How to plan and pivot to stay in business - Nathan Ryder #394

Paul Yeager  
Hello everyone, I am Paul Yeager This is the MToM Show podcast, a production of Iowa PBS and the Market to Market TV show. This week, we are going to do another one of our revisits this one is with Nathan Ryder. He's the former TV reporter turned farmer, we last talked to him and his wife in September or at least the fall of 2020, ahead of the first COVID fall. That's when everybody was energized about farmers markets and supporting local and we're trying to stay home because I couldn't get on a plane and travel somewhere. So let's find out how business was in 20. Spoiler alert, good. But what was the story in 2021? And what is the story look like in 2022. So we find out from Nathan, what's going on there on the farm. We're also gonna talk a little bit about the weather. Because you know, I just I can't stop not talking about the weather. That is what we are up to this week as we find out what it's like to be a small time farmer who is dependent on the friends and family to help when times get busy. And we'll also find out about the mum business. If you have any feedback for me, Paul.Yeager@IowaPBS.ORG. Now let's get caught up with Nathan Ryder. 

Alright, Nathan so before we started rolling, we were talking about our old news days. Let's kind of just recap a little bit. We're both recovering TV reporters. But we've gone in different directions. Do you miss being outside on cold days? Now? Granted, you worked in Arizona, so it was warmer there but you've spent time in the Midwest? You've got a big approaching snowstorm do you get the itch

Nathan Ryder  
the itch to stay inside and be warm? Or go out to my you know nice high tunnel that's passively heated by the sunshine on a cold day and you know gets up to 60 in there. Yeah. No, I don't have the itch to go back into news and stand outside and subzero live shots with my teeth chattering

and but I still feel bad for those that do I look at them and go, Oh, why could their assignment desk not take pity on them?

Yeah, I think I think the coldest I ever was was on a live shot on the eastern side of Lake Michigan up in Michigan City. And boy, the wind was blowing off that like and I think with the windchill, it was about 25 below zero. I had never been so cold in my life. Talk about you walk outside and your lips just froze and your cheeks frozen place was painful. I don't know why people live in that. Yeah.

Paul Yeager  
And keep coming back year after year. Because right like, oh, Surely it can't be that bad every winter. And it is.

Nathan Ryder  
Well, you know, people always used to tell us growing up in Arizona while your blood is thinner. So you can't handle the cold. Like people who live in colder climates. Do I think there's some truth to that? Because yeah, you know, growing up in Arizona, you thought 60 degrees was cold.

Paul Yeager  
Yeah. Yeah. I always enjoy that. You can always tell the people out out of place in Florida in November in December when it's it's 60 degrees and the locals are in three layers of coats and the non natives are in shorts. It's like the bowl season. Let me see. I will go down to Orlando. They're the only ones in shorts on the beach and the beach is empty. Well, the high was 65 degrees today.

Nathan Ryder  
And they're on parkas. Yeah.

Paul Yeager  
So you lived in Arizona, you've worked in Michigan worked in Indiana, you took root in Illinois, how do you miss moving around? Or have you enjoyed finally putting some roots down and, and heading into that next chapter.

Nathan Ryder  
Now we've we've really enjoyed finally putting our roots down. You know, working in news is a lifestyle that moves you around the country a lot. So you're constantly on the go. And you know, that was fun in our younger days, especially when we didn't have kids and a whole household to run. But we always kind of wanted to have something more. And that's something more was stable work. And the ability to be able to start our our small farm operation that we had always dreamed of doing. So we moved out to the Midwest because we knew that just wasn't really a sustainable idea that could happen in Arizona. So we came someplace where there's actually four seasons, and there's this thing called rain that falls from the sky periodically that you don't get a lot of in Arizona. And the ability to grow things you know, so we we came to the Midwest and people always ask us, you know, why did you leave Arizona and we tell them well, you know, we wanted to live a more sustainable life and have a farm where we could raise our kids and they able to help people eat healthy, local grown food. So here we are, we're putting down our roots. And we're still glad to be here and be able to have that farm lifestyle. 

Paul Yeager  
You're in Southern Illinois, I believe the town let's see if memory holds, Golchester? 

