't your farm? Um, and we've done different stuff with like redemption rates for so if there's like so many, so many dollars out in circulation of the of the farm bucks currency, like we're going for at least 75% redemption rate. So we take, we we keep a lot of data on how much is in circulation, how much is actually getting spent, and we're looking at that regularly, comparing that to sales, um, and like an additional vegetable sale to to see how we're doing. And then if if we're meeting that or not meeting that, then it then it warrants a conversation. CCMC as a company does do performance-based reviews and they do annual raises and stuff like that based on performance. So that's built into the HOA management company.

SPEAKER_03 35:17

Carmen, you're talking about like you came out of college and into the working world. Uh, what was you're a landless farmer and Trip, you're talking about living out of an airstream on a farm. And and this is the thing, I think once we look at the overall picture of where we are at today is that land prices are sky high for entry-level farmers that have the will, but not necessarily the means to get into it. Um, and then, you know, it's not just the land, it's how do you actually house farmers? And then how do you how like how do you bring them together in a community setting where I think so often farming in the United States at least can be quite isolating? You know, they're they're that lone farmer out on the tractor and it puts a lot of pressure on them. Um I I'm really curious, uh you know, as you zoom out at the landscape level, how you think that this approach is it like is this a great fit for where we are for entering farmers into a profession? Um or is there still a lot of improvement that you would like to cover there?

SPEAKER_00 36:32

Yeah. I feel like I feel like this particular model is one one piece of the puzzle, and we kind of see it as a as a spectrum. But like one aspect we've always appreciated with this particular agarhood model is how it elevates the farmer into a more professional position, like a a police officer or a nurse, that you're you're paid a living wage, you have benefits, you you have investments and stuff that come along with the company. So there's like the farm director alongside the lifestyle director and the maintenance director and the community manager. And um, so we we do like that, especially for uh young farmers starting out that also have student debt or just like don't have the means to go out at on their own. I the the agrihood setting, I feel like is a really good place to hone your skill and to learn. It is the opposite of isolating, it's like more like a fishbowl. And that also invites a very specific type of candidate to work there. Cause if you just want to be with your plants, you're not going to survive in an HOA. Like we used to joke and say we were Minnie and Mickey Mouse at Arden because we felt famous. Like everybody knows you, but you could you know like the first 200 residents that moved in, and then you stopped being able to remember the names.

SPEAKER_03 37:45

You guys are the people I would in a heartbeat hire as the first farmers. I'd be like, this is whenever they probably saw your resumes of both of you coming together, they were probably like, oh my God, what we just like stumbled upon them. It's the best thing ever.

SPEAKER_00 38:00

It was it was very serendipitous, and it was a really nice, it was a really good turning point for us and and where we went with our careers. This is an option now, and you don't have to be a starving artist. Like you don't have to live below the poverty line or fear medical bills, like, but the the flip side of that is it's not your farm. Like there's aesthetic expectations, like it has to look a certain way. Your customers don't go away if if they're unhappy with you or the product, like they live there. So, like, how do you maintain that long-term relationship in a positive way? And just how do you how do you deal with the pressure of resident expectations? And like it's uh it's heavy on the people's skills.

SPEAKER_03 38:43

Yeah, what are what is that like from the resident side? Do you think? Are are they drawn to these projects because of the agriculture? Like, is that the motivating factor you think that why they buy into these kind of communities?

SPEAKER_00 39:00

There's still something romantic that draws people in, and there is there's absolutely a movement for people to want to be closer to where their food comes from or once want their kids to know that a carrot comes out of the ground and not out of a bag and at the grocery store or whatever. So South Florida was unique in that it was like a melting pot of people from all over the world. So we put a push-pin map on the wall, a world map, and we let people put pins in it. And it was it was remarkable to see all the places from around the world and how they ended up in South Florida and like in that for us facilitated conversations around people's food cultures and exchanges of recipes and and things like that, just really highlighting the benefit of diversity. But everybody loves food and everybody has a food story, and and I think that's what makes agrihoods so appealing.

SPEAKER_03 39:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:47

It is it's a people connector.

SPEAKER_03 39:50

Trip, I'm gonna throw this one out to you. What do you see a pipeline of young, ambitious and skilled labor force that you can plug into these operations, or is there a gap there?

