Potatoes in Wisconsin and Peru

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These two potato farms and their polar opposite growing methods prove that despite our differences, all farmers are ready and waiting for the next generation to show interest and take over. These stories show us that there's a place for everyone in agriculture.

Thank you for listening :)

Transcript

Audio Only - All Participants: 0:02

Happy Tuesday everyone. Today I'm sharing two of my favorite farm travel stories of all time. If this is your first time listening to the Global Stewardship Podcast, hi, my name is Hannah. You may know me as Hannah at the Gardens on social media. Essentially, I'm a traveling farmer. I just grew up visiting farms all around the world, connecting to where my food comes from. Learning about farming, and ultimately it led me to start my own farm while still continuing to explore farms around the world and learn from other people who are stewarding the land like God intended. And normally I have a guest on the podcast with me, farmers who are doing really great things for the environment and for the land. But the stories I plan to share with you today have just stuck with me for a really long time, and I knew that I wanted to share them with you. But after these exact stories coming up at dinner yesterday and learning that so many listeners. Are actually not farmers and may have this inner deep call to become farmers. I thought today was the day. So I actually found myself, putting this episode forward on the lineup list and just hope you guys will enjoy it. Bear with me if you were expecting a guest today. It's just me, guess we'll be back next Tuesday. You know, I visit amazing land stewards all over the planet. Are doing great things to nourish the earth, and these stories I'm about to share are about two different, very different potato growers. One grower being in the Andes Mountains in Peru, and the other being a giant, industrial scale farm in Wisconsin. And although the two growers produce potatoes in just drastically different ways, you can't even imagine how different picture, the most polar opposite potato growing. And that is exactly what we're about to talk about. Both stories prove though that there is something for everyone in the agricultural industry, and so I would like to just treat this episode as a call for you if you're not. Farming yet, if you're not a part of this industry, this is the call for you. And I'm just saying, hey, there might be something here for you in the world of food, in the food system and farming. And a lot of people, when they think the term farmer, they picture, an old white dude with overalls and a big open corn field or something. That's so crazy that I'm doing this episode. I thought about this this morning, the old McDonald. Ification of farming. So many people think that farmers look like that, and there certainly are plenty that do, but I think as this podcast has probably begun to show you and will continue to show you, is that farmers look very different all around the world. There's just so much more to this world of food and farming than people could ever really imagine. Across the globe. Over a billion farmers work tirelessly every day to provide the food that sustains us. And at the end of these long days, no matter their methods of food production, many farmers, growers often find a moment of calm and reflection after their day of hard work. And I've been there myself, many of us. End of the day thinking about the legacy we're going to leave behind. A lot of us as farmers are wired very similarly, and I just find that it's a really common thing that farmers sit down and think about who's coming after me, what am I doing all of this for? Who's gonna take over? And this was definitely the case on a frigid winter night high in the Peruvian Andes. I was up in these just jagged, rugged mountains. Picture this, it's a high altitude kind of mountain lodge. I'm inside a, a very nice, large mountain hut. I was sitting in front of a Woodburn stove warming up by the fire, and we had just walked, gosh, nine, 10 miles that day. There's no power in this building, and so the flames that I'm sitting in front of are the only thing illuminating the conversation in the room. And these flames that are flickering are casting light on a very weathered, smiling, lit face of a local patriarch. This older man, he'd spent 70 plus years as what's called a pastoralist, meaning that he lived on the move virtually every single day of his life dedicated to herding alpacas and llamas. Pastoralists can be herders of all different kinds of animals, but in Peru it's predominantly alpaca and llama herding. And this is a very typical lifestyle for people in this area. these are the Quechua people up high in communities there in Peru, and they not only move with their animals every single day, but they oftentimes grow potatoes too. So this is where the potato growing comes in. And the potato growing is kind of a side gig or at least just sustenance extra food for their families. Occasionally they may make a trade or barter for different kinds of things, uh, in exchange for their potatoes. Something that I learned that they do is they'll actually travel down to lower altitude communities like really far down the mountains and even travel down into the low, low parts of the country to trade with communities from the coast, et cetera. But this Catcha herder I was talking to, he was sitting there with me, stoking the fire, and we just had some really surprisingly deep