Golconda. Yeah. And it's all it's Golconda. It's not Golconda. You know, there's those, you know how the emphasis is on certain syllables minus Waterloo. Like, it's Waterloo, not Waterloo. Yeah. You know how it goes?

Nathan Ryder  
Mm hmm. I do. Yeah, yeah. When we first moved here, I used to say, Go. Golf,  Golconda. You know, because it's G O L. But we were quickly informed around here. It's Golconda, Golconda. Like a gallbladder?

Paul Yeager  
Yeah. There you go. So you moved in, I want to say in 19, right. Is that when you came? Or was it 18? Memory is? Oh, gosh.

Nathan Ryder  
So yeah, this gets difficult because the years start blurring together. You know, this, Paul,

Paul Yeager  
I know. I know. That's the thing. Your gray hairs not showing like minus

Nathan Ryder  
oh, well, I got plenty in there. Yeah, it's there look close enough. It's there. Um, let's see. So we moved over here in 2013, was when I moved to Southern Illinois, we worked on a large agronomy, farm growing corn and soybeans and cattle for about three years. And then we moved on to our own farm. So 2017 ish is when we do under our forever farm.

Paul Yeager  
And so now, business is what's the goal always a business? Or did you always think I'm just going to grow things that the area needs? Or mass produce commodities? I mean, how did you envision it to how you are today?

Nathan Ryder  
So we, you know, as a, as a family, my wife and I had always wanted to be sort of self sustaining. So we, we wanted to be able to raise food for ourselves and our family. And then, you know, even when we started with a garden, when we lived in Indiana, we ended up with an excess of food. So we were giving food away to our neighbors and to our friends in town. And, you know, somebody finally said, you know, you guys do such a good job with the garden, why don't you think about selling some of that, and so we did. And then it kind of just grew holistically from there, you know, we started selling chicken eggs that we had, because funny, my, my wife likes chicken math, if anybody's familiar with that, that's where six little chicks suddenly grow into 12, and then 24, and then 48. And it keeps growing from there. But every time we go to the feed store, she found another six chicks that she wanted. So, you know, then we got into the egg selling business. And slowly our produce selling business started to grow, too. So we've always wanted to keep it small, we both have to have off farm income, you know, to keep things going. Because as money farmers know, across the country, it doesn't always pay the bills. So you have to have that extra income coming in, to really keep things stable and not be at the whimsy of your customers in the markets these days. So,

Paul Yeager  
you know, I was thinking about this when we were getting ready to chat, I was like, you know, and all farm jobs sometimes for what you are doing is almost like a form of marketing. Because you can go and tell other people and really use the word of mouth where as opposed to just being on your farm in your cocoon, and you just hope advertising or the word of mouth of other customers, you get to go out and kind of do marketing among co workers.

Nathan Ryder  
Right. Yeah, I mean, it does help and we've had a lot of people grow interested in what we're doing, just through that process and being able to network with other people with the off farm jobs. So yeah, it definitely is a good marketing technique to be able to show people what we're what we're doing and what we're all about.

Paul Yeager  
In 2020 we chatted in the fall, you were getting ready to have the what I call the the pumpkin patch, idilic fall, everybody's coming to the farm, but we were in the middle of the first wave of this pandemic, and we thought it was starting to wave. You had put some things in place. You were still doing the CSA. You were still having you'd altered how things had gone there. Let's talk 20/21 How did that fall season go from plan to reality?

Nathan Ryder  
2020 turned out really good for us. I mean, it was I just did not anticipate the amount of people that we were going to have interested in coming out to the small farm experience to be able to do something outdoors to be able to buy the local products. So 2020 was was really good for us. I mean, we had some really busy Saturdays here on the farm and we do our open houses where we had pumpkins bums, you know, flying out the door. And it was almost at sometimes all we could do to keep up between my wife and I, and one of our daughters running the cash register. And you know, my mother in law tried to help people around the farm too. And then we had friends who we invited to the farm to set up a table and sell antiques and stuff. And so they're trying to help out with, you know, all this madness. So, yeah, 2020 was, it turned out really good for us. Our sales were up immensely from the year before. But you know, sort of turning the curve into 2021 things, you know, changed very differently. So we saw that kind of consumer focus that we had in 2020, turn more toward a wholesale focus and 2021, which was something again, we didn't anticipate, but we just sort of flexed with it. We try to be the water, not the rock, and especially during these fickle times. You just kind of have to run with that.

