STUNNING Family Farm Pioneering Small-Scale Farm INNOVATION

Hi, my name is John Dysinger and this is my wife Pam and we're here at Bountiful Blessings Farm in Middle Tennessee. Bountiful Blessings Farm is a two-acre farm located in Middle Tennessee approximately an hour southwest of Nashville and we sell through a spring, summer, and fall winter CSA, two farmer's markets in Nashville, two small grocers, and a food hub. We've been farming here since the fall of 1998 and the farm has evolved a lot since then. We started out as a you-pick strawberry farm and now we're just a very diverse mixed vegetable, small fruit operation and we can't think of a better place to have raised our family and now we get to see our grandkids here enjoying it. We're so bountifully blessed. John and I started our careers in Africa actually teaching. We just really felt called to do something different that would be to bring our family together. My parents had bought this 192-acre farm in their retirement and we actually moved here with teaching job nearby. When we realized that the teaching was not the best fit for our family I turned in my resignation. So when we felt finally that agriculture was our calling we started out with strawberries for five years, a you-pick strawberry farm. After five years we had the devastating spring rains and we made so many mistakes. We didn't know what we were doing. We thought we were going to have to throw in the towel on farming. It was that bad. It's a painful memory even now but it was at that point that God really impressed us to branch out into winter production. And then in 2010 we started actually going year-round and that continues to this day. One of the unique things about our farm is that we don't have many paid employees. It's largely intern run. The main thing they're here for is to learn about farming and we try to involve them in every aspect of that from seeding to harvest to farmer's market and everything in between. We do try to include a lot of extracurricular things, farm tours, weekend activities. We play together, we worship together and we eat together every lunch. A couple of things that are going really well here on the farm is our year-round salad production. Being in the south, summer lettuce has always been a challenge but thanks to a lot of the pioneering work of Ray Tyler we're now producing lettuce year-round and that's by far our biggest money crop. And then of course strawberries. We've got more experience with that than anything else. People love strawberries and ours are the best on the planet they tell us. We've actually kind of developed a hybrid system here where we've got our intense hand-worked beds where we do most of our high-value crops and then we also have pads that we use for lower value crops that we use the tractor on and we're growing all those crops that market gardeners really aren't supposed to grow because they don't make enough money but we feel like by using the tractor and using methods that don't take much labor that we can actually make money even on those crops. Here at Bountiful Blessings Farm we have three main outlets for our sales. That is a CSA. We have about 140 CSA members. The second outlet is our farmers markets. We do two farmers markets and then the third outlet is wholesale. Because the call from God was to serve we really have focused on the CSA. We're building relationships with real people and some of them have been with us since 2003 so because our focus has been on serving our customers they in turn have been a great blessing to us. The farm is a great hub for many businesses and one that I never planned to have is a gluten-free bakery and we sell bread at our farmers markets and we ship nationwide mixes and shelf-stable items. In our bakery we're focused on nutrition and trying to bring to people who are gluten-free a really nutritious option for bread. One of the great things about farm life is it provided a springboard for our children to do different entrepreneurial things. I started doing chickens in 2012. I've ranged from 150 chickens to over 400. I've also really tried to streamline the chicken coops in having clean eggs and so I have roll out nesting boxes and some automated stuff in there that has helped streamline it. A lot of times I move them in the evening and Kelly and Amber will come out and we'll move them together. Collecting eggs is nice to do it as a family. So I do microgreens business. I do about 80 to 100 trays a week. So I grow the microgreens in a little bit of a unique way. I grow them in a greenhouse with fully natural light and in soil. It actually produces a much higher quality with much bigger cotyledons and overall better flavor and color. I have a custom-built harvester that is based off of the Farmer's Friend Quick Cuts Greens Harvester. It is amazing. It cuts trays at about a tray every four seconds so you can get a lot of trays through there. So in addition to the microgreens and the other farm tasks I do, I also focus quite a bit on infrastructure and building lean improvements into our farm systems. One of the quality of life improvements I've done is gotten a one-wheel and I've put about 2,600 miles on it which has saved me a lot of time walking around and it's a lot of fun to ride. My earliest memories are growing up on the farm helping my parents every day run the operation and I quickly and early on learned that there was a lot of ways we could improve the operation by coming up with different tools and methods for doing things more efficiently and that turned into Farmer's Friend in 2012 with the launch of the Quick Cut Greens Harvester and that operation started here on the farm in a shop building just down the road and it's grown a lot from there. We use the Greens Harvester twice a week for arugula and baby kale. We would take a whole lot longer harvesting without it. We found a really great way to use the caterpillar tunnels and that is to move them over berries and so we found by moving them twice a year we can add a lot of additional protection without the expense of permanent tunnels. We are really loving the quick plant fabric in fact it's really transforming our farm. We find that it makes a cleaner product and we seem to have less disease growing on the quick plant. We are using it for all of our lettuce but we're also using it for a lot of less traditional crops. We've used it on garlic this year, brassicas, okra, sweet corn. Last year we experimented with a little piece of quick plant fabric on part of a row and the corn on the quick plant grew so much healthier and taller that everybody thought it was a different variety. What we're finding is it just eliminates weeding. It's a way as I see it to do no-till without the challenge of weeds. I think that small-scale farming is the biggest hope for the future of our planet. It's very satisfying to know that we're doing our little part to make the world a better place. I think what really keeps us motivated is the response that we get from our customers. And working with the interns is also very satisfying to see young people changing their worldview and realizing that they can actually enjoy hard work. And it's very satisfying to be able to work with my sons and to build a future together here. Farming for us has been about building our faith and building our family and it's been a really good life. You know there's there's hard days that come on the farm where you're kind of asking yourself why am I doing this? But the reality is whenever I ask that I start thinking about well what would I rather be doing and I can't think of anything that I'd rather be doing than farming. Hi guys I'm Jonathan with Farmer's Friend. If you enjoyed this video hit the like button and subscribe to see more inspiring stories like this. To learn more about our innovative small farm tools and supplies like easy to assemble greenhouse kits, flame weeders and a lot more check out our website at FarmersFriend.com