conversations despite the fact that we literally did not speak each other's languages. At all. I vividly remember this moment. He was refilling my cup of cocoa tea. Cocoa tea's, the herbal drink of choice in Peru. Also, a ton of countries in South America drink cocoa tea as well, and Central America too. It's known for helping alleviate altitude sickness. So that's why I was drinking it. I had traveled from sea level in South Carolina to elevations between 14 and 17,000 feet, so that's pretty high if you're not familiar with feet. That's just under the altitude that like ever space camp is at. So I was definitely experiencing altitude sickness. When you fly to this part of Peru, You fly into Cusco, which is over 13,000 feet on its own, and that drastic elevation change is never recommended for humans. But you have to do it every time you fly into Cusco so for any of you who've been to Machu Picchu, I've probably experienced that crazy flight in drastic altitude change. So that first day of my arrival in Cusco, I got really, really sick and I was drinking a lot of this tea on this trek that I was doing through these indigenous communities. And I was drinking the tea. Certainly not as much as locals do. Some people drink it from sunup to sundown. It's totally not healthy for you to do that. But this was just part of living the true, authentic life of these semi nomadic indigenous growers for the week or two that I was there accompanying them and. I served alongside this tea was often a steaming plate of dozens of homegrown potatoes, and so in front of this fire, in this moment, I'm sipping this tea, picking potatoes off a plate by hand, each with a completely unique shape, color, texture, taste. In this region of South America, it's the birthplace of the potatoes, so it's home to more than 4,000 varieties of potatoes with colors just as vibrant as the surrounding mountains. If you've ever seen photos of Rainbow Mountain in Peru. We actually, I didn't know we were going to be doing this, but we actually trekked right by over Rainbow Mountain on this multiple week long Trek to visit these herders and spend all this time with them. So it was super interesting walking right next to hundreds of tourists who were getting off big tour buses to take pictures at this absolutely beautiful mountain. And we just kind of trekked up and saw it and then we just kept on going and going. Going and going and going for days into the mountains. It was so cool. Just unreal. Just by happenstance that we saw this mountain that I had no idea we were gonna be even seeing. Also, at the beginning of the track, I just happened to pass by a giant potato festival where people from multiple different Alpine communities had just come together. Everyone had brought potatoes and I guess they were competing. It was just really hard to tell. What they were competing in, whether it was color or shape, or uniqueness of these potatoes, nobody could translate. But long story short, there were potatoes of absolutely every color, shade of the rainbow, every shape, all different sizes, just piles and piles of rainbow potatoes. So. Anyways, he was feeding me these potatoes, uh, so proud, showing me each and every one, each different one, and explaining, trying to explain what they were, why they were different. It was such a beautiful conversation, and it was this blend of chua, Spanish and English. He didn't speak Spanish, but the Spanish person I was with kind of spoke Quechua, and so through this blend of Quechua Spanish and then my blend of English, Spanish, we were communicating and I leaned in to hear all these captivating stories of decades that this man had spent just right alongside his ruminant animals, traversing mountain ranges, trekking across potato fields. Each tale and story was so beautiful, but just layered with this deep, kind of like eerie, unspoken struggle. And it naturally led us to talking and discussing about the future of shepherding within this Quechua community. Obviously the life of indigenous pastoralists is far from easy, and for this particular group of herders, city life at lower elevations is undoubtedly becoming increasingly tempting for the younger generations. So the elder actually shared a reality with me. That's all too common. I've seen it in high altitude communities all over the world that traditional agricultural operations. Are just no longer holding enough appeal to keep the next generation from migrating to the big cities. And oftentimes the younger people are leaving in search of, you know, quote unquote, better work, more interesting work. But it's largely because children are sent away from such a young age now, rarely raised in the mountains that their ancestors have stewarded in this case for thousands of years. And so since they are sent away to school from a young age, they're losing that deep interconnection with the land, losing the why behind why their parents have done this, why their grandparents have done this. Their ancestors for thousands of years have tended to this land. And you know, the city has an alluring appeal to it. And so in an era of totally unprecedented creature comforts, many of these young kids wonder why anyone would willingly choose this life of grueling, exhausting days working the land. Obviously this is something that I choose personally to live this life. Even despite getting a degree that was supposed to lead me to politics, I chose the life underneath the sun, and he and I kind of with heavy hearts agreed that an understanding of why someone would do this can really only