Paul Yeager  
When did that become evident that that had changed, like in the spring?

Nathan Ryder  
Yeah, it was, yeah, it was spring of 21. We had a lot of interest in our CSA program, of course, because people were still sort of coming off that. Wanting to be involved in the local food movement, wanting to support their local farmers, you know, we saw a lot of that push coming through 2020. So we were able to pick up on that in 2021, with our CSA program. But then, in early spring, we started getting lots of phone calls about our wholesale mums. We had high schools wanting to do mum fundraisers, we had plant nurseries that were having a hard time getting supplies from their normal growers, getting them secured for their fall sales. So our phones actually started ringing off the hook with plant nurseries looking for wholesale moms. So we were able to take on some of that. But, you know, here again, I'm a small grower. And so I'm having to get all these materials from other suppliers. So I was very limited in what we could take on. But we basically tripled our wholesale mum's sales in 2021, we probably could have quadrupled them if not more, because our phones rang straight from April, all the way through until October with people looking for moms, because they couldn't they couldn't get them there was a shortage. And I wished I would have had the ability to buy more plant material and more pots and more soil. But you know, when when we got all that stuff in May, we were lucky to get the supplies that we got to grow the crop that we had. So I'm hoping that 2022 pans out a little better than 2021 at least. But I'm worried, you know, going into it as what what the supplies are going to look like this year,

Paul Yeager  
you make it sound like 21? I won't say more corporate ag but it was more stable. Is that more stable when you have a wholesale when you know that this number is going out the door on this date versus I sure hope I have great weather in those three Saturdays in a row in September, October.

Nathan Ryder  
Yes. And And this past year. I mean, that really panned out for us because the consumer interest in coming out to the farm. And having the whole farm experience, I would say that almost totally evaporated this year. Because here in Southern Illinois, you know, things were really back open again, the economy is moving, you know, movie theaters were back open. So people were sort of returning back to that normal weekend life. And I feel like heading out to the farm for the farm experience really just kind of went by the wayside. It was, you know, a huge thing in 2020. But in 2021, people were distracted by all the other normal things that they could get back into again. So yeah, in this case, those wholesale sales really saved us for the lack of customers that we had on the weekends in October this year.

Paul Yeager  
So in spring, when you're taking these orders from these schools, that one fundraisers or whatever that one your product, is you don't know that the the the visits are going to be down in September, October, November. So did you hedge a little bit of well, we can't put all of the eggs in this basket, we have to save some or did you just say well, we'll just cross the bridge and we get there in the fall.

Nathan Ryder  
We did. You know, we did put some aside. We looked at our sales of mom's you know, to people who visited the farm last year. Well, that would have been 2020. You know, we looked at those sales in 2020 and thought okay, well if we do those same sales in 2021 You know, we need to we need to make sure we set that aside. So luckily we did we it was a big bet for us because It was like, Well, do we want to bet on the fact that we're going to increase our customers coming to the farm this year in 2021? And we need to order even more moms and supplies to grow them? Or do we want to keep the order the same? And, you know, we really decided we would just, we would keep it the same. And if we sold out, you know, early, we sold out early, and we would call it a successful season. So luckily, we didn't lose our hat on that, this past year in 2021. So we did have some months, you know, leftover at the tail end, but it wasn't very much we were almost completely wiped out for this year.

Paul Yeager  
How does mum you mentioned dirt and pots and things like that? Do you get mum seedlings? Are you planting seeds? How do you grow them?

Nathan Ryder  
Yeah, so we we get rooted cuttings from a greenhouse company up in Northern Illinois or Michigan. So we go through, you know, ball seed, who's a huge, you know, huge cutting supplier in the the ornamental plant industry. And so they broker a grower to grow them and we order them in but, you know, we had just like, pretty much every other farmer, I'm sure issues getting the colors and the variety that we had ordered, you know, they would have to substitute with 50 of this and 50 of that. And so, it was a challenging growing season, because we're working with plant varieties we've never worked with before. They're responding differently to the conditions that we've got in place. So it was 2021 was a challenging year. I'm glad it's in the rearview mirror and behind.