SPEAKER_01 40:09

I don't see a pipeline, uh, but I I do see immense opportunity if the if the messaging can be intact in a way like if you go to growing conferences, they'll have like breakout sessions, and it this will be the young farmer breakout session. You go into that room and you're gonna hear about this uh Carmen and I might talk about starving artists, farmers, but it it's uh this chorus of you know land is hard to get, you know, capital you know, out of reach, um, and with good reason. Like that's real. I think agrihood jobs, and that we have a website called agrihoodjobs.com where we post our own opportunities. Like Carmen was saying, it's a it's a professional position with a living wage and benefits associated with it. And if you can, you know, get it, get it in your head that you know, you don't it it doesn't have to be your land. It doesn't you don't have to go into overwhelming debt to achieve this dream, and you can contribute to a 401k and you know, your Roth every year and every you can you can check all these boxes uh as a professional uh role in in your community and still serve that purpose that you want to serve by being an organic farmer in your community.

SPEAKER_00 41:37

I I think too, we've hired we've had we've definitely hired staff that like might have had like one or two years of farming experience, but then once they've done a couple more seasons, they're like actually don't want to be a farmer. And it's way better to like farm for an agrihood and discover that than to dump all your money in the business and then and have to recover from that later. So 100%. Yeah, it's a good it's a good dabbling effort.

SPEAKER_01 42:02

I don't know, it's it's a lot, and you would have put a lot of your life into that and deferred a lot of investment that would have gone elsewhere into that.

SPEAKER_03 42:10

You know, that's the crazy thing is like you guys are look like really young, vibrant, and healthy, and you're talking about like my priorities are starting to shift, and at the same time we're looking at what's the average age of a farmer now in in the country. It's like 64 or something like that. You're gonna say 70.

SPEAKER_00 42:26

I was gonna say in the 70s, but yeah, it's up there.

The Future Collaboration Agrihoods Need

SPEAKER_03 42:29

Like that's crazy. You know, we we have uh we have an issue. Yeah. Yeah, and I think everybody's really, you know, like you said, I one of you said, I think it's it's a solution. Um it's it's certainly not the silver bullet. And I don't think like if there was a silver bullet out there, I think it it'd be really kind of boring. You know, it's if it's just one thing. Um that's why I love like we have now 150 episodes of people looking at this from their own kind of corner uh and taking their stories and saying, look, we can kind of iterate and innovate from this perspective and get going. Um so with that in mind, I mean, Trip, you're you're certainly uh not an old farmer and and you're starting to say, hey, you know, my priorities are shifting. What what does the future look like from here? What what's on the horizon that really excites you guys that you want to be celebrating in the next five to ten years?

SPEAKER_01 43:29

Uh yeah, so I mean, our again, we're not a volume uh kind of business. So we uh are focused on what's you know making uh the relationships that we have right now meaningful and you know supporting the the work that's either happening, like Carnes in South Carolina, uh Carnes Crossroads. So I mean we have our heads down in in that regard on that specific. work, um doing that work well and we have a five-year-old so we are you know in the in five years from now we're gonna be celebrating him being 10 double digits amazing what about you Carmen what what do you really think well I don't know I like Trip was saying I'm very we we like to take on big projects and go slowly and through through the whole whole project be be all in but I think in the future it would be cool once more these agar hoods pop up that there could be more maybe there's more potential collaboration between agar hoods and linking the the infrastructure and shared processing that like uh I think one thing early on that really uh intrigued us about agar hoods is the ripple effect beyond people's property lines and yeah we're just really really happy to be a part of it and be able to apply our our skill set to this space.

SPEAKER_03 44:55

Yeah there's not that many people out there that that can do what you guys do with your resume that backs it up. So it's just so fascinating to hear where you guys are coming from where you are now and where you're going. Well tell tell the the audience where they can learn a more about you um and get updated or reach out and and hire you guys. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 45:20

Um so it would be great we're at convivial foodscapes with an s dot com uh you can also find us Instagram and you can go on YouTube and actually see uh us making our own YouTube videos and celebrating the the hard work that our our farmers are doing out there and um we kind of you can go to like the Carnes Crossroads channel on our YouTube and kind of see that from its infancy to oh Arden if you want to see the soil we started out with at Arden there's some really way back there from 2018.

Where To Find Them And Closing

SPEAKER_03 45:54

Yeah. You guys are awesome. Yeah I'm really inspired by what you're doing and and how you've you've really started to uh make your mark on on a movement that I don't think is going to slow down anytime soon. So it's been a pleasure to have you guys on with thank you we appreciate it. Yeah thank you Neil for everything you're doing too we can't wait to see um you guys in five to ten years too thanks for tuning in to the Regenerative Real Estate podcast the show production is a reflection of the work that we do through Latitude Regenerative Real Estate and Hamlet Capital. This episode was edited by Asher Griffith at Cicada Radio. If you're a landowner investor or developer exploring regenerative projects or if you're sitting on land and wondering what's possible you can learn more or reach out to the links in the show notes and if this conversation was useful consider subscribing or sharing it with someone working at the intersection of real estate investment and impact. Until next time this is Neil Collins signing off the pocket