come from that deep connection to the land, the animals, our food, and one another that. Obviously many, uh, younger generations are totally missing now. I mean, most humans in general, especially in, you know, quote, Western kind of cultures are missing that deep connection and so we were just feeling it in our mixed chua, Spanish, English, and just agreed that encouraging young people to forge personal relationships with these elements may be our last hope in preserving fading traditions like nomadic pastoralism from becoming stories of the past. And I am gonna talk more probably over time about my time in Peru and other places similar to it. But I do want to compare this story to. Actually potato farmers in Wisconsin, when you spend sun up to sun down with people living the rhythms of their life, it teaches you a lot. It's a very humbling experience and there are so many parallels to life back home to other farms that I've visited. So it will definitely come up again throughout different conversations. But just a few short months after my return home from Peru, I set off on a giant road trip across the United States. I visited a farm almost every single day, a different farm every day, humbled by how much I learned at every single stop that I visited. People like my friends Taylor, she's at Ayers Valley Farm in Ohio. Just an incredible, impeccable operation. I visited Annalise Wagner. She's a Wisconsin conventional dairy farmer. She taught me so much about confinement, dairy, and some pros and cons and just, it was such an eye-opening experience. And this farm I'm about to tell you about really solidified in me this belief that we have a sliding scale. It's not conventional versus regenerative. It's not good versus bad. It is this giant extensive sliding scale of farming practices and there are very, very few people who do it perfectly, But I find that the folks you think are actually just wreaking havoc on the planet are constantly striving to do better and better and better with their stewarding practices every single day. And Heartland Farms, who I'm about to tell you about, is a great example. In every sense of the term. They're a conventional farm. There's no doubt about it. Of all the farms I visited on my journey, west Heartland Farms, who's a fifth generation operation in Hancock, Wisconsin, had the most profound impact on my perspective of our food system and probably of any farm of the hundreds and hundreds that I've visited over the years. I've never had a farm leave this big and deep of an impact in my soul like Heartland Farms did. Like my alpaca herding friends in Peru, the farmers at Heartland Farms also grow potatoes, though these are obviously grown very differently. The ones in Peru are hand dug in trenches. Um, they're up in very high altitude grasses. The animals graze over them. It's just a totally different scene, whereas at Heartland Farms. They grow chipping potatoes that are actually cultivated for bagged potato chips in supermarkets, convenience stores. The potato chip bag that you're thinking of, they're the growers for that. They've got tractors worth more than your house. Plus my house, plus maybe your neighbor's house. Plus their neighbors house absolutely mind blowing machinery. Their operation is insane. The farm spans 27,000 acres across five different counties in Wisconsin, making it one of the largest farms I've toured to date. I arrived, obviously with countless preconceived notions as a small scale, natural minded regenerative farmer that I am. I was absolutely mind blown, impressed by their sustainability measures, particularly their ability to conserve water. And so the way that I understand it, and a lot of this went way over my head because it's just so technologically innovation sound, but. They have remote controlled, monitored irrigation systems that can get instantaneous rainfall and soil information. So it provides them the ability to turn on and off and adjust irrigation as needed. In individual field sections like down to the square foot, they can know exactly what's happening in their field without walking on it. Without having to go look at it. And they have drones that do this. They've got all kinds of crazy technology. And so with this increased precision technology flexibility and the accuracy provided by their advancements in technology, the farm saves mind blowing amounts of water annually. You know, there's no blind spraying going on here. There's no blind fertilization. They do know down to a very, very small square footage exactly what each part of the field needs. Have I said mind blowing too much already. They have this crazy control room also. It's got screens and laptops and it's actually got this electronic chart where they display millions of gallons of water saved, and it's constantly ticking up in numbers, showing you how much water they've saved, and it's in one of these main engineering rooms. That's pretty cool. So Heartland Farms, they impressed me. They demonstrate also the diverse career opportunities within the agricultural industry. They've got the drone pilots. They have wash and pack staff, so they're potatoes, they're truck drivers. They have very fancy machinery that harvest these things. Truck drivers that drive it to the storage facility, to the wash and pack place. So they have people who run storage. They have humidity experts because not only are some of the potatoes shipped straight off to the factory to be made into potato chips same day or next day, but they do store a bunch of'em so that people can have fresh