Paul Yeager  
But let's keep talking about it anyway.

Nathan Ryder  
Let's dwell on it.

Paul Yeager  
What was the CSA business? Like then, in '21?

Nathan Ryder  
CSA was good. We were able to attract a lot of new customers to the CSA program this last year, a lot of people had approached us because, you know, they were thinking about getting on with services, like misfits, you know, produce where they're going to get the box, that ugly produce shipped to you once a week. And they started thinking, Well, you know, maybe there's somebody locally that grows pretty produce that we can get, and we'd support a local farm. So we did garner some business from that, you know, still some people who were thinking it'd be a good idea to have my supply vegetables locked in for the growing season in case we have more supply chain disruptions. So we were happy with CSA sales, and in 2021, we're already off to a good start for 2022. So I'm hoping that we continue with the CSA growth this year.

Paul Yeager  
What's in the hoop barn right now?

Nathan Ryder  
Well, right now, not much of anything, because we have we've had some pretty cold days. I'm I'm about at that time of the year where I can start seeding some coal crops, you know, some kale and chard, and some of those really cold loving crops. They'll probably start going in this next week. But the grounds frozen pretty good in there right now. So we're, we're hoping that after we get through this winter storm, this week, we'll get enough warmth that we can start to see that ground thought a little bit and get some some of those spring items planted.

Paul Yeager  
Do you find that tastes of people changed from say 19 to 20? To 21? I mean, is kale a thing because we need to be healthy or we don't want kale because we didn't, it didn't work the time before to keep me healthy. Why would I go do it now? Right?

Nathan Ryder  
Well, I'll tell you here in Southern Illinois, it's interesting because people love their staples, so your cucumbers, your bell peppers or tomatoes. They love our fresh salad greens. I like to mix it up. I like to throw some fun stuff at them every once in a while. So maybe some arugula. Some stir fry mix. We grew some little Japanese salad turnips this last year, which turned out to be a big hit. Everybody loved those. So, you know, part of our mission is to educate people and let them taste and try new things. Part of that is making sure they have a recipe so they know what to do with it and how to cook it. But it's funny we do we do get people who try things once they're like Hey, um, you know next time I don't want the Swiss chard, it's okay. Like okay, well, Swiss chard for you or one of your other CSA members will so yeah, we it's funny, like there's there's not a whole lot of trend eating here in Southern Illinois. It's, it's, you know, kind of kind of stick with what you know.

Paul Yeager  
I don't think we're that far off here either. So that's okay. Animal lies in how what do you have floating around the yard right now?

Nathan Ryder  
Yeah, so Well, we've got all of our chickens of course for our farm fresh eggs. We have some heritage breed turkeys that are running around the farm right now. We're hoping that this year they'll be breed and we'll be able to hatch out some new heritage breed turkeys. We've got our flock of Katahdin hair sheep that are on the increase. So we had a great year last year where we had some to use born. So now we're up to four. So we're hoping to expand the herd this year and you know, that will go toward being able to buy some farm fresh meat, you know, off the farm, we would like to be able to provide pasture raised sheep, and lamb. And then we've got our dairy goats. So we produce our goat milk soap on the farm. So we have our dairy goat flock herd going as well. So it kind of rounds it out

Paul Yeager  
was so I mean, that's one of those is that thing, something you can sell year round because the milk is produced year round.

Nathan Ryder  
Yeah, so we actually, you know, milk in the spring, of course. And then once we dry them off. Yeah, we freeze milk all year long. And that's, that's the nice thing about being able produce that soap is that we can put stockpiles of soap in the freezer. My wife who's the soap crafter, she can handcraft her goat's milk soap all winter long. It's something we can change the sense of all season long. So yeah, it's a nice product to have, especially around the holiday time when we don't have really any produce growing on the farm. But we have the goat's milk soap that we can continue to sell sort of as a, a gateway for people to get in and get a gift card and maybe buy a CSA membership as a gift to so

Paul Yeager  
now I don't think you do a big Christmas time market. Do you do one Saturday or one weekend in the in the fall to sell some of those gift items?

