Visit to Organic Pyramid Farms

Hey, this is Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com. I am in Chico, California on the grounds of Pyramid Farms. And the farmer that is out here that is making a go of it, completely self-reliant out here, making a living only through his farming activity, is Matthew Martin. Matthew, it's good to see you out here. Thanks. It's good to see you. Well, you know, looking at seeing what you're accomplishing here, it's pretty interesting to see that you've made a decision to become self-reliant. You live by your labor and by literally the fruit of the land here. How long have you been doing this? I've been a full-time farmer for 15 years. Before that, I was part-time for about nine. So how did you get an interest in farming and all things farming related? Well, my parents were original do-it-yourselfers years and years ago, back before when do-it-yourselferism wasn't popular. And so they built their stereos and redid their kitchens. You know, anything that needed to be done, they did themselves. That was kind of ingrained in me. So when I got older, I kind of got an interest in gardening and grew a vegetable garden one year and the bug bit me. And I'm like, I want to grow and see how much fruit of my own I can grow. And so then I had about an acre and a half, two acre place that I just worked, you know, in my spare time. And I did that for about nine years and then transitioned into selling vegetables on weekend at a farmer's market and then took the leap and went full-time with it. Well, it looks like it's turning out well for you. And it looks good on you. You look like you enjoy working outside and just getting to it. So how large of acreage is Pyramid Farms? We cultivate eight and a half acres. Of course, we're in California, so we can get double crops out of quite a bit of our land here. And what are some of the things that you do on a regular basis, ongoing, that are some of your premier crops or your featured crops? Oh, you know, the regular old tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic. We grow about 30 different crops, but our premier crop is carrots. It's the one that our customers go crazy for. What are some of the things that you are skilled in doing that help you to be self-reliant? I mean, farming, that's quite an art to begin with, but there's a lot of other things you've got to do to support the things that come to you and that sort of thing. So what are some other things that you've done around here? Well, my prior occupation, I was a trained mechanic, and so, of course, that helps me quite a bit. If something breaks, I can fix it. So mechanical skills come in big, a lot. I wish I had better construction skills. I don't. Okay. So pretty much anything that I build is not square and it's not level. But it works. Okay. I'm also, you know, good with money. I know how to make a budget and stick to it. Very good. And so some of the things I noticed walking around your property here, you have a support shop that helps you be able to take care of things around here, whether it's a broken piece of equipment or something that you're going to design and make that's an implement or something like that. That's all done in your shop. So what are some of the things that you do out of your shop? On the top of it, I house my solar array and then the outside coverage for storage and crop storage and tool storage. And I even use it inside the shop for crop storage, tool storage. But one of the projects I did quite a few years ago was a motorized fertilizer spreader, which actually we'll go, I'll go and show you some of that and see that, which saves me quite a bit of labor. A lot of times it's hard to find tools that are actually scaled for a small farmer or affordable for a small farmer, or that you know, they're going to work. You know, if I spend a couple thousand dollars on a tool that doesn't work, that, that means I spent a couple thousand dollars on a tool that doesn't work. I, you know, looked at what was out there and decided that, you know, I didn't want to take the risk on, on a couple thousand dollars on a fertilizer spreader. And so I modify a commercial spreader into a motorized spreader. We're going to look at that in just a moment here, but you were talking about three circles and the overlap of those. Why don't you share that with our viewers? Well, you know, within sustainability, you've got three different focus points, three circles. And most people talk about sustainability and they're talking about environmental sustainability. But you also got to consider the social aspects of social sustainability, what you're doing in the community, is it sustainable in the community? And then economic sustainability, what you're doing, can you pay the bills with it? You know, if you're using practices that you are limiting the fact that you can't pay the bills, then you're not going to be in business any longer. So there's a sweet spot where all those three circles meet, and that's where I try to run my operation. So, and very well said. One of the things that I noticed here is that you do have mechanization, not overtly so, but you have small tractors. Some of the work here is done by hand, other times where it's prudent to do so, you use a tractor. Where do you draw the line between those two things? When do you use mechanization versus let's do this by hand? Well, I'm not a huge fan of big, heavy tractors and the compaction that they bring. I've been on some farms that, you know, they spend too much time on big, heavy tractors compacting their soil and then dealing with the after effects. And of course, when I started out, it was me and a rototiller. So some of my practices are the evolution of that, trying to still maintain efficiency of labor, yet, you know, not going for big, giant tractors and every tool known to mankind. We use plastic mulch here, but I don't have a mulch layer. More fuel, more passes over the ground, and I can, you know, my crew can lay mulch pretty much almost as fast as I could do it with a tractor.