potato chips all year round, believe it or not. So they have humidity experts, humidity controllers. These are just a few of the key roles that contribute to this farm's success. So. When I was there, potatoes were harvested first thing in the morning. Okay. Check out my Instagram. I'm going to post some videos. They were so cool. They harvested first thing in the morning. Washed, cleaned, packed, and immediately within an hour of these potatoes being harvested, if not sooner, the potatoes were trucked off straight to the potato company. Turned into potato chips. So even though your potato chips are extremely unhealthy for you, maybe at least they're fresh. Just kidding guys. We're getting insight into our food system here. The president of Heartland Farms places a really strong emphasis on educating young people about the importance of agriculture. And he often says something of their large team of growers that I really relate to. He says, we may not be related by blood, but we are by sweat. And I think that's something a lot of farmers understand within their teams and their community of farmers. I'm definitely trying to build a place like that on our property here. The farm hosts, community centered groups gathering lots of schools, school trips, and they offer a firsthand look at the hard work involved in food production, really in hopes of inspiring the next generation of farmers because they too know that the next generation is key. So farming practices these two stories, it's so clear. They vary as wide as the landscapes. They shape the stark contrast between the two potato growers, the ones that I met in Peru and at this Wisconsin farm is painfully obvious. I could go on and on and on about how vastly, drastically different their growing practices are and which one's better, yada, yada. And I think you guys, as listeners can probably guess. How they vary so drastically what those growing practices are and what I may believe about them. But despite their differences, there were these two powerful and undeniable similarities that stood out to me that one, the farmers were dedicated to improving the way that they steward the land, and two, most importantly, they really desire to see future generations prepared and eager. Keyword, eager to take their place. We are in urgent need of young people to enter the food production industry, bringing fresh ideas and a renewed passion for growing high quality food. According to the 2022 USDA census of agriculture, the average age of farmers in the US is 58. Yeah. You heard that 58 is the average age of farmers in the United States, and I'm sure you've heard that stat before, but it's a number that's been steadily rising with each new census. So farmers are getting older and older. So whether you dream of spending your days under the sun connected to the rhythms of life like my Peruvian friends and myself. Or you're working in an office developing new technologies. At a place like Heartland Farms, there are countless opportunities within food and farming. So if you've been feeling the call to help feed your community, now's the time to act. If you're listening right now and you're not a farmer yet. There's a generation of farmers preparing to retire. There's land changing hands and there's operations that need major help if they're going to survive. There's just developers knocking on everyone's doorsteps, whether it's solar panel, farms, you name it. You have to bring your expertise, your interests, your passions, I hope that these two stories were interesting and maybe lit a spark or planted a seed. For those of you, especially who aren't farmers or just encourage those of you who are growing and producing food, to just press on what you're doing is absolutely incredible. And I know I'm biased saying that as a farmer myself, but we're feeding people. We're feeding people. This is, we need farmers. I appreciate you just letting me share this story. I'm of course going to have producers from many of the farms I've visited around the world join as guests on the podcast, but I could not get a catcha translator, and I unfortunately will never see this. Nomadic shepherd, herding man again in my life probably. And so this was just one that made more sense to recap the story and summarize right here. But, I'm really excited for next week's episode. So tune in again on Tuesday. And thank you for listening all the way to this point. Most people leave right around here, so let's just let them leave. Okay. Now it's just you and me. Let me know in the comments or wherever you're listening to this. I really want to know if you are a farmer or if you're a conscious consumer listening. I'm trying to understand who is here, whose ear I actually have so that I can cater things to you. Don't forget to check out my social media also, because I'm going to be posting beautiful, stunning photos and videos of these two experiences that are very fascinating, and especially the rainbow potatoes and the Rainbow Mountains, you'll get to see a little more behind the scenes of what I was trying to describe and explain in this podcast, and I think you'd really enjoy it. Also, there is a link in this podcast description from Farmhand who sponsored last week's episode, and that is so huge. If you would do me just a huge favor and click it and go check it out. just stop what you're doing and go click. Thank you guys so much. I hope you have a fantastic week and that I see you again next week. I'll have guests back on and we'll jump back into it it's about to get very interesting. Okay. Bye.