Nathan Ryder  
No, not really, we once once we close down after Halloween, that's kind of our vacation time. So we go into hibernation mode from November through December in January pretty much. That's that's kind of the time for us to take time as a family and have the fun weekends and check out and maybe go do a little day trip or something. So we're not tied to the farm every single day. But we do online sales with our soap, we have an online shop. And then we also do you know sales by appointment. So people can always call us and put in an order or do an order online and then schedule time to pick it up. We'll have it ready for him. So we try to make it as convenient as possible.

Paul Yeager  
Now, there's challenges, of course to doing farm work, do you ever, at some point when you're in the desk job, go, you know, I wish I was all in on this? Or do you enjoy a little bit of the mix and match of employment?

Nathan Ryder  
It I mean, it is a challenge on a daily basis. So yeah, when when you have those days when it's 97 degrees outside and 92% humidity and you have to go out and weed. Yeah, the desk and the air conditioning looks really nice. And so it's hard to motivate yourself to step away from the desk and go out and do what needs to get done. But at the same time, I think there's a lot of pluses behind it. So you know, you can really structure your day to fit what you need to do. So a lot of times I'll go out in the morning, as soon as the sun comes up at five in the summer, I'll be outside in the cool morning doing work on the farm. By eight o'clock, you know I can come in, I get showered, I can reset myself for some desk work, take a little break, have lunch, maybe do some stuff for the farm, go back to a few more hours to desk work and then go out in the early evenings when it cools down again and do some more farm work to end the day. So I think it's it's nice to have that balance in that mix to be able to change it up throughout the day. But there's others that it's harder to harder to retool your your thinking and step away from the desk for sure.

Paul Yeager  
Have you been able to network with other farm family groups that are in your type of business and find out? You know, are you exchanging ideas, sharing stories of struggles and successes?

Nathan Ryder  
Yeah, we you know, I'm on a couple different small farm Facebook groups, which are great because I think that provides a real easy way to exchange ideas and sort of pick people's brains find out what's working for them and what's not. But at the same time, you know, we live in such a different market for what we do. And so it's always good to get other ideas and find out what's working for people and what's not, but, you know, then you have to try to figure out how to tool that to your area. And so that, you know, that's one challenge that we've had is you know, moving from the West Coast, you know, we know how local food is on the west coast and and sort of how small farms operate there. And then it was very different when we moved in the Midwest, and, you know, people are just used to sort of going to the grocery store and getting their staples off the shelf or buying frozen vegetables. And so, you know, it's hard to sort of retool people's thinking, you know, back toward some of the fresh produce that we have to offer again. So, yeah, it's, I think it's important to be able to, you know, Peg ideas off of people and, and sort of have that morning coffee shop, routine, you know, it's like the agronomy, farmers, corn, soybean farmers going down to the local coffee shop and chatting each other's ears off in the morning, I think you got to do that.

Paul Yeager  
Instead, you just do zoom meetings, things like this.

Nathan Ryder  
Yeah. Hey, you know, you get a lot out of Zoom meeting, sometimes

Paul Yeager  
you do. You well. And, again, let's go back to how it started, when we started talking about our, you know, recovery news days of just think of how you wouldn't have to get into the car to go travel to somebody that you need for your story, when you can just say, Hey, I'm gonna send you a link, do you have five minutes? And that's changed the way we get information now?

Nathan Ryder  
Yeah, I mean, you you have access to so many other ideas and other people that it's almost silly not to take advantage of that. Because, I mean, for me, I'm an information hound. And maybe that goes back to my old reporter days. But I love to find out what the small farm, you know, 30 miles away from us is putting in the ground and what their people are buying, because it, it might be something that might people will be interested in. It may not be. But how do you know unless you put those feelers out and get that information?

Paul Yeager  
Yeah, it's always fascinating how that all shakes out. 2022. So we're, we don't have anything in the ground yet. We're looking at adding some meat, do you have a place to process your meat, because that was a big thing. In 20, and 21. Yeah, that's,

Nathan Ryder  
that's a, that's a sticky challenge. Luckily, I'm hoping that by the time that we get to the point of processing meat, that supply issue will be sort of figured out, we have the challenge here in Southern Illinois, where we don't really have a large processor nearby, we have a couple small mom and pop shops. But they almost exclusively switch over to deer processing in the fall, you know, we're in huge deer country down here. So once shotgun season opens, in November, the processors go totally deer, you can't get anybody in to get processed for a good four months. So you have a shortened window in Southern Illinois, we did just find out that our local state legislators have been working to open up a new processing plant that's going to be about 45 minutes away from us, and they're going to be a decent sized plant. So they're really trying to to help the cattle ranchers down in Southern Illinois have another outlet to be able to feed their cattle into to get process. So I'm hoping that that will sort of open up the market down here for us to get meat processed by the time that we actually need to process. That's my hope.

Paul Yeager  
Hope. It is, you know, and that's that their stories about that. And you know, we've had discussions on the TV show about, you know, if you want the market to recover, put a processing plant in your backyard? Are you ready to put it in your backyard? You know, and that was a frank question, then are you even in cattle country? Some buddy will say I don't want that near me. So I mean, that's, that's a whole touchy subject. It environmentally, I'm going to mix a couple of your backgrounds? Or do you have any embrace of environmental lism with your products? I mean, we're talking about things that are not mainstream that you're doing and growing and, and raising? I mean, was that by design to be more stewards of the land? I mean, I don't I don't think I've heard you say organic? Is any of your stuff organic,

Nathan Ryder  
so no. So we we try to grow as organically as possible. But we do not go toward organic certification. So we just, you know, our area and our region, organic is not a huge draw for folks. So for us to take on the expense and the time to become organically certified. We just came to the conclusion that it wasn't a smart business move for us. I would love to do it, but the payoff just isn't going to be there. So we grow things as holistically and naturally as we possibly can. We try to avoid harsh chemical inputs. We really avoid using any type of herbicides. We'll use them if we have to, if we're getting into a pinch where we've got some type of pest or wheat issue going on, and our customers know that you know, we're pretty upfront with them. We've had folks who have told us that they're allergic to a specific pesticide or fungicide or herbicide, when I grew peaches I used to break out when I would pick the peaches because of the fungicides that we would spray on them. So we we try to be as upfront with our customers as possible. We'll tell them like, hey, if we got to spray a crop, you know, we're gonna let you know that that crop has been sprayed, we're gonna follow all the guidelines and the harvest intervals, you know, keep everything appropriate so that we're not, you know, doing anything wrong. But we'll only do that as a last resort. So we're gonna try to do everything as organically as possible. Okay, yeah, wow. And that's one of the that's one of the nice things I'll just throw in there about having the guinea hens and the chickens roaming the farm is they really cut down on our pest pressure and our sheep, our goats produce manure on the farm, that we can compost and turn back into our crop fields. So we really tried to keep things as holistic and natural as possible on the farm. Without that certification. And you know, we're, we have concerns about the environment and about weather. Every it seems like every year that we've been growing here, has been different weather wise. And I don't know that there's any place in the country where the weather has been the same from one year to the next. But we take our stewardship of the environment in the land very seriously, as I think most farmers do.

Paul Yeager  
And that land of yours is about to get a nice big coating of snow. What's your forecast locally for you?

Nathan Ryder  
Oh, gosh. So it's it's bounced back and forth. First it was we're going to get buckets full of rain, and then it's going to ice over and then we're going to get seven inches of snow. Now they're saying we're going to get lots of rain and then about a quarter to a half inch of ice, and then some amount of snow on top of that. So a lot remains to be seen. We were picking up groceries tonight. We're going to be stocked up and ready to hunker down for a few days. If that's the case.

Paul Yeager  
No, it'll be fun. So I appreciate the time. Nathan, thank you so much good to catch up. And good luck on a 2022 growing season and consumers. Let's see how they they shake out.

Nathan Ryder  
Yeah, I support your local farmers. Don't forget about him. All right. Thank you, Nathan. Thanks, Paul.

Paul Yeager  
Thank you for making it this far into the podcast if you have any feedback for me MarkettoMarket@IowaPBS.org. This has been a production of Iowa PBS and the Market to Market TV show. We'll see you next Tuesday when a new episode drops